We begin today with Aidan Quigley, Jesse Hellman, and Benjamin J. Hulac of Roll Call writing about some of the proposed Republican and Democratic amendments for the “vote-a-rama” during Saturday night’s debate in the Senate over the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
The Senate kicked off its potential marathon of amendment votes on the Democrats’ climate, tax and health package late Saturday, setting the stage for what is likely to be hours — or even days — of votes on predominantly Republican amendments.
The so-called vote-a-rama follows Senate adoption of a motion to proceed to the bill just after 7:30 p.m. Saturday, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the 50-50 tie. All 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats supported the motion to move forward on the $300 billion package.
Under the rules, senators had up to 20 hours to debate the bill, but used only four hours of that time. The limits to the vote-a-rama are primarily lawmakers’ stamina and their desire to head home for the August recess after a final vote on passage.
The Senate is set to consider scores of Republican amendments and several proposed by Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats. Eager to shorten the voting time, Democrats are offering few amendments other than Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s substitute amendment.
The full Senate was in attendance for the vote-a-rama.
I hope that if Sen. Warner gets really hungry, he relies on Madam Vice President’s tuna melt recipe, ‘cause the tuna melt that he made on his own in 2020 went viral for all the wrong reasons.
Next, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post asserts that the Republican Party was becoming a conspiracy-fueled party long before the presidency of Trump.
Much has been made of the ensuing polarization in our politics, and it’s true that moderates are a vanishing breed. But the problem isn’t primarily polarization. The problem is that one of our two major political parties has ceased good-faith participation in the democratic process. Of course, there are instances of violence, disinformation, racism and corruption among Democrats and the political left, but the scale isn’t at all comparable. Only one party fomented a bloody insurrection and even after that voted in large numbers (139 House Republicans, a two-thirds majority) to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Only one party promotes a web of conspiracy theories in place of facts. Only one party is trying to restrict voting and discredit elections. Only one party is stoking fear of minorities and immigrants.
Admittedly, I’m partisan — not for Democrats but for democrats. Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy — and there’s a perfectly logical reason for this: Democracy is working against Republicans. In the eight presidential contests since 1988, the GOP candidate has won a majority of the popular vote only once, in 2004. As the United States approaches majority-minority status (the White population, 76 percent of the country in 1990, is now 58 percent and will drop below 50 percent around 2045), Republicans have become the voice of White people, particularly those without college degrees, who fear the loss of their way of life in a multicultural America. White grievance and White fear drive Republican identity more than any other factor — and in turn drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the U.S. political system.
Other factors sped the party’s turn toward nihilism: Concurrent with the rise of Gingrich was the ascent of conservative talk radio, followed by the triumph of Fox News, followed by the advent of social media. Combined, they created a media environment that allows Republican politicians and their voters to seal themselves in an echo chamber of “alternative facts.” Globally, south-to-north migration has ignited nationalist movements around the world and created a new era of autocrats. The disappearance of the Greatest Generation, tempered by war, brought to power a new generation of culture warriors.
Nicole Hemmer of CNN says that the conspiracy-minded right has been with us going back to the 1940s.
The Sandy Hook conspiracy made Jones the talk-radio equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church, which staged vile anti-gay protests at soldiers’ funerals. But within just a few years, Jones would become part of the right-wing power structure, from his interviews with soon-to-be president Donald Trump to his alleged role as an organizer at the January 6 insurrection.C
More than that, many in the Republican Party and conservative movement increasingly sound like Jones, with talk of false flags, crisis actors and pedophile rings now a mainstay of right-wing rhetoric. And while the Trump presidency opened the door for the mainstreaming of Jones, it’s important to understand how ripe the GOP was for Alex Jonesification.
From its beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, the modern conservative movement embraced a conspiratorial mindset. From books that argued former President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor to unite Americans behind him in war, to the anti-fluoridation conspiracies of the John Birch Society, to the communist-around-every-corner witch hunts of the McCarthy era, conspiracy theories have become a core component of conservatism in America.
