<You probably haven’t heard of “Podiumgate.” I’ve been kicking myself for the last week or so because there’s been so much going on and this story is so convoluted that I haven’t made time to write about it. But it’s the kind of story I’ve always loved. And it’s a big story, even if, for the moment, it’s almost entirely contained within Arkansas. So in this post I’m going to try to give you the outline, to catch you up so we can keep tabs on it going forward. It’s so convoluted that I may get some points wrong or at least get some points of emphasis wrong. But bear with me because you’ll be glad you did.

It all starts back in June when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas takes a trade delegation to Paris, France to drum up business for Arkansas. She was visiting an aerospace trade show and aerospace and defense actually make up a significant amount of the state’s exports. (And yes, I’m withholding some details about what went down in Paris to build up dramatic tension. You have to keep reading.)

There’s a guy in Arkansas named Matt Campbell, a lawyer/blogger who seems to have mad FOIA skills. He publishes a blog called the Blue Hog Report. And save that link since this story almost entirely goes back to his on-going sleuthing. Campbell files a Freedom of Information Act request for the expense records for the trip. But what he gets back is very limited due to a law that allows the governor’s office to make exemptions to the state FOIA law. Campbell points out that these exemptions are only for security issues and it’s not at all clear why expense reports from a trade trip to Paris need to be withheld for the governor’s security. So now Campbell sues to get the records. Two days after Campbell sues Sanders calls a special session of the state legislature for, among other things, a dramatic revision of the state’s FOIA law. Hmmm.

Arkansas is a pretty Republican state at this point. But the FOIA changes are too big a pill for even state Republicans to swallow. A more limited reform is eventually passed. But at this point Sanders has made a pretty big story about what seems like a gadfly blogger just trying to go through some expense reports.

Eventually Campbell gets the documents. But there’s something weird. The governor’s office paid almost $20,000 for a podium it purchased from a company called Beckett Events, LLC. No one has seen the new podium and there seem to be all sorts of irregularities tied to how the thing was expensed.

Then it gets more fun. The state GOP steps in and says, “hey since everyone’s getting so bent out of shape about this, we’ll cover the cost of the podium. So everyone can just go back to what they were doing before this became an issue.”

Needless to say the state party stepping in to pay for the podium didn’t settle the matter....>

<.....As just a personal note, I continue to be confused not only about whether a podium was actually purchased but whether the people following the story think a podium was purchased. Are we talking about an elaborate ruse to cover up some hijinks in Paris or a nepotism-hire governor with truly high-falutin tastes in podiums? I’m still not totally clear on that point.

But here’s where the story gets even more interesting. Becket Events is owned by Virginia Beckett, a former hill staffer and GOP lobbyist. Beckett and another women named Hannah Stone consulted on the governor’s inauguration as part of the services provided by Beckett Events. But here’s the kicker. Late last month someone found images on social media showing Stone and Beckett checking into a Paris hotel at the time Gov. Sanders was there on her Paris aerospace junket. Then someone else noticed that both women also got subpoenas from the Jan. 6th committee. There’s actually been a troop of online sleuths vaguely reminiscent of the folks who social media’ed the Jan. 6th attackers who’ve come up with LOTS of pictures of the three all over the world. Here’s Sanders with Hannah (Salem) Stone in Finland, apparently on some White House trip, in 2018. They even found the two at Sanders’ inauguration with Kid Rock.

It’s not clear what Beckett and Stone’s Jan. 6th involvement has to do with Paris or the purported podium. But it at least added charge to the whole story.

And also, helluva a kegger in Paris, apparently.

As often happens in these kinds of stories, it’s not immediately clear what the wrongdoing could even be. Yes, $20,000 sounds like a lot of money for a podium. But maybe high tech podiums are more expensive than you and I think. Was Sanders partying in Paris with some DC GOP pals? That’s not great. But it certainly wouldn’t be something that brings down a Republican governor in a heavily Republican state. It’s simply not clear what the big deal even is. But Sanders’ response to it has been thermonuclear pretty much from the gitgo.

Also, the podium story seemed so weird and farfetched that a lot of the people were doubting that podium was even real. So the governor’s office finally released a photo of the podium. That raised even more questions since the podium in the photo looked identical to the podium Sanders used when she was inaugurated back in January. (And yes, Beckett and Stone worked the inauguration and were there in person.)

You know that old saw about how the cover-up is worse than the crime? That’s never been true and people who say that are idiots or at least they’re not people who cover scandals. You take the risk of covering something up because the thing itself is really bad. And coverups usually work. Even when they don’t work or you get caught for the cover up you still are mostly able to keep the underlying big bad thing under wraps. People do the cover up because usually it works and even when it doesn’t it partly works.

The latest development — or the one that really broke the story wide open happened last week when a whistleblower came forward who claims to have first hand evidence that the governor’s office illegally altered and withheld documents tied to the controversy. This seems to have been enough for a lot of state Republicans. One state Senator, James Hickey, called for the Legislative Joint Auditing Executive Committee to investigate the whole situation and get to the bottom of it. This would, critically, take the matter out of the Sanders’ administration’s hands. That committee meets next week.

And that, as near as I can tell, is where things stand. As noted, at least from a distance, I can’t tell whether we’re actually supposed to think a podium even exists. Or if it exists, how did Sanders get herself into this mess or, more specifically, what was she trying to hide? I’ve tried to cover a lot of ground here. So it’s quite possible I’ve left out key details or bobbled others. I’ll try to correct or add detail as we go forward.

My informants back in Arkansas tell me that Gov. Sanders had already burnt through a lot of good will through a generally high-handed and bulldozing approach to pushing through her legislative agenda — something many of us will likely recognize or find familiar from her stint as White House Press Secretary. She’s Arkansas and Trumpite royalty so she probably would have gotten away with all that. But it’s made even state Republicans not terribly interested in going out on a limb with her. Or rather joining her out on the limb she now occupies.>

<The historic ousting of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker hands Democrats a political gift: The opportunity to both mock their opponents’ misfortune and to raise money off it.

“Republicans are in ruin,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington State Democrat, said in an email seeking contributions for her reelection. “They are wallowing in their own pigsty of incompetence.” She asked for a $3 donation.

More than 20 Democrats in Congress sent fundraising emails following Tuesday’s vote to remove McCarthy as speaker, according to PunditAnalytics. Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz and a small faction of hardline conservatives who were upset that McCarthy worked with Democrats to avert a government shutdown last week forced his demotion.

President Joe Biden joined in, sending a campaign email that tied the effort to leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“After removing their own Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, a bunch of extremist Republicans are throwing their name in the ring,” the fundraising email said. “Republican power players like Marjorie Taylor Greene are even floating a Trump speakership. Seriously!”

Gaetz himself fired off fundraising emails as he castigated McCarthy over his attempts to keep the government open.

