Chris Lehmann at The Nation:
Congressional Democrats are banking on the GOP’s notional 2022 agenda running afoul of a midterm electorate increasingly skeptical of the party’s alarmist culture-war messaging. At a videotaped event for the rollout of the so-called Commitment to America with sympathetic voters outside of Pittsburgh, McCarthy nodded in agreement as one audience member bemoaned the “Marxist agenda” overtaking Covid-hobbled public schools. Fellow lawmaker panelists such as QAnon enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Trump toady Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) were not exactly walking advertisements for moderation in power.
On the topic of Donald Trump’s anti-semitism, Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post says the Republican Party will still stick by him, as they have in the past:
Trump has uttered this sort of stuff before — without any noticeable pushback from his party. Virtually the only time Republicans condemn antisemitism is when it comes from the left. […]
Every Republican who appears on a cable news programs should be quizzed about this. In particular, reporters should ask House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) how he can keep going on bended knee to Mar-a-Lago or promise to put Greene back on committees if the GOP wins the House majority. (McCarthy, you might recall, deployed his own unsubtle antisemitic trope during the 2018 election, when he warned in a tweet that “we cannot allow Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg to BUY this election.” The three billionaire Democratic donors he mentioned — George Soros, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg — all just happen to be Jewish, though he denied his tweet had anything to do with religion.)
Meanwhile, David Graham explores Trump’s corrupt dealing:
The Trump Organization also charged the Secret Service as much as $1,185 per night for agents protecting Trump family members—nearly six times the usual allotted rate for government employees. In all, the House report found that the Secret Service spent at least $1.4 million in taxpayer money at the Trump International and other Trump properties, and probably more.
By the standards of federal spending, $1.4 million is not a great deal of money. (The government has spent $5.4 trillion this fiscal year.) What is offensive here is not the sum, but the naked profiteering. The Secret Service couldn’t shop around: Agents had to stay at the hotel to protect the family members. The Trump Organization treated that as an easy way to bilk the government, sending public money directly to the president’s own pockets while claiming that it offered agents huge discounts. It was a brazen parody of what it means to be a public servant.
At The Week, Joel Mathis looks at eJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s impact on the Supreme Court:
“Originalism” is a term usually associated with the court’s conservatives, but Jackson quickly showed she is willing to make originalist arguments for progressive ends. In an Alabama voting rights case, for example, she pushed back against the notion that the Constitution is always supposed to be blind to racial considerations. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, she argued, were “race-conscious” additions to the Constitution, designed “to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the Freedman, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.”
On a final note, don’t miss this excellent piece by Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic on John Fetterman and his ability to empathize with voters:
A candidate’s health is, of course, a legitimate election issue. It’s fair for voters to have questions about Fetterman’s ability to do the job of a senator. But the interesting thing I’ve learned while reporting on this is that, for many Fetterman fans, his stroke doesn’t seem to have given them any pause at all. That might not be surprising; partisanship is a powerful thing. But for these supporters, the fact that the man had an ischemic stroke—something nearly 700,000 Americans experience annually—actually makes him even more relatable than he already was. Again and again, when I asked at a recent rally in Pennsylvania about the candidate’s health, people in attendance launched into detailed descriptions of their own health scares and struggles—their father’s heart attack, their sister’s cancer—and how they’ve managed to bounce back. So what? these voters told me. It can happen to any of us.
