Month: February 2022

Politico

Take The Hint, John Roberts — It’s Time For You To Retire, Too

John F. Harris – February 3, 2022

“Judges are like umpires,” John Roberts famously said at his confirmation hearing as Chief Justice. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them … They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”

The analogy is vivid and folksy — and even more starkly at odds with reality today than when Roberts invoked it back in 2005.

One way to hear Roberts’ pious words is as a gesture of respect. He knows the truth is more complicated. But he’s describing an ideal that right-thinking people should honor in theory, and judges and justices should strive at least to approximate in practice.

Another way to hear the words is as a gesture of contempt. Roberts is asking his audience to join him in a cynical exercise of make-believe. It is designed to preserve the fraudulent mystique of the high court as detached and apolitical when anyone can see from a surfeit of narrowly decided cases that justices are fully immersed in questions of politics and power.

The first interpretation is more fair to Roberts, with a tenure as chief justice in which he has valiantly tried to protect the reputation and independence of the court.

There is one sure way, however, that Roberts could prove he deserves the benefit of the doubt: He could join Justice Stephen Breyer in announcing his retirement at the end of the court’s term this summer.

This surprising act would be most likely to advance what the Chief Justice says he wants — a revival of public faith in the Court’s institutional legitimacy, and that its rulings flow from something other than the personal agendas of individual justices or the partisan machinations that placed them in their jobs.

Unlike with Breyer, there is no swirl of speculation that a Roberts retirement is imminent — nor any public pressure campaign designed to make him surrender to the wishes of the party that originally put him in office. There is no reason to suppose that Roberts is interested in career counseling from a columnist.

Still, Roberts’ own words suggest a powerful logic to the chief justice imposing term limits on himself. If he believes justices are like umpires, his own retirement would be the best example — a rebuke to glaring counter-examples all around him. His fellow justices plainly don’t believe they are detached arbiters of law. That is why they try to time their retirements (as Breyer did), or hope for a delay in their deaths (as Ruth Bader Ginsburg failed to achieve) so that their successors can be selected by a president of the right political persuasion.

Most of all, Roberts knows that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does not remotely believe that the high court is apolitical. He deserves credit, perhaps, for having the courage of his power-over-principle convictions: He has already signaled he is likely to lead his party in blocking any further Supreme Court nominations for the balance of Biden’s term in the plausible event Republicans regain a Senate majority in this fall’s elections.

As Roberts surely recognizes, what McConnell is contemplating in the future — just like what he has done already in the past — is in its own way a form of court-packing. It is no different in effect than it would be if Democrats used their majority to increase the size of the Court in order to install several sympathetic nominees. Already the Court has two justices, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who are there principally because of McConnell’s willingness to defy precedent — to tolerate extended vacancies to block nominees he doesn’t like or to race the clock to swiftly advance nominees he does like.
While Roberts sermonizes about the majesty of the law and the austere detachment of the judiciary, it is entirely reasonable for skeptics to believe that the fate of important constitutional questions is controlled by random twists of fate and purposeful political gamesmanship. It is increasingly unreasonable to believe the opposite.

For this reason, there are at least three reasons Roberts might consider hanging up his robes this year, each blending idealistic and practical considerations.

• First, the chief justice can probably trust Biden more than whoever comes after. Despite their presumed differences on judicial philosophy, Roberts must perceive that he and Biden are more committed to the cause of institutional legitimacy for the court than either McConnell or the 2024 Republican nominee (which as of today is mostly likely either Trump or someone who shares Trump’s contempt for institutional independence).
• Second, he could make an eloquent statement on behalf of orderly institutional governance. Perhaps, at age 67, Roberts is thinking: Hey, I could easily stay in this job for another twenty years — until I get really infirm or die. That is indeed normal practice at the Court, just as it is increasingly normal for the geriatric class to cling to power in Congress. But it is not normal in most important fields of American life. Any CEO or university president or editor who is in her or his late sixties and has held office for 17 years would now be thinking about stepping down — or being forced to think about it by a responsible governing board. Already, Roberts has served nearly the length that many would-be reformers recommend for Supreme Court term limits (18 years in one recent proposal). Just because the Constitution allows justices to stay parked in their jobs until deep in old age does not mean it is desirable for them to make that choice. This trend also contributes to cults of personality — such as those that built up on the left around Ginsburg and on the right around Antonin Scalia — that are entirely at odds with Roberts’ notion of self-disciplined, self-effacing umpires of the law.
• Third, Roberts’ apparent self-conception as an apolitical defender of the law and its highest institution is about to get much harder, in potentially untenable ways. Increasingly, Roberts does not seem to be concerned merely with calling balls and strikes in the fashion of an umpire. Instead, he understandably seems to view himself as more like a baseball commissioner trying to protect the sport itself during a time of crisis. This was the widespread interpretation of what Roberts was doing in the Obama years, when he seemed to be shifting some of his own views — widening the strike zone, if you will — in order to uphold the Affordable Care Act and avoid the eruption of controversy that would have followed if a conservative majority had struck it down. Many people are wondering whether this same instinct will be at play as the court this year reexamines the constitutional right to abortion granted in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. The Chief Justice’s exquisite maneuvers call to mind a juggler frantically trying to prevent a plate from crashing to the floor, or the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. It’s all very admirable — yet also at odds with the notion that justices are simply interpreting the law without regard to politics.

