Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to step down, giving Biden a chance to make his mark
John Fritze, USA TODAY January 26, 2022
WASHINGTON –Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is planning to step down by the end of this term after nearly three decades on the high court, a source with knowledge of his plans told USA TODAY on Wednesday, handing President Joe Biden his first opportunity to nominate a jurist whose influence could be felt for decades.
Breyer’s announcement, which several outlets citing unnamed sources said would occur at the end of the court’s term in the summer, will kick off a frenzied process of naming and confirming a successor, typically a months-long ordeal that in this case is expected to end with a groundbreaking nominee: Biden had promised during his presidential campaign to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court for the first time in American history.
“For virtually his entire adult life, including a quarter century on the U.S. Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer has served his country with the highest possible distinction,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement. “He is, and always has been, a model jurist.”
Schumer said Breyer’s replacement would be confirmed “with all deliberate speed.”
Breyer did not respond to a request for comment through a court spokeswoman. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a tweet that the administration had “no additional details or information to share.” The news was first reported by NBC.
At 83, Breyer is the second-most senior associate justice and his retirement was encouraged by liberals who wanted to ensure Biden’s nominee would benefit from a Senate controlled by Democrats. Breyer generally sided with the liberal justices, so whoever replaces him won’t likely change the court’s current conservative leanings.
But Breyer’s departure will deprive the Supreme Court of its foremost proponent of a living Constitution, the notion that interpretation of the founding document can change with the times. Breyer has also been an outspoken defender of the notion that justices decide cases based on their judicial philosophy and not their politics.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer participates in a panel at the Gewirz Student Center on the campus of Georgetown University Law Center in 2014.
Nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Breyer is often described as a pragmatist, an optimist and an institutionalist who believed in giving deference to the legislative branch but who was skeptical of executive overreach. A prolific writer, Breyer authored significant majority opinions striking down anti-abortion laws in Nebraska and Louisiana and is also known for scathing dissents, including in several death penalty cases.
Breyer penned some of the court’s most notable opinions in the term that ended last summer. He wrote the majority opinion thwarting the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act, concluding that the conservative states that sued over its mandate that most Americans obtain insurance did not have standing to sue. He also wrote the court’s opinion in a major First Amendment case, siding with a former student who was punished for a vulgar social media post aimed at her school.
Breyer wrote that it “might be tempting” to dismiss the student’s profanity-laced post as unworthy of the First Amendment’s protection.
“But sometimes,” he added, “it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.”
Breyer, a California native and Harvard Law graduate, is the court’s most vocal opponent of the concept of “originalism” espoused by the late Justice Antonin Scalia –the idea that jurists interpret the Constitution based on its meaning at the time it was written. Breyer instead embraced the idea of a “living” document that allows courts to give a more dynamic reading when it’s not clear what the framers had in mind.
But Breyer is also viewed as a less doctrinaire liberal than Associate Justices Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor – more willing to side with the court’s conservatives in certain law enforcement cases, for instance. In that sense, he was sometimes viewed as a conduit between the court’s liberal and conservative factions.
Biden is now expected to now begin the process of selecting a new Supreme Court justice as Democrats are still reeling from the impact former President Donald Trump had on the Federal judiciary – nominating three justices to the high court and more than 200 judges to lower courts. The Supreme Court’s current 6-3 tilt makes the court the most conservative it’s been since the 1930s, when it battled with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over his New Deal policies.
Because Biden’s nominee won’t affect that balance, the president may face an easier confirmation process. Senate Republicans did away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017, meaning Biden will now be able to get his nominee confirmed with a simple majority.
Some progressive groups pushed for Breyer to retire. Those groups were mindful of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to step down before Republicans won control of the Senate in 2014. But others noted Breyer, who once worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, was well aware of the political dynamics.
Unlike Trump, who made his short list public before choosing a nominee, Biden has kept his leading candidates for the lifetime appointment to himself. Still, the president raised the idea of nominating a Black woman to the court ahead of the Feb. 29 primary in South Carolina last year. He won the state and turned his struggling campaign around.
Assuming Biden selects a nominee from the traditional pool – that is, current judges – and picks someone who can serve for decades before retiring, the choices are somewhat limited by a lack of racial diversity in courtrooms across the country. D.C. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who President Barack Obama considered for the court in 2016, is widely considered a leading candidate this time around.
Leondra Kruger, a justice on the California Supreme Court who worked in the Justice Department for Obama and President George W. Bush, is also often mentioned as a possible candidate. Kruger, who worked in the Solicitor General’s office, argued a dozen cases at the Supreme Court.
Not only would Biden’s pledge bring the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, it would also put four women together there for the first time – along with Associate Justices Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee who is the court’s first Latina. It would also be the first time two African Americans serve simultaneously, with Biden’s nominee joining Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.
In part because Trump and Senate Republicans were in a rush to replace Ginsburg before the November election, Barrett’s confirmation took 27 days. The median number of days between a Supreme Court nomination and final action by the Senate is 68 days, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
Brianne Gorod, chief counsel at Constitutional Accountability Center who clerked for Breyer in the 2008 term, described him as having a “profound and abiding belief that our Constitution sets up a system of government that should work for people.”
“He therefore cares deeply about the realities against which the court is deciding cases,” she said. Those concerns, she added, “are evident in many of the opinions he has written over the years.”
Poll: As Ukraine tensions escalate, 62% of Republicans say Putin is a ‘stronger leader’ than Biden
Andrew Romano, West Coast Correspondent January 25, 2022
With at least 100,000 Russian troops massing on the border of Ukraine, more than 6 in 10Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (62 percent) now say Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a stronger leader” than Joe Biden, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
Fewer than half as many Republicans (25 percent) decline to take sides, saying neither leader is stronger than the other.
And just 4 percent of Republicans say Biden is stronger than Putin.
“Shame on them,” John Sipher, who worked in Moscow and ran Russia operations during his three decades in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, told the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast Tuesday when asked about the results. “Vladimir Putin hates the United States. He wants to do everything he can to weaken the United States around the world. He’s attacked our troops in Afghanistan. He’s undercut every foreign policy issue, [including] foreign policy issues that Republicans have supported for years around the world. He’s assassinating people around the world.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Alexey Nikolsky/ Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images, Andrew Harnik/AP)
The survey of 1,568 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Jan. 20 to 24 and includes 500 self-identified Republicans and Republican leaners, also found that the number of GOP respondents who believe Putin is stronger than Biden rises to 71 percent among those who name Fox News as their primary source of cable news — and falls to 54 percent among those who prefer other cable-news channels.
In recent weeks and months, Fox’s top primetime anchor, Tucker Carlson, has repeatedly favored Russia over Ukraine, asking onNov. 10 why the U.S. would “take Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s side” and arguing in December that Putin was justified in building up troops along the border.
Ukraine is “strategically irrelevant to the United States,” Carlson added Monday night. “No rational person could defend a war with Russia over Ukraine.”
The U.S. is not positioning itself for direct war if Russia invades, but it has warned of severe consequences for Moscow, including a punishing round of sanctions by both the U.S. and its allies. Many European states are alarmed by Russia’s strong-arming of its democratic neighbor, and they worry that such an invasion would be a prelude to more moves by Putin to expand his influence over former Soviet-bloc states.
A convoy of Russian armored vehicles on a highway in Crimea on Jan. 18. (AP)
As a report in the New York Times noted, “Putin is seeking to redraw the post-Cold War boundaries of Europe, establishing a broad, Russian-dominated security zone and drawing Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit by force, if necessary.”