Republicans now have to choose his replacement in what’s likely to be a messy and complicated process, since it will require agreement from almost all GOP House members. The chamber’s legislative business grinds to a halt until then. Interim Speaker Patrick McHenry has called for a vote Wednesday.

The prospect of Republicans fighting among themselves and publicly trading insults allows Democrats to stay above the fray and let the opposing party figure out a way to resolve its embarrassing squabble.

A fundraising email from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Tuesday said that “extreme MAGA Republicans” have thrown the House into “chaos, crisis and confusion.”

“Who knows how long it will take for them to get their act together,” he continued in the email. “On the other side of the aisle, House Democrats are united and ready to get to work.”

Representative Adam Schiff, running for a California Senate seat, asked donors for money before the vote. “I don’t have anything good to say about Matt Gaetz,” the text read. “But this much is true: No one trusts Kevin McCarthy.”>

<Mike Lindell's lawyers in the Dominion lawsuit have filed a Motion to Withdraw with the court to get off his case due to non-payment of fees.

The motion states that Lindell is in arrears to his attorneys by millions of dollars with no hope of getting caught up and no ability to pay future fees.

This comes on the heels of all retailers cancelling his MyPillows, his banks cancelling him, AMEX closing his line of credit, the FBI seizing his phone, multiple lawsuits, and the IRS recently opening a tax fraud investigation of him.

Lindell was a true American success story. He went from homeless crack addict to hugely successful entrepreneur with 3,500 employees in Minnesota.

Then he met Donald Trump.

And everything that Trump touches dies.>

Cast your lot with a disreputable malignant narcissist and sociopath, suffer the consequences.

<Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), one of eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker earlier this week, was torched in The Arizona Republic by E.J. Montini for trying to pretend he didn't vote for "chaos."

"When it comes to the aftermath of ousting Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs disagrees with … everybody," wrote Montini. Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich effectively called Biggs and his cohorts "traitors," Montini noted, saying, "Ninety-six percent of Republicans voted for McCarthy. 4% voted against him. From my position as a longtime Republican activist, they are traitors. All eight of them should, in fact, be primaried. They should all be driven out of public life. What they did was go to the other team to cause utter chaos."

Biggs, speaking to constituents, denied that — but no one is really buying that, wrote Montini.

“I would fundamentally disagree with that premise. We’re not in chaos right now,” said Biggs in a video addressing questions he's received from voters. "He said that removing McCarthy was 'done by the book.' He said, 'It may be not pretty. It may seem conflictual,' but added, 'I think things are moving along,'" wrote Montini. "Just about everyone in Washington — and everywhere else — would disagree with him. But I don’t believe that’s an unusual situation for Biggs."

With the speaker ousted, normal business in the House is effectively paralyzed until a new speaker is selected. Top candidates for that role appear to be House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Montini concluded by noting that Biggs said he can't name who he would want to be House speaker in McCarthy's place, because that person would "be immediately disqualified" among many GOP lawmakers by his endorsement. "Imagine that," wrote Montini. "Imagine being part of a collective like the House Republican caucus in which your opinion carries that much negative weight.">

<According to an exclusive Thursday, October 5 CNN report, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a letter to the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee accusing the lawmakers of 'needless escalation" regarding President Joe Biden and U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) "battle over GOP claims that the FBI played a role in social media suppressing a story about Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020."

Per CNN, "At issue is whether Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent whose work focuses on cybersecurity and foreign influence on social media, can be forced to be deposed before Congress without being accompanied by both a Justice Department attorney and his personal lawyer."

The DOJ has warned Chan "not to testify before the" committee over his "request to have both his personal lawyer and a Justice Department attorney present during his deposition, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN."

Judiciary spokesperson Russell Dye told the news outlet, "Everything is on the table for Mr. Chan, including contempt."

According to the report, "the Republican-led committee claims that under House rules, Chan cannot have both counsels present for a deposition. A line included in House Judiciary rules stipulates that a witness may be 'accompanied at a deposition by two designated personal, nongovernmental attorneys to advise them of their rights.'"

However, CNN reports, "In its letter to the committee, DOJ argues that under the law, government employees are allowed to be accompanied by agency attorneys during a congressional deposition. The letter says that Chan would not cooperate with the panel's subpoena unless a DOJ attorney is allowed to accompany him along with his personal attorney."

The news outlet notes, "The DOJ and the Republican-led Judiciary Committee have been going back and forth for months over securing Chan’s testimony. Chan was supposed to appear voluntarily before the committee on September 15. But when the panel found out Chan was planning to bring both his agency and personal counsel, the interview fell apart and the committee promptly issued a subpoena."

A senior Democratic aide knowledgable [sic] of congressional probes told CNN, "Nobody who has ever been subpoenaed who requested agency counsel has ever been denied agency counsel.">

Non-lawyer Gym Jordan will seemingly stop at nothing to obtain the result he desires.

<ABC News reported on Thursday that ex-president Donald Trump had shared nuclear secrets with a billionaire at his golf club, and experts were quick to react to how the report could affect Trump's current criminal case on classified document handling.

Trump, who has denied all wrongdoing in the Florida case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, has already weathered numerous reports about his purported sharing of confidential information. In this case, Trump is accused of sharing secret U.S. nuclear submarine details with a foreign national.

Reporter Molly Jong-Fast had a simple reply to the breaking news. "GOP front runner," she wrote Thursday.

Conservative lawyer and anti-Trump activist George Conway had this to say:

"Everyone who has accused P01135809 of selling the nation’s secrets should profusely apologize. Out of innate charity, he gives them away for free," he wrote Thursday.

Reed Galen, co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, also chimed in:

"Disclosure of classified/secret/ts/sci information is a crime, too, I believer [sic]. Where are my #natsec folks?" he wrote.

Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa had a unique take on the situation:

"Just a reminder that Trump had multiple meetings with Putin with no other American officials present. I’m sure it was fine though," she wrote Thursday.

CNN anchor Jim Sciutto said, "There is no more sensitive intelligence to the U.S., Russia and China today than that relating to submarine capabilities and detection."

Author and journalist David Rothkopf wrote on his social media that "For sure this is the tip of the iceberg of this sort of thing. He didn't keep all those classified docs because his inner archivist demanded it. It was because he saw value in them...and the value came from sharing the information with people who shouldn't have it.">

<With Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) becoming the first House speaker in American history to be ousted mid-Congress as a small group of GOP hardliners demand extreme cuts and hold government funding hostage, the party must pick a new speaker to get out of this chaos — and former President Donald Trump is pushing the party to back House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) for speaker.

But this is not going to do much to improve the GOP's ability to function, wrote Heather Digby Parton for Salon.

That's because Jordan has no more ability than McCarthy to navigate the hostage-takers' demands to keep the government open.