Perhaps Roberts has such deft fingers that he really will manage to save the dike and turn back the tide of ideological forces threatening to swamp the High Court. In that case, let him stay in his job another 17 years and fully earn the cult-of-personality status he says he doesn’t want. Until then, though, people are entitled to roll their eyes during John Roberts’ sermons about the purity of the judicial branch.

Yahoo! News

COVID boosters are the secret to getting back to normal. Why are Americans so resistant to them?

Andrew Romano and Alexander Nazaryan – February 3, 2022

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Denmark lifted all of its remaining coronavirus restrictions — a moment that millions of Americans have been longing for, especially as the Omicron wave that began in December appears to be subsiding.

Recent polling indicates that pandemic fatigue is rising among ordinary Americans, a trend that elected officials have noticed. “We need to move away from the pandemic,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said on Monday, after he and other governors met with President Biden.

Denmark is an enticing vision of what could be. So is the U.K., where coronavirus safety measures were dispensed with in mid-January. But neither the president nor his top public health officials have been eager to signal an end to the emergency phase of the pandemic by lifting any remaining federal restrictions or softening safety recommendations (such as in-school masking).

The reason is simple, the challenge intractable: The fast-moving Omicron variant is still causing more than 2,500 U.S. deaths a day — and not nearly enough vulnerable Americans have received their booster shots to prevent the next serious variant from taking a similarly tragic toll.

So far, despite an endless supply of shots and months of easy access, barely a quarter of the U.S. population (27 percent) has received a booster — less than half the Danish (61 percent) or British (55 percent) rate.

Even among Americans who’ve already received their initial vaccine doses and are eligible for another, nearly 50 percent have yet to get a booster, which offers much greater protection against serious or critical COVID-19 illness than what continues to count for full vaccination (two doses of the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer or Moderna, or a single Johnson & Johnson shot).

A new CDC study of the Omicron surge in Los Angeles found that while vaccinated people were 5.3 times less likely to end up in the hospital than the unvaccinated, boosted people were 23 times less likely to do so, meaning that boosters afforded four times more protection against hospitalization than a first-series vaccination alone.

The result is practically unique to America, where vaccination rates are solid but booster rates are low: “A pandemic of the unboosted,” as Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious-disease expert at Baylor College of Medicine, recently told the Financial Times.

Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the U.S., the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is “at least 63 percent higher” than in any other large, wealthy nation, according to a New York Times analysis published earlier this week.

“The only large European countries to exceed America’s COVID death rates this winter have been Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic, poorer nations where the best COVID treatments are relatively scarce,” the Times reported.

Experts say fading vaccine protection — along with higher numbers of unvaccinated and overweight residents — is a major reason why.

“What if there was a way to prevent 99% of Covid deaths and 96% hospitalizations, safety was validated in billions of people, it was free, and there was an unlimited supply?” Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, tweeted Wednesday.

“There is. 3 shots,” he continued. “But tens of millions of Americans won’t go for it. And the US outcomes reflect that.”

Why is America so bad at boosters? The country’s initial vaccination effort was more or less successful, with 74.2 percent of all adults — and 88.4 percent of seniors — now considered “fully” inoculated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But its subsequent booster effort has been hampered by regulatory disagreement, confusing public health messaging and the spread of misinformation, not to mention two new waves of the coronavirus since the fall, when the booster effort was just beginning.

“The White House COVID-19 team was correct back in August 2021 when they said that most Americans would need boosters and that the effort would begin in September,” Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore public health commissioner, told Yahoo News. “But then the messaging became very convoluted from the CDC. The American public generally understood this back-and-forth to mean that boosters were a nice-to-have luxury instead of essential.”

The contrast with peer countries is stark. In a Twitter thread explaining Denmark’s decision, political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who advises the Danish government and leads the country’s largest study of pandemic behavior, rattled off several key differences with the U.S. that have allowed his homeland to return to normal first.

But one data point in particular stood out. “Sixty-one percent of the [Danish] population,” Petersen wrote, has “received a booster vaccine.”

In Europe, that figure is hardly an outlier. More than half of Germans, Italians and Belgians have received an additional dose, and France, Spain, Canada and the Netherlands will soon clear the 50 percent mark themselves.

Yet Americans trail far behind — and that, more than anything else, is what’s holding the U.S. back from declaring an end to its own state of emergency, experts say. Some of the U.S. states with the lowest booster rates have already returned to something approaching normal, while more cautious blue states continue to wait, even as booster uptake remains anemic nationwide.

The disparity is startling, and the conclusion obvious. “The percent of people who are currently hospitalized due to COVID-19 are disproportionately unvaccinated and disproportionately not boosted,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Wednesday during a White House pandemic response team briefing to explain why the U.S. has been slower than its European counterparts in returning to normal.

She shared a statistic from a hospital surveillance network: Only 8 percent of people age 65 and over who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had been boosted. “We really do have to look to our hospitalization rates, and our death rates, to look to when it’s time to lift some of these mitigation efforts,” Walensky said.

The science on boosters has been clear for months. Even before the hypermutated Omicron variant materialized last November, studies were showing that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines’ original 90-plus percent effectiveness against COVID infection and hospitalization had worn off over time and in the face of the hypercontagious Delta variant — but that it could be restored, almost instantly, with a third shot.

