2021 March | Let's Fix This Country

Tempers Flare Over Move to Kill Filibuster and Revive Senate

Mitch McConnell is livid. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin”, he repeated, “to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like”. He was reacting to the threat of Democrats ending the filibuster, the Senate process for preventing bills from becoming law by requiring a super majority of 60 votes rather
Drew Sheneman, The Star Ledger

than a simple majority of one. No longer the Senate majority leader, he is furious that the filibuster might be taken away from him. He demands it because it transfers the Senate’s power to him, taking it from the Democrats, never mind that they became the majority by winning in the elections.

There is no provision for the filibuster in the Constitution, but we often are told — by those holding the short straw — that without the filibuster, the Senate will be subject to the tyranny of the majority. McConnell prefers the tyranny of the minority, armed with the filibuster to block the victorious party from passing its legislative program.

Republicans may ridicule a majority that is so only when Vice-President Kamala Harris steps in to break 50-50 ties. But Democrats should reject such cavils for good reason:. Should they ditch the filibuster the votes of the 50 Democratic senators speak for a whopping majority of voters over those claimed by Republicans. The populations of the states the 50 Democratic senators represent exceed the populations backing the Republican senators by close to 40 million people, which we found when we ran the data, a fact useful in this argument but seemingly so far undiscovered by the media.

McConnell thinks the Senate belongs to him. He would use every rule in the Senate’s arcanum to fulfill his threat that, “This chaos would not open up an express lane … for the Biden presidency to speed into the history books. The Senate would be more like a hundred car pileup” when subjected to McConnell’s obstruction.

“This is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon, to proceed with a garden-variety floor speech, to dispense with the reading of a lengthy legislative text, to schedule committee business, to move even non-controversial nominees at anything besides a snail’s pace.”

Joe Biden is steeped in Senate doctrine, having served there for 36 years. He has stressed “unity” as his goal for America and yearns to forge bipartisan agreement across the aisle. He prefers not to do away with the filibuster. “It has been used as often to protect rights I care about as the other way around”, he told Ezra Klein of Vox during the campaign.

But Biden is not entirely opposed to its discard. Now he is president, facing the use of the filibuster to block so much of what the party in power wants to do. As a clear signal of the obduracy of the loyal opposition to any gesture of unity, Biden just saw not a single Republican vote for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act. It could only be passed by “reconciliation”, a Senate rule that shields budget-affecting bills from filibustering, enabling passage by the simple majority of 51 votes.

decision time

A key bill on deck is the For the People Act of election reform. It is not budget-related and Republicans will assuredly block it by filibuster. One need only listen to McConnell, who said in a PBS NewsHour interview about the Act,

“This is an outrageous one-party takeover of the way we conduct elections in this country and there will be overwhelming total Republican opposition…It’s another bill that would pass without a single Republican vote”.

The Act — HR-1 in the House and S-1 in the Senate, indicating its primacy — has been waiting for this moment since January 2019 when first written. It contains a number of measures designed to make it easier to vote, which is diametrically counter to some 220 Republican bills waiting for passage in state legislatures that are designed to make it more difficult to vote. To countermand the states’ targeted voting restrictions, aimed at Blacks and Latinos because they heavily vote Democratic, the bill is viewed as critical for Democrats if they are not to be engineered out of the running.

HR-1 has already been passed. Still in committee, S-1 could move to floor for debate and voting as soon as this spring. That will be the point at which Mr. Biden will realize that with the filibuster left in place this and other major programs such as immigration reform, gun control, and police reform will be dead on arrival. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will press to scuttle the filibuster.

Every thought piece on the subject warns that, if he filibuster is jettisoned, there will come a day — as soon as 2024 — when a Republican president backed by a Republican-controlled Senate will choose to reverse Biden’s programs. But the alternative is to sit idly in acceptance of effective Republican control of the Senate by filibuster and squander four more years in the gridlock that has been persuading Americans that democracy has reached the end of the road. McConnell’s tirade showed Democrats that he wll be impossible to deal with in any event, so what have they got to lose.

from seldom used to always

The filibuster was given birth by accident during the Jefferson administration. A rule for ending debate was dropped without realizing that there was nothing to stop a senator from prattling on forever. No one took advantage of that loophole until 1837 when Whig senators tried to block a Democratic bill to reverse a prior censure of President Andrew Jackson. Save for a resurgence in the second half of the 19th century during a bout of polarization, the tactic lay largely dormant until the mid-20th century when the filibuster was used heavily by Republicans, allied with Dixiecrats (Democrats from southern states in agreement), to block legislation favoring racial equality and civil rights

straight. Texas Republican Ted Cruz, in his attempt to defund Obamacare, made it to 21 hours in 2013, famously reading Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” to his daughters watching on C-Span.

