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If Dems Successfully Message on News Outlets Lefty Pundits No Longer Read, Did It Ever Happen?

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In the wake of a WSJ report that Democrats have fallen to a historic approval low, the usual suspects — in this case, David Atkins — have taken to Bluesky to blame everything on Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Again.

Atkins demanded that Democratic leaders talk about Trump conspiring with his personal attorneys to cover things up.

People keep asking “what do you expect Democrats to do???”

I expect Schumer and Jeffries to hold a press conference and say: “Donald Trump is conspiring with his personal attorneys he corruptly installed at DOJ to cover up his close friendship and possible horrific crimes with Jeff Epstein.”

Let me stipulate that the messaging that Schumer and Jeffries do do is often feckless, though in this case, Schumer released a statement on both Xitter and Bluesky on Thursday first arguing that sending Donald Trump’s personal lawyer to meet with Ghislaine “stinks of high corruption,” which led a few articles. That followed around ten other social media posts, including his prediction on Wednesday that, “Maybe Speaker Johnson declared the Epstein Recess to give Trump time to prepare papers for the pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell. Disgraceful” (making Schumer a prominent early adopter of the theory that Trump will pardon the sex trafficker) and a post (again posted to both Xitter and Bluesky) elevating video of Markwayne Mullin admitting Republicans were trying to give Trump cover. And while Jeffries was more focused on redistricting and messaging on the Big Ugly last week, Epstein was a repeated focus in his press conferences (it was the initial focus of Katherine Clark’s comments), and he was mocking Trump on this even before it bubbled into a scandal.

Atkins’ complaints that Dems aren’t messaging on Epstein comes in the wake of three significant earned media wins by Democrats on Epstein in recent weeks:

  • After Dick Durbin released a whistleblower’s description of the 1,000 people Pam Bondi pulled off their day jobs to review Epstein files, Allison Gill responded by releasing damning details of the search, followed days later by NYT. The details of this search will continue to feed the controversy (as well as FOIAs to get the spreadsheet of prominent names discovered in the search, so it can be compared to the list of names Todd Blanche asked Maxwell about in their cozy tête-à-tête). Update: Durbin sent a letter (with Sheldon Whitehouse) to Todd Blanche for information about the meeting, which NYT reported on.
  • After Ron Wyden sent letters in March and June demanding that Todd Bessent and Pam Bondi release FinCEN files on Epstein and Leon Black, NYT did a story on the financial aspects. When Republicans accused Wyden of sitting on this during the Biden Administration, he sent another letter disproving that and mapping out what steps they should take. In a great story on Wyden’s efforts, Greg Sargent noted the value of such letters: “such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability.”
  • And then there was Ro Khanna’s tactic that shut down the House by leading Mike Johnson to give up on a rule governing last week’s work, which led to follow-on efforts in committees and the Senate. This — which required working with Tom Massie (something lefties religiously disavow) — was a parliamentary score, with series of stories in the Hill beat press to follow.

Almost none of that appears in Atkins’ response to my question why he was ignoring other members. He said he had mentioned a Whitehouse interview, but he ignored the long thread from Whitehouse more directly addressing the corruption, as well as a Podcast with Jamie Raskin where they dedicate the last 5 minutes of to it.

The real tell to Atkins’ willful ignorance (or outright deceit) about what Dems have done is his claim, “I have highlighted [Dems who are pushing this]. But they get lost in the fray when leadership isnt backing them up,” [my emphasis] a day after RTing this story from Axios.

The social media card for the story, which uses Jeffries’ picture above two quotes, misleadingly suggests the Minority Leader said, “This whole thing is just such bullsh**t” … “I don’t think this issue is big outside the Beltway.” Which seems to be as far as Atkins got.

The entire story is premised on those quoted centrists opposing Jeffries’ encouragement to focus on it, and links an earlier story describing Jeffries’ affirmative focus on it.

Why it matters: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-N.Y.) leadership team has encouraged its members to maintain the drumbeat on Epstein,

The column goes on to list just some of what Dems are doing — with the encouragement of the Minority Leader (the earlier post describes that Ro Khanna worked closely with Jeffries in jamming the Rules Committee).

The other side: Other Democrats argued that going after Republicans on policy and slamming them on Epstein aren’t mutually exclusive. “I think all these issues are linked together,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) told Axios.

  • “Trump is willing to lie and betray his own people, and he’s willing to take away your health care to give it to his rich friends. … I think it’s all part of one story,” said Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
  • Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a former CPC chair, said similarly: “I’m talking about Medicaid, I’m talking about tax breaks to billionaires — and I’m talking about Epstein, because he fits right in there.”

State of play: Jeffries has surprised some of his members by bear-hugging rank-and-file efforts to force the release of the Epstein files despite his usual reluctance to engage on salacious issues.

  • His messaging arm, the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, sent out several emails to members’ offices last week on how to message on Epstein, as Politico first reported.
  • “We’ve encouraged members to lean into this, to talk to their constituents about it,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), a DPCC co-chair. “It’s an opportunity to speak with people who might usually disagree with you.”

Atkins’ entire whine — based off a premise he would have known was outright bullshit if he had only clicked through to a ragebait story he RTed — was rewarding for Atkins; 17 people RTed it as if it were true, with one person even whining about Garland along the way. But the whole thing was either an affirmative misrepresentation or a confession that Atkins knows fuckall about what Dems have done and simply didn’t bother to check before whining about it.

I won’t lay out all that Dems have done — there are actually multiple stories out that I’m sure even Atkins could read if he bothered to click through on ragebait. It should be enough to say that Dems, with Massie, deprived Republicans of the tools of their majority for a week and have been mocking them relentlessly ever since. That Johnson ran away will continue to feed this story.

But one example is illustrative. Ruben Gallego — often attacked for his centrism and coddling of cryptograft — got into an extended spat with Trump mouthpiece Markwayne Mullin in the Senate last week (the appearance Schumer elevated), after Gallego tried to pass a resolution to release the files. Following that, Gallego appeared on Jim Acosta’s Substack show, where he described how this all reeks of a cover-up (and accused Republicans of revictimizing the victims and exploiting the vulnerabilities of their base). He played on populist concerns about rich people, and mocked Republicans for fleeing like they did when the Brits invaded DC. A centrist Dem delivered up precisely the kind of message Atkins claimed no one is delivering, and he did it two days before Atkins whined about it.

I’m not sure Atkins has an excuse for making a false claim belied by an Axios story he had RTed a day earlier. At some point, a pundit has to be responsible for clicking through to the stories they’re disseminating.

But — again stipulating that Jeffries and Schumer’s messaging is often feckless — I think there’s something else driving much lefty belief that Dems are not messaging, on top of pundits like Atkins making false claims belied by ragebait they’ve disseminated without reading.

In the last several years, fascist-supporting oligarchs have given people good reason to stop consuming a wide variety of media. After Elon Musk bought Twitter — the algorithm of which already disproportionately rewarded right wingers — he invited Nazis to overrun it. In a bid to cultivate Trump’s favor, Jeff Bezos has willfully gutted the WaPo and shut down anti-Trump opinion on the platform. NYT continues to frame most stories in ways that pitch Trump as the hero, with many outright framed to Dem- or trans-bash. Substack, where people like Paul Krugman and Terry Moran and Jim Acosta have fled after having been hounded out of traditional media, also platforms Nazis. Google has allowed AI to enshittify its search function, making it far more difficult to find breaking news.

One by one, lefties have abandoned those platforms, often in a failed attempt to force the oligarchs who own them to reverse course. The decision to abandon those platforms are, for most people, self-evidently ethical decisions.

But the consequences of those ethical decisions are that even if Dems do something great, you will be blind — blinded by ethical choices you yourself made.

