The Tarbabys Blog

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.

Associated Press

Kinzinger pushes ‘uneasy alliance’ to thwart Trump’s allies

Steve Peoples – February 1, 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — In the high-stakes fight for the GOP’s future, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is calling on Democrats and independents to form an “uneasy alliance” with Republicans to fight former President Donald Trump’s influence.

Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics in Congress, has directed his political organization to initiate a novel campaign to convince non-Republicans to support anti-Trump Republican candidates in GOP primary contests across the country later this year. Experts suggest the practice, sometimes known as “party raiding,” will be hard to execute on a broad scale, but Kinzinger warned that failure to shift the GOP’s embrace of Trump could undermine democracy or even a lead to “failed state.”

“People need to wake up to that real possibility,” Kinzinger, who is not seeking reelection this fall, told The Associated Press. “We have to be able to have uneasy alliances, as uneasy as they may be in this moment.”

There are few modern examples of a sitting Republican member of Congress so openly asking Democrats to help take down a former president of his own party.

Kinzinger’s plan underscores the extraordinary challenges Trump antagonists face as they fight to purge Trumpism from the GOP using the existing political system, which offers party leaders little control if voters line up behind extremists. At the same time, Trump allies control the Republican Party infrastructure at the state and national levels — in addition to fundraising.

Lest there be any doubt, the Republican National Committee is considering a resolution to expel Kinzinger from the GOP during its winter meeting in Utah this week.

“This announcement by him only reinforces why he should be expelled from the Republican Conference,” said Trump ally David Bossie, who sponsored the RNC resolution to expel Kinzinger from the party. “He is actively trying to defeat his colleagues and no longer believes in our shared conservative Republican values.”

Kinzinger, a 43-year-old military pilot who will not seek reelection at the end of the year, addressed his new strategy publicly for the first time in an interview with The AP on Tuesday — almost exactly one year after launching his “Country First” political organization, which aims to purge Trump from the GOP.

Through its first year, the group claims to have recruited more than 100,000 members, including 4,000 volunteers. Country First has also raised more than $2 million, including roughly $250,000 over the last 45 days. But that’s very little compared to Trump, whose political organization has raised more than $100 million since he left office a year ago.

Trump also plans to use his campaign cash to shape primary elections.

He has aggressively called for primary opponents against the 10 House Republicans who joined Democrats in voting to impeach him following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Three of them, including Kinzinger, have decided not to seek reelection, and the others face primary challengers already.

“We’re underdogs,” Kinzinger acknowledged. “But without an underdog coming in and taking on a fight … nothing’s going to change.”

The new focus on Republican primaries represents a strategic shift for Kinzinger’s network, Country First, which spent much of the last year propping up anti-Trump Republican candidates for state and federal office in general elections with varying levels of success.

Country First backed the winner in 8 of 11 state house races across Virginia and New Jersey last November. But Kinzinger’s preferred candidate for a high-profile special congressional election in Texas last May finished in 9th place with just 3% of the vote.

Kinzinger’s new campaign is designed to attack the root of Trumpism where it’s spreading with little resistance: in the Republican nomination process. Because the vast majority of Republican-held congressional seats are not competitive due to gerrymandering and cultural trends, the congressman argues that Trump-backed “extremists” can only be stopped in the Republican primaries that decide which candidate appear on the general election ballot.

But because Republican primary elections are often decided by the most passionate partisans — in this case, Trump supporters — Kinzinger hopes to change the composition of the Republican primary electorate to include more moderate voters and Democrats.

His group this week posted detailed instructions on its website instructing Democrats and unaffiliated voters about how to participate in upcoming Republican primary elections. Nearly two dozen states have what’s described as “open” primaries that allow voters affiliated with either party to participate, but even in states that close their primary contests to non-Republicans, Kinzinger says there’s time for voters to change their political affiliation — at least temporarily — to the GOP.

Country First has yet to determine which races to focus on or exactly how to reach the voters it needs to transform Republican primaries, according to co-founder Austin Weatherford, who serves as Kinzinger’s chief of staff. In many districts, there are no viable alternatives to the Trump-aligned candidates.

Weatherford said a team of law students and other volunteers are currently going through the political map to determine which races would be top targets.

While most primary elections are months away, Texas’s upcoming primary elections on March 1 offer an early test. Kinzinger’s team is eyeing the primary in the race to replace Rep. Louie Gohmert, a vocal Trump supporter who is running for state attorney general.

History does not bode well for Kinzinger.

Caitlin Jewitt, a political science professor at Virginia Tech, noted that similar calls for strategic voting in the 2008 and 2020 presidential elections had little impact.

In those cases, it was Republicans called for their voters to interfere in Democratic primaries. In 2020, for example, Trump encouraged his supporters to vote for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, thinking Sanders would have been an easier general election opponent.