In March 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea from Ukraine; since that year, Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbass region have been mired in a war with Kremlin-backed rebels that has killed more than 13,000 people. As a result, Ukraine has moved closer to NATO, a development that Putin is now using as a pretext for escalating tensions.
Previous polls suggest that rank-and-file Republicans, who were once hawkish toward Russia, have increasingly adopted Trump and Carlson’s softer stance. In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney faced criticism from Democrats after he described Russia as America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe.
Tucker Carlson speaking at a conference in Esztergom, Hungary. (Janos Kummer/Getty Images)
As William Saletan recently pointed out in Slate, “In Gallup polls before 2016, Republicans generally viewed Russia less favorably than Democrats did. Now it’s the other way around.” Likewise, “Republicans used to be more likely than Democrats to view Russia as a critical threat and to emphasize containment of Russian power rather than ‘friendly cooperation.’” But “by 2017, those numbers had turned upside down: Only one in three Republicans described Russia’s military power as a critical threat, and most said the U.S. should focus on cooperation instead of limiting Russia’s power.”
Polls taken last June also showed that Putin enjoys a better net favorable rating among Republicans than Biden does, by anywhere from 16 to 22 percentage points.
According to U.S. intelligence, Putin’s intentions remain unclear — though he appears to have developed a war plan that includes an invasion force of 175,000 troops.
In turn, Biden has said that Russian invasion would be “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II,” and the New York Times reported over the weekend that the administration is now “considering deploying several thousand U.S. troops, as well as warships and aircraft, to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe.”
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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,568 U.S. adults interviewed online from Jan. 20 to 24, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or nonvote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.8 percent.
Although the change benefited Republicans at the time, it has allowed Democrats to confirm judges during Biden’s first year at a pace that was last rivaled by former President Ronald Reagan’s initial 365 days in office.
Democrats’ confirmation productivity during this Congress hasn’t garnered much attention, thanks in part to their own consuming drive to chip at the filibuster and pass election reform legislation. Still, it stands in stark contrast to the party’s failure to push its voting bill past the Senate’s supermajority requirement.
And it’s not the only arcane change that Democrats have benefited from, taken right out of the GOP playbook, when it comes to judicial fights.
Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is continuing his GOP predecessors’ move to nix the veto power that home-state senators once wielded over circuit court nominees. That tradition is known as the”blue slip,” named for the paper that senators use to express their favorable or unfavorable opinion about a specific judicial pick. Durbin took his first formal step against the practice this month, moving forward on a circuit court nominee who would represent Tennessee and lacked support from both GOP Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty.
“Senate Democrats and the Biden administration are not allowing Republicans to play by one set of rules and Democrats by the other,” said Christopher Kang, chief counsel at the liberal group Demand Justice. “Of course they should take advantage of the fact that blue slips don’t exist anymore for circuit court judges, and obviously the fact that the time has decreased now to two hours for district court nominees.”
Senate Democrats’ approach to judicial nominees under Biden carries a huge potential lesson for the filibuster battle: It underscores the likelihood that any rules change in the chamber will eventually be used by the party in power, regardless of that party’s stance when out of power. For example, Republicans highlighted former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 2013 elimination of filibusters for executive-branch and most judicial nominees when they axed the 60-vote margin for Supreme Court justices in 2017.
That 2017 change will theoretically make it easier for Democrats to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, should one arise this year. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has adamantly defended the legislative filibuster, and Republicans argue confirmation rules changes are a separate category from legislative rules changes. But some in the GOP acknowledged that the latest Democratic fight to change the filibuster could set a precedent if they take back the majority.
Unlike former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama, Biden did not fill a Supreme Court seat during his first year in office. But, so far, Democrats have confirmed a total of 42 judges; that includes 29 district court nominees and 13 circuit court nominees, the latter considered a record for the modern era. And Democrats could get to fill even more vacancies if more judges take “senior status” and step aside from the bench with the 2022 midterms election approaching and control of the Senate a toss-up.
Republicans are quick to highlight that the new rules didn’t exist during Trump’s first year in office, hurting his nominations clip relative to Biden’s.
“The Democrats have had the benefit of no 30-hour rule for post-cloture debate for district court nominations, unlike the first half of the Trump administration, so the Biden confirmation pace is not an apples-to-apples comparison,” said Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network.
Prior to leaving for this week’s recess, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took procedural steps to move forward on three district court judges and one circuit court judge for when the Senate returns. And just as Senate Republicans did under Trump, Democrats are putting forth multiple circuit court nominees on a single panel in order to speed up the confirmation process.
There are currently 39 Biden judicial nominees pending before the Senate. Every judge the Senate has confirmed so far has received blue slips indicating support from home-state senators. But Andre Mathis, whom Biden nominated to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — which includes Tennessee — is the first judicial nominee to advance without a blue slip, although Democrats argue that the White House sufficiently consulted with Blackburn and Hagerty before moving forward.
For Republicans, consultation is “the name of the game” on blue slips, as one GOP judiciary panel aide put it, speaking on condition of anonymity. During the Trump administration, Republicans said that home-state senators would be consulted about circuit court judge nominees but wouldn’t be given a veto. They argue Democrats need to reciprocate.
As circuit court vacancies open up in purple and red states, it’s not yet clear to what extent the White House and Senate Republicans will be on the same page or which vacancies will be prioritized first. Biden recently nominated Arianna Freeman to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and while Freeman has support from home-state Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Pat Toomey hasn’t indicated whether he will return a blue slip for her.
Biden has yet to nominate someone to another 6th Circuit vacancy in Ohio, a purple state, or tackle circuit court vacancies in red states like South Carolina, Louisiana and Texas. There are also several circuit court vacancies in blue states like Rhode Island, which could offer the White House a faster confirmation process, with buy-in from home state senators.
“In a number of those states in those circuits, where, especially for us, we know so much pivotal litigation is happening … there’s certainly a lot of opportunity where we need to move quickly,” said Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the Fair Courts Program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Similar to Republicans, Democrats have preserved blue-slip veto power for district court nominees. While Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) returned blue slips for three district court nominees for his state, it’s not clear yet whether Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) will return a blue slip for William Pocan, a Wisconsin district court nominee and the brother of Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.).
Senate Democrats note that Biden’s current vacancies to fill in red or purple states tend to be replacements for judges appointed by Democratic presidents. Nonetheless, they might be well-served to move quickly on those vacancies, with both Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee eyeing a November election that could hand the GOP control of the Senate. Republicans warn they could stall Biden’s judicial nominees if they win the majority in 2023, should they deem home-state senator consultation insufficient this Congress.
“I obviously hope we keep the Senate,” one Democratic Judiciary panel aide said, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity. “But if not, time is of the essence, and I think everyone is keenly aware on that front.”
Glenn Youngkin Sets Up Tip Line To Report Teachers And You Know What Pranksters Did Next
Lee Moran January 26, 2022
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) tip line seeking reports of what he describes as “divisive practices” in schools — such as the teaching of critical race theory ― has been hit with fake complaints.
Qasim Rashid, a Virginia-based lawyer and former Democratic congressional candidate, tweeted some of the taunting messages that people claim to have sent to a dedicated email address after he sarcastically told followers not to “make a mockery of this.
“Albus Dumbeldor was teaching that full blooded wizards discriminated against mudbloods!” read a “Harry Potter”-themed email reportedly sent to the tip line.
“Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!” said another message, referencing “The Simpsons.
It’s not the first time pranksters have overwhelmed a GOP reporting site, with similar action being taken against a Texas system to snitch on people who help others get abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
Singer-songwriter John Legend, meanwhile, urged Black parents to flood the Virginia line “with complaints about our history being silenced.”
