AOC is the new Trump She'd rather tweet than be an effective politician https://unherd.com/2022/03/aoc-is-the-new-trump/
Ocasio-Cortez calls on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/29/aoc-clarence-thomas-resign-supreme-court/ excerpt Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should resign after it emerged that his wife had pressed the Trump White House in text messages to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the Jan 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. Ocasio-Cortez’s call for Thomas to resign — as well as her raising the prospect an impeachment effort — goes further than most other Democrats have in their demands for Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election or the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection after certain texts from his wife came to light last week. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) also has said Thomas should be impeached. The texts by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and lawyer by training, revealed that she had reached out to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows multiple times in the weeks after the 2020 election, pushing the baseless claim that the election had been stolen and urging Trump officials not to accept the results. At the time, President Donald Trump and his allies had vowed to take their efforts to overturn the election results to the Supreme Court. In January, Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision to reject Trump’s request to block White House documents from being released to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. The bipartisan panel is investigating the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mobthat tried to stop the confirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral college win, an attack that led to five deaths and left about 140 members of law enforcement injured. On Monday, a person familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Washington Post that the committee will seek an interview with Ginni Thomas. Unlike federal judges, Supreme Court justices are not subject to an ethical code of conduct and can be removed only by impeachment. The House would need to draft articles of impeachment, then a simple majority would need to vote to impeach. At least two-thirds of the Senate would then need to vote to convict the justice. Samuel Chase remains the only Supreme Court justice to have been impeached in U.S. history, but the Senate ultimately acquitted him. In the past week, a growing number of Democratic members of Congress have called on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from certain cases. “The facts are clear here. This is unbelievable,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday. “You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election to the sitting president’s chief of staff. And she also knows this election, these cases are going to come before her husband.” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was at stake and that “clearly” the justice should have recused himself from decisions related to the election. On Monday, a larger group of House and Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), sent a letter to the Supreme Court requesting that Clarence Thomas recuse himself from future cases involving the Jan. 6 riot and asking for a “written explanation for his failure to recuse himself” in previous related cases. Signatories included seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with 13 House Democrats. more at the link
Yeah that is probably too hard to do. I just googled it and it's only happened once before - in 1805. It seems like the judges usually recuse themselves in a responsible way, but there are some big exceptions. Having a code of ethics would be a good idea.
Gerald Ford tried to impeach a Supreme Court justice — and failed https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/03/29/gerald-ford-william-douglas-impeachment/ excerpt: A member of Congress called for the impeachment of a sitting Supreme Court justice, complaining that the justice had supported the idea that violence and rebellion against the government may be justified under some circumstances. The member noted that the code of ethics for federal judicial officers, which included the concept of recusal in the face of conflicts or the appearance of impropriety, did not apply to the Supreme Court, so that the only recourse against the justice was impeachment. This was not April 2022, but April 1970. The speaker was not Ilhan Omar, but Gerald Ford, then House minority leader and later president of the United States. And the justice in question wasn’t Clarence Thomas, but William O. Douglas, appointed to the court by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. The revelation by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of text messages from Thomas’s wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, urging him to pursue efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has occasioned a firestorm of criticism of Justice Thomas. Many Democrats and liberal groups have demanded that Thomas, who refused to recuse himself in any of the election-related litigation, step down or be impeached. Historians immediately searched for a parallel, with most focusing on the only impeachment of a sitting justice, in 1805. The justice was Samuel Chase, an intensely partisan opponent of President Thomas Jefferson. The House impeached him, but the Senate refused to convict and remove him. Yet this impeachment, early in the Republic, has little to teach us about the precedent of seeking to dislodge a modern Supreme Court justice. Ford’s speech on April 15, 1970, is much more instructive in understanding the dynamics that might come into play should the House take up impeachment articles against Thomas. more at the link
AOC’s Warning for Democrats: ‘We’re in Trouble’ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i-was-right-about-joe-manchin.html excerpt: “I have the utmost respect and confidence in the president, but I just felt like we called two different plays on this one,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think that there is a sense among more senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times, that we can get back to this time of buddy-buddy and backslapping and we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out. I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that.” *** “We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen,” she said. Ocasio-Cortez and the other 97 members of the House Progressive Caucus are calling on Biden to issue executive orders to enact environmental protections, lower health-care costs, cancel federal student-loan debts, and expand protections for immigrants. “If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.” more at the link that's the ticket. executive action. forget passing legislation the regular way.
Why is he a dumbass? One school district in Cali banned it, he didn’t. Maybe he disagrees with the banning? The inclusion would suggest that he does.
Yeah, I suppose it's embarassing that a California city he didn't directly interfere or "one of his team" banned it, but I thought a leader should look at all the angles.
First, because the districts that are banning TKaM are doing so because they consider it racist. Second, because districts in his own state are doing the same thing. Third, unrelated to this tweet, he has participated in much dumbassery. Check out his interview with Adam Carolla.