Your blindspots might entail the following:

  • You will see (and far too often, help to disseminate) the latest outrage Trump posts to his Truth Social account, as well as the uncontested disinformation in it. Those posts will often silence the moral criticism of Trump, as happened with Rosie O’Donnell.
  • You will view Trump speeches and press sprays, as well as oversight hearings in which Democrats have been forcing real news that often is not getting picked up, through the lens of Aaron Rupar or Acyn, who make it easy but bring their own narrow lens. You might see clips from the traditional media. Not all of those clips will be easy to disseminate yourself without rewarding Xitter.
  • You will see the stories about shitty framing or Dem- (or trans-) punching at NYT, but will miss better routine news stories, and even, sometimes, important breaking reporting.
  • To the extent to which it still exists, you will not see the general access political reporting at WaPo.
  • You will not see Capitol Hill beat reporting that is publicized almost entirely on Xitter, including reports admiringly explaining why chasing Mike Johnson away early took some tactical smarts, unless you subscribe to them.
  • Because there’s not a viral algorithm at Bluesky, you may only see the content from electeds crafted for that platform if you follow them directly and even then only if you happen to be online when they post it; you will not see what they post — very often self-consciously crafted to be more confrontational — on Xitter.
  • You will see rage-bait stories from Axios and Politico designed to drive depression among Dems and often, as Atkins did, you’ll disseminate it without clicking through to see what it really says.
  • You won’t see what right wingers are saying on Fox or NewsMax or Breitbart, not even when they’re bitching about firey speeches Hakeem Jeffries made that didn’t filter into Bluesky.
  • You may entirely miss what is going on on TikTok, which is where a great deal of messaging is happening (so will I, as I learned when I looked for the Rosie O’Donnell post that had been widely covered in right wing media before Trump threatened to strip her citizenship over it).
  • You will have to work harder to find news stories that have been broadly reported.

In short, at least in part due to perfectly ethical decisions from people who used to have a radically different media diet before certain changes accompanying rising fascism, even activist Dems will be largely blind to a great deal of what Dems are doing.

I absolutely support that ethical decision (and after two weeks of doing a great deal of — sometimes very effective, IMO — messaging about Epstein and Tulsi’s disinformation campaign designed to bury it at the Nazi bar, such choices may be crucial for your mental health).

But it is not remotely ethical to make comments about what Dems are or are not doing if you have not checked your blindspots.

More importantly, we will not survive if you respond to the effects of oligarch takeover with passivity, demanding you get fed things as easily as you used to get. That is what they are counting on: that their efforts to make it harder to find important news will lead you to give up and assume it doesn’t exist.

I may be biased, but I’m also allegedly an expert on this, because it was the topic of my dissertation. Finding and disseminating oppositional news is an absolutely critical part of opposing authoritarianism; it can take work and risk your security. But it becomes a fundamental part of citizenship.

The oligarch-led assault on the press started long before Trump started implementing fascism but has accelerated during precisely the period when Democrats have demanded to have Dem messaging land in their lap. There are many things Dem electeds absolutely have to do better (though having spent far too much time on Xitter in the last week, it’s clear there’s a purpose to tailor messaging on both platforms, which I do too). I agree that neither Schumer nor Jeffries is great at this messaging (but am also acutely aware of how much time they’re spending off-camera trying to ensure Dems have a chance in 2026).

But Dems have done almost everything right on Epstein, down to forcing Denny Hastert’s successor to abdicate his power for a week to help Trump cover up his sex trafficking scandal. Yet whining pundits are winning clout on Bluesky by misrepresenting rather than learning from that fact.

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Expecting Legislators to Lead the Resistance Is a Category Error

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On podcasts and in this post, I’ve been trying to make a point about how you resist fascism.

Americans have at least three tools to resist fascism: legal, legislative, and via political movement. A great many people have conflated legislative opposition with movement opposition, and based on that conflation, assumed that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries must be leaders of The Opposition.

But that’s a category error.

While there are a lot of things Schumer, especially, could do better, you shouldn’t want either Schumer or Jeffries to be the leader of the resistance. You shouldn’t want that because the goals of the movement and of an opposition party in Congress are not the same. You shouldn’t want that because having a Black guy and a Jew from New York leading your resistance will likely make it harder to do what you need to do, which is (in significant part) to build a political movement big enough to undermine if not overthrow fascism.

I’m sure I’ll need to tweak this illustration and table,  but here’s how I think about it: Democrats in Congress are part of the political movement, but that is different than their legislative role.

Start from the end goal: according to a contested theory from Erica Chenoweth, if a popular nonviolent movement comes to incorporate 3.5% of the population, you can achieve political change. G. Elliott Morris estimates that around 4 to 6 million people participated in the No Kings protests, so about 1.4 to 1.8% of the population (but that’s a one-time protest and you need to sustain such numbers). If you buy this theory, you need to at least double the popular opposition to Trump willing to take to the streets.

While it’s possible you could get rid of Trump via other means (maybe right wingers get sick of him and support impeachment in two years; maybe a Democrat beats him or his chosen successor in 2028; maybe he dies a natural death and JD Vance takes over, with less charisma to get things done), doing so would not be enough to reverse a number of institutional things, starting with the right wing majority on SCOTUS, that serve to protect the trappings of Christian nationalism anyway.

To do a lot of things people rightly believe are necessary — such as holding the ICE goons accountable — you’d need to do far more than just win an election, because unless something more happens, the goons will be protected by qualified immunity.

Now go back to how opposition to Trump’s fascism has grown.

The first things that happened were lawsuits, a flood of them (which continue unabated). While Democratic-led states have brought a number of important lawsuits, members of Congress have little standing to do so. Unions have brought many key lawsuits, as have Democratic groups, as have other members of civil society, including the law firms and universities targeted. I keep noting that some of the key lawsuits challenging tariffs have come from Koch or CATO-aligned non-profits (and the Chamber just filed an amicus), a fact that may get them a more favorable hearing at SCOTUS.

The courts help to buy time. They can provide transparency otherwise unavailable. They force the Trump administration to go on the record, resulting in damaging contradictions. Trump has, thus far, selected his targets very poorly, and so his persecution has and will created some leaders or political martyrs.

But the courts will not save us.

The courts won’t save us because, after some initial pushback on Stephen Miller’s deportation gulag, SCOTUS seems to have fallen into line, repeatedly intervening to allow Trump to proceed with his damaging policies even as challenges continue. The courts won’t save us because we fully expect SCOTUS to bless a lot of what Trump is doing, including firing everyone short of Jerome Powell.

Protests and loud opposition at town halls have been growing since the beginning. But these protests weren’t affiliated with the Democratic Party. That’s useful for several reasons. You’re going to find it a lot quicker and easier to target a well-funded corporate entity like Tesla without such affiliation. And protests will be more likely to attract defectors — former Republican voters or apolitical independents — in the numbers that would be necessary if they’re not branded as Democratic entities.

Plus, movement activities include far more than protests, and there are a number of things being done by people who want no tie to the Democratic Party. Some of the smarter pushback to ICE in Los Angeles, for example, comes from Antifa activists who are far to the left of the Democratic Party and have been doing this work even under Democratic Administrations. Some of the witnessing of abuse of immigrants comes from the Catholic Church, and I would hope other faiths might join in. Some of the political activism is focused on particular interest groups, like Veterans or scientists, which don’t and should not derive their energy from the party.

The political movement is and should remain a big tent because it affords more flexibility and provides more entrance points for people.

And so, even if Jeffries or Schumer were better at messaging, you wouldn’t want them to lead it.

Which brings us to what we should expect from them. A lot of the hostility to both of them derives from the Continuing Resolution in March, in which Jeffries kept all but one (Jared Golden) of his members unified in opposition, but then Schumer flipflopped on whether to oppose cloture. In my experience, the vast majority of people who know they’re supposed to be angry at Schumer for that don’t know what the vote was, don’t know the terms of government shutdown (for example, that Trump would get to decide who was expendable), and can’t distinguish between the cloture vote and the final passage (in which just Angus King and Jeanne Shaheen voted to pass the bill). They sure as hell have not considered whether keeping the government open resulted in things — like the emergency filings that prevented wholesale use of Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to CECOT — that really were a net good, to say nothing of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s challenge to his deportation.

The point being, much of the frustration with Jeffries and Schumer comes without a sophisticated understanding of their day job. For example, many people were complaining that Schumer was messaging about the Big Ugly bill when they wanted him to be messaging about immigration, and then, once they understood the import, started complaining that there hasn’t been enough coverage of the healthcare cuts in the Big Ugly (in my opinion both he and lefty journalists should have been focusing on the dragnet funded by it, as both David Dayen and I did, and as other journalists are only belatedly doing). But they often ignored the efforts made to thwart the bill with Byrd Rule exclusions, which in some cases excluded really toxic things from the bill (like restrictions on judicial contempt).

Jeffries and Schumer will continue to disappoint people wanting them to lead the resistance, because to do their day job — to try to win majorities in 2026 so they can do more to hold Trump accountable and, in the interim, to try — however fruitlessly — to coax their Republican colleagues to stop rubber stamping Trump’s authoritarianism, they have to do things like recruit challengers and help them raise money. There’s a lot one can explain — such as why, in the wake of the crypto industry flooding the Sherrod Brown race with funding, too many Democrats would support a bill the crypto industry wants — without endorsing.