“I don’t think it’ll work on a broad scale,” Jewitt said.

Prof. Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, has asked voters in recent elections about their willingness to vote in the other party’s primary.

“Our survey data just didn’t show any significant degree of that kind of crossover voting for a strategic purpose,” he said. “It would be very unprecedented.”

Franklin noted that Kinzinger’s strategy would also likely be “quite controversial.”

“It’s perfectly legal to cross over and vote in another party’s primary in many states,” he said. “But to the extent we still have norms, one party interfering in the other party’s primary is outside the norm.”

The Hill

No. 2 Senate Republican praises election official for standing up to Trump

February 1, 2022

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) on Tuesday praised former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli for rebuffing a request from former President Trump to seize voting machines following the 2020 presidential election.

Thune said he was relieved that Cuccinelli and other officials pushed back against Trump’s effort to seize voting machines in an attempt to change the outcome of the election, which President Biden won by 74 electoral votes and more than 7 million votes nationwide.

“I’m just glad that there were people in the right places and that the system worked,” he said. “People who had positions of responsibility held their ground even when being asked to do things that they knew they shouldn’t do. Things may have bent a little bit, but they didn’t break.”

Thune made his comments when asked about a story published by The New York Times reporting that Trump wanted his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states. The report cited three people “familiar with the matter.”

The Times reported that Cuccinelli said Homeland Security officials could not take part in the plan.

It also reported that Trump asked Cuccinelli in another meeting about the idea of appointing a special counsel to investigate election fraud, with Cuccinelli replying that it was not a good idea. The report cited “two people briefed on the conversation.”

Thune was one of several Republican senators who pushed back against the former president’s reported actions and statements about the outcome and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday broke with Trump’s suggestion made at a Texas rally over the weekend that people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol may received pardons if he’s elected president again.

“I would not be in favor of shortening any of the sentences for any of the people who pleaded guilty to crimes,” McConnell told reporters when asked about Trump’s statement over the weekend that he would consider pardons for people who tried to stop the certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

“The election of 2020 was decided Dec. 14 of 2020 when the Electoral College certified the winner of the election. What we saw here on January the 6th was an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another, which has never happened before in our country,” he said.

HuffPost

GOP Gov. Candidate: Rape Victims Shouldn’t Get Abortions Because Fetus Could Become POTUS

Lee Moran – February 1, 2022

Garrett Soldano, a Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, faced widespread backlash after he argued against survivors of sexual assault getting abortions, saying they didn’t know if their unborn baby could become president.

Soldano, citing a friend whose mother was the victim of a gang rape, claimed people who become pregnant from sexual assault were put “in this moment” by God and that the DNA of the fetus should be protected.

“And so what we must start to focus on is not only to defend the DNA when it’s created, but, however, how about we start inspiring women in the culture to let them understand and know how heroic they are? And how unbelievable that they are?” he told conservative commentator April Moss on her “Face The Facts” podcast.

“That God put them in this moment and they don’t know that little baby inside them may be the next president, maybe the next person who changes humanity, may get us out of the situation in the future,” Soldano added, per a video of the conversation that Heartland Signal tweeted Monday. “We must always, always protect that DNA and allow it to have a voice.”

The Guardian

Kyrsten Sinema courted Republican fossil fuel donors with filibuster stance

Peter Stone in Washington DC – February 1, 2022

With a crucial vote pending over filibuster rules that would have made strong voting rights legislation feasible, Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema flew into Houston, Texas, for a fundraiser that drew dozens of fossil fuel chieftains, including Continental Resources chairman Harold Hamm and ConocoPhillips chief executive Ryan Lance.

The event was held on 18 January at the upmarket River Oaks Country Club. One executive told the Guardian that Sinema spoke for about half an hour and informed a mostly Republican crowd that they could “rest assured” she would not back any changes with filibuster rules, reiterating a stance she took several days before during a Senate speech.

The Arizona senator also addressed some energy industry issues according to the executive, who added that overall he was “tremendously impressed”.

The day after the Houston bash, Sinema voted against changing filibuster rules, thereby helping to thwart the voting rights bill.

The Houston gusher of fossil fuel donations for Sinema from many stalwart Republican donors underscores how pivotal she has become, along with West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin, in an evenly divided Senate involving high-stakes battles for Republican and fossil fuel interests.

Campaign finance watchdogs say that the Houston fundraiser reveals much about Sinema’s aggressive efforts to capitalize on her Senate power on matters ranging from climate change to taxes to the filibuster rule.

“Sinema isn’t up for re-election this year, but she’s fundraising full-tilt,” Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of OpenSecrets, told the Guardian. “By her comment to oil-industry attendees last week, she clearly knew her vote to protect the filibuster would please them.”

