We begin today with Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic saying that Senator Warnock’s win in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race probably bodes well for President Joe Biden’s reelection bid in 2024.
With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. [...]
Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.
But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)
Perry Bacon Jr. of The Washington Post proposes a new Democratic campaign strategy for assembling coalitions of voters.
...many prominent Democrats remain deeply attached to two campaign approaches that haven’t been very successful. First, there is the idea of building a coalition across racial, geographic, religious and cultural lines that connects Americans based on their status as workers and on economic issues such as raising the minimum wage. That is what many left-wing groups and politicians have been trying to do, most notably Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). [...]
A second strategy is creating a broad coalition that supports centrist policies. This is generally where outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and President Biden have steered the party — taking positions on most issues where a clear majority of the public agrees with Democrats. So that means supporting infrastructure spending and universal prekindergarten while opposing the “defund the police” slogan. The theory is that if you are taking policy positions on every issue that are shared by 60 percent or more of Americans, you’ll get an outsize vote share. [...]
There’s a third strategy staring Democrats right in the face. It’s what’s worked the past three cycles — whenever they’ve been willing to lean into it: Affirmatively running as the pro-tolerance, anti-Trumpism party — as some Democrats did, including Biden, right before the election. That approach both galvanizes the Democratic Party base and also wins over people who voted Republican in the past but are turned off by today’s version of the party.
I was an LGBTQ youth who wanted to commit suicide and, in fact, took varied bottles of pills on several occasions. My mother, to this day, only knows about one of these incidents.
I understand the need for “privacy” especially when a person is attempting to get therapeutic help. For an LGBTQ kid, however, that need for “privacy” can also be a catalyst for other things that are … not so good. See the Trevor Project’s 2022 National Survey on why this is so important.
Probably no one needs to look as far away as Houston, Texas, to notice a LGBTQ youth in a suicidal crisis. Just in case anyone does run across an LGBTQ youth in crisis, here’s contact information for The Trevor Project.
Mark Joseph Stern of Slate breaks down the U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments for Moore v. Harper, the case that could make the so-called “independent state legislature theory” constitutional.
After three hours of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, only one thing is certain: If the justices want to blow up federal elections, they will have nothing to hide behind—not history, not logic, and certainly not the Constitution. The three lawyers defending democracy methodically dismantled the “independent state legislature” theory from every conceivable angle, debunking each myth, misreading, and misrepresentation deployed to prop it up. They bested the conservative justices who tried to corner them, identifying faulty reasoning and bogus history with devastating precision. [...]
In the end, Moore v. Harper probably comes down to Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have all endorsed the ISLT in the past. Roberts, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, clearly have no desire to revive it. So Moore is in Barrett’s hands, and it serves as the ultimate test of her self-proclaimed originalism.
So it was noteworthy that Barrett sounded audibly skeptical throughout Wednesday’s arguments. She was pretty tough on David Thompson, who represented North Carolina’s GOP legislative leaders, suggesting that his “formalistic test” was an unworkable stab at “trying to deal with our precedent,” which cut against him. Thompson tried to draw a line between “substantive and procedural,” but Barrett wasn’t buying it: “As a former civil procedure teacher, I can tell you that is a hard line to draw and a hard line to teach students in that context as well.” She also pointedly noted that Thompson’s standards for implementing the ISLT were not “more manageable” than the North Carolina Supreme Court’s standards for measuring gerrymanders. It was a polite way of calling Thompson a hypocrite.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post notes that one of her old columns was “misconstrued” during SCOTUS oral arguments of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.
A Colorado marketing and graphic design entrepreneur, Lorie Smith, would like to expand into the fizzy and fraught business of wedding websites where engaged couples can tell the story of their relationship, provide guests with travel and hotel details, offer links to their gift registry and have a central location to post all manner of logistical information. What Smith doesn’t want to do is make wedding websites for same-sex couples because she has a religious objection to such marriages. Her objection creates an obstacle to her expansion dreams because Colorado law prohibits businesses from discriminating based on gender and sexual identity. A business owner can’t refuse service to customers because they’re LGBTQ. And so Smith has taken her case to the Supreme Court where oral arguments were heard Monday.
To support her case, her legal team referenced a
column I wrote in 2017. Smith is likening her refusal of same-sex couples to American fashion designers’ boycott of first lady Melania Trump. Both cases, Smith believes, are examples of artists owning their own voice. They are about having the freedom to speak or not speak. The state can’t compel a person to endorse something they do not support.
This is not what I had in mind when writing that column.
Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institute looks at the challenges that President Joe Biden will face in filling vacancies on the federal courts.
To reach record confirmations for Biden’s four-years, Senate Democrats—some facing tough 2024 races—will need to maintain party unity and avoid temporary or permanent reductions in their 50 or 51 vote majority from illness or worse. And opposition senators have ways of slowing and sometimes scuttling nominations and confirmations.