Abbott, other Texas Republicans urge court to reverse ruling on voter fraud prosecutions
January 26, 2022
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) and state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) have urged the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reverse its ruling that Paxton cannot unilaterally prosecute voter fraud.
Both Abbott and Patrick issued separate statements on Tuesday criticizing the court for undermining their push for “election integrity,” a move that critics have called voter suppression for minorities who tend to vote Democratic, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“Texas passed the nation’s strongest election-integrity law to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat, cracking down on voter fraud,” Abbott spokeswoman Renae Eze said in a statement, the Morning News reported.
Eze added that the attorney general is “Texas’ highest law enforcement officer [and] has constitutional authority to enforce that election-integrity law.”
In his statement, Patrick added that “we need checks at the state level to ensure that our elections are fair,” arguing that the court was neglecting 70 years of legal precedent.
“If the court’s decision stands, certain rogue county and district attorneys will be allowed to turn a blind eye to election fraud, and they will have the final say on whether election fraud is prosecuted at all. To me, this is completely unacceptable,” Patrick’s statement also said.
The statements come after an 8-1 ruling in December in which the court dismissed campaign finance violation charges against Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephens and ruled that the attorney general could not directly prosecute most instances of voter fraud.
Paxton has called that ruling “devastating,” and on Jan. 3, he appealed the decision, the Morning News added.
Over two dozen state and federal lawmakers from Texas have signed amicus briefs supporting Paxton’s request to rehear the case, the Morning News also noted.
‘It’s just plain unconstitutional’: Wisconsin GOP leaders again reject resolution to ‘pull back’ 2020 electoral votes
Molly Beck, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel January 26, 2022
Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, listens to testimony.
MADISON – Assembly leaders for the second time have rejected a proposal from a Republican lawmaker to pull back Wisconsin’s electoral votes cast in the 2020 election, which is illegal.
Rep. Timothy Ramthun, a Republican from Campbellsport, introduced a resolution during a floor session Tuesday to take the impossible step of retracting the state’s 10 electoral votes cast for President Joe Biden in 2021.
Assembly leaders referred the resolution to a committee used to schedule floor votes for bills, a required action for such proposals under Assembly rules, and the committee chairman quickly said Ramthun’s resolution won’t be taken up.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html
“Rep Ramthun just attempted to pass an Assembly resolution to recall WI’s presidential electors. Not only is it illegal, it’s just plain unconstitutional,” Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, who leads the committee, said in a tweet. “As chair of the Rules Committee, there is ZERO chance I will advance this illegal resolution. #EndofStory”
But popular conservative website Gateway Pundit falsely reported the move had been successful. Kari Lake, a Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, then tweeted to her 107,315 followers “**HUGE BREAKING NEWS** — Wisconsin Assembly Votes to Withdraw Its 10 Electors for Joe Biden in 2020 Election.”
As of Tuesday morning, the tweet reporting inaccurate information was still up despite Gateway Pundit recasting the story. The tweet had been liked more than 11,000 times and shared by more than 5,000 people.
Recounts and court rulings found Biden beat former President Donald Trump by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. Independent reviews have found no signs of widespread voter fraud.
But Trump’s claims alleging otherwise have fueled a significant number of complaints from Wisconsin Republican voters to lawmakers, seeking a review of how the 2020 election was conducted.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the head of Wisconsin’s elections board certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state on Nov. 30 as Republicans contended they should have waited to act because of a likely lawsuit from Trump.
On Dec. 14, 10 Democratic electors also met inside Evers’ office to finalize the state’s 10 electoral votes for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. At the same time, Republicans convened to cast votes for President Donald Trump.
Ultimately, the results of the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election, which declared Biden the winner, were certified on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to tabulate the Electoral College vote.
Since the election results were certified, Ramthun has called to “pull the electoral ballots back from Wisconsin.”
But according to the Legislature’s attorneys, “there is no mechanism in state or federal law for the Legislature to reverse certified votes cast by the Electoral College and counted by Congress.”
“Instead, except in the case of presidential incapacity, impeachment is the only mechanism for removing a sitting U.S. President,” Katie Bender-Olson and Peggy Hurley, attorneys with the nonpartisan Legislative Council, wrote in a Nov. 1, 2021, memo.
The U.S. Constitution authorizes state legislatures to “direct” how presidential electors are appointed, which the Wisconsin Legislature has done by specifying an appointment procedure in state law, the memo said.
It reads: “The Wisconsin Legislature enacted statutes establishing the process for selecting and appointing presidential electors, which involves the political parties each nominating a slate of electors, and the results of the popular vote for president in Wisconsin determining which slate will be appointed.”
The Legislature could change this process, but it would require amending state law.
There is no procedure under Wisconsin law for “decertifying” or “pulling back” a slate of presidential electors who have been appointed pursuant to state statutes.
Ramthun, the Legislature’s most vocal denier of the 2020 election outcome, was disciplined by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos last week after Ramthun falsely accused Vos of signing a deal with attorneys for former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to authorize ballot drop boxes, according to Vos’s office.
Vos stripped Ramthun of his only staff position, a move criticized by Republican candidate for governor Rebecca Kleefisch.
“I disagree with the speaker’s decision last week,” Kleefisch said Monday in an appearance on WTAQ’s “The Regular Joe Show.” “My fear is over his constituents … I wouldn’t have done that.”
When host Joe Giganti asked Kleefisch if Vos should resign over the matter and other election-related issues, Kleefisch said “no, but I will say this: the people in the Legislature are the ones who choose their speaker. I urge them to choose wisely.”
Last week, two Assembly Republican lawmakers were surreptitiously filmed in their state Capitol offices by a group critical of Vos’s decision to discipline Ramthun. One of the legislators, Rep. John Spiros, slammed his office door in the face of a man distributing a petition to oust Vos.
Vos last summer hired former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to review the presidential election at a cost of $676,000 to taxpayers on behalf of Assembly Republicans. Members of the group captured in one of the new videos called the review too secretive.
Newt Gingrich Invented Donald Trump’s Lock-Them-Up Politics
How one man was the bridge from Reaganism to Trumpism.
By Jonathan Chait January 24, 2022
This past weekend, Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News to denounce the Democratic voting-rights bill before veering — as he is wont to do — into other topics on his mind. Gingrich segued into the January 6 commission, which was cruelly “pursuing innocent people, causing them to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on legal fees” — a tactic Gingrich himself pioneered in the 1990s but which was now not only wrong but somehow illegal. When Republicans gain control of Congress, he warned, they will prosecute the commission itself for unspecified crimes: “When you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down, and the wolves are going to find that they are now sheep, and they’re the ones who are going to face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they are breaking.”
Gingrich’s host, Maria Bartiromo, rather than recoil in horror at this authoritarian-tinged threat, or even ask what crimes he had in mind, instead gushed, “This is such great analysis!”
The man casually threatening to imprison members of a bipartisan commission investigating a violent attack on the Capitol is not some marginal screwball. His influence is ongoing, most recently through advising House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on strategies to win the midterm elections, and long-standing. Donald Trump’s combination of bombast, ridiculous hair, and explosive political success would have been totally impossible were it not for Gingrich’s prototype.
A popular belief, especially among political centrists, holds that Trump is the antithesis of the old Republican ethos. On one side of this divide sits idea-oriented, Reaganite, small-government conservatism, and on the other, an angry, reflexively oppositional, authoritarian personality cult.
Gingrich belies that simple and comforting dichotomy. His career shows how the two strands are so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable.