Once Omicron materialized and started to spread even faster than Delta due to its superior ability to sidestep our immune defenses, this effect became more pronounced. According to several major studies summarized by Topol, two waned vaccine doses now reduce the chances of an Omicron infection by just 25 percent compared with no vaccine doses — while reducing the chances of hospitalization and death due to Omicron by just under 60 percent.

A booster, on the other hand, is twice as effective as two shots against infection (50 percent) and almost completely effective against hospitalization (90 percent) and death (95 percent), even after three months.

Clearly, booster shots are the surest way of keeping vulnerable people out of hospitals. And keeping people out of hospitals, in turn, is the surest way to return to normal, as Walensky said on Wednesday.

Yet the U.S. has botched its booster rollout. Although America got off to a much faster start than Europe in the initial drive to vaccinate its population, Europe caught up by August.

Right around that time, regulators at the CDC and Food and Drug Administration entered an acrimonious debate over whether boosters were even necessary. Some top FDA experts argued that a first series offered sufficient protection even against the Delta strain for most people and that the U.S. should focus instead on getting first shots to unvaccinated populations abroad.

Two officials at the FDA even resigned over what they saw as Biden’s own advocacy for boosters, which they and others regarded as political interference of the kind his administration had vowed to avoid.

The legitimate scientific debate over boosters was joined with a rising Republican resistance to vaccines. The issue became so politicized that former President Donald Trump was criticized by some conservatives for admitting that he had received a booster shot and urging his supporters to take the same step.

Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a favorite of the Republican base, has studiously avoided saying anything about his own booster status, in what many have described as an effort to harness surging anti-vaccine sentiment within the GOP.

By the time boosters were broadly approved, many Americans had absorbed the message that they were optional — even overkill. Then Omicron surged, and vaccine appointments were suddenly hard to come by.

Some Americans started to voice concerns about when inoculations would end, or if they would end at all. Israel has been experimenting with a fourth shot, with results suggesting a marginal benefit. In the end, many Americans seem to have resigned themselves to simply contracting the coronavirus, concluding that natural immunity will suffice in place of getting boosted.

But whatever the causes of America’s booster deficit, the cost is now being measured in lives. According to a Financial Times analysis published Monday, 30 percent of U.S. seniors had gone six months since receiving a second dose as of Dec. 20 — when Omicron was taking off — compared with just 7 percent in Denmark. As a result of this weaker coverage among those most susceptible to serious disease — another 12 percent of U.S. seniors remain entirely unvaccinated — the FT calculated that the U.S. was twice as exposed to COVID hospitalization as Denmark during the Omicron wave.

Ultimately, the paper concluded, “the number of COVID patients in US hospitals on January 19 would have peaked at 91,000 instead of 161,000 if the US had the same rates of vaccine coverage in each age-group as Denmark” — and far fewer Americans would have died.

Going forward, vulnerable Americans will continue to be exposed. A recent Omicron infection offers some initial protection, but it is likely to be short-lived and eventually ineffective against new variants; boosters provide a stronger, broader shield. Yet even now, more than 35 percent of “fully” vaccinated U.S. seniors remain unboosted. That’s 17 million Americans. By comparison, just 9 percent of Britons over 65 are unboosted.

“As flummoxed as I am by folks remaining unvaxxed, I’m even more surprised by millions who’ve failed to get boosted,” Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, tweeted Tuesday, noting that the benefits of boosters “are unmistakable.”

Expanding booster coverage among those who’ve already initiated the vaccination process will be a quicker and easier way to limit America’s exposure to future variants than somehow persuading hard-core vaccine holdouts to get their first jab. But until that happens, returning to normal will remain far riskier in the U.S. than in a country like Denmark or the U.K.

USA Today

Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward, spouse, sue to block Jan. 6 panel from accessing phone records

Chelsey Cox, USA TODAY – February 2, 2022

WASHINGTON — Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, filed a suit Tuesday against the Jan. 6 House select committee for subpoenaing the couple’s phone records.

The Wards allegedly signed documents falsely claiming to be among Arizona’s presidential electors in 2020. The suit sought to block phone provider T-Mobile from sharing records with the committee, according to records obtained by Politico.

The lawsuit has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich, wife of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Senate candidate and ally of former President Donald Trump.

The phone records were subpoenaed from T-Mobile and the Ward’s company, Mole Medical Services P.C., in January, according to court records. Data were requested from Nov. 1, 2020, through Jan. 31, 2021 – a period that starts on the eve of the 2020 presidential election and ends weeks after the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

T-Mobile indicated it would turn over records to the committee by Feb. 4 unless the Wards filed suit.

In the suit, the couple argued the subpoenas violate patient-physician privilege. The Wards are osteopathic doctors who talk to their patients over the phone.

More: Jan. 6 committee: USA TODAY takes you inside the investigation into the insurrection

“Disclosing the phone records and metadata from the Phone Number would provide the PHI of an unknown but quantifiable number of individuals seeking medical treatment from the Plaintiffs to the Committee and potentially to the public at large,” an attorney representing the couple wrote. “Therefore, the enforcement of the Subpoena must be enjoined until and unless limitations are put in place to protect the PHI of the Plaintiffs’ patients.”