But there’s a great deal that Jeffries or Schumer do that doesn’t get seen; each week of the last five, for example, one of the people whining about one or both Minority Leaders non-stop has falsely claimed they hadn’t done or said something they actually had; they were, in fact, whining because what Jeffries and Schumer did wasn’t easy for them to see without their having to work for it. An expert on parliamentary procedure just showed that Dems have made their colleagues work far more hours than in recent memory; Democrats have been using tools to stall, often with no notice, much less anyone mining their public comments for good attack footage.

More importantly, though, there’s a great deal that other legislators are doing that serves both political and legislative opposition. Hearings with Trump’s cabinet members, for example, are astounding, both in terms of content and conflict. While lefties don’t understand the potential use of Congressional letters like right wingers do, some of the ones Democrats have sent lay necessary foundation for ongoing pressure on the Administration, whether on immigration or Epstein or DOD waste. I’ve seen multiple people assume that members of Congress only attempt to do oversight of ICE detention if they get arrested, but far more members have tried; I would like Democrats to have already sued regarding DHS’ serial efforts to change the law on how they do that oversight, but I hope that will happen soon.

There’s a great deal of content for adversarial messaging. The failure — and this is only partly a failure of Congress itself — is in doing that messaging, in using what is out there. If a Minority Leader said something powerful but pundits were too lazy to watch CSPAN, did it really happen?

Therein lies the rub — and the area where the complaints at least identify the correct problem (while often lacking the mirror necessary to identify the cure).

There is broad and growing opposition to Trump’s actions. For privileged white people, at least, most still have courage to step up in both easy and more challenging ways. All around the country Americans are standing up for their migrant neighbors.

Leaders are stepping up to do the most powerful work, the political movement. And Leaders in Congress, as well as rank-and-file members, are doing a lot that’s getting ignored.

What is missing, in my opinion, is the kind of online messaging to make stuff resonate, yoked with an understanding of what Congress can and should do and what activists are better suited to do.

We — and I include myself in that we — are part of the problem.

What is missing is, to a large extent, the same thing that was missing last year, during the election, and was missing before that where Joe Biden’s son was destroyed with no pushback. What is missing is a feedback mechanism that can mobilize shame and accountability, so all the outrage can have some effect, both political and electoral.

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Talking about Chuck Schumer Will No More Save Democracy than Chuck Schumer Will

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The State of the Union was 20 days ago. Since that day, Democrats have spent much of their time talking about other Democrats, talking about how Democrats are responding to the assault on the country, rather than talking about the assault itself and the people responsible.

In my opinion, focusing on Chuck Schumer — however justified your opinion about his fecklessness — is every bit as feckless as Chuck Schumer’s response to this crisis.

What has happened since the Continuing Resolution

There are a slew of reasons I think focusing on Chuck Schumer distracts from the matter at hand. One is that his view that the Continuing Resolution was less bad than a shutdown seems to have been a defensible good faith view (though that doesn’t excuse his head fake about it). It’s certainly possible that Democrats would have messaged effectively during a shutdown and used it to waken Americans of the risk Trump’s attacks on government pose (though as I said at the time, no one had laid the ground work for effective messaging, which makes me question how effective they might have been). But keeping the government open has allowed other positive developments.

Not shutting down the government at least temporarily affirmed the import of employment law. Last week, 25,000 government workers were reinstated pursuant to the efforts of two people whose lawsuits delayed their own firing long enough to issue judgments deeming the firings targeting probationary workers illegal, and then two judges (one, two) who ruled the firings to be unlawful (Trump has appealed the California one of these decisions to SCOTUS). Their reinstatement not only gave people paychecks until such time as Trump fires them properly — paychecks they would not have had under a shutdown — but it affirmed the import of following employment law.

Not shutting down affirmed the import of Congressional funding. On March 18, Radio Free Europe used the Continuing Resolution to substantiate its appropriations-related challenge to the shutdown.

28. On March 15, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed into law Congress’s FullYear Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (“Third Continuing Resolution”), which, like the previous continuing resolutions, appropriated “[s]uch amounts as may be necessary, at the level specified . . . under the authority and conditions provided in applicable appropriations Act for fiscal year 2024” until September 30, 2025. See H.R. 1968, 119th Cong. § 1101(a) (2025).

29. In sum, Congress appropriated approximately $23 million for RFE/RL in the First Continuing Resolution for October 1, 2024, to December 20, 2024. Congress appropriated approximately $41 million to RFE/RL in the Second Continuing Resolution for December 21, 2024, to March 14, 2025. Congress further appropriated approximately $77 million for RFE/RL in the Third Continuing Resolution for March 15, 2025, to September 30, 2025.

Obviously, the legal posture of this, and similar cases, would be different if Trump had not signed a funding bill.

Not shutting down kept Trump on the hook for any collapse of Social Security. After Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander enjoined DOGE from tampering in Social Security, the Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek attempted to pick a fight with the judge, falsely claiming her order would force him to shut down Social Security entirely.

She wrote two letters basically calling him a dumbass, stating that DOGE can access anonymized data and her order only covers the DOGE agenda, not normal operations.

And then the White House told him he was out of line.

Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatened Thursday evening to bar Social Security Administration employees from accessing its computer systems in response to a judge’s order blocking the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.

Less than 24 hours later — after the judge rejected his argument and the White House intervened — Dudek is saying he was “out of line.”

Dudek initially told news outlets, including in a Friday interview with The Washington Post, that the judge’s decision to bar sensitive data access to “DOGE affiliates” was overly broad and that to comply, he might have to block virtually all SSA employees from accessing the agency’s computer systems. But Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, who issued the order, said in a letter that Dudek’s assertions “were inaccurate.

[snip]

In response to Hollander’s letter, Dudek said in a statement emailed to reporters just after 5:30 p.m. that the court clarified its guidance and “therefore, I am not shutting down the agency.”

Dudek, in a follow-up interview Friday afternoon with The Post, thanked Hollander for the clarification, adding, “The president is committed to keeping the Social Security offices open to serve the public.” He then acknowledged that this was an about-face from his stance in an interview with The Post earlier in the day.

“[The White House] called me and let me know it’s important to reaffirm to the public that we’re open for business,” he said. “The White House did remind me that I was out of line and so did the judge. And I appreciate that.”

Social Security has always been deemed essential during shutdowns and it would have been here. But right now, the White House is sensitive enough about Social Security that they’re not even using an expansive injunction as an opportunity to fuck with it.

Meanwhile, for all the complaints about how shitty the Continuing Resolution is — for the cuts it made to Veterans health and education — I’ve seen almost no effort to hold Republicans accountable for it (just three Democrats — Jared Golden, Jean Shaheen, and Angus King voted to pass it). If it’s so bad, why aren’t Democrats hanging it around Republicans necks (aside from the fact that they’re too busy talking about Chuck Schumer, who voted against the bill itself)?

What needs to happen

Many of the discussions about Chuck Schumer make the same mistake he does: they assume the answer to Trump’s attack on democracy lies in winning midterms.

That’s a luxurious thought.

(In a really good JV Last column, he describes, “Winning in 2026 will not be sufficient to stop the authoritarian push; but it is necessary.”)

But it imagines we have more time to reverse Trump’s actions than we likely do, and it falsely assumes that the Democratic Party — rather than a trans-partisan or nonpartisan movement — is the entity that might reverse Trump’s attacks. Even if you could be sure of winning the House, without thinking more broadly you could only freeze things; without a whole lot more political work, for example, you couldn’t impeach and remove Trump.

To be clear, the quickest way to slow or reverse Trump’s actions is to convince Republicans — somewhere between four and nine in the House, and/or four in the Senate — to stall his efforts. That’s actually what Schumer says too, but he’s not talking about ways (much less doing anything obvious) to make that happen. Barring convincing Republicans to do something to protect the Constitution, it’ll require a mass uprising (or strike) to bring about change. Barring convincing a politically active majority of the country to cherish democracy, even ousting Trump would just bring us back to where we were quickly, with some other right winger exploiting the Republican thirst for authoritarianism.

Town halls

And one of the things that are already going on — outraged constituents at town halls — is one of the quickest ways to affect that, as I wrote about here. Even Chuck Grassley resorted to bullshit claims at a rowdy town hall recently. Organizers have even succeeded in using empty-podium town halls to focus on Republican failures, and more Democrats are showing at town halls in other districts.