"House Republicans have a long wish list of extreme policies they want to pass in this new budget and nobody seems to have told them that they don't have a majority in the Senate nor do they have the White House, which means that their dream agenda is dead on arrival anyway," wrote Parton. Among their demands are "radical cuts in spending, process changes that are unconstitutional and a total reversal of American foreign policy, and they seem determined to hold their breath until they blow up the country if they don't get their way."

"There's little reason to believe that Trump's endorsee Jim Jordan will be able to deal with this insoluble problem any better than McCarthy did and even less reason to believe he wants to," warned Parton. "He may not have joined the rebels in this instance but he's just as extreme as they are."

Jordan, who is current leading the effort to impeach President Joe Biden despite their own witnesses not providing any evidence supporting it, has already made clear funding for Ukraine, which is still supported by even a majority of his own party caucus, is on the chopping block if he becomes speaker.

Another top contender for speaker is Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), currently the House Majority Leader.>

<Within hours of multiple news outlets reporting that shortly after he left office, Donald Trump allegedly shared classified secrets about America’s nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago resort, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted the ex-president a delay he had requested in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case alleging violations of the Espionage Act.

Judge Cannon’s apparent support for the ex-president who placed her on the federal bench has been widely discussed by legal experts. At least one of her rulings in favor of Trump was reversed by a higher court that admonished her for overstepping her authority.

“Months after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club — an Australian billionaire who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists, according to sources familiar with the matter,” ABC News reported Thursday evening.

“The potential disclosure was reported to special counsel Jack Smith’s team as they investigated Trump’s alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the sources told ABC News. The information could shed further light on Trump’s handling of sensitive government secrets.”

Friday morning, Judge Cannon granted Donald Trump a temporary pause in the case alleging he unlawfully removed from the White House, retained, and refused to return – even after being served a subpoena – classified documents. Photos of boxes allegedly containing some of the hundreds of classified and top secret documents he had stored on a stage and in a restroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence have been widely shared online.

“And right on time,” MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin sardonically suggested, “and even before Oct. 12, enter Judge Cannon, with the first step of the relief Trump wanted in postponing the classified documents case.”

The Messenger reported that the “federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents criminal case on Friday temporarily paused series of key pre-trial deadlines tied to the prosecutors’ sharing of sensitive evidence that the former president is entitled to while mounting his defense.”

Judge Cannon “signed a paperless order halting for now the deadlines she’d previously set stretching from October through May, when the trial for Trump and three of his co-defendants is currently slated to begin in Fort Pierce, Fla.”

“Cannon’s order doesn’t address the May 20, 2024, start date for the trial itself. But it does note all of the scheduled deadlines tied to classified information are on hold ‘pending consideration and resolution’ of a Trump motion filed last month that had proposed a new timeline.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported, “In a court filing on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump’s legal team proposed moving the start of the trial to mid-November from May 20, the date set by Judge Aileen M. Cannon.”

Judge Cannon has yet to respond to that request.>

<Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert was dealt a major blow by a federal judge who temporarily refused to toss out a bombshell defamation lawsuit filed against her by a political watchdog group, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.

To make matters worse, Judge Kathryn A. Starnella denied Boebert’s attempt to avoid discovery — meaning the group can bombard the embattled politician with subpoenas for potentially embarrassing documents, emails, and text messages about her personal life.

David B. Wheeler, the head of American Muckrakers, filed the lawsuit in June, charging the MAGA-loving Boebert badmouthed him on national television after his group claimed she had two abortions, smoked methamphetamine, and once worked as an escort on the website SugarDaddyMeet.com.

Boebert sought to dismiss the case by claiming she had a right to publicly defend herself against the scandalous allegations she vehemently denies. She also asked the judge to “stay” or block the intrusive discovery process that opens the door into her lifestyle and mysterious past.

But court documents from the October 5 hearing showed Judge Starnella waylaid Boebert on multiple fronts.

“ORDERED: Representative Lauren Boebert’s motion to stay discovery is DENIED,” the minutes of the hearing stated.

The judge also took the motion to dismiss the lawsuit “under advisement” and gave Wheeler two weeks to amend his complaint – a possible sign that the jurist thinks there may be enough evidence to proceed with a trial.

“The wins of the day were (1) the Judge didn't outright dismiss the case and (2) the Judge is allowing us to amend our complaint despite opposition from Boebert's attorney,” Wheeler stated in a post on his website.

As RadarOnline.com reported, Wheeler alleged Boebert used her political clout and taxpayer funds to conduct a 2022 smear campaign against him and the group, which saw a 92-percent drop in donations.

The highlight of the campaign featured an appearance on Fox News where she threatened – but never did – to file a lawsuit against Wheeler and the donors.

Wheeler has vowed to also subpoena Sean Hannity and other top dog executives at Fox News to prove Boebert was hellbent on shutting down Wheeler’s operation.

What’s more, Wheeler has submitted into evidence a trove of titillating audio recordings from potential witnesses who claim Boebert allegedly puffed on methamphetamine, talked about an unwanted pregnancy, and plied her body on an escort service website.

Boebert, who is running an uphill battle for a third term against Democrat Adam Frisch, has denied all of Wheeler’s allegations, famously declaring in court documents that she has "never been a drug addict or stripper."

If the case goes forward, Wheeler plans to grill Boebert in an action-packed deposition and “hold her feet to the fire.”>

<As former President Donald Trump seriously tossed around the idea of serving as House Speaker, his top aides frantically tried to persuade him to drop the idea, reported Politico on Friday.

The issue began when a few key Republicans, like Reps. Troy Nehls (R-TX) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), proposed a Trump speakership, with Nehls reaching out directly to the former president. This development, reported Politico, "triggered panic" among other members.

The real risk wasn't that Trump would actually become speaker, said the report — the front-runners in the race are House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH). Most Republicans didn't believe he could get the votes he would need.

The risk was that House Republicans in vulnerable elections next year would be tied directly to the former president as the caucus battled over how big a role he should play in their leadership.

According to the report, aides close to Trump ultimately talked him out of it by explaining it would blow up in his face. "Not only would he lose to Scalise or Jordan, they told him, but that he could receive just a handful of votes since the nomination process is done by secret ballot — meaning Republicans were free to vote their conscience without MAGA blowback," said the report — with aides even warning that Trump could be barred from even attending that closed-door election.

Ultimately Trump, who may not even have been eligible to be speaker anyway under rules prohibiting people under indictment from House leadership, gave an endorsement to Jordan on Thursday evening, taking himself out of consideration.

Per the report, Nehls still tried to talk Trump into running, telling him, "You can come in and make Congress great again.">

<The Supreme Court is heading into its second week of its term and will hear major cases, including a racial gerrymandering challenge to South Carolina's 1st Congressional District and a whistleblower retaliation case.