The Houston fundraiser, which was expected to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the senator’s campaign coffers, offers a stark example of how Sinema has been courting major Republican donors and special interests who, in turn, seem to be increasingly eager to help her.

Sinema’s drive to rope in more big Republican donors was also apparent at a September fundraiser in Dallas at the $18m home of G Brint Ryan, a prominent Republican donor and CEO of a global consulting company, who hosted another money bash last year for Manchin.

Sinema’s stance against changing filibuster rules has also won her support from other top Republican donors such as Stan Hubbard, a Minnesota billionaire broadcaster who gave her $2,900 last September, which reportedly was the first donation he made to a Democrat since 2019.

Hubbard told the Guardian that her opposition to the filibuster was a crucial reason he donated, adding that it would “be terrible to get rid of the filibuster”, and that he thought voting rights were “just fine”, without passing a Democrat-backed bill to protect them.

Little wonder that voting rights advocates were dismayed by Sinema’s staunch opposition to any changes with the filibuster.

“We are very disappointed that Senator Sinema has put formalistic rules over protecting our democracy,” said Danielle Lang, the senior director of voting rights at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Sinema’s position on the filibuster rule has sparked anger among liberal backers such as the powerful group Emily’s List, which endorses Democratic women who support abortion rights. One week after Sinema gave a floor speech indicating that she wouldn’t support altering filibuster rules, Emily’s List publicly stated that the group would no longer endorse her.

In her floor speech backing the filibuster rule, Sinema touted the need for more bipartisanship, stressing that she would not “support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country”.

But Sinema’s vote and speech only spurred more criticism in Arizona where the state Democratic party issued a rare censure in the wake of her continued support for the filibuster.

Arizona’s Democratic party chair Raquel Teran has stated that the vote was a “result of her failure to do whatever it takes to ensure the health of our democracy”.

More broadly, Democratic angst about Sinema was highlighted by a January tracking poll before her filibuster vote that showed just 8% of registered Arizona Democrats had a favorable view of the Senator.

The recent poll reflects a steep drop from the 70% positive rating the Senator had in 2020. Her declining popularity also has been spurred by the senator’s voting against raising the federal minimum wage, and skipping a Senate vote to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Sinema has also drawn brickbats from Democrats for her unwillingness last month to endorse the House passed Build Back Better legislation that she and Manchin were instrumental in whittling down from the measure’s original size, while accelerating their fundraising outreach to rightwing donors and lobbyists.

Sinema told Democratic senators according to the New York Times that she was opposed to any tax increases in personal rates or corporate rates to pay for the bill, which included approximately $550bn for clean energy and climate change measures, a crucial part of President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Leftwing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was especially irked when both Sinema and Manchin joined all the Senate Republicans in blocking the filibuster rule change, saying that they “forced us to go through five months of discussions which have gotten absolutely nowhere”, and indicating he might support primary challengers to both senators.

Veteran Arizona Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin noted that Sinema “clearly understands the electoral position she is in, and is using this opportunity to raise as much as she can in order to make challenging her a herculean task – whether she runs as a Democrat or an independent.”

Coughlin’s analysis seems on target based on the very robust $4.4m that Sinema’s campaign had in the bank at the end of September.

Charlie Black, a longtime Republican operative and lobbyist, added that “Sinema’s gotten a lot of support from the business community, including both Republicans and Democrats.”

Still, with Democratic attacks on Sinema increasing, the odds are good that if she opts to run again in 2024 she will have a primary opponent, perhaps Congressman Ruben Gallego, who has publicly suggested he might challenge her, and knocked the senator over her filibuster vote.

A group called the Primary Sinema Project that began last summer has raised at least $330,000, including $100,000 during the week after her filibuster speech.

Sinema’s drive to raise big bucks early seems to be underscored by the jump last year in donations from fossil fuel interests, according to campaign finance data.

Last year, Sinema hauled in $24,310 from fossil fuel donors compared with just $7,522 the year before, according to OpenSecrets.

Although there’s no data yet on how much Sinema raised in Houston, a veteran fossil fuel lobbyist told the Guardian that donors at such fundraisers are often asked to pony up the maximum of $5,800 to the senator’s campaign committee, and write another check for as much as $5,000 to the senator’s leadership Pac.

For Krumholz of OpenSecrets, the Houston fundraiser offers a broader message.

“The timing of the fundraiser and Sinema’s filibuster-protecting vote really puts a fine point on the return on investment for her donors.”

Krumholz added that the fossil fuel fundraiser “seems well timed as Congress revisits the $550bn BBB measure focused on climate change provisions, where her vote could help industry minimize new regulatory and tax burdens.”