But standing on the floor of the Senate and speaking for hours was thought to be a waste of time. Hence, the adoption decades ago of the silent filibuster which sufficed to induce surrender and leave a bill stillborn. It works like so: When the majority leader cannot get unanimous consent of all 100 senators to proceed to a vote on a bill, the leader files a “cloture” motion to end debate as if a debate is actually taking place. To beat this silent filibuster, the majority party must come up with 60 votes. Knowing that it cannot means the mere threat of filibuster is enough to send a bill to oblivion, a tactic that has come into habitual use to shut down the opposition party.

Chipping away at the filibuster began in 2013, when Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democratic majority voted to end its use against appointments of federal judges. In 2017 Mitch McConnell took it a step further, doing away with the filibuster’s use against appointments of Supreme Court justices as well, and in the Trump years has taken advantage of Reid’s initiative to stock the federal bench with close to 200 conservative judges.

obstacle course

Posing a threat to President Biden’s ambitious plans are two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are averse to ending the filibuster.

Manchin went on Fox News to make an extravagant pledge shortly after the election.

“I commit to all of your viewers and everyone else that’s watching. I want to allay those fears …when they talk about whether it be packing the courts, or ending the filibuster, I will not vote to do that”.

Why is a Democratic senator committing to Fox viewers, one might ask.

“My position on the filibuster has been steady my entire career”, said Sinema, whose entire career in the Senate spans two years. “I would always oppose efforts to eliminate the filibuster”, she told Oklahoma’s James Lankford, whose Senate office is next door to hers. “You know what, when I make a statement, I don’t move from that”. Never mind a poll that says 61% of Arizonans rank passing major bills more important than keeping the filibuster.

Last year, Manchin said,

“The minority should have input — that’s the whole purpose for the Senate. If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”

Sinema recently said,

“Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.”

Lofty principles, but that’s not what the filibuster does. There is no debate. Putting politics aside and reaching compromise has become inconceivable in today’s Senate. Writing new laws is discouraged in the first place, so easily can the filibuster bury them. Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid, writes in his book that the Senate has become a “kill switch” — the book’s title — that “shuts down our democratic process”. Klein writes, “The modern Senate has become something the founders never intended: a body where only a supermajority can govern”.

A number of proposals have been offered to reform the filibuster rather than eliminate it in the hopes of pacifying Manchin and Sistema. They involve a tangle of rule changes only a parliamentarian could love, but all of which call for the restoration of the “talking filibuster” so that, as Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) put it, senators can no longer “phone it in.”

Democrats have a very ambitious plan of reform after years of stagnation with no time to waste. Pundit Ezra Klein says, “What Democrats need to do is simple: Just help people, and do it fast”.

Mar 21 2021 | Posted in Reform | Read More »

How the Filibuster Threatens Biden’s Presidency

Joe Biden is steeped in Senate doctrine, having served there for 36 years. He has stressed “unity” as his goal for America and yearns to forge bipartisan agreement across the aisle. He does not want to do
He spoke for 21 hours trying
to defund Obamacare.
away with the filibuster. “It has been used as often to protect rights I care about as the other way around”, he told Ezra Klein of Vox during the campaign.

But Biden is not entirely opposed to its discard. “I think it’s going to depend on how obstreperous they become”, he added, meaning
Republicans. But now he is president, facing the all-too-familiar use of the filibuster to block so much of what the party in power wants to do. As a clear signal of the obduracy of the loyal opposition to any gesture of unity, Biden just saw not a single Republican vote for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act. It could only be passed by “reconciliation”, a Senate rule that exempts budget-affecting bills from filibustering, enabling passage by the simple majority of 51 votes rather than the filibuster’s hurdle of 60.

hidden agenda

There is much pretense about the virtues of the filibuster. In its defense, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell maintains that, “The Senate exists to require deliberation and cooperation”, even quoting James Madison who said the Senate’s job was to provide a “complicated check” against “improper acts of legislation”.