Kelli Ward was among the most prominent GOP leaders who backed Trump’s claims of election fraud after the 2020 presidential election. She filed a lawsuit seeking to have a judge void President Joe Biden’s 10,457-vote win in Arizona with the Maricopa County Superior Court soon after Election Day, according to The Arizona Republic.

The Wards, who were designated pro-Trump electors had the former president won Arizona, also joined a lawsuit against former Vice President Mike Pence in December 2020 to pressure the former vice president to challenge the election results ahead of Jan. 6, Politico reported.

Business Insider

Adam Kinzinger calls Josh Hawley ‘one of the worst human beings’ and a ‘con artist’ after the senator urges Biden to block Ukraine from joining NATO

Brent D. Griffiths,John Haltiwanger,Bryan Metzger – February 2, 2022

Adam Kinzinger renewed his criticism of Josh Hawley, this time over how the US should handle the Russian-Ukraine crisis.

“I hate to be so personal, but Hawley is one of the worst human beings,” Kinzinger wrote on Twitter.

Hawley urged Biden to abandon any support for Ukraine joining NATO.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger blasted Sen. Josh Hawley on Wednesday after the senator criticized President Joe Biden for ordering troops to Europe as Russia ramps up its preparations for a potential new invasion of Ukraine, while calling on the White House to block Ukraine from joining the NATO alliance.

“I hate to be so personal, but Hawley is one of the worst human beings, and a self egrandizing [sic] con artist,” Kinzinger wrote on Twitter. “When Trump goes down I certainly hope this evil will be laid [sic] in the open for all to see, and be ashamed of.”

Insider caught up with Hawley on Wednesday and showed him Kinzinger’s tweet, which he was seeing for the first time.

“And what prompts this outburst?” Hawley asked. Informed that Kinzinger seemed to be taking issue with Hawley’s stance on Ukraine’s NATO membership, he laughed. “Weird,” he said.

Responding to Hawley’s comments in a tweet, Kinzinger said, “It is weird. We are in weird times. Like having a Senator more interested in pleasing Tucker and playing to worst instincts than leading. Denying Jan 6th truth despite fomenting it, among other things.”

This isn’t the first time Kinzinger has attacked Hawley. Kinzinger, a member of the House’s January 6 committee and one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection, previously torched the senator for bragging about his role in leading the effort to object to the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Hawley’s position on Ukraine, which was first reported by Axios, mirrors that of Fox News Host Tucker Carlson and other conservative commentators who have questioned whether it’s in America’s interest to firmly align NATO behind Ukraine.

“Such a deployment can only detract from the US military’s ability to ready and modernize forces to deter China in the Indo-Pacific,” Hawley, who is from Missouri and who is widely viewed as a potential presidential candidate, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Hawley says that US support for Ukraine’s eventual admission into NATO, a policy President George W. Bush’s administration set in motion, is not strong enough “to justify committing the United States to go to war with Russia over Ukraine’s fate.”

“We should urgently deliver to Ukraine assistance it needs to defend itself against Russia’s military buildup and other threats,” Hawley writes.

The US has provided Ukraine with roughly $2.7 billion in security assistance since 2014 — the year that Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea — including $650 million in the past year. Russia has also supported rebels in a war against Ukrainian forces since 2014.

The Biden administration has warned Russia it will face severe economic sanctions if it invades Ukraine. The Pentagon on Wednesday also announced that Biden formally approved the deployment of US troops to NATO member countries in Eastern Europe to serve as a signal of Washington’s support for the alliance. But Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine to defend it against Russia, given it’s not a NATO member.

HuffPost

GOP Rep Slams Sen. Josh Hawley As ‘One Of The Worst Human Beings’

David Moye – February 2, 2022

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) has apparently had enough of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley ― and doesn’t care who knows what he thinks of his fellow Republican.

Spoiler alert: It’s not very nice.

On Wednesday, Hawley criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to order troops to Europe as Russia increases its military presence on its border with Ukraine. At the same time, the senator asked the White House to drop U.S. support for Ukraine joining NATO, according to The Hill.

Kinzinger wasn’t impressed by Hawley’s suggestion that America not support its ally, especially considering that he serves on the Jan. 6 select committee, while Hawley was seen raising his fist in solidarity towards a crowd of Donald Trump supporters ahead of the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6.

And he didn’t mince words, calling Hawley “one of the worst human beings,” and “a self aggrandizing con artist” in a fiery tweet, adding, ”When Trump goes down I certainly hope this evil will be laid in the open for all to see, and be ashamed of.”

Kinzinger got some support for the tweet, but many conservatives mocked his misspellings and suggested his tweet was actually an endorsement of Hawley.

The Missouri senator told Business Insider that he didn’t understand Kinzinger’s animosity.

“And what prompts this outburst?” Hawley asked, before adding, “Weird.”

Kinzinger agreed via Twitter that “we are in weird times,” and said the proof is a Senator like Hawley who seems “more interested in pleasing Tucker [Carlson, of Fox News] and playing to worst instincts than leading. Denying Jan 6th truth despite fomenting it, among other things.”

The Grio

What in the hell is wrong with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?

Sophia A. Nelson – February 2, 2022

OPINION: Florida’s governor, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has been on a proverbial warpath against everything—from banning mask and vaccine mandates and the teaching of critical race theory to suppressing voting rights.