LZ Granderson of The Los Angeles Times does not like the use of the word “theorist” when describing the conspiracy-minded right,
I don’t like using the phrase “conspiracy theorist” to describe people like Alex Jones, because people like Jones are not “theorists.” They’re snake oil salesmen.
Theorists would be more like scientists. Building on knowledge with hypotheses, perhaps even testing them with research and experiments with controls, collecting data.... You know, they check to see whether their theories are true. [...]
More recent events ought to keep us alert for conspiracies as well. Watergate. Falsified police reports and affidavits to justify questionable shootings. Members of Congress doing unusually well in the stock market. Well, it’s clear why distrust of the government exists.
However, distrust is a feeling, not a theory. If you have a theory, the next step is to try to find out whether it’s correct, to learn more about reality. Not look for ways to prop up hunches regarding things we don’t like. Jones, Trump, Carlson and their ilk manipulate distrust to supplant reality, not pursue it. When challenged, these charlatans dig in even more, not with information, but with rhetoric that seduces the worst in us.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker asserts that Democrats have the opportunity to brand themselves correctly as the party of personal freedoms.
To be sure, it’s a huge leap to extrapolate from a state referendum, in which fewer than a million people voted, that Democrats have found a recipe for turning around the midterms. As a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation has confirmed, most voters still consider the economy and inflation to be the most important issues, with abortion a secondary one, albeit one that is particularly salient for some key voting groups, particularly women between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine. And Democratic candidates need all the help they can get. Despite a recent fall in gas prices, Joe Biden’s approval rating is languishing, at thirty-nine per cent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll average. Historically, the party of low-rated first-term Presidents has fared badly in the midterms, a fact that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama can both attest to.
Nonetheless, it’s evident that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade lobbed a grenade into this year’s elections, giving fresh hope to Democrats, who have also been buoyed by the sight of Republican primary voters selecting some candidates in key races who are extremist, inexperienced, or both. (“The quality of candidates on the Republican side is such an issue that we think the race for the Senate majority is basically a Toss-up,” the election analyst Kyle Kondik, of the political newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball, wrote on Thursday.) [...]
Whatever happens in November, the long-term consequences of the Roe decision could be highly consequential. For decades, the Republican Party has largely owned and exploited the language of individual liberty and freedom, even as many of its policies have favored the rich and powerful— from gunmakers to Big Pharma and Wall Street—over individual middle-class Americans. This cynical strategy has paid big dividends for the G.O.P., but Senator Murphy is right. With the overturn of Roe, and efforts to ban any transgressions against fundamentalist views, the zealots of the Supreme Court and the conservative base are presenting Democrats with an opportunity to seize the mantle as the defenders of long-established individual rights.
Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch writes about the approaching five-year anniversary of the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Five years ago, white supremacists descended upon Charlottesville to oppose that city’s attempt to remove Confederate statues. But anyone who witnessed the torch-carrying marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us!” had to realize that the so-called Unite the Right march was about more than monuments.
Today, the political right is united in its extremism, barely distinguishable from hate groups. “The Great Replacement” — a conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being brought to America to “replace” and disempower white people — has become the common fodder of Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable news show host in the nation.
Events in Charlottesville on Aug. 11-12, 2017 — culminating with a neo-Nazi plowing his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer — should have been a “never again” moment.
But when then-President Donald Trump surveyed that wreckage and saw “very fine people, on both sides,” white supremacists in America knew they had a friend in the White House. Trump later sealed this deal with a shoutout to the Proud Boys — “stand back and stand by.” Following an attempted coup to keep Trump in office on Jan. 6, 2021, he described the insurrectionists as “great people.”
Fabiola Cineas of Vox writes about the Justice Department’s decision to charge the LEOs responsible for killing Breonna Taylor.
Police officers shot and killed the 26-year-old Black woman in her home on March 13, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky, while executing a search warrant connected to a drug investigation. Taylor was asleep when the officers barged into her apartment that night with a “no-knock warrant” and fired 32 shots.