But there is no provision for the filibuster in the Constitution, which says Madison thought these objectives could be accomplished without one. When majority leader in 2017, McConnell seemed less interested in the filibuster’s “deliberation and cooperation”; he went the shortcut route of 51-vote reconciliation in the Republicans’ failed attempt to repeal Obamacare, and again that year to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That time it was the Democratic who would not contribute a single vote.

McConnell speaks fondly of the filibuster for one reason: It transfers the power of the Senate from the majority to his minority, equipping him to block all legislation of the president and the party that the voters thought they had elected, surely not what the founders had in mind. Nor does the filibuster serve to block “improper” bills; not in today’s Senate. Rather, it discourages writing bills in the first place, so easily can the filibuster bury them. Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid, writes in his book that the Senate has become a “kill switch” — the book’s title — that “shuts down our democratic process”. Klein writes, “The modern Senate has become something the founders never intended: a body where only a supermajority can govern” .

decision time

“This is an outrageous one-party takeover of the way we conduct elections in this country and there will be overwhelming total Republican opposition…It’s another bill that would pass without a single Republican vote”.

Democrats should reject any accusations of shoddy ethics should they ditch the filibuster. Technically, they may be in the majority only by the single vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris stepping in to break 50-50 ties. But the 50 Democratic senators will first have spoken for a whopping majority of voters over those claimed by Republicans. The population of the states the 50 Democratic senators represent exceed the populations backing the Republican senators by close to 40 million people. We ran the data through a spreadsheet and came up with that fact, so far undiscovered in the media.

from seldom used to always

The filibuster was given birth by accident during the Jefferson administration. A rule for ending debate was dropped without realizing that there was nothing to stop a senator from prattling on forever. No one put that to the test until 1837 when Whig senators tried to block a Democratic bill to reverse a prior censure of President Andrew Jackson. Save for a resurgence in the second half of the 19th century during a bout of polarization, the tactic lay largely dormant until the mid-20th century when the filibuster was used heavily by Republicans, allied with Dixiecrats (Democrats from southern states in agreement), to block legislation favoring racial equality and civil rights. It is only recently that the threat of filibuster was enough to send bills to oblivion.

Any senator can invoke the filibuster procedure, provided 41 or more senators vote to sustain it. Thus invoked, a supermajority of 60 votes is needed to pass a bill rather than the simple majority of 51.

Originally, the filibuster meant standing in the well of the Senate and speaking hour after hour about anything and everything to delay vote on a bill. Avowed segregationist Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, set the record in 1957 by speaking for more than 24 hours straight. Texas Republican Ted Cruz, in his attempt to defund Obamacare, made it to 21 hours in 2013, famously reading Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” to his daughters watching on C-Span.

But standing on the floor of the Senate and speaking for hours was thought to be a waste of time. Hence only the threat of filibuster sufficing to induce surrender and leave a bill stillborn in the Senate dustbin.

With the Senate the graveyard where legislation goes to die, the role of Congress has been appropriated by the executive branch. Presidents have used executive orders to accomplish what Congress has abdicated — an average of 260 by the last four presidents, with Joe Biden signing more in his first 30 days than any of them. The federal agencies then turn those orders into regulatory rules, effectively creating laws that congressional legislation should have created. It is an expansion of executive power that greatly bothers recent conservative appointees to the Supreme Court.

obstacle course

Posing a threat to President Biden’s ambitious plans are two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are averse to ending the filibuster.

Manchin went on Fox News to make an extravagant pledge shortly after the election.

“I commit to all of your viewers and everyone else that’s watching. I want to allay those fears …when they talk about whether it be packing the courts, or ending the filibuster, I will not vote to do that”.

Why is a Democratic senator committing to Fox viewers, one might ask.

Last year, Manchin said,

“The minority should have input — that’s the whole purpose for the Senate. If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”

Sinema recently said,

“Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.”

Lofty principles, but that’s not what the filibuster does. There is no debate. Putting politics aside and reaching compromise has become inconceivable in today’s Senate. The senators’ fond remembrance of yesteryear’s ideals puts Biden and fellow Democrats in a bind. And Norman Ornstein, a congressional savant at the American Enterprise Institute, warns against putting too much pressure on Manchin, a conservative Democrat from a Republican state who just might turn his coat from blue to red, giving Republicans a 51-49 advantage in the Senate, and returning McConnell to power as Majority Leader.