First - who cares? If someone is against banning books why does it matter from which end of the political spectrum it is initiated? A conservative can be against banning books with LGBTQ topics, etc. Second - this is a stupid “gotcha” - he has no control over votes within individual school district boards. He most likely picked the book because he didn’t agree with it being banned. So, again, it is stupid. Third - I don’t care. He seems like a tool. The posed picture by nature looks inauthentic. But the sentiment is reasonable and the whole “gotcha” meme is only about circling TKaM and being like “lolol ‘California’ banned that due to wokeness he didn’t realize what he posted, and he’s in charge of California, harharhar”. Zzzz
I am against banning books. Newsom is an idiot because he thinks the books are being banned by conservatives because the conservatives are racist, but they are actually being banned by progressives because the stupid progressives think something like TKaM is racist. The gotcha is funny because he is virtue signaling against conservatives, but it is progressives that are banning the book. He doesn't understand what is happening. It isn't that he is against banning books, it is that he thought he was scoring points against the other side but it was actually an own goal. That is exactly the point. Welcome to politics. He should have said books shouldn't be banned, period. Instead he tried to virtue signal and got burned. He is a clueless governor that apologized for calling an organized group of train robbers a gang. It is only because California is essentially a one party state and the opponents he faces in the Democratic primary are even worse that he is even in office.
https://theweek.com/politics/101200...red-in-the-rights-culture-war-trap-once-again How Democrats got themselves ensnared in the right's culture-war trap once again The GOP has succeeded in taking the 'center' out of the center-left DAMON LINKER APRIL 1, 2022 Democrats were always going to have a tough time in the 2022 midterm elections, given historic trends and the party's already extremely narrow majorities in Congress. Add in surging inflation and a brutal war being waged in Europe and things begin to look especially bleak. But that doesn't mean all of the party's woes are circumstantial. Some are self-inflicted — especially when it comes to the culture-war issues that increasingly dominate American politics. In recent years, Republicans have become experts at leveraging their own extremism on these issues for electoral gain. The game goes like this: Stake out a right-wing position that cheers the GOP's base, thereby ensuring high turnout in the next election; count on progressive activists to respond with their own mirror-image form of left-wing maximalism and Democratic officeholders to adopt that message as their own; use those words and deeds both to justify the right's original impulse toward extremism and to portray the Republican Party as the country's sole defenders of common sense against an insidious form of progressive ideology. Then rinse and repeat. If Democrats want to avoid a wipeout in 2022 and perhaps in 2024 as well, they need to stop responding to the right's extremism with a counter-extremism of their own. Take abortion. As I recently noted, Republicans in states across the country are busy passing extraordinarily restrictive laws against the reproductive rights of women and handing off enforcement powers to private individuals. These "bounty hunter" provisions, which empower people to sue those who procure (or who aid someone else in procuring) abortions, allow these states to sidestep judicial review and avoid injunctions imposed by federal courts. (If states aren't directly enforcing the statutes, no one has standing to seek relief from the penalties they impose.) Polls consistently show that something close to 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That means a very solid majority should be sympathetic to a message like this: In passing laws like these, Republicans are revealing themselves to be radicals far out of step with the American mainstream. Some restrictions on abortion should be permissible, but outright bans are draconian, and efforts to skirt judicial review are un-American in intent and downright authoritarian in effect. What's next? The death penalty for women who have abortions, as some Republicans have proposed? The point of such a response would be to portray the Democrats as the reasonable party upholding moderation and decency in the face of a lunatic assault on the rights and freedoms of the female half of the population. Instead, in late February, 48 Democrats voted in favor of a bill — the Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA) — that would enshrine the right to an abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in the country as a whole and potentially knock down parental consent laws in 37 states. A solid majority may think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, but support for post-viability, late-term abortions is far lower, and the most recent Gallup poll to ask about parental-consent laws (from 2011) found 71 percent support for them. That means Democrats have somehow managed to place themselves on the negative side of public opinion on an issue where they should easily be able to portray their opponents as the extremists. That might delight single-issue activists and the most ideologically progressive donors to the party, but it could well turn out to be electoral poison in November and beyond. A similar dynamic is playing out around Florida's "Parental Rights in Education" bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law earlier this week. LGBT activists have had considerable success in persuading journalists and Democratic officeholders to label the legislation the "Don't Say Gay" bill and in describing it as motivated by anti-gay and anti-transgender animus, which could well be both true and an effective message for Democrats, at least in some parts of the country. There is legitimate reason to worry that the law, which seems to have been written in intentionally vague language, could be interpreted to permit sweeping restrictions on what teachers of all grades can say about sexuality and gender in schools. Yet the passage of the bill that has gotten the most media attention is one that bans"classroom instruction" on "sexual orientation or gender identity" from kindergarten through the third grade. That makes it sound like Democratic opposition to the bill is motivated by the desire to teach young kids about subjects that most parents are likely to consider, quite reasonably, inappropriate for them. (Polling on the bill has been all over the map.) How can it be that Democrats have ended up, by implication, defending the position that public schools should be free to teach children younger than 8 years old about sexual orientation and gender identity? Coming on the heels of controversy about the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools and residual animus against teacher's unions for demanding pandemic-related school closings, this stance could ultimately blow up in the face of Democrats big time. And not without reason. Trying at the state level to regulate the details of public-school curricula and restrict what teachers can say in the classroom is a bad idea. Saying so could give Democrats leverage to oppose bills like the one DeSantis championed in Florida while rallying the American majority to their side. But only if it's paired with a defense of giving local school boards the power to make these decisions for themselves. Taking the opposite view — that parents should get no say in what their kids are taught and implying that teachers and administrators should be empowered to introduce little kids to issues in sexuality and gender — is a politically toxic position that could only appeal to a progressive activist. In political terms, the culture war is a battle over definitions: Which party is narrowly extreme and sectarian? And which stands with America's conflicted majority? In repeatedly taking the Republican bait, Democrats deny themselves of the chance to prevail by refusing to confirm the right's caricature of their position. We're not the extreme ones! They are! The only way for liberals to win the right's radicalizing culture-war game is not to play.
‘We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves’: Enthusiasm gap keeps getting worse for Dems The last time the voter enthusiasm deficit was this wide, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/31/enthusiasm-gap-dems-00021774
Democrats Need to Get Better at Politics—Fast The stakes are too high for them to blow it. https://www.thebulwark.com/democrats-need-to-get-better-at-politics-fast/