Protests

I’ve said from the start that Elon Musk’s role in DOGE provides Democrats with an easy villain. That’s true not just because he keeps fucking up.

He, and his showrooms, make really easy targets for protests.

It also provides a way for Trump believers to begin to criticize his actions, as NYT recorded among Trump supporters who attended the NCAA wrestling match to which Trump brought Elon.

“Not a big fan of Elon,” said Blaize Cabell, a 32-year-old wrestling coach from Independence, Iowa, who nonetheless remains a big fan of the president. He said he viewed Mr. Musk’s career as a businessman as a series of failures and buyouts and said that the billionaire was “making a lot of callous cuts,” citing the Department of Agriculture. Earlier this month, the department fired thousands of experts and then scrambled to hire them back.

“I don’t even know what to think of him at this point,” David Berkovich, a 24-year-old wrestler and graduate school student from Brooklyn, said of Mr. Musk. “He’s just there all the time.”

“He’s going a little rampant — I think everyone can agree with that,” said Bobby Coll, a 24-year-old finance broker who lives in Manhattan’s West Village. He was there with his girlfriend, Julia Sirois, who said of Mr. Musk’s role in the administration, “It’s someone putting their hand in a cookie jar they don’t belong in.”

[snip]

“That’s a tough one for me,” Jarrod Scandle, a 44-year-old retired police officer from Shamokin, Pa., said of the president’s Tesla stunt. “I think it’s a little, I’m trying to think of the word —” he said as his voice trailed off. He concluded that he was really more of a Chevy or Ford kind of a guy.

Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Columbia, Mo., said she thought Mr. Musk’s constant presence “looks ridiculous.” That he is as empowered as he is just makes the president “look weak,” she said, which is about the worst thing that can be said of someone at a Division I wrestling championship.

“It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,” Ms. Travis said of the president.

As I’ve repeatedly noted, the Wisconsin Democratic Party is trying to brand Brad Schimel with Elon’s taint in their Supreme Court race on April 1.

Right wingers are attempting to push back on the protests against Musk by claiming that all protestors are connected to the three people DOJ charged with attacks on dealers. But there’s an easy way to make this backfire. After Pam Bondi tried to intimidate her the other day, Jasmine Crockett did what I think every Trump opponent should: point out that Trump freed a bunch of violent cop assailants.

Even Neera Tanden did this in a recent CNN appearance.

What is missing so far from the pushback on Elon is a successful pushback on his claims that he is finding fraud, a claim that Republicans are using to avoid more directly confronting him. But the problems Elon is causing keep piling up. Catherine Rampell recently catalogued all the ways DOGE is preventing government workers from doing their jobs.

At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.

At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.

At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)

Yesterday WaPo estimated that DOGE attacks on the IRS will create a $500 billion revenue hole at the IRS.

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

Notably, this would have been invisible otherwise (as it was before Joe Biden hired extra IRS agents to track it down). But DOGE’s involvement makes it visible, something that can be hung on Trump.

And WaPo explained why Elon is having such a difficult time finding fraud at SSA. (Remember, I’ve got a list of all the DOGE debunkings here.)

Trump’s focus in the last two weeks on deportations, rather than firings, has also taken attention away from all the people fired, which has, in turn, shifted the focus away from the services Trump is taking away. Both need to be the centerpiece of messaging.

Messaging

There are topics that I think would be promising foci of organizing, or more organizing. because they’ll expand the network of organized people beyond traditional Democrats and may be more successful at pressuring Republicans.

There was a March for Science on March 7 — but finding ways to translate what science means into terms accessible to the public; the cancer cures and healthier food and business opportunities are a necessary step to get taxpayers to care about NIH and NSF cuts.

This morning I wondered why we haven’t seen more organizing around Trump’s attack on the Department of Education and sought to find a review of how Kentucky successfully defeated a voucher initiative last year. And I discovered that the group that succeeded in that has reformed to organize around that attack .

I have yet to see a concerted response to Trump’s attack on libraries and museums (though here are some organizing pages). Update: NYT has more.

There have been a few protests from Veterans in DC, at least one in February and another in March. VoteVets are also running ads in five swing districts.

I keep talking about how little farmers have pushed back, though I’ve seen individual pushback at town halls.

Finally, there needs to be an attempt to reclaim antisemitism from the white nationalists using it as a weapon against critics of Israel. There’s been a lot of Jewish pushback on the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil, for example. But not yet a full flipping of the perverse narrative Stephen Miller has adopted to justify shutting down universities.

Leaders are stepping up, all over the country. And rather than joining in those efforts, far too many people (at least some of whom who have a grift that depends on it) have made Chuck Schumer a bigger issue than Trump. Yes, people need to throw more anvils at Elon, and once he catches them, make sure he brings Trump down with him.

But they keep throwing anvils better suited for Elon at themselves.

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“Dead Man Walking:” Magic Numbers Nine and Four

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I’d like to look at a few things that Chuck Schumer said in a wildly counterproductive interview.

After a squishy exchange about the horrible people running for NYC Mayor, Lulu Garcia-Navarro challenged Schumer for his focus on upcoming elections. Schumer noted that the courts are our best bulwark against Trump’s abuses (something that factored heavily in his decision to let the Continuing Resolution get a vote). But then Garcia-Navarro asked what happens when Trump starts ignoring judges, as he did Friday when deporting hundreds of mostly Venezuelans to El Salvador in defiance of an order from James Boasberg. Schumer said he hoped the five to six Senators who’ve spoke up in support of the courts would do so — but then suggested they might be more likely to do so in a few months, assuming Trump will become less popular.

You know, I’ve heard you and other Democratic leaders talk about the next election as if it’s just going to be another election like any other election. But there has been all of this discussion about Trump auguring the end of democracy. I worry about this. When I say we’ll win the election, I’m assuming democracy stays, but that we have to fight to make sure that happens. I think that Trump is destroying norms that have preserved our democracy for centuries, certainly for decades, and he’s destroying them, and he doesn’t care. What is our best bulwark? It’s the courts. And one of the things we were able to do, which is proving very, very good, is we put in 235 new judges. And they’re now hearing so many of the cases that attorneys general, private citizens, unions and others are bringing. We’ve had preliminary success.

Are they going to respect those court orders, do you think? That is the $64,000 question. So let us say the courts uphold this. And one of the people who will determine that more than any other is probably John Roberts, who is very conservative. I didn’t vote for him. But I do believe that he believes in the courts. And so I think that even at the highest level, if you get the Supreme Court upholding the law, it will matter. What if Trump keeps going? That’s the question everybody’s asking. And I worry about this a lot. I wake up sometimes at 2, 3 in the morning thinking about this. I believe this, and it’s a little bit in concert with what I’ve said to you before: I believe Republican senators, on this issue, will stand up. I’ve talked to some of them. About five or six have said publicly they will work to uphold the courts, and to uphold the law if Trump tries to break it. And we can do that legislatively if we have to. That’s my hope. That’s what we’ve got to work toward. And I think there’s a decent chance that that would happen, particularly if Trump, three months from now, is less popular. [bold NYT’s, italics mine]

Those five to six Senators have been silent since Trump’s open defiance was revealed on Saturday.

Then, later, Schumer again pointed to his confidence that Republican Senators would like some distance from Trump.

The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.

These passages were among those mocked by those prioritizing Schumer over Trump and Elon Musk. In the rush to condemn Schumer (who has canceled the book tour at which there were sure to be loud protests), people mocked the very idea that Republicans in the Senate would ever oppose Trump.

I think Schumer has earned a good deal of the criticism he’s getting, even if I’m certain it is distracting from the focus on Trump and Musk.

I part ways with the claim that Senators will never split from Trump.

To be very sure, Trump has garnered near-total fealty, from the House and Senate, since his inauguration in January. His grip on the GOP has tightened year after year since he first sold his grievance narrative in 2018. The reason the Senate had this no-win choice in the first place is because, for the first time in recent memory, the GOP House stood together on a funding vote. Many of these Senators are veritable cult members, spouting the craziest nonsense that Trump told him to say.

But to suggest Senators will never split from Trump is counterproductive for two reasons.

First, to suggest you can never get Republicans to break with Trump is to concede.