I know I am asking a rather loaded question. But it is one for which I have been desperately searching for answers. Florida is off the chain: neo-Nazi rallies, anti-CRT sentiments, debates on banning books, bans on vaccines and mask mandates and attacks on voting rights and fair elections. But worse than the state itself is its young Yale and Harvard Law-educated governor, Ron DeSantis.

Florida’s governor has been on the proverbial warpath against, well, everything. Yet, this man is the most likely 2024 Republican nominee, in my opinion. He is the new darling of the conservative right. Bold. Brash. A braggart. He’s has called teaching about the impact of race in American history “crap.” And he carps on and on about protecting freedoms and rights by attacking science, mask-wearing and vaccines as Florida has surged with COVID cases, hospitalizations and tragically, deaths.

Gov. DeSantis sounds a lot like someone else we know who lives in Florida—“the former guy” as he is now referred to on social media (“TFG,” aka Donald Trump). So let me break down some of the more concerning facts about this GOP rising star and why it should scare the hell out of us all. Let’s start with this most recent factoid: Just this past month, Florida legislators introduced a bill that would protect white citizens from feeling discomfort with teachings about America’s racial past.

DeSantis said this about critical race theory:

“In Florida, we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory. We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other. We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards. Finally, we must protect Florida workers against the hostile work environment that is created when large corporations force their employees to endure CRT-inspired ‘training’ and indoctrination.”

This statement happened in December when DeSantis announced the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees, the so-called Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a legislative proposal that he and Republicans say will give businesses, employees, children and families the “tools” to fight back against woke indoctrination (*rolls eyes*). Further, he purports that the Stop W.O.K.E. Act will be the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation and will take on both corporate wokeness and critical race theory. This proposal by DeSantis builds on his previous actions to ban CRT and the New York Times’ 1619 Project in Florida’s schools.

DeSantis has embraced the phrase “Let’s go Brandon”—a euphemism for a vulgar attack on President Biden. He tortures Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to the president, by selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merch and “Freedom Over Fauci” flip-flops.

Another scary example of how out of control DeSantis and his Florida team of Republicans are was the reactions to the neo-Nazi rally that happened this past weekend. As other state legislators and even U.S. Sen. Rick Scott condemned the disgusting display of hatred toward Jews in Florida, the press secretary for Gov. DeSantis tweeted this: “Do we even know they are Nazis?” Christina Pushaw wrote in a now-deleted tweet, according to FloridaPolitics.com.

Her point was to compare these horrid creatures openly spewing hateful rhetoric at Jews to what the Lincoln Project did this past fall in Virginia at a rally for then-gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin—where they posed as neo-Nazis from the Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. This was a response from a spokesperson for the chief executive of a state, which has a very large Jewish population. It’s insane!

Let’s just call it what it is: Gov. DeSantis is Trump lite. He is maybe even worse. Why? Because, unlike Trump, he doesn’t really engage in the hyperbolic insults, offensive racial talk and animus that Trump does. He is smarter. Smoother. Slicker. He makes jokes. He positions himself as a champion of freedom and individual liberties, while all the while he’s suppressing them.

But to me, what makes DeSantis the most dangerous is that, in a state like Florida, where an evil horror like the Rosewood massacre took place in 1923, he lacks any understanding of that history and its Jim Crow vestiges in his own state. An entire peaceful Black community was wiped out and murdered by a band of white racists who burned their community down, buried their bodies and covered it up for decades—until history came calling, and my former law firm, Holland & Knight LLP, took up the case and won reparations for the victims. One of my mentors, Martha Barnett, was the lead counsel and the former president of the American Bar Association.

DeSantis has been a George Wallace-like figure trying to undo voting rights and the balanced teaching of race, history and civil rights in America. Case in point: Last May, DeSantis asked the Florida legislature to pass a restrictive voting rights bill. He signed into law the controversial voting bill, joining a host of other GOP-led states pushing new limits on voting in support of former President Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. In signing the bill during an appearance on Fox & Friends, the Florida Republican highlighted provisions of the bill, including stricter voter ID requirements for voting by mail, creating limits on who can pick up and return completed ballots and banning private funding for elections. He was very proud of himself.

Here’s the bottom line, as we all continue to focus on “TFG,” we have a much more dangerous problem brewing. His name is Gov. Ron DeSantis. We had all better make sure that in 2024, this man and the other guy get nowhere near the White House. Or Democracy may just end.

The gas station of the future will have treadmills, gardens, and solar panels – but no gas.

By Nate Berg – February 2, 2022

A competition asked people to design a service station for a future when electric vehicles dominate. The result looks very different from what we have today.

[Image: courtesy Electric Autonomy Canada]

The gas station as we know it is an endangered species. As electric vehicles gradually make up a larger share of cars on the road, entirely new kinds of service stations will be needed to fuel their journeys. A new design competition has come up with a vision for what those stations may look like, and it’s funded by one of the biggest gas station companies in the world.

Parkland, a Canada-based gas station operator with 3,000 locations in 25 countries, is the main sponsor of an international competition to create the electric fueling station of the future. The winning entry has just been announced, and the design envisions a facility where the time it takes to recharge a battery—easily a half hour longer than a typical gas fill-up—is seen as an opportunity to rest, relax, and maybe even explore.