Justices will return to the high court on Tuesday following the Monday holiday and hear three cases before concluding the week of arguments on Wednesday.

Here are the cases to be heard this week:

Whistleblower heads to high court

The high court will first hear Murray v. UBS Securities, which asks whether a whistleblower must prove his employer acted with "retaliatory intent" when a company fired him, in this case, the bank UBS Securities.

The case surrounds UBS strategist Trevor Murray's effort to review a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that overturned a $1.7 million jury verdict against UBS and parent UBS AG in his whistleblower suit. That appeals court found whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require Murray to show the bank acted with retaliatory intent.

The lawmakers say the 2nd Circuit's decision will have "an outsized influence nationwide” because it's considered the "Mother Court" on securities law, according to the brief. They also say it may affect decisions by appeals courts that haven't yet ruled on the burden of proof questions in Sarbanes-Oxley Act whistleblower cases.

A nautical insurance dispute

Later on Tuesday, the justices will hear argument in a maritime law dispute that began after a yacht owned by Raiders Retreat Realty Co. ran aground in 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sustaining around $300,000 in damage.

Although no damage was caused by a fire, the company that insured the yacht, Great Lakes Insurance SE, denied coverage because the yacht's fire-extinguishing equipment wasn't recertified or inspected on time.

Great Lakes wants to undo a 3rd Circuit ruling that a separate Pennsylvania insurance law favoring policyholders could take priority over the federal maritime choice-of-law provision. The insurer argues that the appeals court broke a nearly two-century-old precedent with its decision.

If the Supreme Court upholds the 3rd Circuit, any state's insurance or policyholder law could be found to override the commonly used federal choice-of-law provision, which could cause an unpredictable legal landscape for insurance claims....>

<.....Justices on Wednesday will hear oral argument appealing a ruling that required the South Carolina General Assembly to redraw the 1st District because it was discriminatory against black voters, a case that could affect Rep. Nancy Mace's (R-SC) 2024 reelection prospects.

The suit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil rights plaintiffs who say the map moved more than 30,000 black residents in Charleston to a neighboring district with a black majority. That district, which covers Charleston County, is represented by Mace.

Mace narrowly defeated Joe Cunningham in 2020 after he became the first Democrat to flip a U.S. House seat in the state in 30 years.

But with the Supreme Court aiming to decide the case before next November's election, her current Democratic opponent, Mac Deford, is hoping the Supreme Court will agree with the lower court's decision.

“That’s where they cut the 30,000 African American voters out, essentially silencing their voices and our democratic process,” Deford told a local CBS affiliate last month. “It’s something that Nancy Mace has benefited from. She benefited from it heavily last year. I think it’s equally as disturbing that she’s not denouncing it."

The Supreme Court had for some years exercised scrutiny toward the Voting Rights Act, a federal law that bans race discrimination in elections. But in a surprising move last June, the justices struck down an Alabama gerrymander in Allen v. Milligan, affirming a lower court's decision that the state violated the VRA when it drew congressional maps that diluted the black voting power in the state.

The legal issue in the Oct. 11 case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, is distinct from the Milligan matter. Alabama was found to have violated the VRA when it drew its congressional maps, while the lower court in Alexander ruled that South Carolina ran against the state constitution's safeguards against race discrimination.

Justices will also be examining the South Carolina dispute at a time when Mace says she's been under fire from "establishment" Republicans ever since she joined seven other GOP House members to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). "I've had a lot of threats about my fundraising," she told CNN on Oct. 4.

In response to the case, a spokesman from Mace's office, Will Hampson, told the Washington Examiner she has been "consistently been an independent voice for the Lowcountry."

"No matter what the district looks like, she looks forward to continuing to deliver results for the people of South Carolina," Hampson said.>

<Congresswoman Liz Cheney said police who defended the U.S. Capitol from violence incited by then-President Donald Trump prevented a massacre on Jan. 6 — but she said democracy is still in danger.

Cheney, who spoke Thursday to a full house at the Dennison Theatre of the University of Montana, pointed specifically to Rep. Jim Jordan as evidence of the ongoing political crisis.

The former Wyoming representative said Jordan helped Trump and failed to alert Capitol police of impending violence, and the Ohio Republican’s candidacy for Speaker of the House shows democracy remains in crisis.

Cheney, who served as vice chairperson of the Jan. 6 committee that investigated Trump, said when people think about that day, they should remember not just a date, they should look back on the fight to defend the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s important for the American people not to let the ferocity of that battle leave our consciousness,” Cheney said. “It’s important to go back and remember, to look at the video of that battle, particularly along the west front of the Capitol.

“And if the doors had not held, if those police officers had not fought so valiantly, we would have had a massacre that day.”

Cheney, a conservative Republican, represented Wyoming in the U.S. House from 2017 to 2023, but she earned the status of pariah in her own party when she became an unequivocal spokesperson against Trump after he tried to steal the 2020 election. Thursday, she spoke to 1,100 people for the 40th Anniversary Mansfield Dialogues at UM, and the crowd in left-leaning Missoula gave her a standing ovation. For roughly an hour and a half, Cheney took questions from Gov. Marc Racicot, who served in Montana from 1993 to 2001, and then she answered audience questions presented by UM political scientist Rob Saldin.

Saldin said he wanted to start with an observation that came out of a conversation with his wife. She told him that if someone said 20 years ago she’d be enthusiastic to attend a political address by Liz Cheney, she wouldn’t have believed it.

Cheney interjected, to laughter: “It’s weird for me too.”

The talk honors the legacy of U.S. Sen. Mike Mansfield of Montana, known for his respectful and bipartisan leadership. Up until this year when Sen. Mitch McConnell eclipsed his record, Mansfield was the longest-serving Senate leader. Cheney said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, worked with Mansfield.

She said Sen. Mansfield and Gov. Racicot embody the type of substantive leaders the nation needs, and Racicot, in turn, said he’d work with Cheney if she chose to campaign. Cheney, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, has said she’s committed to working against Trump, but also has not announced her own political plans, including whether she’d run for president. (She said she wasn’t sure if she should use the present tense in describing herself as a Republican, but she also was certain she wouldn’t be serving politically as a Democrat.)

At the talk, Cheney said both parties exhibit vitriol and political toxicity, but she said just one candidate running for president has called for violence against his political opponents, and just one has called for the execution of the joint chiefs of staff chairman: “This is not moral equivalence.”

“We have to really make sure, as a nation, we think about what that means, and that we stand together to make sure that violence is not part of our political process,” Cheney said, in her advocacy against Trump....>

<....Trump was indicted in August on four criminal counts, including conspiring to defraud the United States, in charges that reflect the findings of the committee on which Cheney served. He’s expected to be in court for the next year, including in a civil trial that started this month in New York.