Gingrich reshaped his party in two important ways. First, he instilled the belief that the party’s main problem was that it was too nice and accommodating to the opposition. “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he explained in 1978. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
Gingrich trained House Republicans to depict their rivals in the most hysterical terms. A 1990 memo he wrote instructed candidates to label their Democratic adversaries with the terms betray, bizarre, decay, anti-flag, anti-family, pathetic, lie, cheat, radical, sick, traitors, among others.
And while Ronald Reagan gained credit for converting the party to supply-side economics and away from traditional fiscal conservatism, it was Gingrich who turned this program into a kind of theological tenet. Reagan, after all, had agreed to several tax increases in order to reduce the deficit his original tax cut had caused. But when George H.W. Bush made another deal in 1990 — to hike the top tax rate from 28 percent to 31 percent in return for hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts — Gingrich led a Republican revolt, ultimately deposing the House leadership. Since the 1990 Gingrich revolt, not a single Republican in Congress has ever supported even the tiniest tax increase.
Gingrich reached the pinnacle of his career after the 1994 midterm elections swept his party into control of Congress, which he depicted as a “revolution.” The conservative movement was intoxicated by power and possibility. The first issue of The Weekly Standard portrayed Gingrich as an action-movie hero, swinging from a rope while firing a machine gun over a flaming Washington landscape.
As the party’s chief ideologist, Gingrich castigated the Clinton administration as a radical, socialist threat that would destroy the American way of life unless it was destroyed itself. His party’s tactics reflected that apocalyptic conception of the stakes of their disagreement with the Democrats. First, Republicans shut down the government to force Clinton to accept their program, then impeached him.
While many Republicans initially met Trump’s 2016 campaign with disgust and attacked him as an apostate from the Reaganite creed, Gingrich quickly recognized Trump’s politics as an iteration of his own. In a March 2016 interview with Slate, he explained that he welcomed Trump not despite but because of his belief in movement conservatism: “Remember, I came in as a Reaganite, Kempite when I helped lead the effort in 1994. And I have consistently been in favor of a more aggressive, more active Republican Party that reaches out and expands its base and that is very, very idea-oriented.”
Gingrich’s fervent advocacy for Trump echoed the upside-down logic he had always used on his own behalf. On the one hand, he piously insisted he was motivated by high-minded ideas. “You are fascinated with sex, and you don’t care about public policy,” he scolded Megyn Kelly, shortly after Trump was caught boasting about sexual assault. On the other, he obsessively criminalized his opponents, both real and imagined, calling at various times for the arrests of such disparate figures as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd,Madonna, and various poll workers in states Trump claimed falsely to have won.
Meanwhile, the content of the policy itself seemed extremely pliable. In one postelection speech at the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich predicted, “My argument is that Trumpism produces a balanced budget largely as a consequence of its policies rather than by focusing on the balance itself.” It mattered not a whit to Gingrich that Trump’s policies actually increased the deficit. Sexual morality, like deficits, could either be the bedrock of social order or a totally insignificant hang-up of the elite media, depending entirely on which party could be held responsible for it.
Tax cuts remained the exception. Cutting taxes was the issue that enabled him to seize power within the party in the 1990s, and it held the party together under Trump’s presidency. No surprise that his advice to McCarthy reiterates the goal of cutting taxes again.
But more significant than the policy content of the Trump-Gingrich formula is its unwavering commitment to apocalyptic confrontation. Trump and Gingrich’s enemies are always liars and the embodiment of pure evil. The task is always to muster the courage to call out the lies of the liberals and the media and to mete out the same brutal treatment their enemies wish to use on them.
Many observers have assumed there is some neat conceptual divide between the slashing partisanship of a Gingrich and the naked authoritarianism of a Trump. If such a distinction exists, it is one of degree, not kind. At some point, the assumption that the opposing party is completely illegitimate and inherently criminal — beliefs Gingrich has promoted for decades — melds seamlessly into the conviction that your own party is entitled to lock up its enemies and hold power in spite of losing.
If you want to understand how the party of Reagan became the party of Trump, a grasp of Gingrich’s career is essential. He took control of the party at a time when its advance seemed precarious and infused it with the belief that it could only prevail through fanatical bellicosity. If Trump had not come along, there would have been no need to invent him; Gingrich was there all along.
The Anti-Vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America
By Kurt Andersen January 25, 2022
Getty – The Atlantic
Since last summer, the conservative campaign against vaccination has claimed thousands of lives for no ethically justifiable purpose.
In the early phases of the pandemic, as the coronavirus spread in the United States and doctors and pharmacists and supermarket clerks continued to work and risk infection, some commentators made reference—metaphorical reference, fast and loose and over the top—to ritual human sacrifice. The immediate panicky focus on resuming business as usual in order to keep the stock market from crashing was the equivalent of “those who offered human sacrifices to Moloch,” according to the writer Kitanya Harrison. That first summer, as Republicans settled into their anti-testing, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, nothing-to-worry-about orthodoxy, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, said it was “like a policy of mass human sacrifice.” The anthropology professor Shan-Estelle Brown and the researcher Zoe Pearson wrote that people who continued to do their jobs outside their homes were essentially victims of “involuntary human sacrifice, made to look voluntary.” Meanwhile, people on the right likewise compared the inconvenience of closing down public places to ritual sacrifice.
I got in on the analogy too: After Donald Trump’s first big indoor pandemic campaign rally in June 2020, I made a crack on Twitter that for the 6,000 MAGA folks attending it was like a “human sacrifice to please the leader.” And indeed at least once during the month before the rally, Trump played the part of a gung-ho godlike king presiding over the glorious sacrificial deaths of his subjects. When asked, during an Oval Office encounter with the press, whether the nation will “just have to accept the idea that … there will be more deaths” as a result of his open-everything-up-now plan, he said, “I call these people warriors, and I’m actually calling now … the nation, warriors. We have to be warriors.”
“Warriors,” “mass human sacrifice”: These were high-pitched figures of speech studding a debate about our political economy—whether and how governments should intervene to keep people and businesses financially afloat, and how many lives were worth how much of a hit to the economy. Beneath the polemics this discourse was at least fundamentally rational, a weighing of social costs against social benefits.
Today, however, the economy is no longer in jeopardy; unemployment rates and salaries have returned to pre-pandemic levels; GDP per person is higher than it was at the end of 2019; personal savings are growing, and businesses are starting up faster than ever; corporate profits and stock prices are at record highs. And for more than a year, we’ve had astoundingly effective vaccines that radically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. All of which means that for a long time now the right’s ongoing propaganda campaign against and organized political resistance to vaccination, among other public-health protocols, has been killing many, many Americans for no reasonable, ethically justifiable social purpose.
In other words, what we’ve experienced certainly since the middle of 2021 is literally ritual human sacrifice on a mass scale—the real thing, comparable to the innumerable ghastly historical versions.
Anthropologists define ritual sacrifice as societies’ organized killing of people in order to please supernatural beings and—the unspoken real-world part—to fortify the political and economic power of those societies’ elites. The tradition is right there in the first book of the Bible, when God commands Abraham to prove he loves him by murdering his son, and then only at the last second lets Abraham off the hook. For thousands of years in societies all over the world, small-scale and large-scale human sacrifice was common.
One big difference between then and now is the likelihood of death. In sacrificial spectacles hundreds and thousands of years ago, almost all of those chosen to die died, whether or not they had volunteered, whereas only a fraction of the people now volunteering to die by forgoing vaccinations actually do. It’s the new and improved modern version of mass human sacrifice.
But as I surveyed the anthropological literature, I was struck again and again by how well that scholarship describes the factors responsible for the thousands of deaths of Americans each month. Our current experience with COVID is filled with what historians of human sacrifice have identified as its key features. Let me run through the main ones.