It is to give up on one of just a few theories of change available — with just (successful) mass protest and revolution left — and to give up on the one that could bring results most quickly. In the short term, at least, it would take just nine members of the House or four Senators to completely stall Trump’s agenda on a particular issue, and fewer members of the House to cause gridlock. There are that many members who oppose Trump on discrete issues (most notably, Ukraine and Medicaid funding), and exploiting that reality is a tool, however inadequate. Even if you think a mass protest movement would be more successful, pressuring the Senators who’ve enabled Trump so far is a necessary (and fairly easy) step to push back against Trump.

In the interview, Schumer seems to too readily adopt James Carville’s theory of change, to do nothing to accelerate this process (note, Carville’s op-ed assumed House Republicans could not mount the unity to fund government). Perhaps he wants to avoid pissing off the men he’s panting away next to in shorts in the Senate gym.

There’s a great deal that people can do to make it more likely Senators will oppose Trump. I try to make a point of calling out Joni Ernst publicly every time Pete Hegseth disappears the accomplishments of women soldiers, or Thom Tillis every time Hegseth makes the military less safe, or Roger Wicker every time Hegseth has an embarrassing faceplant, or Bill Cassidy every time RFK Jr does something to exacerbate the measles outbreak, or Jerry Moran every time DOGE makes a stupid cut of VA benefits, or Todd Young every time Tulsi Gabbard repeats Russian disinformation, or John Cornyn every time Marco Rubio cuts back on PEPFAR, or Tom Cotton every time Trump does something that will help China. These people haven’t hidden their disagreement on key issues or appointees with Trump. Yet, in spite of those disagreements, these people have all done things to support people they knew were wrong. As the consequences of their cowardice pile up — as measles spreads across the country from Texas and veterans lose their jobs — their complicity should be front and center.

And while right wing members of Congress are not publicly confronting Trump, some of them are pushing back quietly, mitigating some of the damage Trump is doing — sometimes even in ways that extend benefits beyond their own jurisdiction. According to the NYT, for example, Deb Fischer was among those who pushed Trump to reverse some of the firings at National Nuclear Security Administration (though NYT also reports that NNSA lost many key experts nevertheless).

And GOP pushback will go largely unnoticed elsewhere. After succeeding in strong arming vaccine propagandist RFK Jr’s confirmation to lead HHS, Trump withdrew the nomination for vaccine propagandist Dave Weldon to lead CDC, minutes before his confirmation hearing this week, because Weldon didn’t have and wouldn’t get the votes.

That’s all we’ll see of GOP pushback until proof of consequences of their own complicity and pressure on them mounts. But in a world where any kind of friction can slow the march of authoritarianism, even that non-public pushback bit matters, and it could provide definitive down the road.

By all means, scoff at Carville’s outdated naivete and Schumer’s unwillingness to more directly confront those he pants next to on the exercise bike.

But don’t abstain from pressuring right wingers to show some courage against Trump’s outrages.

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Democrats Have to Stop Making Political Decisions with an Eye Towards 2026

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I’ve been out of pocket as events moved towards today’s cloture vote on the dogshit continuing resolution Republicans have written. It’s not yet clear whether seven Democrats (in addition to John Fetterman) will join Chuck Schumer — who has said he’ll vote for cloture — in helping Republicans pass it, or whether a Democrat will buy some time.

It’s clear that Schumer’s excuse only emphasizes that there are no good options. He says if there’s a shutdown, Republicans will only reopen those parts of government they want. In the face of the shuttering of USAID and dismantlement of Department of Education, that seems like a futile worry.

Among the best arguments I’ve seen against a shutdown, laid out but dropped here by Josh Marshall, is that a shutdown would provide Trump a way to halt legal proceedings by deeming those lawyers non-essential.

I was told yesterday that a major driver for Dems was the fear that a shutdown would slow down or stop the various court cases against DOGE. Honestly, that sounded so stupid to me that I was skeptical. But this afternoon I heard it from other key directions. I don’t know if it’s the biggest driver but just on the basis of what I heard I get a sense that it’s a major one. That seems so wrongheaded, so lawyer-brained, that when I got the final piece of the puzzle in front of me and realized this was a real thing, it was hard for me to even process.

Schumer described it this way in his speech yesterday:

Justice, and the courts, extremely troubling, I believe. A shutdown could stall Federal court cases, one of the best redoubts against Trump’s lawlessness, and could require a furlough of critical staff at the courts, denying victims and defendants alike their day in court, dragging out appeals and clogging the justice system for months and even years.

I don’t think this is lawyer-brained at all. Trump could simply call the lawyers engaged in these suits non-essential, stalling legal challenges in their current status, and then finding new test cases to establish a precedent while judges were stymied.

In both Phoenix, where a reduction in force affected all the people running the courthouse, and in the Perkins Coie lawsuit, where a hearing the other day reviewed all the Executive Branch personnel, from Marshals to GSA, who keep the courthouse running, the Executive’s ability to limit the Judiciary via manipulation of facilities and staff has already become a live issue. Here’s how Beryl Howell described the way in which Trump’s attempt to exclude Perkins Coie from federal buildings could be enforced via Executive branch personnel.

THE COURT: I just want to make sure because we, in the judiciary — we’re the third branch. We are not the executive branch. We are not subject to this guidance. But our landlord, and all of the federal courthouses around the country is GSA —

MR. BUTSWINKAS: GSA.

THE COURT: — General Services Administration. And the people who do the security at our front doors, all across the country in federal courthouses, are DOJ-component employees from the U.S. Marshals Service or court security officers. So they are all executive branch employees.

Meanwhile the court cases are making progress. Just this week, we’ve had two judges order reinstatement of all the people fired, grant FOIA status to DOGE, and grant discovery to Democratic Attorneys General (plus in one of the two reinstatement cases, Judge Alsup ordered a deposition from an OPM person involved in the firing). As of this week, DOGE now has to answer for its actions in the courts.

Imagine, for example, if a shutdown made it easier for DHS to keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana for the duration of a shutdown, even if they simply said moving him back to SDNY (or New Jersey) is not a priority. There are other cases where the government is being ordered to pay back payments; a shutdown would make such recourse unavailable to anyone who has not yet sued. In the financial clawback cases (where EPA and FEMA seized funds already awarded), a shutdown would give the FBI time to try to frame the case against plaintiffs they’re pursuing, while the plaintiffs get no protection in the meantime. A key flaw was revealed in the lawsuit against Perkins Coie in the hearing the other day (which I’ll return to); if given the time, I would expect Trump to try the same trick against another law firm, fixing that flaw, in an attempt to eliminate any anti-Trump legal teams in the country.

So the concern that a shutdown would eliminate one of two sources of power is real.

I’m agnostic about whether a shutdown brings more advantage than risks.

One thing I am absolutely certain of, however, is that Democrats on both sides of this debate are framing it in terms of 2026. Those justifiably furious at Chuck Schumer are thinking in terms of primaries against any Senator who supports cloture. They’re demanding a filibuster so that elected Democrats, as Democrats, be seen wielding some power, so the party doesn’t look feckless to potential voters. Those afraid of a shutdown are discussing electoral consequences in 2026. Polls are measuring who would be blamed in the polls.

This mindset has plagued both sides of Democratic debates for two months, with disastrous consequences.

Democracy will be preserved or lost in the next three months. And democracy will be won or lost via a nonpartisan political fight over whether enough Americans want to preserve their way of life to fight back, in a coalition that includes far more than Democrats. You win this fight by treating Trump and Elon as the villain, not by making any one Democrat a hero (or worse still, squandering week after week targeting Democratic leaders while letting Elon go ignored).

And Democrats, on both sides of this fight, are not fighting that fight. I’ve seen none of the most powerful voices — not AOC, not Bernie, not Jasmine Crockett, not Tim Walz, not Pete Buttigieg — put out a video talking about the fight over impoundment, about the stakes of having elected representatives of both parties fight for funding for their own constituents.

Democrats who want a shutdown have done none of the messaging to those already hurt by Trump’s power grab work to make it a short term political win, to explain the tie between right wing capitulation to Trump and services shutting down. Instead, they’ve been fighting among themselves, mobilizing politically active Democrats.

I get the anger with Schumer — though I do think his concerns about the courts need to be taken very seriously.

But until Democrats stop thinking in terms of their own leadership in Congress but instead think exclusively about winning the political fight with people being hurt, not as Democrats, but as people opposed to fascism, they’re going to be looking for power in the wrong places.

Update: Someone on Bluesky defending AOC, arguing that this appearance from her on CNN amounted to the explanation about impoundment I said is missing. It’s a great appearance, and makes the anti-CR case superbly. But I don’t think it gets through the jargon about how government is funded or why. Plus, it’s not viral!