Racicot, former head of the Republican National Committee, said recent polls show that as many as 70% of Americans believe the country is in crisis and at risk of failure, and he wanted to know Cheney’s views. Cheney, a lawyer, said she agreed.

Cheney said she believes there’s no question democracy will survive, but she also said it will be a struggle. To right the ship, she said society needs to do a better job of teaching both young people and elected officials about the U.S. Constitution, members of the media need to ask questions about what’s politically acceptable, and Republicans need to choose the Constitution over Trump.

Prior to Jan. 6, she said members of the Republican party, including just-ousted Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, kept acquiescing to Trump and agreeing to do “just one more thing” for him. She said that included objecting to electoral votes without any constitutional authority.

Their actions led to violence, she said, and Jordan, since endorsed for speaker by Trump, was on the phone with Trump and knew his plans in advance: “The notion that the Republican party is anywhere close to contemplating putting Jim Jordan into the position of Speaker of the House is something that tells you the level of risk we face in our democracy today.”

She reminded the audience that when police officers were fighting to hold off the mob, Trump was watching the battle on television in the White House. She said he not only ignored pleas that he tell the crowd to go home, he sent a tweet that led to a surge in activity and directly contributed to the violence.

“We need to remember that what Donald Trump did is as evil as you can imagine and as much a dereliction of duty from an American president as we’ve ever seen,” Cheney said.

But Racicot wanted to know why other Republicans stay silent, why there’s a “herd mentality,” and Cheney said it’s an important question. She said the number of people who truly believe the election was stolen is small (“maybe two,” she joked) — and “one of them might be one of your representatives here in Montana.”

Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale has defended Trump, who stumped for him in Montana when Rosendale tried to unseat U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, in 2018. Rosendale, a popular hardliner who may take another shot at the U.S. Senate in 2024, also supported Cheney’s ousting from political office last year.

Cheney said some people cave to political pressure, and she also pointed to a lack of leadership. She said the situation is difficult to explain, but she also said it is due to “a complete lack of courage” in members of the Republican party choosing Trump over the Constitution.

She agreed with Racicot’s characterization of Trump as lacking character and being cruel and deranged, and she also said politics are driven in part by a “cult of personality” rather than regard for the rule of law.

But she said if Republicans abandon their values, “the party becomes dangerous to democracy.”

People who have taken for granted that political institutions held in the face of the crisis are wrong, Cheney said. She said they only held because specific people stopped Trump, and she said none of the people who worked for him then will work for him again.

As for how she views the current crop of Republican nominees for president, Cheney said she didn’t want to say too much to criticize anyone in case she inadvertently helps a candidate. But she said she believes former governors Chris Christie, of New Jersey, and Asa Hutchinson, of Arkansas, along with former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, have been honest with the American people; the three also are critics of Trump.

If Trump becomes the Republican nominee for president, she said the Republican party won’t be the Republican party anymore. She said politics are shifting, and she urged students and citizens in the audience to recognize their own power and work across party lines for the good of the country.

“One of the casualties, frankly, of the Trump era has been not having leaders who talk about the tremendous goodness of this country and remind us of the blessings of America,” Cheney said. She said the thought makes her emotional. “ … It doesn’t mean that we’re without flaws, but my God, what an amazing place.”>

<On a warm Friday night in the St. Mary’s Catholic Church parking lot, sweating men sipping cold beers dipped fish fillets into bubbling deep fryers as children played on the bouncy castle.

This down-home fish fry used to be a regular stop for U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, a moderate Republican who grew up in this former coal town in Central Illinois. But that was before new district lines drawn in 2021 pushed him into far more conservative terrain — and into competition with a fellow GOP incumbent.

To keep his job in Congress, Davis had to square off with Rep. Mary E. Miller, a member of the right-wing Freedom Caucus who closely aligned herself with former president Donald Trump. In the primary campaign, she assailed Davis for his willingness to compromise with Democrats and to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Miller, the hard-liner, won the 2022 race. Davis, the consensus-seeker, was out.

The bitter Republican feuding was not merely a symptom of the broader civil war in the national party. Rather, it was prompted by the actions of Illinois Democrats, who used their supermajority in the legislature to redraw district lines in a way that would strengthen their already titanium-solid lock on power.

The strategy worked, adding one Democratic seat to the Illinois delegation and trimming two Republican ones as GOP voters were packed into a smaller number of districts.

The new map also accomplished what experts say gerrymandering does with ruthless efficiency, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are responsible: hollowing out the moderate political center and driving both parties further toward the ideological fringes.

“Gerrymandering undermines a key element of democracy, which is competition,” said Harvard University government professor Steven Levitsky.

Politicians representing more-evenly split districts fear general election competition and therefore tend to govern more moderately, Levitsky said. But those in lopsided districts worry more about primary challenges and become responsive to the extremes in their party.

The consequences were on vivid display during the past couple of weeks in Congress as a small group of hard-right Republicans drove the government to the brink of a shutdown and then expelled Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from the post of House Speaker, the first speaker in the nation’s history to be ousted by members of his own party. The eight GOP members who voted to reject him represent districts that are safely Republican, with little to fear in general-election contests against Democrats.

Miller was not among those eight dissenters, but she was part of a larger group of hard-right Republicans that had earlier blocked McCarthy’s spending plans — forcing him to work with Democrats to avert a government shutdown, a collaboration that helped to seal his fate.

Levitsky, a co-author of the book “Tyranny of the Minority,” said the push to the extremes has been particularly evident in the Trump-led Republican Party and that gerrymandering is one cause among many.

“What’s really new about our politics today is that the radical fringe on the right, who are pretty authoritarian and pretty nativist, are now exercising outsize power,” Levitsky said.

But for both parties, the primary election — dominated by the most ideologically committed voters — has become more important as districts with competitive general elections have dwindled. Over the past quarter-century, the number of House swing seats, as calculated by the Cook Political Report, has been cut in half — from 164 in 1999 to an estimated 82 in next year’s election. Only 25 incumbents — 6 percent of the House’s 435 seats — were defeated in 2022. Sixteen of them lost in primaries.

Gerrymandering isn’t the only factor driving that phenomenon; geographic sorting, in which cities have become bluer and rural areas redder, has contributed mightily.

<.....In recent years, Republicans have used their dominance at the state level to create highly favorable maps in large states, such as Texas and Florida, as well as smaller ones, including Tennessee and Utah. But where Democratic legislators control the process, they’ve proved equally adept at creating maps advantageous to their party.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan group that studies the issue nationally, gave the Illinois map an “F” rating and classified none of the state’s 17 congressional districts as competitive.

Although Democratic voters unquestionably outnumber Republicans in the state — Biden defeated Trump by 17 points in Illinois in 2020 — the effect is exaggerated by district lines that have helped to give Democrats a 14-3 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. In a comparison with a baseline map with no partisan advantage, Princeton researchers found that Illinois Democrats had given themselves three additional seats — a total matched only by Republicans in Texas.

