The conservative blueprint envisions ‘a biblically based’ definition of marriage and wants to protect adoption agencies that only work with Christians
Rebecca McCrayWed 24 Jul 2024 07.00 EDTShare
In 2021, Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram decided to take the next step toward growing their family and applied to foster a child. After identifying a three-year-old in Florida who they hoped to ultimately adopt, the Rutan-Rams turned back to their home state of Tennessee to start training to become foster parents.
But their plans quickly fell apart when the Christian state-funded foster care placement agency informed them by email that they “only provide adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. The Rutan-Rams, who are Jewish, were out of luck.
“There’s already emotions playing into wanting to be a parent, and then to have us attacked personally just made it that much harder,” Liz Rutan-Ram told the Guardian.
The Rutan-Rams sued the Tennessee department of children’s services, arguing that a state law permitting private agencies to refuse to work with prospective parents on religious grounds violates the Tennessee constitution’s equal protection and religious freedom guarantees. The case will soon go to trial.
The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.
Though Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, his campaign’s own 16-page policy agenda echoes many of its goals, and his ties to the plan’s architects are well-established. In Milwaukee last week, the Heritage Foundation’s role in the Republican national convention was on full display, both on welcome banners at the airport and in the millions of dollars invested in the event itself. Following Trump’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said he was “good friends” with JD Vance, and effusively declared him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future”. Vance has previously said there were “some good ideas” in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.
The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.
To the Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a queer parent, the image of family portrayed by the policy agenda is blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
“The definition of family according to Project 2025 leaves a lot of folk out,” Washington-Leapheart told the Guardian. “This blueprint really delegitimizes the kinds of families that are day in and day out raising children, paying taxes, contributing meaningfully to society.”
The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.
Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
The Holston Home for Children in Tennessee, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Tyler worries that Project 2025’s deliberate erosion of the separation between church and state, a founding principle embedded in the first amendment to the US constitution, will get a helping hand from the US supreme court, which has handed a series of victories in recent years to Christian activists. She specifically mentioned the 2021 decision in Carson v Makin, which struck down a Maine law that banned the use of public funds for religious schools. It was “an earthquake of a decision that a lot of people didn’t really pay attention to that has really opened the door to government funding of religion”, said Tyler.
The threat of a theocracy doesn’t seem far-fetched to Washington-Leapheart.
“Project 2025 says that religion is a permanent institution that should influence American life,” said Washington-Leapheart. “That alone communicates the kind of arrogant way Christianity is situated as an inevitability. And it’s not. I say that as a Christian person who is firmly grounded in my faith. It is not an inevitable part of my identity, it is a choice I make every day.
and first I was gonna post Calvin and Hobbes, then I was going to post Fur Babies, then Heathcliff, each time talking myself out of posting in favor of continuing to read. I did that, right up until this toon, which I have been enjoying for around a year. It’s got a storyline, and many fun/funny side storylines, and it’s just enjoyable to me. Today’s also is politically oriented, so I decided to break from reading and post it. Then we can discuss, or you can ask me to not post anymore comics, and I will stop. (I won’t stop reading and enjoying it, though!)
A few headlines of interest here, with snippets and links.
I got a great giggle when I saw this story last night. Imagine Republicans telling other Republicans they’re being too racist…
https://apnews.com/article/trump-harris-attacks-johnson-hudson-76f8e90d24004e49449087787ac031a5
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump’s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.
At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for her role in Biden-Harris administration policies. (snip-more)
=====
Monthly headlines are turning into daily headlines:
Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever globally, beating a record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continue to feel the heat, according to the European climate change service.
Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit).
Climate scientists say it’s plausible that this is the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day throughout that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture. (snip-more)
=====
Cuteness overload!
The second baby of a tree-dwelling kangaroo made its public debut this week in New York, poking its pink head head out of its mom’s furry white pouch. (snip-click the Video hyperlink just above the title)
Heather Cox Richardson’s history Substack is just a treasure of information and connections between history and current times. Here’s a copy today, because there are fine talking points in favor of the Dem candidate for US President.
JUL 24, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Today more than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S. relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national security.”
Those signing the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
In a New York Times op-ed today, former secretary of state Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances,” “new solutions.”
Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all, she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”
Today, Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week. The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.
She began by thanking Biden and touting his record, then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”
While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care, affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every senior can retire with dignity.”
“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”
In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.” “They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going back.”
“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks.
MAGA Republican representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) has taken a different angle: he introduced an impeachment resolution against Harris, while others are demanding that the House should investigate Harris and demand the Cabinet remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment. The Republican National Committee has decided to make fun of Harris’s laugh.
But concern in the Trump camp showed today when Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared with reporters a “confidential memorandum” trying to get ahead of polls he says will show Harris leading Trump. He said he expects to see a “Harris Honeymoon” that will end quickly.
Trump has continued to post angrily on his social media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home. His lack of visibility highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside. CNN’s Kate Sullivan noted today, for example, that “Trump said he’d consider Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary, but now says he doesn’t know who said that.”
