Jonathan Chait: What Is Really Unprecedented Is Trump’s Criminality

Jonathan Last: We’ve Finally Reached Bottom

Steve Benen: GOP discovers new standards on the mishandling of classified info

If there was one thing Republicans cared about six years ago, it was how high-ranking officials dealt with classified materials. In fact, as recently as 2016, the GOP was certain — that is, the party at least pretended to be certain — that politicians disqualify themselves from positions of authority when they put documents at risk.

And so, now that Republicans have learned that Donald Trump allegedly took highly sensitive classified materials to his golf resort, one could imagine the party expressing outrage with the former president. After all, given the GOP’s recent history of passionate feelings on the subject, it stands to reason that Trump may have crossed an intolerable line.

But that would assume that the Republican Party’s principles and standards are consistent. They are not.

To this day, rabid Republican activists will reflexively chant, “Lock her up!” at the mere mention of Clinton’s name because she allegedly failed to properly deal with classified materials.

And now many of those same Republicans say they don’t much care. Indeed, the only thing many in the GOP appear to care about this morning is condemning federal law enforcement for taking the issue seriously. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/gop-discovers-new-standards-mishandling-classified-info-rcna42183

Adam Serwer: Conservatives Believe Trump Is Above the Law

Dana Milbank The GOP is sick. It didn’t start with Trump — and won’t end with him

What we are living through today is just a continuation of the GOP’s direction for the past 30 years: the appeals to white nationalism, the sabotage of the functions of government, the routine embrace of disinformation, stoking the fiction of election fraud and the “big lie,” and the steady degradation of democracy.

Now, it seems, that degradation is accelerating. We see this in the determined efforts by Republican leaders to ignore, or discredit, the truths being revealed by the House Jan. 6 select committee: Trump demanding magnetometers be removed on Jan. 6 so his armed supporters could attend his rally and then march on the Capitol; Trump ignoring pleas from aides and family members to intervene on Jan. 6 to stop the bloodshed; Trump seriously entertaining the seizing of voting machines and attempting to install new leaders at the Justice Department who would support his false fraud claims; and Trump’s allegedly still-active attempts to tamper with witnesses before the committee.

As they avert their gaze from the cascading horrors of the failed coup, Republicans are instead looking to a familiar guide: Gingrich. The former speaker, now a board member of the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, announced this year that he is serving as a consultant to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and his team.

No sooner had this been disclosed than Gingrich, on Fox News, threatened the imprisonment of lawmakers serving on the Jan. 6 committee, saying they’re “going to face a real risk of jail” after Republicans take over Congress. Throwing political opponents in jail for investigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol and a coup against the U.S. government?

Replied Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee: “This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.” But Gingrich knows that. He’s the one who first started tugging at the threads. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/04/dana-milbank-republican-destructionists-book-excerpt/

Jennifer Rubin: A stunning GOP losing streak since Dobbs could remake the midterm landscape

Jackie Calms: The abortion vote in Kansas shows that populism can work for Democrats too

The lopsided Kansas result also was a victory for direct democracy in these increasingly anti-democratic times. Contrast the people’s choice with the rush in red state legislatures — Indiana, for instance — to ban or severely restrict abortion. These lawmakers are insulated from popular opinion by gerrymandered districts; their only fear is a far-right party challenge if they show moderation.

For that reason, between now and the 2024 election, Democrats will be trying to put more abortion rights measures before the public wherever states allow voter initiatives on the ballot.

This prospect poses an opportunity to call Alito’s bluff. In his opinion, he essentially dared abortion rights supporters to use the ballot box to get their way in the states. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” he wrote (without explaining why he doesn’t think men have a dog in this fight).

For Democrats to keep control of the Senate, powered by the abortion rights backlash, would be especially gratifying. It would deprive Mitch McConnell of his hoped-for return as majority leader in January — apt payback for the senator who busted norms to create the Supreme Court supermajority that enabled Roe’s reversal.