Illinois’ new district lines for 2022 made the few GOP districts that remained even redder, which created a problem for two moderate Republican representatives. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an outspoken Trump critic who was certain to have drawn a strong primary challenge in 2022, opted to leave Congress. Davis fought to stay but found his moderate record used against him in his reelection bid against Miller.

His willingness to reach across the aisle had made him a favored partner of Democrats and had helped him win general elections in his politically balanced district. But that instinct for compromise, he said in an interview, became a liability under the new Democratic-drawn map.

Davis said he was hammered in the primary for “pictures with Biden. Pictures with Obama. Not Trumpy enough. Voted for common sense immigration reform, etc., etc., etc.”

Davis called the gerrymandering and Miller’s attacks on him unsurprising.

At the Taylorville fish fry, some of Davis’s former constituents were more pointed.

“Rodney got screwed,” said Bob Davis, 88, a retired school administrator having dinner with his family at a picnic table. “I think it should be illegal. When you intentionally draw the lines for political reasons, I think that’s wrong.”....>

<.....The cost of bipartisanship

A statue of Abraham Lincoln titled “The Last Stop” is displayed in the Taylorville town square. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post) Manipulation of voting districts has been around since at least 18th-century England. It became known as “gerrymandering” in 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry approved a district whose odd shape reminded people of a salamander.

The new 13th District in Illinois more closely resembles a snake. It squiggles across 175 miles of lightly populated and Republican-leaning farmland and connects the more urban and Democratic leaning areas of East St. Louis, Springfield, Decatur, Champaign and Urbana.

It is a safely Democratic district, which was won in 2022 by first-time candidate Nikki Budzinski, a longtime labor union official who also served in the Biden administration.

Taylorville had been part of the old 13th District, which was split fairly evenly between Republicans and Democrats, with just a four-point GOP advantage, according to the Cook Political Report. Davis won the district first in 2012 and was reelected four times, serving 10 years largely as a center-right moderate.

Then, in the most recent redistricting, Taylorville was moved into a new 15th District, a largely rural and conservative bloc that almost completely surrounds the 13th and that had been made significantly more Republican by the shifting lines, giving it a 22-point GOP edge.

As Davis fought to stay in Congress last year, he stressed his Republican bona fides: Campaign materials reminded primary voters that he had been “proud to work with President Trump,” and he sought the former president’s endorsement.

But his opponent, Miller, was quick to note that Davis had also voted to certify Biden’s 2020 election victory, which she called “tainted,” and supported the creation of a congressional commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In a matchup of Republican incumbents, it wasn’t even close: After Trump came to the district to campaign for Miller, she cruised to a primary victory, 57 percent to 43 percent.

In sharp contrast to Davis’s approach, which he describes as “principled compromise,” Miller is rated by Voteview, a nonpartisan research group that tracks congressional voting and ideology, as more conservative than 98 percent of current House members.

She has called for the impeachments of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and a ban on further funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

Miller did not vote to remove McCarthy when he was ousted from the job Tuesday, explaining in a statement that she wants her party to be “focused on stopping the radical Democrats.” But she has repeatedly sided with a small group of hard-right Republicans that frequently sparred with McCarthy and ultimately doomed his speakership.>

<In a Sunday, October 8 op-ed published by The Guardian, ex-President Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen argues that Republicans, by "slavishly supporting Trump and his Maga – Make America Great Again – supporters" — "have empowered a political movement that is increasingly testing the limits of the US democratic experiment."

The ex-Trump Organization vice president emphasized that even if the 2024 MAGA hopeful loses to President Joe Biden again, "the problem of the Republican party will still be with us long after he's left the political scene."

Cohen suggests, "Trump's hold over the Republican party is so complete that it borders on the pathological. Since March, he has been indicted four times and charged with 91 separate felonies. Yet his poll numbers among Republicans have dramatically improved. He enjoys a more than 45-point lead in the race for the party's presidential nomination."

However, he insists "If there is any silver lining, it is this: for all the Republican voters who love Trump, there is a larger mobilised group of voters who loathes him."

Cohen writes:

Since leaving office, his approval numbers have also largely stayed the same. Americans have, by and large, made up their minds about Trump – and the verdict is: 'We don't like him.'

The last three US elections prove the point. In what was largely seen as a rebuke to Trump, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats picked up more than 40 seats and control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, he lost re-election by at least 7m votes to Biden (4m more than he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016). In the 2022 midterms, the Democrats dramatically overperformed, picking up a seat in the Senate and barely losing the House of Representatives. So far this year, in dozens of special elections, Democrats are overperforming by a whopping 11 points. Part of this is a byproduct of the supreme court’s decision on abortion rights, but it's also a backlash to the extremism that Trump has engendered.

Cohen suggests this is because "The GOP today is less a political party and more an inchoate mass of cultural grievances, conspiracy theories and lowest common denominator political slogans. Trump, for all his toxicity, is a symptom of the GOP's decades-long descent into madness. Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party's rank-and-file supporters."

The ex-Trump lawyer emphasizes, "For those hoping that a principled and mature Republican party will somehow emerge from this mess, think again.">

<Rep. Nancy Mace announced she plans to support Rep. Jim Jordan to replace ousted House speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom she voted to remove from office last week. When pressed about the allegations that Jordan ignored sexual assaults by a team doctor while he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, the Republican congresswoman claimed to not "know anything" about the issue, despite it being widely reported.

"I know you've been outspoken about defending victims of sexual assault," Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan said to Mace on Sunday. "Do the past allegations against Jim Jordan that he turned a blind eye to sexual abuse give you any reservations? How do you square that?"

"Yeah, I'm not familiar or aware with that," Mace said. "He's not indicted on anything that I'm aware of. And so I don't, I don't know anything, and I can't speak to that."

"I don't know anything about that," Mace continued. "What I do know is that I've been a very strong voice for women. I've talked to Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise about that. I've been a very strong advocate for rape victims."

In 2019, Mace revealed that she was raped when she was 16, and she has said that event shaped her views on abortion. Mace also noted she is working on a bill with Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee to address the large backlog of unprocessed rape kits.

Mace is correct that Jim Jordan has not been indicted, but he was named as a defendant in a suit against the university in 2018 that alleged OSU doctor Richard Strauss abused athletes on the team over the course of decades, including while Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach. Jordan has denied knowing about the abuse during his tenure, but at least six former OSU wrestlers have said Jordan was aware but failed to act. An independent investigative report released by the university in 2021 concluded that Strauss abused at least 177 students.