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DNC Convention 2024: Day 2

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

The second day of Democratic National Committee Convention 2024 has commenced.

DAY 2 CONVENTION SCHEDULE
Here’s today’s event lineup (times shown are Central Time):

7 a.m.-9:30 a.m.: Delegation breakfasts
9 a.m.-10a.m.: Morning press briefing
9:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m.: Women’s Caucus meeting
12 p.m.-1:30 p.m.: Disability Caucus meeting
12 p.m.-1:30 p.m.: Youth Council meeting
12 p.m.-1:30 p.m.: Rural Council meeting
1:45 p.m.-3:15 p.m.: Veterans & Military Families Council meeting
1:45 p.m.-3:15 p.m.: Poverty Council meeting
1:45 p.m.-3:15 p.m.: Interfaith Council meeting
6 p.m.-10 p.m.: Main programming

MAIN PROGRAMMING
Main programming has already begun as this post publishes at 7:30 PM ET/6:30 PM CT

Tonight’s schedule (times shown are Central Time):

5:30 PM

Call to order
• Jaime R. Harrison, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee

Gavel in
• Mitch Landrieu, DNC Night 2 Co-Chair and Committee Co-Chair

Invocation
• Rabbi Sharon Brous, IKAR
• Imam Dr. Talib M. Shareef, The Nation’s Mosque

Pledge of Allegiance
• Joshua Davis

National Anthem
• Aristotle “Aris” Garcia Byrne

Remarks
• Jason Carter, Grandson of President Jimmy Carter
• Jack Schlossberg, Grandson of President John F. Kennedy

Remarks: “Project 2025—Chapter Two: The Economy”
• Malcolm Kenyatta, PA state house of representatives
6:00 PM

• Kyle Sweetser, former Donald Trump voter
• Stephanie Grisham, former Trump White House Press Secretary
• Nabela Noor, Content creator
• Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI)
• Kenneth Stribling, Retired Teamster

7:00 PM

Roll Call
• Minnesota Delegation
• California Delegation

8:00 PM

• Ana Navarro, host introduction
• Sen. Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader (D-NY)
• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
• Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL)
• Ken Chenault, American business executive
• Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM)

9:00 PM

Keynote Remarks
• Angela Alsobrooks, Nominee for the U.S. Senate (D-MD); Long-time mentee of VP Harris
• Mayor John Giles, City of Mesa (R-AZ)
• Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
• Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff
• Former First Lady Michelle Obama

10:00 PM

• Former President Barack Obama, key note speaker

Benediction
• Bishop Samuel L. Green, Sr., African Methodist Episcopal Church, 7th Episcopal District
• Archbishop Elpidophoros, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

HOW TO WATCH
See yesterday’s post for the best channels on which to catch the majority of this evening’s programming.

DNC at United Center-Chicago will stream a live feed from its own website between 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM ET (6:00 PM to 10:00 PM CT) Tuesday through Thursday.

https://demconvention.com/

USA Today will also live stream Tuesday through Thursday.

https://www.youtube.com/@USATODAY/streams – main page

https://www.youtube.com/live/6n40S96nmv8 – tonight’s feed

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How Tucker Carlson Duped the People His Producer Called “Dumb … Cousin-Fucking … Terrorists”

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In response to Tucker Carlson’s misleading propaganda claiming that Jacob Chansley was just a peaceful tourist escorted at all times by his own dedicated cop, a number of January 6 defendants are demanding mistrials because of claimed Brady violations.

Dominic Pezzola’s attorneys, for example, argued that the video released by Tucker shows that the Senate never had to recess, which (they claim) undermines the government’s obstruction claim against the Proud Boys.

Never during this trial has there been any evidence of any raucous or extremely disruptive or violent demonstration in the Senate chamber. (There have been a few images of demonstrators sitting on chairs or standing in the well of the Senate.)

Then came the Tucker Carlson show on the evening of March 6, 2023.

On March 6, Tucker Carlson released shocking footage from January 6th, 2021 that showed “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley walking calmly through the halls of the Capitol with two Capitol Police officers. At one point, one of the officers appears to try opening a door or elevator, and then turns and leads Chansley in another direction. Later in the video clips, Chansley is seen walking past nine police officers gathered in a hallway intersection. Chansley and his police escorts walk right past the nine officers without any resistance.

And then the Tucker Carlson show presented footage of officers calmly escorting Chansley (and apparently other protestors) into the Senate chamber. The Washington Post wrote that Albert Watkins, Chansley’s attorney through sentencing in November 2021, said he had been provided many hours of video by prosecutors, but not the footage which Carlson aired Monday night. He said he had not seen video of Chansley walking through Capitol hallways with multiple Capitol Police officers.

“What’s deeply troubling,” Watkins said Tuesday, “Is the fact that I have to watch Tucker Carlson to find video footage which the government has, but chose not to disclose, despite the absolute duty to do so. Despite being requested in writing to do so, multiple times.” [emphasis original]

The government’s response lays out that, in fact, both Chansley’s attorneys and Pezzola’s received this video in global discovery (there was a 10-second segment not released until January that was not exculpatory, which likely shows a Senator fleeing even as Pezzola stands just feet away — see below).

Pezzola’s motion describes “shocking footage” of Chansley “walking calmly through the halls of the Capitol” with two police officers who purportedly “escort[] Chansley (and apparently other protestors) into the Senate chamber.” ECF 679, at 4. Pezzola quotes Chansley’s former attorney for the proposition that the government “withheld” this footage from discovery in Chansley’s and Pezzola’s cases. Id. The footage is not shocking, and it was not withheld from Pezzola (or Chansley, in any material respect, for that matter).

The footage in question comes from the Capitol’s video surveillance system, commonly referred to as “CCTV” (for “closed-circuit television”). The Court will be familiar with the numerous CCTV clips that have been introduced as exhibits during this trial. The CCTV footage is core evidence in nearly every January 6 case, and it was produced en masse, labeled by camera number and by time, to all defense counsel in all cases.3 With the exception of one CCTV camera (where said footage totaled approximately 10 seconds and implicated an evacuation route), all of the footage played on television was disclosed to defendant Pezzola (and defendant Chansley) by September 24, 2021.4 The final 10 seconds of footage was produced in global discovery to all defense counsel on January 23, 2023. Pezzola’s Brady claim therefore fails at the threshold, because nothing has been suppressed. United States v. Blackley, 986 F. Supp. 600, 603 (D.D.C. 1997) (“For an item to be Brady, it must be something that is being ‘suppress[ed] by the prosecution.’”) (quoting Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963)).

While discovery in this case is voluminous, the government has provided defense counsel with the necessary tools to readily identify relevant cameras within the CCTV to determine whether footage was produced or not. Accordingly, the volume of discovery does not excuse defense counsel from making reasonable efforts to ascertain whether an item has been produced before making representations about what was and was not produced, let alone before filing inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of discovery failures.

3 The productions excluded a limited set of footage that the Capitol Police designated as security information, such as X-Ray machine feeds and views of evacuation routes and Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (“SCIF”) office lobbies.

4 The remaining CCTV was disclosed in global discovery on January 23, 2023. It similarly – as with other CCTV – depicts defendant Chansley outside of the Senate Chamber with law enforcement, after his initial breach of the Chamber.

It’s hard to overstate how much this exchange vindicates DOJ’s decision to make all the January 6 video available to all defendants, which delayed trials for probably six months, but which ensured that at the moment defendants like Chansley and Pezzola started claiming they didn’t get something, DOJ could point to when they in fact did receive it.

DOJ rebuts Pezzola’s argument that any of this is exculpatory, relying, in part, on former Army Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs’ description of overwhelming the Capitol.

Pezzola’s argument seems to be that the snippets of Chansley’s movements that were televised by Carlson establish that there was no emergency necessitating the suspension of proceedings. The televised footage lacks the context of what occurred before and after the footage. Chansley entered the building as part of a violent crowd that gained access as a result of Pezzola’s destruction of a window and he traveled with Pezzola during the initial breach. And just as Defendant Biggs had recounted in a recorded statement after January 6, 2021, by the time Pezzola forcibly breached the Capitol and Chansley rode his coattails, the mob—through the sheer force of its size and the violence of those within it—had wrested control of portions of the Capitol grounds and the Capitol itself from a vastly outnumbered U.S. Capitol Police force. 5 As a result, for a period that afternoon, those defending the Capitol were in triage mode—trying to deal with the most violent element of those unlawfully present, holding those portions of the Capitol that had not yet been seized by rioters, and protecting those Members and staffers who were still trapped in the Capitol.