1. Cultural and social complexity
The literature suggests that, far from happening only in simple societies, “human sacrifice stamps relatively advanced and especially decadent peoples,” as the Cambridge University scholar Stanley Arthur Cook concluded a century ago, just as the practice finally seemed to be disappearing. In the introduction to The Strange World of Human Sacrifice (2007), the religious historian Jan Bremmer wrote, “Human sacrifice is not something that is typical of marginal or minor tribes. On the contrary, as a regular practice on a grander scale, human sacrifice seems to belong to … larger empires”—“more developed cultures” that “have a strong government” and thus “could happily dispose” of people “without the community suffering a disastrous loss of members.” A groundbreaking 2016 study of scores of socially complex cultures across the Pacific and East Asia found that “sacrificial victims were typically of low status.” In various places around the world, the victims of human sacrifice tended to be elderly, ill, or both.
“The sacrifices,” Bremmer wrote, “often took place during exceptional circumstances … in periods of crisis.” In Inca societies in 15th- and 16th-century South America, according to a 2015 paper, “sacrifices were often conducted in response to natural calamities, such as … epidemics,” “based on their belief that illness and natural disasters were forms of supernatural punishment for sins committed.”
Accompanying the exceptional health crisis of COVID-19 were the immediate economic and social crises: public life shut down, a spike in violent crime, a one-third drop in stock prices, an economic recession, unemployment near 15 percent. In the spring of 2020, a University of Chicago survey found that of the 80 percent of Americans who believe in God, more than 60 percent at least somewhat agreed that the pandemic was “God telling humanity to change how we are living”; 43 percent of evangelicals “strongly” felt that to be true. In a different 2020 survey, three in five white evangelicals agreed that the pandemic and its ramifications were “evidence that we are living in what the Bible calls the ‘end times.’”
Naturally, many Christian ultra-conservatives rushed to put a finer point on it, including reliable superstars such as Pat Robertson, who declared, “We’ve allowed this terrible plague to spread throughout our society—and it’s a small wonder God would hold us guilty.” Notably, most believers apparently didn’t judge themselves to be sinners deserving of this punishment: According to the University of Chicago survey at the start of the pandemic, 55 percent thought God would protect them from infection.
3. Politics plus faith
According to the literature, human sacrifice occurred in societies where highly supernatural religion and state governance were deeply intertwined.
For some time in the U.S., evangelicals have made up about a third of Republicans, and 78 percent of all U.S. evangelical voters chose the GOP nominee in 2020. Donald Trump is a conspicuously un-Christian leader for an ultra-Christian party, but he is a showman, like the most successful evangelists throughout American history. In the fall of 2020, he put on a spectacular pandemic show with a Christian subtext: Infected with the coronavirus, he entered the valley of the shadow of death on a Friday. Three days later, he returned, on live TV, descending from the sky before surmounting America’s great secular temple and ceremoniously removing his mask, resurrected.
Even his most fervidly Christian supporters have never minded that he shares practically none of their theological beliefs. Indeed, his leadership of the American right is apparently making evangelical and Republican more or less synonymous in the minds of Trumpists. A longitudinal study by Pew of 2,900 Americans identified a peculiar sliver of the white people who liked Trump when he first ran for president: In 2016, a sixth of those white Americans didn’t identify as evangelicals or born again, but by 2020 they did. Republicanism has been transformed by the merger of religion and partisanship that started before the turn of this century. “If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extravagantly supernatural beliefs,” I wrote about the 21st-century GOP’s anti-modern denial of various empirical realities in my 2017 book, Fantasyland, “doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics and policy?”
4. Enormous scale
The human sacrifices carried out in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Aztecs, “a relatively young empire,” killed thousands of people and perhaps tens of thousands annually. For that civilization, according to Science’s Mexico-based archaeology and Latin American correspondent, “political power as well as religious belief is likely key to understanding the scale of the practice.”
Relatively young North American empire? Check. An annual count of victims in the thousands? Check. Driven by religious belief and politically powerful figures seeking to sustain their power? Check.
5. Victims volunteer and “volunteer”
In the Quranic version of the story, when Abraham is ordered by the Almighty to murder his son, the boy voluntarily submits to the plan in order to please God. The Aztecs’ “sacrificial victims earned a special, honored place in the afterlife,” according to one account; another declared that many “went willingly to the sacrificial altar.” The historian Bremmer writes that in the ritual sacrifices carried out by India’s Kond people into the 1800s, “the victims were always treated with great kindness before being sacrificed” to “the founding goddess of the village” and that, “in turn, the Konds expected them to offer themselves voluntarily.” Not surprisingly, when it comes to human sacrifice, the lines between voluntary and involuntary, suicide and murder, can be blurry. In the blood sacrifices practiced by the indigenous Chukchi people of Siberia well into the 19th century, the anthropologist Rane Willerslev explained in a 2013 paper, their ritual of so-called voluntary death was accomplished by means of various forms of “sacrificial trickery.”
Millions of Americans in 2021 were tricked by propagandists of the political right into forgoing vaccination and thus volunteering for death by COVID. Fox News hosts have consistently disparaged vaccination. During 2021, according to Media Matters, Tucker Carlson discussed vaccines on half of his nightly broadcasts after Joe Biden became president, “and all but one of those episodes featured a claim that undermined vaccines or vaccination efforts.” One night this month he said, “The boosters aren’t working” and “there’s evidence that people who get the booster are more likely” to become infected. The median age of Fox News viewers is 65. Unvaccinated people from 65 to 79 are now 21 times as likely to die of COVID as vaccinated people the same age, and unvaccinated Americans 50 and older are 44 times likelier to be hospitalized than the vaccinated and boosted.
Last fall, Joy Pullmann, the executive editor of the well-funded right-wing magazine The Federalist, published a remarkable essay there headlined “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is a Good Thing.” She portrays vaccination, along with other pandemic mitigation, as part of an “illusion of human control over death,” because, she insists, “there is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer.” And, according to her, “the Christian faith makes it very clear that death, while sad to those left behind and a tragic consequence of human sin, is now good for all who believe in Christ.”
Indeed, Pullmann continues, “it is time for Christians individually and corporately to repent for the way we and our institutions responded to the COVID-19 outbreak”—that is, apparently, to seek forgiveness for their sins of quarantining, getting vaccinated, actively avoiding death. Christians, she writes at one point, are “routinely martyred” in Communist China and “raped and ethnically cleansed to punish their beliefs” in the Middle East. She declares, “It’s time for we comparatively comfortable Westerners to despise the shame”—the shame of trying to avoid death by COVID—“and get back to running our race like [our] fellow Christians, not cowards.”
This argument reminds me of the Disciples of Christ minister who famously encouraged his hundreds of devout, credulous followers to die nobly at their Peoples Temple compound in 1978. “Be kind to seniors and take the potion,” Jim Jones told the residents of Jonestown gathered near the vats of poisoned Flavor Aid, with his armed lieutenants ensuring compliance. “Die with a degree of dignity,” he declares on a recording of that event, above the screams of some of his followers. “Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. Stop the hysterics.”