In justifying her support for Jordan, Mace said, "I am going to be supporting Jim Jordan, for speaker for a number of reasons. I think that his values, his work ethic, his ability to just run circles around everyone with regards to policy and pushing forward. We've been one of the least productive Congresses inside of 30 years, and he's going to be a workhorse for our country."

Host Margaret Brennan pressed Mace on her endorsement, pointing out harsh words from former Rep. Liz Cheney, who recently cautioned Republicans not to elect Jordan speaker because he was the member of Congress who knew the most about Trump's plans for Jan. 6.

"Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for Jan. 6, than any other member of the House of Representatives," Cheney said during a speech last week. "And if the Republicans decide that Jim Jordan should be the speaker of the House, there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution."

Mace, who unlike Jordan voted to certify the 2020 election results, dismissed Cheney's concerns. "There's going to be all sorts of issues that we agree on and disagree on. And also in terms of Jan. 6… I was one of the most vocal members of our party, that day, and the days and weeks beyond that," she said. "I got primaried because of my vote to certify, because I spoke out. And so you know, we have to look forward and unite and come together regardless of what has happened in the past."

Mace this summer said she was willing to "bury the hatchet" with Donald Trump as well. Trump has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting multiple women, and lost not just one but two defamation suits brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll after he denied that he raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

"We can't afford four more years of Joe Biden," Mace said in June. "I'm willing to bury the hatchet to save the country, and I know President Trump is too.">

Like this one, <stalker>?

<It’s often said that Donald Trump has a cultlike following. But that’s far too benign.

“Star Wars” has a cultlike following. Taylor Swift has her cult of “Swifties.” A political organization that has no platform other than loyalty to the leader is not a cult, it’s an autocratic movement.

The tragicomic chaos in the House in the last week is the natural result of a political party that has lived under Trump’s thumb. It should end any pretense that the current Republican Party is a serious governing party.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”: “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. The totalitarian movements, each in its own way, have done their utmost to get rid of the party programs which specified concrete content and which they inherited from earlier, non‑totalitarian stages of development.”

It seems like another time in another galaxy, but not that long ago there actually was some ideological diversity within the Republican Party.

In 1966, Time ran a cover story highlighting the winners of the 1966 midterm elections as a “Republican Resurgence,” after the Goldwater defeat of 1964. Time’s editors selected six Republicans as being emblematic of this rebirth: California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Michigan Gov. George Romney, Illinois Sen. Charles Percy, Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

The six governors and senators had differences of opinion on almost all major issues. Hatfield, deeply influenced by his service in World War II, never voted for a bill to authorize U.S. military engagement. He was one of only two Republican senators who voted against the 1991 Gulf War.

With Sen. George McGovern, Hatfield co-sponsored 1971 legislation calling for a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. Reagan, on the other hand, was consistently supportive of the Vietnam War and campaigned against the creation of Medicaid.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Republican governors who were pro-choice governed states with a larger collective population than the Republican antiabortion governors. Bill Weld of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania’s Tom Ridge, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and New York’s George Pataki all were proudly pro-choice.

Today, there are no Republican governors who support abortion rights, and many are actively working to criminalize abortions in their states. The Republican Party three decades ago was overwhelmingly a white-dominated party, but it allowed for at least some dissent and disagreement.

While it is difficult to attribute any deliberate or methodical plan to Donald Trump, whose mind operates like an old-fashioned pinball machine on tilt, his basic antidemocratic, strongman instincts have crushed dissent in the Republican Party, empowering the underlying authoritarian impulses within the party. A once-center-right political party with core ideological principles is now marching toward the formation of an autocratic state.

It’s possible that Trump will not be the Republican nominee in 2024, but his success in molding the party to his image ensures that anyone who wins will continue down an authoritarian path.

When Ron DeSantis ran for governor of Florida in 2018, he aired a commercial showing his toddler daughter building a border wall with toy blocks, followed by a shot of him holding his infant son and reading from a book, “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’” His wife also appeared in the ad, saying, “People say Ron is all Trump, but he is so much more.”

What’s unfolding in the Republican Party is an inevitable step in the cycle of authoritarian movements. What once was deemed sufficiently pure is judged to be inadequate and in need of purging.

The Night of the Long Knives, the murder of Leon Trotsky, the Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge — each was the result of a radical movement further purifying its core membership and ideology, and something very similar is taking place among today’s Republicans.

When Trump emerged in 2015, he was initially rejected by Republican voters. In May 2015, Donald Trump polled at 3% among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters. While it’s not unusual for a new and still-unknown candidate to start with a low number, Trump had almost a 100% name recognition among potential voters.

Republicans knew who he was; they just didn’t like him. A May 2015 Washington Post–ABC News poll found that just over 20% of Republicans viewed Trump favorably. By early December 2015 — and after his attack on John McCain’s war record, his mocking of a disabled reporter and his calling for a Muslim ban — Trump had surged to his largest lead during the Republican primary, opening up a 35%-to-16% margin over Ted Cruz....>

<.....Jeb Bush, who led the field in early polling, was by then at the same 3% level of support that Trump had in May. The media coverage of Trump’s rise evidenced an unwillingness to grasp Trump’s appeal. “Donald Trump Leads Florida Polls, Despite Call for Muslim Travel Ban” was the headline in the New Times Broward–Palm Beach. “Trump Poll Surge Continues Despite Backlash Over Muslim Ban,” trumpeted the Dec. 10, 2015, broadcast of Voice of America News.

This was like reporting that Jim Beam sold a lot of bourbon even though it contained alcohol. Trump was rising with Republican voters because of his racism and religious bigotry.

There was no backlash with the majority of Republican primary voters. The exact opposite was occurring. Trump’s hate was creating a surge of appeal.

Donald Trump understood the true nature of the Republican Party better than the party’s leaders. “This suggestion is completely and totally inconsistent with American values,” then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said as he denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. “I do not think it is reflective of our principles, not just as a party but as a country,” then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the ban.

But it was his call for a Muslim ban that helped Trump clinch the 2016 nomination. McConnell and Ryan and the establishment donor class of the Republican Party would never admit publicly that the xenophobia and racism that appealed to Trump voters were far more motivating to Republican voters than the small-government, low-taxes, constitutionally conservative so‑called “values” they insisted were the true core of the party.

But their commitment to their deeply held beliefs was so weak that they now supported a man who bragged he was “the king of debt,” refused to release his tax returns to show he even paid taxes and whose Muslim ban was a religious test that was anathema to constitutional principles.

They didn’t care about anything but remaining in power, and they thought they could use Trump while controlling him.

There is a childlike need for many Republicans in what was once “the establishment” to believe that the Trump years were some aberration, that the party was “hijacked” by Donald Trump. The problem with this is that the passengers on the hijacked plane do not cheer for the terrorist. But in the Republican Party, the hijacker is the most popular person on the plane.