Next, Parkland wants to start building these stations. “We spend a lot of time thinking about where the industry is going, and there’s no question that mobility is starting to electrify,” says Darren Smart, Parkland’s senior vice president of strategy and corporate development. But when it comes to the customer experience of actually charging electric vehicles, Smart says, the industry is lagging. “Charging stations are located in uninteresting spots, they’re out of the way, and in some cases they may not be the safest locations. That is made all the worse by the fact that an EV driver needs to dwell at a location for 20 or 30 minutes to charge,” Smart says. “So it’s a bad combination.”

James Silvester, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based architect, designed the winning entry, and it suggests a dramatically different kind of refueling, which prioritizes experience over expedience.

Silvester’s design is a long linear building with charging ports ringing its perimeter. At the center is a mall-like space made up of stores, vendors, and non-commercial spaces meant to help drivers take a break from the road.

“The building needs to respond quite differently from a five-minute quick fill and drive off,” says Silvester. “It’s got to offer people some sort of destination or unique experience that can keep them entertained. If I was in a car for 40 minutes at a gas station, I’d be pulling my hair out by the end.”

Designed with a modular system that allows the oval-like shape of the station to stretch out to fit different-size locations, Silvester’s EV charging station can provide a broader variety of services and spaces than a typical gas station. In addition to the traditional food and drink options available, his design offers space for things like an exercise area, massage therapy, and even just a small plant-filled garden where drivers can rest while their battery recharges. (Of course, charging technology itself is rapidly evolving, so it’s possible in the future, EV charging times will be much shorter, too.)

The building Silvester proposes would have sustainable materials like wood and stone and a roof capable of holding solar panels. He says its modular design would make it quick to build and flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of sites.

The design was chosen by an international jury of architects, designers, and electric vehicle advocates—and comes with a prize worth about $19,600. Second and third prizes are also being awarded, as are several honorable mentions. The competition was launched last August by Electric Autonomy Canada, an independent news platform focused on the transition to electric vehicles. Nino Di Cara is the group’s founder, and he says the competition’s main goal was to kickstart the thinking about how these facilities can and should differ from those built for internal-combustion vehicles. Another goal was to lure more gas drivers to the other side.

“We wanted to create a bit of EV envy amongst gas-car drivers,” says Di Cara, imagining a family on a road trip driving past one of these stations, and the kids in the back seat saying, “Why can’t we stop there?”

Silvester says his design’s flexibility also gives the opportunity to even bring some local character to a road-trip stopover. Space within his EV-focused station could be set aside for local vendors or regional specialties. The stations could even be sited near lookouts or trails, giving travelers a chance to see the actual place they’ve stopped and not just the inside of a convenience store. “A lot of these places you just pass through but you never experience, so it’s an opportunity for the community to come get involved as well,” he says.

Silvester’s design may be more than just a clever idea. Parkland’s Smart says the company is beginning discussions with Silvester about how the design can begin to be implemented, albeit slowly. The company is in the early stages of its own electric vehicle transition, but has plans to open a network of 25 ultrafast EV-charging stations across British Columbia by midyear. That could be the start of the company’s shift toward meeting the needs of a growing community. Smart says Parkland is beginning to plan out how one of these EV-only charging stations can get built. “In the next couple of years, I think you’ll start to see these pop up,” Smart says.

The Week

Republicans’ love of gerrymandering has come back to bite them

David Faris, Contributing Writer February 2, 2022

Entering this cycle of congressional redistricting after the country’s decennial census, Democratic strategists were in a state of near-total panic. Disappointing election results in 2020, particularly at the state legislative level, once again left Republicans with more “trifectas” (control of the state legislature and the governorship) than Democrats, and thus able to draw district lines uncontested for many more seats than their counterparts, putting Democrats in the position of needing a big, blue wave just to gain a bare majority in the House. Another decade in the wilderness loomed.

But something funny happened on the way to Democratic catastrophe — many state Republicans decided to reinforce their own incumbents rather than ruthlessly boxing out their opponents in as many districts as possible, and others ran into problems in court. Meanwhile, Democrats in Illinois pursued an extremely aggressive gerrymander of their own, and New York is likely to follow suit. And in California, Democrats did an end-run around the state’s non-partisan redistricting commission and may net as many as six additional seats just from the new lines. The result is that instead of being able to take the House easily with similar results to 2020, Republicans might well have put themselves in a worse position than when the process started.

For Democrats, there’s a delicious irony here: Republicans could have had non-partisan redistricting nationwide had they supported the For the People Act, which the House passed last year and the Senate continues to ignore like a stack of unwanted electric bills. Yes, there were a lot of other things in there, but Democrats would have been happy to run a stand-alone redistricting bill through Congress if it seemed like there was one iota of interest from the other side.

GOP leaders painted themselves into a corner on redistricting in another consequential way when their hand-picked, ill-gotten Supreme Court majority decided that gerrymandering was not unconstitutional and that either Congress or the states would have to act to put an end to the process. As the 5-4 majority held in Rucho v. Common Cause, “To hold that legislators cannot take their partisan interests into account when drawing district lines would essentially countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting to political entities.”

