Michelle Goldberg: Why Fox Had to Settle

It is deeply disappointing that Fox News settled the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems before Rupert Murdoch and his roster of celebrity propagandists had to testify. But it is not surprising. Fox News, after all, had no viable defense so the public will be deprived of seeing Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and several of their colleagues grilled on the stand, forced to reckon with the real world, unable to fall back on the dense lattice of misinformation that typically sustains Fox’s narratives.

Although the public will be deprived for now Smartmatic is still suing Fox for $2.7 billion, though no trial date has been announced yet. “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign,” Smartmatic lawyer J. Erik Connolly said in a statement on Tuesday. “Smartmatic will expose the rest.”

I’m not sure I believe it — Fox has just shown the world what it’s willing to pay to avoid the unmasking. But reality isn’t done with Murdoch and the rest of them yet. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/fox-news-dominion-settlement.html
 

BeMatt Stieb: Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Clarence Thomas’s Mother a House

When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas got caught last week for accepting lavish vacations and yacht trips from billionaire conservative donor Harlan Crow, he said his patron’s generous hospitality was “not reportable.” But according to a new report, Thomas didn’t even disclose when one of Crow’s firms directly paid him tens of thousands of dollars.

ProPublica, which broke the news, followed up in a Thursday report showing that in 2014 one of Crow’s companies bought a number of Savannah, Georgia, properties co-owned by Thomas and members of his family for a total of $133,363. The purchase included the two-bedroom home of the justice’s mother, Leola, which Crow’s firm then upgraded with $36,000 in renovations by an award-winning local architect, including a garage, a repaired roof, and a new fence and gate.

A post-Watergate federal disclosure law requires justices to report details of real-estate sales over $1,000, but Thomas failed to disclose the purchase. Four ethics-law experts told ProPublica that he had violated the law in not doing so. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets,” one watchdog told ProPublica. Buying Thomas’s mother a new garage was simply an effort to “preserve its long-term viability,” Crow told ProPublica in a statement. Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.

According to two neighbors, Thomas’s 94-year-old mother still lives in the house owned by her son’s billionaire friend, who did not say whether he charges her rent. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/harlan-crow-bought-clarence-thomass-mothers-house.html
 

Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels: The GOP’s abortion problems are only beginning

Consider some numbers compiled by Playbook:

72%: That’s the percentage of Americans who oppose “laws that make it illegal to use or receive through the mail FDA-approved drugs for a medical abortion,” according to recent polling from PRRI.

63%: That’s the percentage of Americans who oppose “laws that ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually around the sixth week of pregnancy.”

52%: That’s the percentage of Americans who “oppose restrictions that make it illegal to obtain an abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.”

These are terrible numbers for Republicans.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) knows it, which is why he had such a tough time answering questions on abortion yesterday.

Donald Trump knows it, which is why he’s holding secret meetings with the religious right to get them to back off talk of a national ban.

Every single Republican running for president — or even those thinking about it — is on the wrong side of public opinion on this issue.

Meanwhile, conservative judges and red state legislatures are pushing more extreme restrictions on abortion.

It’s an unmitigated political disaster for Republicans in 2024. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2023/04/14/the-gops-abortion-problems-are-only-beginning-00092045

 

Benjamin Hart: Elon Musk Drives NPR Off Twitter

Earlier this month, as part of his continuing dogfight against traditional media outlets, Musk slapped a “state-sponsored media” label on NPR’s Twitter account, putting it in the same category as propaganda-heavy, government-controlled outlets like Xinhua and Sputnik. NPR ceased tweeting in protest of the move and pressed its case to Twitter, after which Musk tweaked the label to “government-funded media.” That did not mollify NPR, which said the label was still inaccurate, since it’s a private company with editorial independence that receives only about one percent of its funding from the federal government.

Given the hostile atmosphere for media outlets on a platform that needs them considerably more than the other way around, there’s a good chance NPR won’t be the last to make a decision that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: Just get the hell out of there. A news-media exodus would be bad for Twitter’s bottom line, but it might also sadden Musk on a personal level.

Because what good is a punching bag if it’s no longer there to be punched? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/elon-musk-drives-npr-off-twitter-in-latest-genius-move.html

Eric Levitz: Why the GOP Can’t Moderate On Abortion Pill Bans

For the Republican Party, the political costs of judicial victory continue to multiply. Which seems like bad news for the GOP. The pro-life’s movement ambitions have never been popular. Only about 35 percent of Americans supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year in Gallup’s polling. But banning access to abortion pills polls even worse.

In March, a Reuters survey asked voters whether they would support a federal court cutting off access to mifepristone, only 27 percent said yes, while 70 percent said no. Earlier this year, the same poll found that Americans support keeping medication abortion legal throughout the U.S. by a 65 to 21 percent margin. Meanwhile, a Public Religion Research Institute poll in February found Americans opposing a ban on the receipt of abortion pills through the mail by a 72 to 26 percent margin. When asked specifically about a ban on women receiving prescriptions for mifepristone from out-of-state providers in 2022, 76 percent of respondents voiced opposition in a Marquette University Law School survey.