But today, instead of frankly rousing true believers to volunteer to die for Christ (or, as Trump demanded in 2020, for the economy), most orchestrators of the current mass-sacrifice campaign employ fear-based trickery. In Vero Beach, Florida, the right-wing pastor Rick Wiles (his surname a synonym for manipulative tricks!) has said that demons are “implementing a plan that they created 10-15 years ago” and insisted that the vaccines are “Satan’s syrup.” In Boynton Beach, Florida, one of the state’s three Republican National Committee members (whose day job is probate law, distributing the property of the dead) wrote that “Diabolical [Democratic] Michigan Governor Whiter [sic] wants her citizens to get the Mark of the Beast to participate in society.” Trump’s crypto-Republican buddy Kanye West announced back in July 2020 that “vaccines are the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”
And the right’s QAnon anti-vaccination cohort has produced its own eager volunteers for mass human sacrifice—volunteers probably oblivious to the irony that their own conspiracy theories center on a fantasy that elite liberals practice gruesome human sacrifice.
The original protestants 500 years ago, and in particular the extreme ones who self-exiled to the New World 400 years ago, very much identified as a fervent Christian minority persecuted by powerful ungodly elites. The fundamentalist Protestant revival that got under way in the U.S. a century ago was specifically anti-science, because adherents’ literal reading of Genesis didn’t jibe with modern geology or astronomy or biology. Starting in the 1960s and ’70s, their next U.S. revival resumed that crusade and extended it to other scientific realms, lately including virology. Not only are white Protestant evangelicals less likely than any other large American religious demographic to be vaccinated, but, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, those “who attend religious services regularly are twice as likely as less frequent attenders to be vaccine refusers.”
6. Participants’ murky understandings
Overseers and victims of human sacrifice don’t necessarily understand its goals, ostensible or real. “Many times when witnessing sacrifices,” the Russian ethnologist Vladimir Bogoraz wrote in his classic early-1900s monograph on the Siberian Chukchi, “… I asked to whom the sacrifice was being proffered. The answer was, ‘Who knows!’” The Chukchi expert Willerslev says this shows the witnesses’ lack of “any strenuous commitment to faith,” that the “rite of sacrifice is somehow thought to be effective as long as the ritual rules are followed”—that is, even the awareness of trickery doesn’t necessarily dissuade participants.
Bureaucratic trickery has been a consistent part of Republican-led governments’ COVID policies. The 2021 year-end staff report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis lays out how the Trump administration worked to keep citizens uninformed about the risks of the virus and about the scale of the mass death that was about to occur. In the spring of 2020, when the White House ordered the CDC to loosen its recommendations to churches about masking and social distancing, the CDC’s “incident manager,” Jay Butler, emailed a colleague to say that “this is not good public health—I am very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do.” Butler also had misgivings “as someone who has been speaking to churches and pastors on this (and as someone who goes to church).” Trump and his administration discouraged testing for infection from the start. As Deborah Birx, the former White House pandemic coordinator, told the House subcommittee this past fall, the “less aggressive testing of those without symptoms” was “the primary reason for the early community spread.”
Along-standing theory of human sacrifice, the “social-control hypothesis,” has argued that social elites used it to keep the hoi polloi subservient. But the evidence was scattered and anecdotal, untested by the most rigorous modern scholarship. One big question: What distinguished the cultures that practiced human sacrifice from those that did not? Thanks to a massive historical database of the social and genetic particulars of a hundred traditional societies spread over a sixth of the planet, from the eastern Pacific to Australia and East Asia, in 2016 we got one definitive answer: “Ritual human sacrifice,” an official summary of the research said, “played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom.”
Researchers from the University of Auckland, Australia’s Victoria University, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History categorized 93 Austronesian societies, 40 of which practiced human sacrifice, according to three levels of socioeconomic fairness—from most egalitarian, where children didn’t inherit wealth or status from parents, to totally nonegalitarian, where children could acquire wealth and status only by inheritance. The results are stark: The less fair a society’s socioeconomic system was, the more likely it was to practice human sacrifice—67 percent of the least egalitarian societies versus only 25 percent of the most egalitarian and 37 percent of those in the middle. More specifically, the researchers wrote, “human sacrifice substantially increased the chances of high social stratification arising,” “increased the rate at which” those societies “gain high social stratification,” and “stabilizes social stratification once stratification has arisen.”
Do I even need to make the point that in America since the 1970s, as a result of the reengineering of our political economy led by Republicans, Big Business, and the rich, the U.S. has become much less egalitarian, inequality and stratification have radically increased, and socioeconomic mobility has radically decreased?
Whether they were convinced that COVID wasn’t real; that if it was, God would keep them alive or, alternatively, use COVID to kill them on schedule; that vaccines are “Satan’s syrup” or make you sterile or worse; that in any case vaccination mandates are, like gun regulation, a tyrannical plot by liberals and globalists; or that the Omicron variant was introduced to deflect public attention from Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial (and, by the way, omicron and delta combined are an anagram for media control)—whatever their reasons, millions of Americans have been persuaded by the right to promote death, and potentially to sacrifice themselves and others, ostensibly for the sake of personal liberty but definitely as a means of increasing their tribal solidarity and inclination to vote Republican.
That’s why the Republican governor of Texas, after mandating masks early in the pandemic, gave in to his pro-sacrifice hard-liners last fall and issued a prohibition on businesses requiring customers to be vaccinated. It’s why at a November forum for the Republicans running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, one candidate bragged that he was “the only one up here … who’s not vaxxed.” It’s why the Republican attorney general of Missouri, running for the U.S. Senate there, informed the state’s local health and school officials in December that any “mask mandates, quarantine orders, and other public health orders” concerning COVID are unconstitutional and thus “null and void,” which at least one county took to mean that it must end “all COVID-19 related work” of any kind. It’s why all 13 states that have legally prohibited vaccination mandates have Republican-controlled legislatures, and why at least fiveRepublicanstatesarepaying unemployment benefits to people who leave their jobs because they refuse to be vaccinated.
Back in 2020, the Republican-led resistance to mask wearing and other public-health measures may have made people die unnecessarily, but if so it wasn’t killing that many more Republicans (or those in their vicinity) than other Americans. During the second half of 2021, however, after vaccines were available to all adults, that changed dramatically. Of the 20 least-vaccinated states today, Trump carried 17 in the 2020 election. According to one analysis, in the most Republican tenth of America only 42 percent of people were fully vaccinated by the end of last year. In Washington State, for example, the shrinking unvaccinated minority have lately comprised more than nine out of 10 COVID victims under 65, and three-quarters of the older ones. More and more, the unvaccinated (three out of five of whom are Republicans) and those killed by COVID are distinctly GOP subsets.
It was a graph I saw in the fall that startled me into taking the mass-human-sacrifice idea seriously. The Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy’s granular analysis plotted the number of deaths and degree of Republicanism in each of America’s 3,000 counties, then divided the counties into 10 groups from reddest to bluest, each containing a tenth of the U.S. population. In the reddest counties—those where 70 percent or more voted for Trump—the COVID death rates from last June through November were five or six times the death rates in places at the other end of the political scale. And step by step up the blue-to-red scale, the statistical correlation is amazingly consistent—the more Republican your county, the more likely you are to die of COVID.
At their imperial peak 500 years ago, the Aztec rulers sacrificed 20,000 or more people each year, some estimates suggest. By the reckoning of experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation, counting only the “COVID-19 deaths [that] could have been prevented by vaccination,” the number of Americans unnecessarily and avoidably killed in the U.S. from just last June to November is 163,000.
A week before Christmas, at a right-wing convention in Phoenix called Americafest, Sarah Palin said, “It’ll be over my dead body that I get a shot,” and “if enough of us rise up … there are more of us than there are of them.” (This week, as the federal trial of her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times was starting, she “tested positive for coronavirus,” the judge announced in court. “She is, of course, unvaccinated.”) In fact, 87 percent of adults have now been at least partially vaccinated. The 13 percent who have not are basically the same people who’ve said all along that they’d refuse to be vaccinated—and most of them, like Palin, are Republican, and nearly all the rest of them are Republican-leaning independents.