God forbid that we “countermand” any of the Framers’ implicit decisions! The Court’s failure to address an obvious deficiency in American democracy because of a 235-year-old oversight is very much in keeping with the role it has played throughout American history — handmaiden of conservative power and final resting place for ideas of justice. The Rucho decision was, of course, applauded by conservatives who believed that partisan gerrymandering is an important tool in the quest to preserve the GOP’s grip on state legislatures and its advantage in the House.

In any case, now that the late liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been replaced by hardline conservative Amy Coney Barrett, it is even less likely that the Supreme Court will intervene to stop this very obviously antidemocratic practice from being accepted as a routine feature of our politics — unless, of course, gerrymandering is suddenly seen as decisively benefiting Democrats.

Indeed Republicans, having closed off both the legislative and the judicial paths to ban partisan gerrymandering nationally, are belatedly realizing that they don’t like it after all. Prominent Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini complained on Twitter about Democratic-led non-partisan redistricting reform campaigns: “It was never about stopping gerrymandering. Instead, it was all about power.” New York State Republican Party Chairman Nick Langworthy attacked the state’s gerrymander, likely to return 22 Democrats and just four Republicans to D.C., as a “brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker.”

The GOP’s redistricting own-goal represents a very rare failure of Republican national strategy to play maximal “constitutional hardball” — using every possible opportunity under the legal order to pursue partisan advantage, even if such maneuvers violate widely accepted normative principles and expectations. It’s not something Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would ever have allowed to happen if this were his operation.

Still, it’s not quite time for Democrats to pop the champagne. Bitter legal battles in Florida and New York could reshape the partisan balance in the coming months. Beyond that, the current political landscape probably does not need to lend any additional advantages to the GOP. President Biden and the Democrats are unpopular enough that they would get clobbered if elections were held anytime soon, on anyone’s maps. The distinctive smell of political blood might also explain why Republicans left some seats at the table.

One thing is clear, though, in the aftermath of multiple state parties sidelining their “non-partisan” commissions: There is no way out of gerrymandering without more fundamental change. Despite the public popularity of non-partisan redistricting, even the most carefully orchestrated arrangement, in the end, needs some political actor to break a potential deadlock. Whether that’s a “non-partisan” swing voter on a commission or the state supreme court, it is human beings who will ultimately sign off on these maps, and there are just too many ways to manipulate even the most painstakingly designed processes.

Clever partisans, especially in politically lopsided states like New York and California, can find a way around the well-intentioned fine print to get the results that they want. That means that absent a very detailed, national bipartisan agreement, non-partisan redistricting is probably not the long-term way to avoid the perils of gerrymandering. As a group of political scientists and analysts (including myself) have been arguing for years, the only real long-term solution to this mess is to increase the “district magnitude” for the House using ranked-choice voting. Instead of each district sending one person to D.C., many would send three or five, making them nearly impossible to gerrymander. These reforms would also have the beneficial side effect of obliterating our destructive two-party politics; instead of just entrenching the current stalemate, more radical reforms could move us away from the hyper-partisanship and polarization that has turned American politics into a repellant spectacle.

The alternative is to keep fighting these pointless and divisive battles every 10 years, which achieve little other than undermining the public’s already-frayed faith in our democratic institutions and giving one party or another an unfair advantage. At least this time around, Democrats won’t be the suckers, and if this fiasco convinces Republicans that deeper reforms are needed for the party to remain competitive, this will be a win-win for Democrats and democracy.

Vanity Fair

Republican Senator suggests Biden’s black female SCOTUS pick won’t know “a law book from a J.Crew catalog.”

John Kennedy managed to combine racism, sexism, and WTFism in one fell swoop. 

By Bess Levin – February 2, 2022 

Since Joe Biden reiterated his campaign pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, conservatives have engaged in a daily battle to determine who can offer the most sexist, racist, and generally offensive commentary in response to this long-overdue, historic moment. Tucker Carlson has obviously been a reliable source of mouth sewage. Former Cato Institute vice president Ilya Shapiro told his followers in a since-deleted tweet: “Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog and v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into last intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” Ted Cruz insisted that, despite the long history of the Supreme Court being exclusively a club for white men, Biden’s pledge tells the majority of Americans, “I don’t give a damn about you,” and is somehow “an insult to Black women.” Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker claimed Biden’s ultimate pick will be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action. 

Apparently not wanting to be left out, GOP Senator John Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday, according to Politico: “No. 1, I want a nominee who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog. No. 2, I want a nominee who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’”

While conservatives, who will still control the Supreme Court regardless of whom Biden picks, are undoubtedly concerned about the president nominating someone whose “agenda” doesn’t involve obliterating voting rights, sending children to prison for life with no chance of parole, and probably destroying Roe v. Wade, it’s the first part of Kennedy’s statement—the one that seemingly suggests a Black woman would be so unqualified that she would not know the difference between a “law book” and a clothing catalog—that‘s clearly the most offensive.

Like his fellow Republicans, it does not appear that Kennedy had any issue with Trump pledging to nominate a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020. (Though he did ask the woman who ultimately got the nod, Amy Coney Barrett, “who does the laundry in your house?” during her confirmation hearing.) Cruz actually called Barrett a “role model for little girls,” a glaring bit of hypocrisy White House press secretary Jen Psaki seized on Tuesday. “There is no outcry around that,” Psaki said during her daily briefing with the press. “The president’s view is that after 230 years of the Supreme Court being in existence, the fact that not a single Black woman has served on the Supreme Court is a failure in the process.”