The popularity of allowing access to medication abortion is not hard to understand. Since the pills lose efficacy during the advanced stages of a pregnancy, they do not enable the most controversial category of abortions. At the same time, the medicinal termination of a pregnancy is less invasive — and thus harder to sensationalize — than surgical abortion.

Perhaps for this reason, national Republicans have been oddly quiet about Kacsmaryk’s ruling, largely declining to defend the decision against Democratic attacks. One congressional Republican, Nancy Mace, actually encouraged the FDA to ignore the ruling.

While silence or heterodoxy might be viable stances for rank-and-file D.C. Republicans, they are almost certainly unfit for the party’s 2024 hopefuls. Pro-life voters and organizations command a substantial share of the GOP primary electorate. If the Republican nomination contest is competitive, then contenders will face enormous pressure to align themselves with the party’s pro-life vanguard.

Already, Ron DeSantis is getting right with the movement. Currently, Florida prohibits abortion after the first 15 weeks of a pregnancy. But earlier this month, the state’s Senate passed a bill that would cut the period of legality down to six weeks. Since Florida also requires two separate doctor’s visits before one can legally access an abortion, and wait times for such appointments can be lengthy, the new restriction would function as a de-facto blanket ban in a high percentage of cases. DeSantis has signaled that he will sign the law, in defiance of the will of Floridians, a supermajority of whom believe that abortion should be legal in “all or most cases,” according to a 2022 poll from  Florida Atlantic University.

As DeSantis and Donald Trump fight for the allegiance of the party’s most powerful interest groups, it is all but certain that they will be compelled to champion the pro-life movement’s crusade against mifepristone. That means that the next Republican administration is likely to be the most hostile to reproductive autonomy yet. But it also makes the odds of such an administration taking power in 2025 a bit lower than they otherwise would be. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/why-the-gop-cant-moderate-on-abortion-pill-bans.html
 

Sarah Jones: The United States of Vigilantes

Daniel Perry was ready for a confrontation. In Facebook messages, the Texas-based U.S. Army sergeant told friends he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters” and “ might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex.” Online, he searched for terms such as “protest tonight” and “protesters in Seattle get shot” and “riot shootouts.” On July 25, 2020, Perry, a white man, was driving for Uber when he drove his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in Austin. One protester, a white Air Force veteran named Garrett Foster, approached Perry’s car while legally carrying an AK-47. Perry shot and killed him.

Although Perry claimed self-defense in keeping with the state’s sweeping “Stand Your Ground” law, witnesses said Foster never raised his rifle. Prosecutors argued that Perry simply “couldn’t keep his anger under control,” and on April 7, a jury found him guilty of murder. But Perry’s conviction might not stand for long. Perry has not yet been sentenced, but the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has already said he intends to pardon Perry for his crime. “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or progressive district attorney,” Abbott said in a statement. “I will work as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.” On April 12, days after the verdict had been announced, the New York Times reported that investigators hired by Perry’s legal team had visited some jurors at their homes in an effort to show that they had “relied improperly on information not presented during the trial.”

The Austin American-Statesman reported that the Board of Pardons and Paroles must review the conviction and issue a recommendation to Abbott before he can issue a pardon. Abbott appoints the board’s members, and he perhaps assumes he can influence the board’s proceedings. “It’s what happens in Uganda or El Salvador,” a defense attorney who wasn’t involved in the Perry case told the American-Statesman. Don’t expect Abbott to care. Elements of the Republican Party are embracing vigilante violence with dire implications for its future and the safety of its opponents.

Abbott seeks to appease the far right. Tucker Carlson called Perry’s conviction “a legal atrocity” and invited Abbott to discuss a potential pardon on his Fox News show. To Carlson and his viewers, Perry may be the next Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protesters and killed two in 2020. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time of the killings, became something of a hero to the right. After a jury acquitted him of murder, Carlson interviewed Rittenhouse and called him “a sweet kid.” He met former president Donald Trump and appeared at events for Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization. Rittenhouse may see something of himself in Perry. On Twitter, he called on Abbott “to step in and do the right thing.”

When men like Perry can kill with impunity, no one is safe. There will be other killings that Carlson will excuse and conservatives in power will condone. At stake is the right to protest and more: human life, even democracy itself. The streets are one front in a much bigger war. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/daniel-perry-is-a-vigilante-with-friends.html

Tim Miller: Ron DeSantis’s “Insidious” Immigration Bill

Ron DeSantis’s remarkable 2023 legislative session is replete with compassionless quasi-conservative bills that he hopes will power an upcoming presidential campaign. The session is set to reach its apex this month with the signing of a Stephen Miller-style immigration law that targets immigrant communities in his not-really-a-border-state state.

HB 1617: “An Act Related To Unlawful Immigration,” has yet to garner a catchy “Don’t Say Gay”-type moniker to describe its barbarism.