It’s notable that the Republican president who stirred up and led the anti-lockdown, anti-mask movement during 2020 never signed on to the anti-vaccine dogma. Despite gaining some natural immunity from having been infected, Trump was among the first to be vaccinated a year ago, then stepped right up to get a booster. Last summer, it seems like, he was persuaded by the overwhelming political logic of the numbers—by then a supermajority of the electorate was vaccinated, 70 percent and growing, while only about half of those remaining were still committed to the hard-core anti-vaccination vision. Trump obviously made a marketing choice to pivot away from those dead-enders.
“I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you’ve got to do what you have to do,” he said at a rally in August on a farm in an Alabama county where 88 percent voted for him. But: “I recommend—take the vaccines, I did it, it’s good, take the vaccines.” Some people booed. Which made news, to which Trump is addicted. So in three interviews on three consecutive days at the end of the year, he went at it again, harder—with Bill O’Reilly on their joint speaking tour, on Fox News, and on The Daily Wire with the MAGA star Candace Owens.
For the past six years, few of his masses of fervent supporters—whether evangelical or irreligious—have objected much to any particular Trump heresy or inconsistency. Indeed, his extreme unpredictability is part of the show. And as he considers running for president in 2024, he must be acutely aware that his margins of victory and loss in 2016 and 2020 were mere thousands of votes in a few states, and that his voters are disproportionately the ones now being sacrificed. “I watched a couple of politicians be interviewed,” Trump said this month, “and one of the questions was, ‘Did you get the booster?’ … They’re answering like––in other words, the answer is ‘yes,’ but they don’t want to say it, because they’re gutless.” Perhaps his primary campaign has begun: His leading rival for the nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, keeps refusing to say whether he’s gotten a vaccine booster shot.
The pandemic will eventually finish its course, and the supply of sacrifice victims will run out. But the people who politicized and badly exacerbated this current mass-fatality event must now realize, if only unconsciously, that large-scale human sacrifice can be a useful modern political tool for a party ideologically committed to extreme inequality. What might be the next public-health crisis they can exploit? After all, for 40 years now they’ve proved their righteous power by sacrificing thousands of lives each year to the quasi-religious American fetish for guns.
But some emerging anthropology scholarship offers a glimmer of hope. Those 93 Austronesian societies in Asia and the Pacific where ritual sacrifice and inequality were strongly correlated all had populations of under a million. An ongoing cross-cultural study, based on a different, wider-ranging historical database called Seshat, has found an inverse correlation between human sacrifice and population: Organized, state-sanctioned sacrifice typically becomes unsustainable in larger societies. As Laura Spinney explained in The Atlantic in 2018, the Seshat data corpus “includes ‘mega-empires’ whose subjects numbered in the tens of millions,” and thus “tracks social complexity closer to modern levels.” Over time, the essentially parasitic nature of human sacrifice becomes more generally acknowledged. This “particularly pernicious form of inequality,” concludes the Oxford University anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, one of Seshat’s founders, eventually disappears in very big societies “because they cannot survive with that level of injustice.”
So perhaps in a country of 330 million people, and even just within its super-red jurisdictions, the long-term governing prospects for the live-free-and-die GOP are inherently self-limiting. Maybe we have empirical grounds for hoping that the long arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice in this instance. For now, though, the death count keeps gratuitously rising.
Mars Wrigley closing nearly century-old chocolate plant on Chicago’s West Side
Robert Channick, Chicago Tribune January 25, 2022
Mars Wrigley closing nearly century-old chocolate plant on Chicago’s West Side
Mars Wrigley is closing a nearly century-old chocolate plant on Chicago’s West Side once hailed as the most beautiful candy factory in America.
Built in a Spanish-style architecture in 1928, the sprawling plant in the Galewood neighborhood bordering Oak Park employs about 280 workers and will be phased out over the next two years, the company said in a statement Tuesday.
What becomes of the employees and the unique factory — an intriguing part of Chicago’s rich candy history — remains to be seen.
“The company remains committed to the city of Chicago and intends to partner with the surrounding community on a future vision for the site,” a spokesperson for Mars Wrigley Confectionery said in an email. “As we continuously evaluate our footprint across North America, our Associates were informed of the decision to move the majority of operations to other facilities in the U.S. over the next two years.”
The U.S. headquarters for privately held Mars Wrigley moved to New Jersey in 2017, following Mars’ $23 billion acquisition of Chicago-based Wrigley in 2008. The Mars Wrigley global headquarters are located on Goose Island in Chicago.
Workers at the closing Chicago plant will be “encouraged to explore the opportunities to apply for open roles across our network, specifically in the Chicago area,” the Mars Wrigley spokesperson said.
Mars Wrigley has an ice cream factory in Burr Ridge, a candy factory in Yorkville and a pet nutrition manufacturing site in downstate Mattoon, among other Illinois locations, the company said.
The plant at 2019 N. Oak Park Ave. produces a variety of “filled bar chocolate” such as 3 Musketeers and Milky Way, the company said. The success of the Milky Way, a malted milk candy bar introduced in 1923, helped build the company and the Chicago factory, with founder Frank Mars moving the company from Minneapolis to Chicago when it opened in 1929.
Built on 16 acres in a residential area, the plant was named the “factory of the month” in a 1953 Chicago Tribune series, which called it “an outstanding bit of architecture … in a beautiful setting of brilliant green bent grass, beds of flowers, shrubs and towering trees.” The factory included tinted walls, red tile roofs and two-story-high curved-top windows.
Inside, fine art adorned the walls and Oriental rugs were “scattered about,” reflecting the company’s mission to create a better workplace and beautify the neighborhood, according to the Tribune article.
The Tribune reported that the candy bar plant was the “largest of its kind in the world,” at least as of 1953.
The property was formerly part of the Westward Ho Golf Club. Mars Wrigley plans to donate the factory site “for the use of the community,” the company said.
Mars moved its corporate headquarters to New Jersey in 1940 and relocated to Virginia in 1984, where the parent company remains.
Liberal stronghold Lawrence fears getting gerrymandered into rural Kansas district
Jonathan Shorman, Katie Bernard January 25, 2022
Every year, Lawrence Free State High School social studies teacher Blake Swenson walks his students through redistricting, the crucial once-a-decade redrawing of congressional and legislative boundaries to account for shifts in population.
The students test out online mapping tools that let them draw their own districts and discover just how hard it is to make them equal, as required by federal law. And Swenson covers the less savory elements of the process, too — the raw politics that can lead to gerrymandering.
So when Republican lawmakers proposed a congressional map last week that would move Lawrence out of its current home in the eastern Kansas 2nd District and into the western and north central 1st District, the idea didn’t shock him.
“I wasn’t too surprised they would try to do this just because this has kind of been the trend,” Swenson said.
Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas and long a liberal stronghold in a conservative state, is bracing for the possibility it will spend the next 10 years in the Big 1st – a vast Republican expanse that currently stretches from just west of Topeka to the Colorado border.
The Kansas Senate on Friday passed a congressional map that would extend the 1st further east, snaking north of Topeka then south to snatch up Lawrence. On Monday, a House committee advanced an identical proposal to the full House, a sign the Republican-controlled Legislature is bent on sending the plan to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.
The House debated the plan on Tuesday. GOP leaders defeated several attempts to amend the map. A final vote is expected Wednesday.