5 Biggs stated, in part: “When you’re holding a position, like a fort, and you’re being overrun, if there’s three of you or four of you, and you’re outnumbered a hundred to one, are you gonna sit there and just go, ‘I’m holding the door’? No, you’re just gonna get your ass beat. That’s already gone. if that many people show up to your house, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Gov’t Ex. 611B. Biggs later continued, “You’re gonna stand up to [] tens of thousands of people storming that? No, that’s stupid. You step [] aside. That puts less chance of anyone getting hurt or anything like that, and you allow it to happen.” Id.

DOJ also lays out specifically how Tucker chose to release only video from after the damage — in the form of the violent breach of the Capitol and the decision to flee the Senate — had been done.

Chansley piggybacking on Pezzola’s violent breach of the Capitol provides more than enough evidence of his corrupt intent to interfere with Congress that day. But there is much more evidence of his and others’ conduct. The televised footage shows Chansley’s movements only from approximately 2:56 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Prior to that time, Chansley had, amongst other acts, breached a police line at 2:09 p.m. with the mob, entered the Capitol less than one minute behind Pezzola during the initial breach of the building, and faced off with members of the U.S. Capitol Police for more than thirty minutes in front of the Senate Chamber doors while elected officials, including the Vice President of the United States, were fleeing from the chamber. Chansley then entered the Senate Gallery, where he proceeded to scream obscenities while other rioters rifled through the desks of U.S. Senators on the floor below. All these actions were captured by Senate floor and/or CCTV cameras. In sum, Chansley was not some passive, chaperoned observer of events for the roughly hour that he was unlawfully inside the Capitol. He was part of the initial breach of the building; he confronted law enforcement for roughly 30 minutes just outside the Senate Chamber; he gained access to the gallery of the Senate along with other members of the mob (obviously, precluding any Senate business from occurring); and he gained access to and later left the Senate floor only after law enforcement was able to arrive en masse to remove him. It is true that a sole officer, who was trying to de-escalate the situation, was with Chansley as he made his way to the Senate floor after initially breaching the Chamber, as the televised footage reflects.6 But the televised footage fails to show that Chansley subsequently refused to be escorted out by this lone officer and instead left the Capitol only after additional officers arrived and forcibly escorted him out.

6 Notably, this officer’s statement regarding these events was also disclosed in discovery to Chansley’s attorney on May 19, 2021.

It’s a classic lesson in how propaganda is made, by focusing on the least damning part of a story and suppressing the rest. It happens to have been released in the same period where the Dominion lawsuit revealed that Tucker’s then investigative producer, Alex Pfeiffer, likened Tucker’s own viewers to “dumb,” “cousin-fucking” “terrorists.”

“Might wanna address this, but this stuff is so f—— insane. Vote rigging to the tune of millions? C’mon,” Shah wrote.

Carlson’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, responded: “It is so insane but our viewers believe it so addressing again how her stupid Venezuela affidavit isn’t proof might insult them.”

Shah advised that Carlson should mention the affidavit noting it was “not new info, not proof” but then quickly “pivot to being deferential.”

Pfeiffer, who has since left the network, answered that the delicate dance was “surreal.”

“Like negotiating with terrorists,” he added, “but especially dumb ones. Cousin f—– types not saudi royalty.”

The kerfuffle also gave journalists an opportunity to go back and ask for the video used in the Chansley case to be released to journalists.

One of the videos newly released to journalists shows the mob closing in on the Senate and — I suspect this may be the 10-second clip that was originally withheld — one or more Senators fleeing as a single cop holds off the mob by yelling “back off” repeatedly.

Kyle Cheney, who first pointed to this segment, suspects the fleeing Senator may be Chuck Grassley.

In other words, what we’ve learned from this incident is that Tucker is the one lying about what happened. DOJ, in fact, had been withholding some of the most damning video from the public but not defense attorneys, and Tucker’s propaganda effort has provided yet another glimpse of how many close calls the police managed to avert on January 6.

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DOJ Has at Least One Card Left to Play: Congress’ Instinct for Self-Preservation

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Last night, Trump and DOJ submitted their competing plans for a Special Master to Judge Aileen Cannon. As I laid out, Trump’s plan is a transparent effort to stall the entire investigation for at least three months, and after that to bottle up documents he stole — those with classified markings and those without — at NARA, where he’ll launch new legal fights in DC to prevent further access.

Judge Cannon has ordered Trump to weigh in on the government’s motion for a partial stay of her order, asking her to permit the investigative team access to any documents marked as classified, by 10AM on Monday. Trump will object for the same insane logic he gave in his Special Master proposal: That if he can get a private citizen Special Master to override the government’s classification determination, then he can declare the documents — even Agency documents that would be government, not Presidential Records — part of his own records at NARA.

Because Trump didn’t share his choices until after close of business day on Friday, both sides also have to inform her what they think of the other’s Special Master suggestions — Barbara Jones (who was Special Master for the review of both Rudy Giuliani’s and Michael Cohen’s devices) and retired George W. Bush appellate judge Thomas Griffith for the government, and retired EDNY and FISC judge Raymond Dearie and GOP partisan lawyer Paul Huck Jr for Trump — on Monday.

Then, if Cannon has not relented on the investigative side for documents marked as classified by Thursday, DOJ will ask for a stay of that part of her decision from the 11th Circuit, pending the rest of their appeal (the scope of which remains unknown and may depend on her other decisions this week).

Cannon’s decision on whether to permit investigators to access the documents marked as classified may provide the government leverage over the Special Master choice, which could create new bases for appeal. None of the choices for Special Master are known to be cleared, much less at the TS/SCI levels that would be needed to review the documents Trump stole, though Dearie, who was on FISC as recently as 2019, surely would be easily cleared as such.

That doesn’t matter for the government’s preferred approach. The Special Master won’t get any known classified document under their approach.

They would, however, under Trump’s approach (which more closely matches Cannon’s current order). And so DOJ will have to agree to give clearance to whatever person ends up as Special Master under the Trump plan.

The same Supreme Court precedent that undergirds all these arguments about classification authority, Navy v. Egan, is specifically a ruling about the Executive’s authority to grant or deny clearances. The government could deny any of the proposed Special Masters clearance — and might well do so, to deny Huck access. Likewise, the government might well deny Trump’s lawyers (at least Evan Corcoran, who is likely either a witness or subject of the obstruction side of the investigation) clearance for such a review as well.

So if Cannon doesn’t grant the government’s motion for a stay, then she effectively gives the government several more levers over her control of the Special Master process.

She probably doesn’t give a damn.

There are two other developments we might expect this week, though.

First, last Wednesday, DOJ asked and Chief Judge Beryl Howell granted permission to unseal the parts of the search warrant affidavit mentioning the same two grand jury subpoenas that she unsealed for mention in DOJ’s response to Trump’s Special Master motion. (I’m looking for the person I owe a hat-tip to this for.) Since receiving that permission, DOJ has not yet gone back to Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart to request further unsealing of the affidavit; there’s not even the tell-tale sealed filings in the docket that ended up being prior such requests.

If and when DOJ does ask for further unsealing, it might reveal more information about Trump’s actions — and, importantly for the question of who can be cleared for the Special Master review, Evan Corcoran’s. There are several entirely redacted paragraphs that likely tell what happened in response to the May 11 subpoena. There’s also a likely detailed discussion of the probable cause that Trump — and others — obstructed the investigation, some of which could be unsealed with mention of the surveillance video.

The government response before Cannon didn’t address the evidence of obstruction (or the June 24 subpoena) in much detail. Simply unsealing references of that subpoena in the affidavit might provide more damning information about Trump’s efforts to hide classified documents from DOJ.

More importantly, on Tuesday, the House returns from August recess. It’ll be the first time since the search that both houses of Congress are in town. And in their Motion for a Stay, the government noted (and Judge Cannon did not object) that it did not understand Cannon’s order to prohibit a briefing to “Congressional leaders with intelligence oversight responsibilities.”

5 The government also does not understand the Court’s Order to bar DOJ, FBI, and ODNI from briefing Congressional leaders with intelligence oversight responsibilities regarding the classified records that were recovered. The government similarly does not understand the Order to restrict senior DOJ and FBI officials, who have supervisory responsibilities regarding the criminal investigation, from reviewing those records in preparation for such a briefing.