However those factors play out, three additional factors will challenge Biden’s ability to top Donald Trump’s four-year record of 231 appointments—54 court of appeals (circuit) judges and 177 district judges. Those factors will also make it almost impossible for Biden to reverse the shift Trump accomplished in the courts of appeals’ party-of-appointing-president composition. The factors are the paucity of projected vacancies, who’s likely to create the vacancies, and the administration’s disinclination so far to fill district vacancies in red and purple states.
Lisa Hänel of Deutsche Welle takes a look at the far-right group Reichsbürger, the group that had dozens of its members arrested by German police on suspicions of plotting to overthrow the German government.
Reichsbürger reject the German legal system and the country's parliamentarism, and most of them propagate the re-establishment of the German empire founded in 1871. They also believe that the victorious Western Allies of World War II, who defeated Nazi Germany, still secretly rule the country.
In recent years, the growing number of Reichsbürger has alarmed German security authorities. In its June 2022 report, the domestic intelligence service estimated that around 21,000 people belong to this scene — and their number is rising.
The high potential for violence among the self-proclaimed Reichsbürger was described as particularly worrying: "Around 500 of these people still have at least one weapons permit," the intelligence report read.
The Reichsbürger are not a homogeneous group, according to a 2018 study by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation. Instead, the term refers to a "large, very diverse milieu of ideologists" who vary in their propensity for violence and militancy, but all are united by the belief that the Federal Republic of Germany is not a sovereign state. They reject the constitution and all state institutions.
Norma Costello and Vera Mironova write for Foreign Policy that Ukraine is on the verge of having its energy systems completely destroyed.
Ukraine’s power supply is currently being held together with Band-Aids. Targeted Russian missile strikes have destroyed much of the country’s energy infrastructure, which plunged 6 million people into blackouts that lasted for days last month. Close to 50 percent of the country’s energy facilities have already been affected by Russian attacks, and the remaining 50 percent remain under constant threat of bombardment. Air raid sirens screamed across Kyiv this week to warn of incoming missile attacks. Some cities in Ukraine have managed to maintain a so-called normal power outage schedule of 4-hour blocks of power three times per day. But in other places, such as the eastern city of Kharkiv, blackouts can last for up to 12 hours per day.
The situation is not without irony. Earlier this year, Ukraine’s diverse energy supply was seen as a key to its resilience. Ukraine’s electricity sector was seen as a potential bulwark against Russian threats to squeeze Europe during the winter by restricting gas exports to the continent. In June, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine would start exporting electricity to the European Union via Romania. At the time, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said she was “thrilled with Ukraine’s accomplishment, achieved while protecting their homeland, which will pave the way to what I know they can become: a clean energy powerhouse and energy exporter to the European Union.”
However, as Russian missiles continue to barrel through Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Ukraine has become reliant on the EU for support to keep its hospitals, schools, and administration buildings afloat. The Energy Community—an organization that brings together the European Union and its neighbors to create an integrated, pan-European energy market—has stepped in to help Ukraine.
Finally today, Nicola Abé writes for Der Spiegel about the man who wants to wants to rid Latin America of machismo, beginning in Bogotá, Colombia.
Henry Murrain, 45, is sitting with tears in his eyes in his coffeeshop in Bogotá on a rainy Wednesday. "It isn’t easy to be a child in Latin America," he says. A black man growing up in a white city, someone who was always different from the others, and not just because of the color of his skin. But he is also someone who has made it far in life, becoming the undersecretary of culture for the city – and he has big plans. His mission is nothing less than a cultural shift. But his opponent is not one that can be beaten into submission. His opponent is machismo itself.
Machismo, which he views as a kind of cage imprisoning all of society, is a poison that paralyzes the population, regardless of gender or social standing, and also costs lives. It is a deeply ingrained attitude that has long since been identified as a problem in Latin America, but there have been few attempts to change it – this narrative of the powerful, autonomous man who never cries and isn’t allowed any feelings aside from aggression and sexual desires. The rigid gender roles and societal expectations, says Murrain, don’t just lead to psychological suffering, but also to violence.
The bullying he experienced as a child at school never entirely left him. Because he wanted to learn more about what causes it, he set out to redefine the age-old question: What makes a man a man? He began researching machismo, initially working for an NGO before joining the city administration of Bogotá. It is a city, he says, that has made significant progress over the past decades, including a rapidly sinking murder rate, fewer traffic accidents and more environmental protections. "The only area where there have been no improvements is that of gender-based violence," Murrain says. And he is convinced he has figured out why: "We have never actually worked with men. It’s really quite absurd."
Have a good day, everyone.