The deal that might be offered to the pair is likely to restore the requirement that filibusters must be real, not just a threat but “more painful” as Manchin puts it, restoring a “talking filibuster” with the minority required to stand and express their views without a break for 24-hour days. As before, it would take a vote of 60 senators to end the one-sided debate — a move called “cloture” — and bring a bill to a vote. But what would that solve? Where would 10 Republicans be found to end a filibuster and allow 51-to-50 passage of a Democratic bill?

Democrats have a long list of popular reforms, certain of which will continue to sink the country into ever-staggering deeper debt. Republicans made their own contribution to the nation’s debt with tax cuts and $3.5 trillion Covid relief and will now use the filibuster to make certain Democrats take it no further than what they see as the horrific $1.9 trillion payday for its putting taxpayers on the hook for defaulted pension funds and $1,400 checks to retirees unaffected by the pandemic and already receiving Social Security checks.

So which should it be? Mitt Romney, arguing against extinction of the filibuster in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, called it, “the last procedural hurdle to one-party government”. Nevertheless, Jamele Bouie at The New York Times contends that, “The public business must, in some way or other, go forward”. And Ezra Klein concluded in a recent editorial, “What Democrats need to do is simple: Just help people, and do it fast”.

Mar 15 2021 | Posted in Reform | Read More »

Why Do We Let the Big Lie of a Stolen Election Stand?

To examine the “facts and causes” of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a commission like that which investigated the 9/11 attacks. House members on the left and right have already drawn up separate bills prescribing who would choose commission members. Skeptics wonder how non-partisan members can possibly be found in today’s polarized climate.

There is already disagreement. Democrats want to stack the deck with seven of their own on the commission against four Republicans, with only the Democrats granted subpoena power. “Partisan by design” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, correctly. If the Democrats’ design were to go forward, the commission’s findings would be written off as rigged.

Republicans want to restrict the inquiry to just the events of January 6th. Democrats want to probe domestic extremism at large. In turn, Republicans will insist on the right to investigate left-wing violent groups. Missing from either draft is a provision requiring that none of the commission panelists be current politicians, that all should be several years removed from government to maximally purge today’s toxic partisanship. Imagine a commission disrupted by gaslighters like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley.

barking up the wrong tree

Learning what went wrong on that January day — the dysfunction in the security services that caused the Capitol to be poorly defended, the threat posed by white supremacist terror groups, their planning and coordination in the days leading up to the assault — all is of fundamental importance. But much is already known. After all, the insurrection was televised, its slogans and banners for all to see. In our selfie age the rioters filmed their own attack, handing the FBI footage to identify perpetrators and evidence to open some 400 cases against them. Congress is already conducting its own hearings. There are already recommendations, even.

That means there will be heavy redundancy in the proceedings as a commission trudges on for months. The public has seen it all and will not tune in. The really crucial job for which a commission is needed goes ignored and undone: dismantling “the Big Lie” believed by millions that the election was stolen.

first, review the run-up

In “Popular Delusions and the Madness of Trump”, we made clear that Donald Trump alone created the lie. Others hooked a ride — Rudy Giuliani expecting $20,000-a-day fees, Sidney Powell seeking fame, Mike Lindell to sell pillows, Bill Barr to keep his seat of power — but the originator and promoter of the plot was entirely Trump.

For months before the election he laid the groundwork. “The only way we can lose…is if cheating goes on”, he had said. Mailed-in ballots would be rife with fraud. “Millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries”. Counting of mailed-in ballots, foreseen as mostly used by the more pandemic risk-averse Democrats, would only begin on Election Day in most states. That meant that Trump would lead on election night from in-person voting by Republicans, and Biden would gain in the days thereafter as mailed ballots were counted.

That eventuality, called “blue drift”, was explained in the mainstream media but not by Fox hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and the right wing commentators. They would use the phenomenon to support Trump’s claim of fraud as Biden’s votes rolled in. That Biden’s votes mysteriously came later would be the crux of Trump voters’ belief of a stolen election perfectly stated by one Ashley Klein, a Minnesota horse trainer interviewed by The New York Times who couldn’t believe what was happening.