And while conservatives hide behind the argument that they simply care about Biden nominating the most qualified person to the bench, it’s clear to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the modern Republican Party that something else—some people might even call it racism!—is going on here. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote on Wednesday: “These attacks are meant to reiterate the narrative that liberals elevate unqualified Black Americans at the expense of others who are truly deserving, as part of a larger backlash narrative, one that echoes past eras in American history, in which advocacy for equal rights is turning white conservatives into an oppressed class. Republicans will likely be unable to block the nominee, but they can extract a political price, motivate their own voters, and dull the historic significance of Biden’s choice by orienting the political conversation around the idea that another shiftless Negro is getting free stuff at others’ expense.”

Daily Beast

Trump’s Promise to Pardon Jan. 6 Rioters Is Worse Than Watergate

Matt Lewis February 1, 2022

Donald Trump will never stop reminding us of how dangerous a prospect another four years of him in the White House would be. (If only he had been impeached, convicted, and barred from office over inciting a riot!… Oh, wait.)

“If I run and if I win, we will treat [the Capitol rioters] from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” Trump declared at a rally in Texas on Saturday night. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

On Jan. 6, some of the horde that ransacked the Capitol justified their behavior by declaring, “Our president wants us here.” In floating the possibility of pardons, Trump reaffirms their belief that they were doing his bidding.

To be sure, Trump accidentally made an important point about “treating them fairly.” As it’s unlikely the 45th president will ever pay any legal price for inciting a riot that temporarily halted Congress’ certification of the election, it hardly seems fair for his ground troops to be punished for following his orders. Indeed, the lesson many are likely to take from the whole Trump presidency could be summed up in Nixonian terms: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

‘America First’ MAGA Tough Guys Are Modern-Day Neville Chamberlains

Speaking of Nixon, if it wasn’t clear before this weekend, it should be now: Donald Trump’s presidency makes Watergate look tame.

Watergate, in hindsight, was a botched “third-rate burglary,” that turned into an attempted White House coverup. Trump’s presidency, in contrast, involved numerous impeachable offenses, two actual impeachments, several serious attempts to strong-arm officials into “overturning” the 2020 election, and (lest we forget) the denouement: the incitement of an attempted insurrection.

And yet, the outcomes are very different. Watergate toppled a president and sent several of his top men to jail—including chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, assistant in charge of domestic affairs James Ehrlichman, and White House Counsel Chuck Colson (among others).

It took them a while, but by the time Nixon resigned, Republicans—both in office and to a large extent, in the general population—were ashamed and appalled by Watergate. Though Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford, there were real consequences for his actions.

By contrast, Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results has been generally dismissed or defended by Republicans. And about 70 percent of Republican voters incorrectly believe the 2020 election was either “definitely” or “probably” illegitimate.

Rather than being forced (as Nixon was) into the political wilderness, and his party plunged into a deep-cleanse of soul-searching, Trump remains the most likely GOP nominee for president in 2024. Meanwhile, most of his accomplices have either completely skated or were pardoned by him. In the event Trump is re-elected in 2024, the people who rioted in the Capitol, threatened to “hang Mike Pence,” and attacked police officers will likely be pardoned, too.

Consider the moral hazards. Such an action would send a clear signal that raw power, rather than the rule of law, is what matters—and that defeated presidents get one free shot at attempting a coup.

Watergate hastened some wide-ranging “good government” ethics reforms. But arguably more importantly, it chastened a generation of political staffers and operatives. This is not to say that there won’t always be very many skeevy, bad actors plumbing the depths of D.C. politics, but post-Watergate you always knew that if you crossed the line, there would be a price to pay. You might be humiliated. You might be fired. You might even do time.

Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election failed because enough people close to the levers of power—advisors, staffers, bureaucrats, etc.—thought better of it. This is partly because (a) some were law-abiding patriots who value the Constitution, and (b) some feared there would be ramifications for breaking the law.

Nixon didn’t have some of the advantages Trump has enjoyed, such as a major cable news outlet dedicated to supporting him and an army of disinformation propagandists on the internet. Worse still for Tricky Dick, the GOP of 1974 still had the capacity for shame, as well as the courage and will to hold powerful people accountable.

If Trump and his accomplices go scot-free, future staffers and bureaucrats may well reason that “just following orders” is the path of least resistance. If Trump were president again, and he follows through on his pardon pledge, what would be the disincentive for any of his supporters considering political violence?

Trump’s Arizona Speech Proves His Shock Comic Act Has Jumped the Shark

Think about this way: Trump is still inciting his supporters and dehumanizing his political adversaries.

Although it received less attention than his other remarks this weekend, Trump’s speech Saturday night also featured criticism of the New York State attorney general, the Manhattan district attorney, as well as Fulton County (Georgia)’s district attorney, all of whom are investigating him. Trump urged supporters to organize protests against them, saying, “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick….”

This isn’t normal political rhetoric, and we’ve already seen the folly that was “Take Trump seriously, but not literally.”

That’s why justice needs to be served for the crimes committed. Someone needs to go to jail. Someone has to pay.