But the name of DeSantis’s legislation matters less than the particulars. Among them: requiring hospitals to collect the immigration status of patients and report it to the government and preventing legal DACA recipients from obtaining law licenses.

But the most troubling provisions are related to the “transport” and “harboring” of immigrants that you should “reasonably should have known” were undocumented, then it’ll be a felony and you can be sent to prison. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/ron-desantis-insidious-immigration-bill

Peter Wehner: An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee

Perhaps the most revealing statement during this manufactured crisis came from Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who compared the incident to the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

“What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the state capitol,” Sexton said. When he was pressed about his statement, he said, “That quote did not say absolutely it was worse. It said it could be.”


No one, not even Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature, can watch what happened last week on the floor of the House and the January 6 attack on the Capitol and consider them remotely comparable.

What happened in Tennessee wasn’t an “insurrection.” It was indecorous, a breaking of procedural rules, but it was also an event without violence or destruction, without assaults or deaths, without heavily armed mobs or nooses hanging from gallows. No one in Tennessee will be charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States. And what happened in Tennessee didn’t include peddling lies and embracing crazed conspiracy theories in order to overturn a free and fair election. So what’s going on here?

We’re watching Trump-induced idiocy. For more than seven years, Republicans have defended Trump’s cruel, unethical, and deranged behavior. They are constantly having to deny what they have become in service to him. It’s created cognitive dissonance. How can the party of “family values” defend a moral degenerate like Trump? How can law-and-order Republicans defend a violent insurrection and threats against judges and prosecutors? How can “constitutional conservatives” rally around a man who attempted to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/trump-induced-idiocy-tennessee/673726/

Jackie Calmes: Why does the Republican Party have a death wish?

From top to bottom, at all levels of government, the Republican Party is on a tear to epitomize the timeless truth of 19th century Britain’s Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Signs of backlash are building, however. Witness Democrats’ takeover of the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week, and its capture of Michigan’s entire government last fall — victories in two heartland states that Democrats had long feared were slipping away from them. By public demand, the Republican-controlled Tennessee House has had to reseat the two Black Democratic representatives it expelled last week for egging on a protest in support of gun control after a shooter killed six at a Nashville school.

For a Republican Party that didn’t even bother to write an actual platform in 2020, Americans can clearly see a de facto one: Its planks are antiabortion extremism, pro-gun absolutism, anti-LGBTQ activism, book banning, vote suppression and election denialism. That’s not a winning mix.

Most Republican leaders aren’t stupid; they recognize their political peril in swing states and national elections, if only privately. Pollsters and consultants are warning them. As Sarah Longwell, who conducts focus groups of Republican voters, told Politico, “The gap between what base voters demand … and what swing voters are up for has gotten very wide.”

Which suggests just one explanation for Republicans’ not only staying the course, but also doubling down on issues unpopular with just about everyone other than their base: They have a death wish.

I’d recommend Republicans take this advice from a good ol’ American, Will Rogers: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” https://news.yahoo.com/calmes-why-does-republican-party-123003023.html
 

Eugene Robinson: Why Clarence Thomas’s explanations fail the laugh test

In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned after it was learned that he had accepted, then returned, $20,000 from a Wall Street financier. At the time, Chief Justice Earl Warren felt it was important that Fortas step down to preserve the court’s reputation.

Clarence Thomas accepted gifts from Crow worth many times that amount, even counting for inflation, and failed to report them. And then there is all the money Ginni Thomas has received from right-wing organizations that lobby on issues before the court — plus her outrageous involvement in the “Stop the Steal” putsch that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Thomas doesn’t believe in affirmative action or protecting voting rights, though he benefited from both. He does believe in living the good life among millionaires and billionaires whose interests he just happens to protect in his opinions.

My mental image of Thomas used to be of him sitting on the Supreme Court bench during arguments, silent and scowling. Now, I see him on vacation, smoking a cigar with Crow and his buddies, laughing as though he doesn’t have a care in the world. The joke is on us.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/17/clarence-thomas-disclosures-harlan-crow-respect/
 

Paul Waldman: The party of big, intrusive government? That would be the GOP

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street on Monday to reiterate the Republican Party’s threat to wreck the U.S. economy by engineering a default on the country’s debts unless its vague demands for spending cuts are met. McCarthy (Calif.) wants this presented as a debate between advocates of “big government” and “small government,” which is how it is commonly understood.

In fact, this debate is really between two different brands of “big” government. It’s true that Democrats generally want government to spend more money, while Republicans want it to spend less — at least on social services. (They’re happy, though, to spend enormous amounts on certain things, including the military.) But Republicans also want government to be much more intrusive and involved in Americans’ lives, watching them for questionable behavior and limiting the choices they make.

Let’s take one example that McCarthy and Republicans are getting ready to propose: the imposition of “work requirements” for the tens of millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid for health insurance or food stamps to feed their families. If you’re looking for big government, work requirements are it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/19/mccarthy-republicans-big-government/