This seems to telegraph that DOJ plans to brief the Gang of Eight — which includes Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Turner, Chuck Schumer, Mark Warner, Mitch McConnell, and Marco Rubio — about what documents Trump stole, possibly this week. Turner and to a lesser degree Rubio have been demanding such a briefing.

And at a minimum, after such a briefing you’d see everyone run to the press and express their opinions about the gravity of Trump’s actions. Because neither DOJ nor Aileen Cannon can prevent these members of Congress from sharing details about these briefings (especially if they’re not classified), you should be unsurprised everyone to provide details of what Trump stole.

That might devolve into a matter of partisan bickering. But two things might moderate such bickering. First, Marco Rubio is on the ballot in November, and Val Demings has already criticized his knee-jerk defense of Trump.

Just as importantly, Mitch McConnell, who badly would like to prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in the Senate and just as badly would like the MAGA Republicans to go away, really doesn’t want to spend the next two months dodging questions about Trump’s crimes.

If not for Trump’s demand for a Special Master, DOJ likely would have put its head down and mentioned nothing of this investigation until after the election. But by demanding one — and by making such unreasonable requests — Trump has ensured that the investigation into his suspected violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction will dominate the news for at least a few more weeks.

Even if DOJ doesn’t brief the Gang of Eight, even if that doesn’t lead to damning new details and recriminations from being made public, the public nature of the Special Master fight will suck all the oxygen out of the next few weeks of campaign season, at least, just as it contributed to Joe Biden enjoying one of the most positive mid-term Augusts for any President in the last half-century.

But if new specifics about Trump’s negligence and efforts to obstruct the investigation are made public, then November’s election will be precisely what Republicans are trying to avoid it being: not just a response to the Dobbs ruling overturning protection for abortion access, but a referendum on the way Republicans have sacrificed American security in their fealty to Donald Trump.

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Angry Mom: Thanks, Joe “2022 Will Be an Electoral Bloodbath” Manchin [UPDATE-2]

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[NB: Check the byline, thanks. Updates at the bottom of this post. /~Rayne]

I have no choice but to warn you I write this as one hella angry mom. I want to put some people in time out badly.

First, a caveat and an ear-boxing:

The GOP is worthless. They have systematically refused to govern during a time of crisis. What the GOP has done instead has exponentially increased risk to America – Making America Great at Stupidity – and to the rest of the world with its anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-mask propaganda.

They’ve fought every single damned effort to offer aid to the country. Their congressional voting record documents this for posterity as well as in state legislatures. They resist rational science-based efforts to stem the pandemic because of weak sauce excuses like “muh freedum!” which means protecting the unconstitutional right to increase others’ risk of sickness, disability, death, and loss of business.

They’re not a political party with a reasoned platform based on a sound ideology with which the country can identify. Instead it’s an organization intent on maintaining a grip on power by aggregating Know-Nothings, Do-Nothings, and Stop-Everythings, which includes stopping this country from realizing a more perfect union.

If the GOP was a sane and legitimate political party I wouldn’t have had to write this post.

That said, Senator Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden have screwed up in a big way, a couple times over. They need to be schooled for this.

~ ~ ~

Joe Manchin appeared on fucking Fox News yesterday to say he wasn’t going to support the Build Back Better Act which has already been passed in the House.

If that wasn’t a deliberate in-your-face “Fuck You!” to Biden, the Senate Democrats, his West Virginia constituents, and the entire country, I don’t know what is.

Not NBC, not CBS, not ABC. Not NPR, not even a local West Virginia news station.

He went to Fox Home of Demoralizatsiya News.

And he was able to do so because Schumer and Biden allowed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (a.k.a. Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework – BIF) to be delinked from passage of the BBB, putting the BIF first and BBB second in order to obtain Manchin’s support.

Except the BIF is the only thing Manchin wanted to the benefit of his corporate overlords. BBB gives money to those people he doesn’t trust, like most of the constituents of his state, the second poorest state in the country.

Can’t have that.

Ask Adam Jentleson about it. He does a better job in this Twitter thread explaining how this negotiation was fucked up all to hell.

Don’t ask the progressive House Dems about this situation; you should already have been able to hear them warning before this all went down that Manchin couldn’t be trusted. Their fury is righteous.

And I absolutely mean righteous because there’s no goddamned way in hell someone like Ady Barkan, who has fought so vigorously for American’s health care, should have to worry about services he needs as he fights a mortal illness.

There’s also no way that the roughly 10% of Americans who are diabetics should have to continue to worry about coming up with $1000 per month to pay for insulin which costs a few bucks to make. They should be rejoicing about a $35 month price instead, but no – Manchin fucked them over, and Chuck and Joe failed to see the fucking coming at us.

Don’t get me started on the other fuck-ups like the Child Tax Credit, about which one tweeter wrote, “2022 will be a Electoral bloodbath” (sic).

Imagine this happening to a household which has had reduced hours, wage cuts, or has been on minimum wage, or dealing with unpaid time off due to COVID over the last year. Just do the simple math of two young parents trying to manage this on 40 hours a week at prevailing local minimum wage.

People have to pay bills NOW, and in January, and in February, in spite of work disruptions and increased cost of daycare and other childcare expenses…they can’t just float everything until this is fixed or the credit is paid out after they file 2022 tax returns.

Also extremely unhelpful is Biden’s persistent refusal to use his executive power to forgive student loans in part or in whole.

Parents of young children with student loans are doubly screwed by the failures of both the White House and the Senate Leader. And yet there’s head scratching about Biden’s weak approval rating going into 2022 especially with younger voters.

Why the hell should Millennials and Gen Z turn out to vote when they can do the math and they know the Democratic Party hasn’t delivered for them – especially as they go into another COVID hurricane thanks to Omicron?

~ ~ ~

Look, the BBB is an economic stimulus package. Every single household saddled with burdens BBB could alleviate would be able to participate more fully in the economy.

Some of that “economic anxiety” the media hyped up as one reason behind Trump’s election in 2016 could be partially relieved.

Forgiving student loans is likewise an economic stimulus targeted at a segment of the population which is most likely to spend income immediately, locally, and on goods and services which propel our economy.

This is what Joe Manchin failed to recognize and couldn’t explain to his constituents AND his corporate overlords because he’s a selfish dumb ass.

The BBB is economic stimulus — this is the justification for Schumer and Biden to approach moderate GOP members like Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins (ME) to obtain their votes (Collins owes women this, big time).

Other people have been explaining it quite capably:

Yet Manchin refuses to accept the assist.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs downgraded its estimates of U.S. economic growth yesterday.

Which leads me to ask one rather important question, given Manchin’s announcement on goddamned Fox News and Goldman Sachs’ downgrade on a Sunday.

Who knew about Manchin’s decision and shorted the market?

Heaven help you if you did, Manchin.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE-1 — 2:50 PM 20-DEC-2021 —

Thanks to Kendall Brown for saving us a click so we didn’t have to read all the revolting Manchin-sympathetic journalism to get to this bit:

I’m even more convinced something shady happened than I was before if Manchin is going to blame incivility by the White House as a reason to walk away from the BBB.

Who didn’t know Manchin was the hold up? We all of us knew it, it wasn’t a surprise. The White House naming him as the lone Democratic holdout only confirmed what we’d known and what the House progressive caucus was worried about — that a single Democrat would be the sole reason the bill would fail, and look, it was one of the two senators most-likely-to-DINO-tank-a-bill.

Doesn’t he make enough from his other investments to take care of his family if he’s so worried about them being included in harassment because he’d rather tank the entire BBB and hurt Americans in the process? Maybe sell your Maserati, Manchin, and buy a couple security people.

Jesus Christ, what a whiny baby he is.

Rep. Jayapal is now looking at executive action as a Plan B to realizing key components in the BBB.

What a pity Manchin didn’t take a hint from all the feedback he got from average Americans to simply agree to pass the bill and be a hero instead of self owning by appearing to flip flop on his demands throughout the course of the negotiations in full sight of the public who could see he was the bottlenecking gatekeeper.

He looks even more weak and pathetic having to go to yet another sympathetic outlet to make his non-existent case.

UPDATE-2 — 11:50 AM 21-DEC-2021 —

There have been rumbles over the last 24 hours about the BBB possibly being revamped if not revived or resuscitated. But Manchin’s homies have also taken issue with his position on BBB:

The West Virginia Dems had done a fair amount of organizing recently which showed up in polling about the BBB:


Hard to get around these numbers which show bipartisan support among constituents for BBB.

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