The police killing incited national protests that have continued for more than two years. Kentucky prosecutors did not charge any of the police officers with Taylor’s death. One officer was indicted for wanton endangerment for firing into a neighboring apartment, but in March a jury found him not guilty. The city settled a $12 million lawsuit with Taylor’s family in 2020, and in 2021, the Justice Department launched an investigation into allegations of systemic misconduct on the part of the Louisville Police Department.
Now the Justice Department alleges that members of the Louisville Metro Police Department Place-Based Investigations Unit, which police say was formed to reduce violence in a high-crime area but has faced scrutiny for being an alleged “rogue police unit,” falsified the affidavit that was used to obtain the search warrant of Taylor’s home. To get the search warrant, the officers made false statements, omitted facts, and relied on stale information, the department argues. Then, prosecutors say, after Taylor was killed, they conspired to cover up their actions.
At a press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that this act violated federal civil rights laws. “Breonna Taylor should be alive today,” Garland said.
Neil G. Ruiz, Sunny Shao, and Sono Shah of Pew Research Center report on the findings of focus group studies about what it means to be Asian American.
In the fall of 2021, Pew Research Center undertook the largest focus group study it had ever conducted – 66 focus groups with 264 total participants – to hear Asian Americans talk about their lived experiences in America. The focus groups were organized into 18 distinct Asian ethnic origin groups, fielded in 18 languages and moderated by members of their own ethnic groups. Because of the pandemic, the focus groups were conducted virtually, allowing us to recruit participants from all parts of the United States. This approach allowed us to hear a diverse set of voices – especially from less populous Asian ethnic groups whose views, attitudes and opinions are seldom presented in traditional polling. The approach also allowed us to explore the reasons behind people’s opinions and choices about what it means to belong in America, beyond the preset response options of a traditional survey.
Across all focus groups, some common findings emerged. Participants highlighted how the pan-ethnic “Asian” label used in the U.S. represented only one part of how they think of themselves. For example, recently arrived Asian immigrant participants told us they are drawn more to their ethnic identity than to the more general, U.S.-created pan-ethnic Asian American identity. Meanwhile, U.S.-born Asian participants shared how they identified, at times, as Asian but also, at other times, by their ethnic origin and as Americans.
Another common finding among focus group participants is the disconnect they noted between how they see themselves and how others view them. Sometimes this led to maltreatment of them or their families, especially at heightened moments in American history such as during Japanese incarceration during World War II, the aftermath of 9/11 and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond these specific moments, many in the focus groups offered their own experiences that had revealed other people’s assumptions or misconceptions about their identity.
Finally today, Noam Cohen of The Washington Post writes about Wikipedia wars regarding the meaning of “recession,” as well as an experiment that uncovered Wikipedia dependency on the part of some judges of the Irish Supreme Court.
Wikipedia was under siege recently from a right-wing campaign focused on its article about recessions. Isn’t it convenient, these critics said, that the online encyclopedia doesn’t clearly define a recession as two quarters of negative growth? Wikipedia must be taking its orders from the Biden administration, they claimed, which insists that though the U.S. economy has had two negative quarters, it is not in a recession because of other, more positive economic indicators, including low unemployment. The truth was that the Wikipedia article had always reflected different definitions of a recession — some, like the one Britain uses, based solely on two quarters of negative growth; others, like the United States’ preferred definition, based on economists’ assessment of a variety of factors. That didn’t stop angry readers from trying to rewrite the article.
Wikipedia’s administrators — community-elected volunteers who control how an article can be edited — rejected those readers’ demands as unsourced and
then “locked down” the article so only established editors could make a change, which just helped feed the conspiracy theories. Fox News personality Sean Hannity sent out a blog post’s headline on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social network: “Wikipedia Changes Definition of Recession and Then Locks Page.” Elon Musk
tweeted at Jimmy Wales, the co-founder and public face of the project: “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” Wales
pointed Musk to an explanation of what happened, adding, “Reading too much Twitter nonsense is making you stupid.”
[...]
Now comes a
new paper from MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland offering yet more evidence of Wikipedia’s elevated status, finding that judges routinely rely on its articles not just for background information but for core legal reasoning and specific language they use in their decisions.
Have a good day, everyone!