“All of the sudden, just out of nowhere, all these states started going for Biden when Trump had been ahead for hours and hours and hours…I just kind of feel like there was something fishy”.

Trump had begun insisting as far back as July that we “must know Election results on the night of the Election” when he would be in the lead, “not days, months, or even years later!” In the early hours of the next day as the mailed-ballot count for Biden grew, Trump rhetorically asked his followers, “Did I predict this?”. They had been primed to believe him.

“Frankly, we did win this election…This is a major fraud on our nation…We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

That day he tweeted, “STOP THE COUNT!. The mailed ballots, for their being counted after election night, became illegal votes. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win”, Mr. Trump said from the White House briefing room two days after the election. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us, if you count the votes that came in late”.

The election was “rigged” in many tweets such as “We won’t let a RIGGED ELECTION steal our Country!” until the operative adjective became “stolen”, his disciples brandishing “Stop the Steal” placards. With no evidence, he tweeted it was the “MOST CORRUPT ELECTION IN U.S. HISTORY”. He needed no evidence. His people believed whatever he said.

the grand delusion

In a December Fox News poll, 68% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. Among Trump voters, 77% thought he actually won. So did 26% of independents and even 10% of Democrats. That hasn’t changed since. In an early February Quinnipiac poll, 76% of Republicans believed there was “widespread fraud in the 2020 election”. In late February, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll has 73% of Trump voters thinking that Biden was not legitimately elected.

The Trump campaign’s battalions of lawyers and allies filed 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts of states the president lost seeking to overturn election results only to compile a stunning number of losses. Argued before judges that included 39 appointed by Trump, all save one case failed. In the single victory involving few ballots a Pennsylvania judge disallowed “curing” information missing after the fact. (“Big legal win in Pennsylvania!”, Trump tweeted). Cases were dismissed for a number of reasons but the prevailing theme was that the lawyers had gone to court without evidence to support their complaints. Where was proof of thousands of people “double voting” by assuming other identities, ballots cast in the name of dead people, undocumented immigrants allowed to vote?

“It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, about the court cases. She couldn’t be more wrong. The Trump base famously listens only to sources that tell them what they want to hear. Trump had for all his four years told them the media was “the enemy of the people” who dispense only “fake news”. From the election to the insurrection, they were hearing or reading a steady barrage of lies from him.

It’s a sure thing that this overwhelming refutation of Trump’s claims in courts was not pointed out to Fox News watchers, nor by Newsmax, nor by AON, nor by way-right “fact-based, unbiased” Epoch Times. When Fox became hesitant in claiming a stolen election, these other outlets went further in spreading the Big Lie in hopes of taking viewers from Fox.

Nor were the courtroom losses the daily topic of conversation on talk radio. Trump loyalists were hearing from Mark Levin — his 11 million listeners —that stealing elections “is becoming the norm for the Democrat Party”. Bill Cunningham, a syndicated host broadcasting from Cincinnati told his audience he would “never surrender…when hundreds of thousands have voted illegally”. On his syndicated show, Dan Bongino, said Democrats “rigged the rules to make sure that any potential outcome would go their way”.

So it’s not unreasoned to ask whether the Trump faithful had ever even heard of Trump’s total defeat at court and, if so, do they think the courts are rigged, too?

the commission that’s needed

Belief in the Big Lie that the election was stolen is the state of mind that Trump has imprinted on a huge percentage of the American electorate, as well as the corollary that the elective process is corrupt and can no longer be trusted.

Ms Pelosi’s and fellow members of Congress’s lives were at risk on January 6th. Perhaps that explains why the emphasis is a commission that looks into the attack on the Capitol and the insurrectionist groups. But if she hopes to shore up America’s democracy and in the process keep the Democratic majority in the House, and if Democrats dare hope to edge into the majority in the Senate, they had best wake up to the urgent need for a differently focused commission, a well-promoted and televised 9/11-style commission that investigates and exposes the right wing’s lie about who won the election. Without this, the public’s belief in a stolen election will not abate and ongoing elections, beginning with 2022, will be met with the same claims of fraud because nothing was done to shred conspiracy myths about the 2020 election root and branch.

The premise for such a commission is rather simple: Do you claim there was election fraud? OK, prove it.