Lawrence is no stranger to being tossed around in redistricting. From the early 70s until 2002, the city flipped between the 2nd and 3rd District every 10 years. Then lawmakers split the city between the two districts before federal judges drew maps in 2012 that returned it all back into the 2nd.
But never before has Lawrence – a college hub less than an hour’s drive from downtown Kansas City – stood at the edge of being pushed into the rural western 1st.
“I think there’s definitely political gerrymandering going on … ever since I’ve lived in Lawrence, we’ve just changed our district,” said Swenson, who moved to the city in 2000.
The idea of moving one of Kansas’s bluest cities into its reddest district, combined with the speed at which lawmakers are moving, has sent community leaders and activists scrambling. They’re frustrated and angered not only by what appears to be a brazen political power play, but also what they see as the absurdity of dropping one of the state’s most urban communities into a traditionally rural, agriculturally-focused district.
The city didn’t feature prominently in public redistricting discussions leading up to the start of the legislative session earlier this month. Much of the attention focused on the 3rd District, which encompasses the Kansas City metro and whether Democratic-leaning Wyandotte County would be split apart or severed from Johnson County, where Democrats have made gains in recent years.
“I didn’t expect something like this,” Pat Willer, chair of the Douglas County Democratic Party, said.
Lawrence as it appears in Republican-led ad astra congressional redistricting map. The map would move Lawrence into the 1st congressional district while leaving the surrounding area in the 2nd district.
Gerrymandering seen in map
Douglas County, home to Lawrence, currently sits entirely in the 2nd, which includes all of eastern Kansas with the exception of the Kansas City metro. The map passed by the Senate – called “ad astra” among lawmakers – leaves the county in the 2nd except for Lawrence.
The city, with nearly 95,000 residents in the northern part of the county, would be scooped out of the 2nd into the 1st with a bowl-shaped line running south of the city.
“I think visually, looking at that specific little notch, it makes so little sense,” Willer said. “It just kind of drives home the notion of gerrymandering.”
Republicans control three of the state’s four congressional districts. Since 2020, some Republicans have signaled they believe the map can be redrawn to weaken the delegation’s sole Democrat, Rep. Sharice Davids of the 3rd.
But shifting Lawrence into the 1st suggests Republicans are embarking on an even more ambitious project that would not only undermine Davids, but also shore up GOP control over the 2nd.
Under the ad astra map, part of Wyandotte County would move from the 3rd into the 2nd. The switch would be offset by taking Lawrence out of the 2nd.
Kansas Republicans introduced a redistricting map Tuesday that split part of Wyandotte County away from Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District.
Republicans have held the 2nd District for the past decade but it has at times been competitive. Democrats nearly captured the seat in 2018, when Lawrence attorney Paul Davis, a former candidate for governor, ran against Republican Steve Watkins. Watkins, who suffered from numerous controversies and a divisive primary, won by 2,239 votes or less than 1 percentage point.
Republicans hold unquestioned command of the 1st, however. GOP Rep. Tracey Mann won more than 71% of the vote in 2020. With that kind of margin, the party is betting Mann can afford to absorb Lawrence’s Democrats without risk.
Rep. Barbara Ballard, a Lawrence Democrat, said she couldn’t understand how moving Lawrence can be justified. “People may not like that Lawrence is more liberal, votes blue, though it has a lot of Republicans there too,” she told a committee hearing on Monday.
Top Republicans have offered only a few perfunctory non-political explanations for the ad astra map.
Senate Vice President Rick Wilborn, a McPherson Republican who chairs the Senate Redistricting Committee, said during debate that the Board of Regents a decade ago had wanted the schools kept together.
And, he said, it “didn’t cross my mind” that moving Lawrence out of the 2nd would make up for new Democrats in the district from Wyandotte County.
Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, has emphasized that Lawrence and Manhattan would both be in the 1st district, grouping the University of Kansas and Kansas State University together.
“I don’t know how you would contest that Lawrence and Manhattan aren’t similar in their interests. It made a lot of sense to put the universities back together,” Masterson said.
Matt Keith, Board of Regents spokesman, said the board hasn’t taken a position or offered testimony on any aspect of redistricting.
The University of Kansas campus in Lawrence. The Kansas Legislature may move Lawrence into the 1st congressional district, but students don’t appear engaged on the issue, according to a student activist.
KU student engagement lacking
Although Republicans are angling to move KU into a new district, the fight over the congressional map hasn’t attracted the attention of students, said Ryan Reza, a senior studying political science and global and international relations.
Reza, president of Kansas Young Democrats, said that while he appreciates the efforts of some groups to raise awareness, “I think that historically, students have not cared about redistricting – not because they don’t care but because they’re not as informed and aware of the process as they should be.”
For his part, Reza’s objections go beyond partisan politics and include concerns about dividing Lawrence, where he plans to live after graduation, and Topeka, where he grew up.
“The two communities are so tight-knit because a lot of younger folks who work in Topeka live in Lawrence,” Reza said.
Some Lawrence leaders are sidestepping the partisan aspects of the redistricting fight, instead focusing on the economic, cultural and community reasons a move to the 1st doesn’t make sense.
Both the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce and the City of Lawrence have gone on record opposing the ad astra map.
“The City of Lawrence is opposed to redistricting maps that split Douglas County into more than one congressional district. We are also opposed to efforts to place Douglas County into the 1st Congressional District,” Mayor Courtney Shipley wrote in a letter to lawmakers dated Jan. 19.
Shipley didn’t elaborate in her letter and didn’t respond to an interview request.
Lawrence Mayor Courtney Shipley opposes the current Republican-led congressional redistricting map, which would place the city into the 1st congressional district, which includes western Kansas.
In its letter, the Chamber of Commerce focused on urging lawmakers to keep Douglas County intact. Criteria for redistricting include the compactness of districts, preservation of political communities, racial fairness, equal population and partisan fairness, the letter said, alleging the ad astra map “violates several of these criteria.”
“Lawrence has never been in district one and I think for obvious reasons,” Hugh Carter, vice president of external affairs at the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview. “It isn’t a good fit. It’s an ag region.”
Zack Pistora, who sits on the board of the Kansas Rural Center, an agricultural advocacy group, also questioned the connection between Lawrence and western side of the state. How is a U.S. representative supposed to reconcile the interests of the southwest tip of Kansas with the interest of Lawrence residents, he asked.
“It would just be a stretch,” said Pistora, who lives outside Lawrence in Leavenworth County and would remain in the 2nd district under the ad astra map.
South Park in Lawrence. Republican legislators are close to approving new congressional maps that would move Lawrence into the 1st congressional district, which includes western Kansas.
Lawsuit over congressional map?
If the House approves the ad astra map without changes, it will go to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. The governor hasn’t said she will veto the map, but told reporters last week she wanted communities of interest maintained.
The House and Senate would need two-thirds majorities to override a veto. The Senate could likely achieve the necessary support but it’s less clear whether the House has the votes.
The ad astra map would almost certainly face a lawsuit if it becomes law, however. Opponents would likely allege the districts aren’t compact and lawmakers haven’t done enough to preserve communities of interest.
“I would expect there would be court challenges,” said Cille King, advocacy chair for the Kansas League of Women Voters who is also involved in the group’s Douglas County chapter.
Regardless of whether the ad astra map is ultimately enacted, Carter said the way the Legislature has conducted redistricting has been disappointing. With the candidate filing deadline not until June, lawmakers have the entire session to approve a map.
“So to push something, especially with some of the things that we think are clearly at least not in this community’s best interest, so quickly that we can barely scramble and get the leadership in this county all together to even express an opinion is disappointing,” he said.