Alito got the big win in June with his Dobbs opinion. But voters can make sure he doesn’t get the last laugh. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-08-05/kansas-abortion-rights-constitution-amendment

Jane Mayer: State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy

Bess Levin: Ron Desantis’s New Civics Initiative Involves Teaching Kids Slavery In America Wasn’t That Bad

Few people in politics today are more drunk with power than Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor punishes companies that disagree with him, attacks people for living their lives, and suspends democratically elected officials for failure to enforce his favorite fascist policies. Like many a conservative in 2022, DeSantis also hates the idea of kids learning that American history involves a lot of unsavory business, usually on the part of white people. Which is why he’s started a new initiative that involves straight-up lying about the country’s past to Florida’s school children.

Multiple news outlets have reported that Florida teachers who’ve attended conferences held by the Florida Department of Education this summer, as part of a “civics excellence” initiative unveiled by the governor last year, have been deeply disturbed at what they’ve seen. According to the Tampa Bay Times, throughout the sessions, facilitators have attempted to downplay the history of slavery in the U.S., and insist that of all the slave-owing nations, the U.S. was the least into it. Tatiana Ahlbum, a 12th-grade government and economics teacher at Fort Lauderdale High, said it was stressed that the majority of enslaved people in America had been born into slavery, that the colonies bought fewer enslaved people from the transatlantic slave trade than has been previously portrayed, and that less than 4% of enslaved people worldwide lived in America, without noting that that percentage still constituted millions of people.

Ahlbum told the Times that it felt like the instructors were trying to claim America had been “less bad” when it came to enslaving people, which certainly appears to be the case! Meanwhile, another slide reportedly quoted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as saying they wanted to get rid of slavery, while crucially leaving out the fact that both men enslaved people, with the latter owning more than 600 in his lifetime and also famously raping at least one of them. Ahlbum added that few of the facts presented included cited sources. “We were not told which documents stated this or how to find them, just that they existed,” she said.https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/ron-desantis-civics-initiative-slavery

Max Boot: The GOP is Viktor Orban’s party now

All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”

One of Orban’s longtime advisers quit over what she described as a speech “worthy of Goebbels” before backtracking a bit. But Orban hasn’t recanted his repugnant views, and right-wingers in Dallas thrilled to his denunciations of immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights and “the Woke Globalist Goliath.” He even excoriated Jewish financier George Soros, a Hungarian native, as someone who “hated Christianity.” The racist and anti-Semitic signaling was not subtle.

You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.

Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/vicktor-orban-republican-party-cpac-dallas-new-fascism/
 

Bess Levin: The FBI Confirms Its Brett Kavanaugh Investigation Was A Total Sham

Supreme Court confirmation hearings aren’t usually burned into people’s minds, but there were a number of things that went down during Brett Kavanaugh‘s that will be difficult to ever forget. For one thing, the fact that he referenced his love of beer approximately 30 times, telling the lawmakers interviewing him for the job: “We drank beer. My friends and I. Boys and girls. Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer. Still like beer. We drank beer.”

Still, the thing that probably struck people as the most memorable, because it was the most disturbing, was the fact that much of the proceedings centered around the credible accusations of sexual misconduct that had been lodged against the would-be justice, most notably by Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted and tried to rape her when they were in high school. (Kavanaugh has denied this and all other allegations against him.)

Given these allegations—in addition to Kavanaugh’s temperament, which, to put it in terms he can understand, could be best described as “a hothead who just did a 10 Jägerbombs”—it struck many as outrageous for him to be given a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. That sense of outrage only deepened last year, when we learned that the FBI had received 4,500—4,500!—tips about Kavanaugh, which were referred to the White House, i.e. the organization trying to get the guy confirmed to the Court. And now, the FBI has confirmed that, yeah, it didn’t really feel the need to look into any of those tips, and when it did follow up on some, the White House was making sure it didn’t dig too far.

Regardless of whether or not it’s true that the FBI has a policy of taking direction “from the requesting entity,” it would seem that if an individual is up for a job in which he will have the power to affect millions of people’s lives, and has been accused of engaging in horrible acts, the most powerful investigative body in the country should take a more active role. Particularly when the “requesting entity” is the Donald Trump White House, which had a vested interest in not probing allegations of sexual misconduct, given who was running the joint.

Anyway, now Justice Beer Bong has helped take away the rights of half the country—and who knows what’s coming next! https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/brett-kavanaugh-fbi-investigation