The Guardian

The US state that fought back after Republicans tried to rig its elections

Spenser Mestel – February 1, 2022

In recent months, Michigan should have been a hotbed for attempts to rig elections, like it was in 2011. That year, the Republican-led legislature distorted the voting maps so that the GOP was able to win nine of Michigan’s 14 congressional seats despite never earning more than 50.5% of the vote statewide.

Related: After Democrats’ historic defeat on voting rights, what happens next?

A decade later, as the redistricting cycle has come around again, the dynamics are just as toxic. The battleground state broke for Joe Biden by fewer than 155,000 votes, and the Republican-controlled legislature has fought endlessly with the Democratic governor about election “audits”, voter IDs and absentee ballots.

But this cycle, the state’s redistricting commission has pulled off something remarkable. Despite a flurry of legal action and very public disputes between members, it has produced some of the fairest maps in the US. How did it manage it – and will the maps survive?

Neither party was involved in drawing new maps, a process that is open to abuse if politicians are allowed to allocate particular voters to particular districts in order to guarantee a win there. Instead, the responsibility fell to 13 Michiganders – four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents – who were randomly selected by the state.

The Michigan Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission (MICRC) includes a foster care worker, a retired banker, an aspiring orthopedic surgeon, a mother of six, a college student and a real estate broker.

MICRC, and the approach it epitomizes, came about thanks to Katie Fahey, a Michigan resident and political novice who posted a message on Facebook two days after the 2016 presidential election. She said she wanted to take on gerrymandering and eventually recruited more than 14,000 volunteers to campaign for an amendment to the state’s constitution. It passed with 61% of the vote and created the commission, one of the most successful ways to unrig the redistricting process so far and a potential model for other states.

Combatting gerrymandering is no small feat. In 35 states, partisan politicians in the legislatures are mostly or fully in charge of redistricting, and of the maps that have been released and evaluated by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project so far, the average grade is a “D”. States led by both Republicans and Democrats – including Maryland, Texas, North Carolina, Oregon, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois – earned the lowest possible grade.

While Republicans haven’t gerrymandered as much as Democrats originally feared – in fact, the number of Democratic-leaning seats could increase by a few this year – both parties have nearly eliminated their competition. Of the 287 completed congressional districts, only 42 (14.6%) are competitive, and 13 states have passed maps with zero competitive districts, according to an analysis from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and RepresentUs.

Part of MICRC’s success is that it’s almost entirely insulated from the legislature. In December of 2019, applications to MICRC were randomly sent to 250,000 citizens. The pool of respondents was then trimmed (at random) to 200, though 60 of the applicants had to self identify as Republicans, 60 as Democrats, and 80 affiliated with neither party. At this point, Democrats and Republicans in the legislature were allowed to strike up to 10 commissioners each, after which the final 13 were then chosen, again at random.

The results were nearly revolutionary. During perhaps one of the most contentious political processes of the decade, MICRC was able to find cross-partisan agreement. Their final congressional map was approved by eight of the commission’s 13 members – two Republicans, two Democrats, and four independents – and will go into effect before the primaries this year.

The congressional map was graded “A” by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

However, the process still has its critics.

Republicans filed a lawsuit claiming that the map arbitrarily “fragments counties, townships, and municipalities” and that it allows too much population deviation between congressional districts.

Meanwhile, good government groups were upset about the committee’s first closed-door meeting, and several media outlets sued to have records from the event released to the public. In late December, MICRC turned over documents showing that it was preparing for litigation about how it split Black voters across different districts, while previously they were geographically more concentrated.

On 5 January, ​​members of the Michigan house of representatives representing Detroit and others challenged the commission’s maps, arguing that they dilute the voting strength of Black voters, particularly in and around Detroit.

However, proving that point in court will be difficult, expensive and time-consuming, says Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.

Federal law dictates that minority voters have the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice, but it doesn’t set a specific threshold for what percentage of voters in a district need to be of that minority group.

Li suggested that even if the challenge succeeds, it will probably lead to relatively minor changes around Detroit, as opposed to the commission having to start from scratch.

Still, the pressure of drawing – and then having to defend – the map seems to be wearing on the commissioners. One accused the group’s chair of bullying her and introduced a motion to censure her, and members have even disagreed over whether to produce a “lessons learned” documentary about the process, with two refusing to participate at all.

Since at least early December, commissioners have also voiced skepticism of their general counsel, who resigned abruptly last week.

The episode underscores a potential lesson for states looking to adopt a similar style of commission: non-politicians may be better able to work across party lines but might must be prepared for the rancor, criticism and partisan lawsuits that follow.

If the goal is fairer maps, though, the trade-off may be worth it.

“On the whole, these maps are really good maps,” says Li, “and markedly different than what we’re seeing around the country.”