One by one, in case after case, summoned by subpoena with enforced contempt penalties for non-compliance, have those lawyers bring forth the evidence they presented to judges in those 62 cases. In plain language, lay out those complaints before America. In each instance where an impropriety or irregularity is claimed, where someone has sworn out an affidavit reporting someone seen doing something questionable, force that forward. Let’s all see how serious that was, if true. Keep score for that state whether that legally questionable act was a misdemeanor or a felony or nothing, whether it and other claims would have affected who was elected president.

Republicans would on the spot. How could they argue against such a commission? How could they pretend a commission isn’t precisely what they want, their opportunity to prove their case of fraud and “irregularities” that cost Donald Trump his reelection.

Without this commission we are seeing Republicans wholly embrace the notion that the election was stolen. Just over a month

President-in-Waiting

Trump does not view himself as the former president or ex-president. He is the “45th president”, as he is referred to 44 times in the brief he filed with the Senate in advance of the impeachment trial, and in all communications by him and his staff. Thus does the Maharajah of Mar-a-Lago insist he is still the president.

since his removal from office, CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, invited the twice-impeached former president, the man who committed the most treasonous act conceivable under this Constitution for his attempt to overthrow an election in order to stay in power, to speak at their convention, where he claimed continued ownership of the Party and hinted at a possible run in 2024 with, “We won the election twice, think about it, twice…I may even decide to beat them for a third time”. That CPAC scheduled nine panels on how fraud stole the election should tell somnolent Democrats that will be the Republican platform. A failure to establish a commission to very publicly lay bare the Big Lie allows the lie to live on.

Mar 7 2021 | Posted in Takeover | Read More »

A Fascist Symbol Boldly Displayed at Conservative Convention

Over the past year we began filling a file of incidents, statements, policies in the Trump ambit that had seeming fascist overtones. Charlottesville, of course, Trump’s signaling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”, and so on. Thinking it too inconclusive, we never wrote it up.

But the president’s campaign of lies to claim a fraudulent election culminating with his
Variations on the odal rune symbol
and World War II units that wore them..

telling the faithful to come to Washington, to “Be there, will be wild” on January 6th, and the elements attracted by the president’s call, made it clear that Trump was turning a corner for the Republican Party, and he continues to lead it.

On the last day of February the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a must-attend for all on the right to show their bona fides, held its annual get together in Orlando, its usual locus, D.C., having become to fraught with risk (see above). It was discovered that the design of the stage was in the same pattern as an “odal rune” (photo next page). Derived from languages such as Old High German and relating to nobility, inheritance, and landowning from a time when the Teutonic landscape was filled with hundreds of principalities and their serfs, the symbol would much later be worn as insignia by certain German military units in World War II as shown in the illustration. In its various mutations, the rune has been adopted in the U.S. by white supremacist groups as seen in their tattoos, war paint, and clothing patches. When the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi organizations in the country, decided to do some rebranding, they replaced the swastika with the odal rune to make white supremacy more “mainstream”.

The rune has a distinctive shape. To arrive at that shape for the CPAC stage by chance is risible. It was clearly deliberate, and points up that Trump’s riding roughshod over laws, denigrating the courts, attempting to overthrow the government, and so on, have inspired in the extremist wings of the Republican Party a yearning for authoritarianism — and they decided to semaphore that to the white supremacists and white nationalist groups. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have identified these hate groups as the “most persistent and lethal” domestic terror threat facing the United States.

Protesting angrily, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp tweeted “Stage design conspiracies
Difficult to make out in the dark photo, but the feet or wings at left and right rear of the stage match the officer’s insignia below.

are outrageous and slanderous” and “Cancel culture extremists must address anti-Semitism within their own ranks”, a whatabout deviation that hadn’t been anyone’s subject.

Charles Johnson of the 20-year-old commentary and humor site Little Green Footballs, tweeted back that Schlapp’s reaction made it more likely that the rune’s use was deliberate: “Who the hell learns they’re using a Nazi symbol inadvertently…makes excuses and pretends it’s a conspiracy to persecute them”.

Design firm Design Foundry said it “intended to provide the best use of space, given the constraints of the ballroom and social distancing requirements”, and a design of runways that require people to pass one another in close proximity would surely be better that a full and roomy stage.

Mar 3 2021 | Posted in Politics | Read More »