… abortion rights have been on the ballot in seven states. [T]he pro-choice position has prevailed in all of them.“
[Kenneth] Chesebro … contrived a scheme (later adapted by [John] Eastman), which included misusing the very parts of my treatise that Chesebro had helped me with as a research assistant, … thereby casting me falsely as a supporter of a ludicrous reading of the Constitution that Chesebro and Eastman both apparently sought to normalize so that it would make it easier for Trump to get away with circumventing the [Electoral Count] Act.
Tribe goes into the sort of excruciating detail you go into when you’re really really angry.
But Tribe is the least of Chesebro’s problems this morning.
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From a comment on the NYT article:
The goal was not just to overturn “Biden’s win”, but to overturn and permanently end the practice of meaningful democracy in America. If this scheme had worked, establishing the principle that the incumbent vice-president can selectively choose which candidate to award any “disputed” states’ electoral votes, coupled with partisan schemes to selectively manufacture “disputes” at will, no vice president would ever again allow the opposition party to win an election.
Und so weiter. Take your pick of today’s headlines about the THREE MILLION Ohioans who came out to vote in the middle of August in a seemingly obscure bureaucratic referendum.
BUT one that would make it more difficult to defend abortion rights, see, which seems to have fired up a whole lotta people.
[Voters] overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, an amendment that would have raised the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent, as well as complicate the process to bring citizen-initiated ballot measures to voters in the first place. Though it had profound implications for a number of issues, it was widely seen in the state as a way to thwart November’s measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.
The measure’s defeat now gives abortion-rights supporters a clearer path to victory.
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Protecting abortion access is extremely popular in the United States. Efforts that would make it harder to ensure abortion rights can help voters understand how Republican politicians are trying to tilt elections to thwart majority rule.
Andrew Sullivan’s final, parenthetical, mention of John Eastman is the most interesting part of this paragraph. (No link.)
Giuliani’s nothing. A sloppy drunk. Powell is something, but only one thing: The reincarnated Jean Harris, described by Diana Trilling at her murder trial as having the fixed expression “of the classic belle indifference of morbid hysteria, the corners of the mouth turned up in the fixed beginning of a smile.”
Sullivan’s right that of the weird sisters only Eastman deserves a treason trial – one, because he is neither insane nor strung out; and, two, because he and he alone both conceived and plotted the treachery.
“I can’t have my daughters living in a place like that,” [Zion] Zibly said of Israel. “They grew up in a country with Jewish democratic values and it is becoming undemocratic and [more] Jewish — not in the direction of my Jewishness, but in a manner in which they dictate to me what being Jewish is.”
Hey, he’s even named for the place. But no one with half a brain (and Zibly, now director of neurosurgery at Yale, has a whole brain) would let a daughter grow up in haredi Israel.
Polish and Hungarian campaigners recognise in Netanyahu’s drive to turn Israel into an illiberal democracy the transformation wreaked in their own countries. Activists have travelled between Warsaw, Budapest and Jerusalem trading lessons, advice and even solidarity videos. “Tell your people that this must not happen because you might end up like Poland,” urged the country’s former president Lech Wałęsa in a message to Israelis. Meanwhile, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper uses the slogan “Democracy can die in daylight too”, a nod to the Washington Post’s Trump-era motto: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
… If all the strength and numbers Israel’s pro-democracy movement has mustered are not enough, what exactly will it take? Can it really be that a nation is powerless to stop a leader bent on destroying his country to save himself? That thought is almost too bleak to contemplate. Which is why everyone who cares about democracy, including those who are distant from Israel, should desperately want those protesters to succeed. We need them to win.
Given that Israel lacks a formal constitution — its idealistic 1948 Declaration of Independence and a series of easily amended “basic laws” are no substitute — and that the same coalition controls the government and the parliament, [we are seeing] a near-Putinization of what has until now been a liberal democracy for 75 years. Netanyahu would effectively control all three branches of government.
This reflects a vulgar view of democracy as amounting to a tyranny of the majority, wildly out of sync with the American system of checks and balances on top of guarantees for each citizen secured by the Bill of Rights.
… Israel is by now on the threshold of dictatorship. Yet we are optimistic, because the massive resistance movement that has arisen in Israel, with hundreds of grass-roots organizations working together and more being created by the day, shows that President Herzog was actually right. It shows that after years of indifference and fence-sitting, the liberal-democratic camp understands that it needs to fight for its freedom and the future of Israel as a liberal democracy, in a determined manner and for the longer term.
But I think we’re winning it.
[Jon Gabriel recently wrote:] ‘The Arizona GOP had less than $50,000 in cash reserves as of March 31. That’s not much money to fund crucial expenses such as rent, payroll, and campaign operations. Four years earlier, it had close to $770,000…. The party blew $300,000 on ‘legal consulting,’ much of which focused on overturning Trump’s 2020 defeat. All they have to show for it are a Democratic governor and U.S. Senate delegation... If they [Republican party bosses] waste their money on Cyber Ninjas and futile lawsuits, they can’t be shocked when donations dry up…‘
From 1995 until 2019, Arizona boasted not one, but two Republican senators. What is more, from 1991 until 2023, Republicans held the governorship for all but six years. And before 2020, the last time a Democrat won the state’s presidential election was 1996… [T]he shift toward electing Democrats has little to do with the notion that the state has somehow turned blue. It has much more to do with candidate quality and incompetent management by the state’s Republican Party… At one speech in 2022, [Kari] Lake literally told John McCain supporters to “get the hell out.” That didn’t work out so well for her—or Republicans.
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Sweet, sweet words to UD‘s deep blue ears.
Expect [,post-affirmative action on campus,] more antiracist action plans, more vaporous decolonization, more mandated training, more huckster consultants, more vacuous reports, more administrators whose jobs no one can explain, more sleazy land acknowledgments (“Sorry I stole your house!”), more performative white self-flagellation, more tokenization of minority faculty members.
The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white.
This is in the Financial Times, all of whose readers, one assumes, passionately disagree with these options.
And then there’s the author, Edward Luce himself!
If the California bar court finds [John] Eastman culpable of the alleged violations, it can then recommend to the California Supreme Court that Eastman’s law license be suspended or revoked. The outcome of this proceeding is surely of less importance to Eastman than his likely forthcoming indictments in Atlanta and Washington as a Trump co-conspirator.
Women’s rights. Democrats seem rather fired up about them. That’s because the Supreme Court took important women’s rights away.
We’ve already seen this fervency play out in various states. We’ll see much, much more.
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According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 62 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, [which represents] the high-water mark for legal abortion in Pew’s polling, which dates back to 2007.
… Gallup — which has some of the longest trendlines when it comes to issues like abortion — asked Americans to choose between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” after asking about views on the legality of abortion. They found these numbers to be higher than any other annual recording dating back to 1996: 52 percent picked “pro-choice” this May and 55 percent picked “pro-choice” last May…
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month found that nearly three-in-four Americans, 72 percent, think abortion pills should be legal in all or most cases.
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Of course, none of this bothers the Catho-Falangists (‘Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.’) or the Pencerian Evangelicals, since these sects possess divine moral truth and will happily shove no abortion/no porn/no contraception/forced reproduction onto the American population whether we like it or not. But it turns out that Americans are pretty ornery about people trying to destroy their basic liberties; and since current attacks blatantly go after American women‘s liberties, we can now watch in real time as American women rear up to become a most fearsome voting bloc.
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