Trump and Trumpism dominate the Republican Party because he represents what the Republican Party wants to be. There is no “normal” for the party to return to. It is an autocratic movement, not a traditional American political party. To believe this movement cannot win and end democracy as we know it would be as dangerously naive as thinking that the Donald Trump who announced his candidacy in 2015 with 3% of support within the party could never be elected president.

None of us can choose history, but history can choose us. The fate of the American experiment is in our hands. America or Trump? The next 13 months will decide our future.>

<John A. Boehner lasted five years as House speaker before he ran out of patience with his party’s hard-line Freedom Caucus.

“Legislative terrorists,” the Ohio Republican called its members after he quit in 2015. “They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos.”

Next came Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who lasted three years. “The House is broken,” he griped on his way out.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) lasted all of nine months.

“They are not conservatives,” he said of the Freedom Caucus after they led the drive to oust him as speaker last week. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic.”

See a pattern?

Ever since the tea party movement of 2010 elected a wave of anti-establishment conservatives, House Republicans have not merely been divided, but downright dysfunctional.

Freedom Caucus members aren’t only more conservative than other Republicans; many see their party’s leaders as adversaries.

And they don’t believe in compromise — even when their party holds a narrow majority in only one house of Congress, and must reach deals with the Democratic-led Senate to keep the federal government running.

“They view the party as [too] willing to bargain with Democrats,” said Kevin Kosar, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “[They] run on the Republican label, but get into Congress by trashing Republicans.”

Many GOP voters agree with them. An Economist/YouGov poll from July indicated that most Republicans want members of Congress to stick with principle “no matter what” rather than compromise to get things done.

That sentiment is especially strong in districts with big Republican majorities.

Most Democrats surveyed said the opposite: They wanted their representatives to compromise when necessary.

McCarthy’s dilemma was that he was trapped between the hard-liners’ refusal to compromise and his desire to avoid being blamed for a government shutdown.

On Sept. 30, he sponsored a funding bill to keep the government running for 45 days. It passed the House with votes from a slim majority of Republicans and almost every Democrat.

“There’s no bill that can pass with [only] one party or the other,” he noted.

But that modest bipartisan compromise triggered a full-scale revolt by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and seven others in the Freedom Caucus. Gaetz demanded a vote on a motion to remove McCarthy as speaker. The eight Freedom Caucus rebels were joined by 208 Democrats, and McCarthy abruptly lost his job.

The irony is that McCarthy was right. When one party holds a slim majority in the House and the other holds a slim majority in the Senate, neither can achieve results without bipartisan compromise.

Even in the deeply partisan House, where conservative Republicans share little common ground with liberal Democrats, a bipartisan majority wanted to avoid a government shutdown....>

<.....So why did Democrats vote McCarthy out?

There are several explanations. For one, Democrats — like many Republicans — simply didn’t trust the glad-handing Californian.

He wasn’t a reliable negotiating partner. Weeks after he reached a hard-fought agreement with President Biden over spending levels, he walked away from it.

McCarthy regularly wilted in the face of pressure from his party. After a mob loyal to then-President Trump stormed the Capitol in January 2021, he denounced their action. But he voted against certifying Biden’s election, and rushed to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago to apologize for his apostasy.

The simplest explanation may be that McCarthy never asked the Democrats for help. He knew they would have asked for something in return — more seats on committees, perhaps, or changing the rule that allowed Gaetz to seek McCarthy’s ouster. The speaker knew that for every Democratic vote he gained, he risked losing more Republican votes.

But there’s also a deeper reason: The House is organized along party lines, and has been for almost 200 years.

Almost every member runs for office under a party label, relies on party loyalists for votes and turns to their party for help with campaign funding.

Partisan legislation is the norm, and bipartisan initiatives are the exception.

House rules often make bipartisan cooperation difficult. Members from two parties are not allowed to sponsor bills jointly; a bill is allowed only one sponsor. A bipartisan task force is trying to ease that rule, but its proposal hasn’t gone anywhere.

The partisan model is especially stark when it comes to how the House is organized. Every committee chairman comes from the majority. Every speaker in living memory has been elected by the majority party.

“That paradigm has been around so long, it has acquired almost constitutional status,” noted William Galston, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution.

The strongest proof of that proposition is that as soon as McCarthy lost his job, other Republicans jumped to replace him — within the same one-party structure that had brought him down.

House Republicans appear to be hoping that Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), McCarthy’s second in command, or Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Freedom Caucus member endorsed by Trump, can knit the party together more successfully.

But there’s little reason to expect a different outcome. The next speaker will wrestle with the same unstable majority as his predecessor.

There is an alternative, at least in theory: a coalition speaker elected by members of both parties.

Galston, a supporter of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, is promoting the idea.

“This crisis could also be an opportunity ... to break the traditional paradigm,” he said.

His proposal: Members from both parties should support a Republican speaker who agrees to new, less partisan rules.

“Moderate Republicans need to say no to any new speaker without rules changes,” he said — beginning with the rule that allowed Gaetz to depose McCarthy. “Moderate Democrats need to take a step forward for the sake of looking like the reasonable party.”

That option won’t come into play if Republicans quickly elect one of their members the old-fashioned way. But if they deadlock, “it’s a useful option,” Galston said.

And if it doesn’t work this time, it might come in handy later. If history is any guide, the next speaker won’t hold the job long.>

<Representative Kristin Baker, a Cabarrus County Republican, has announced that she will not be seeking reelection in the upcoming year. Baker’s tenure in North Carolina’s political landscape has been marked by her involvement in several contentious issues, notably her significant role in the recent abortion law changes. The new restrictions, which will take effect from July 1, will prohibit most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, significantly limiting abortion access in the state. The law’s passage was a major victory for the Republican party, demonstrating the effectiveness of their slim supermajority in the legislature.

Impacts Beyond State Borders

These new restrictions are expected to have far-reaching effects, impacting not only women in North Carolina but also those from neighboring southern states who often travel to North Carolina for abortions. The law’s passage followed a public campaign pressuring Republican lawmakers to vote against the ban. Nevertheless, the ban was successfully enacted, a testament to the Republicans’ strategic maneuvering within the state legislature.

A Champion of Mental Health and Gender Issues

Throughout her political career, Baker has also been a strong advocate for mental health initiatives. In addition to her work on health-related issues, she successfully pushed for a law banning transgender girls from playing on school and college sports teams based on their gender identity. This has sparked controversy and discussions about transgender rights and gender equality in sports.

Baker’s announcement comes at a time when North Carolina is considering new General Assembly districts for the 2024 elections. This could potentially reshape the political landscape of the state, leading to new power dynamics and representative demographics. As such, Baker’s departure from the political scene may have further implications on the future political direction of North Carolina.>

Wot, being 3-2 on in both houses is not enough? Time to gerrymander and make sure those <evil> Democrats never win anything!