As Tim Alberta noted Sunday in The Atlantic, the Trump campaign tapped J.D. Vance in an attempt to harden the Republican base, only to find now that he cannot bring to the ticket any of the new supporters they suddenly need.
According to Harry Enten of CNN, Vance is the first vice presidential pick since 1980 who has entered the race with a negative favorability rating: in his case, –6 points. Since 2000, the usual average is +19 points. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by +6 points in an election Republican governor Mike DeWine won by +25 points. Vance “was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “The J.D. Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who specializes in focus groups, noted that swing voters groups “simply do not like” Vance. “Both his flip flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position are what breaks through,” she wrote.
The 2024 election is not consuming all of the political oxygen, even in this astonishing week. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that eight large companies must turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices.
“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
The eight companies are: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.
In the House, Republicans have been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the 2025 U.S. budget, laced as they are with culture-wars poison pills the extremists demand. Today House members debated the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the Environment which, among other things, bans the use of funds “to promote or advance critical race theory” or to require Covid-19 masks or vaccine mandates.
According to the European climate service Copernicus, last Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history. The MAGA Republicans’ appropriations bill for Interior and the Environment calls for more oil drilling, fewer regulations on pollutants, no new regulations on vehicles, rejecting Biden’s climate change executive orders, and reducing the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 20%.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/video/jd-vance-data-ebof-digvid-enten
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/gop-race-comments-harris-00170735
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/23/ftc-launches-probe-into-surveillance-pricing.html
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-biden-trump-election-07-23-24
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/
X:
SarahLongwell25/status/1815724143939084597
MacFarlaneNews/status/1815841590964892159
RNCResearch/status/1815818534200697037
in History | July 23rd, 2024
We discussed this a bit here a few weeks ago, about Sinclair sending talking points to all their stations, so that local reporters had to report that as real news. Here’s some more, from yesterday, that I didn’t get to until late.
JUDD LEGUM AND REBECCA CROSBY JUL 23, 2024
Eugene Ramirez, the lead anchor of Sinclair’s national evening news broadcast, resigned in January over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air, three sources told Popular Information. The sources — one current and two former Sinclair employees — spoke to Popular Information on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about the potential professional repercussions of speaking out about Sinclair’s editorial processes. Ramirez’s show, which continues to air with a new host, appears on at least 70 of the hundreds of local television affiliates owned by Sinclair.
One of the primary issues that prompted Ramirez’s resignation was the requirement to include at least three stories produced by Sinclair’s Rapid Response Team (RRT) on a nightly basis. Sinclair’s RRT is a group of four reporters who work out of Sinclair’s national headquarters in Maryland. The group’s output is prodigious. A Popular Information review found that between January 1 and July 4 this year, the RRT published at least 775 stories.
Most of the RRT’s stories are short and aggregate information from other sources. Sinclair publicly claims that the RRT and other components of its national newsgathering operation, known as The National Desk, provide a “comprehensive, commentary-free look of the most impactful news of the day.” But a look at the RRT’s stories over the course of the year shows that the group frequently produces pieces that have more in common with right-wing agitprop than journalism.
Often, the articles summarize press releases or social media posts from Republican politicians or other right-wing groups. Recent headlines include:
53 parent groups confront Biden education secretary over new Title IX rules: ‘Disgraceful’
GOP senator says Fetterman proves how ‘radical’ Dems have become on Israel: ‘Nuts’
Trump PAC launches new ad hitting Democrats on border: ‘Joe Biden does nothing’
Biden mocked by US Oil and Gas Association for touting gas price drops: ‘You’re welcome’
Elon Musk rips VP Harris for ‘lying’ about Trump’s abortion stance
Through July 4, 2024, the RRT has produced 147 stories this year that portray Democrats in a negative light and just 7 stories that portray Democrats positively. Over that same time period, the RRT has produced 57 stories that portray Republicans positively and 22 that portray Republicans negatively.
Many of the pieces produced by the RRT that do not explicitly mention Republicans or Democrats (or do so only in passing) still promote a right-wing agenda, highlighting stories that portray immigrants or LGBTQ people negatively.
These are the stories that Ramirez was required to present each night. Sinclair’s headquarters sent a list of four stories produced by the RRT to the team that produced the evening news broadcast. At least three had to be read on air. One current employee at Sinclair’s headquarters described the RRT team as “the right-wing propaganda arm of the national digital operation.”
The RRT is run by Julian Baron, a 2021 graduate of Syracuse University. Despite having little professional experience (and none outside of Sinclair), Baron’s title is “Chief of Staff for News.” In that role, Baron serves as the right-hand man for Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s Senior Vice President for News.
According to a fourth source, who currently works at Sinclair’s headquarters, Baron and the RRT are also responsible for creating the “Question of the Day,” which around 200 Sinclair affiliates are required to include in their broadcasts. (The questions appear on Sinclair’s website without a byline.) Recent questions include:
Are you concerned violent criminals are crossing the border?
Do you think former House Speaker Pelosi deserves some of the blame for Jan. 6 riot?
Do you think some of President Biden’s family members broke the law in their business dealings?
Do you think the Veterans Administration should be involved in health care coverage for illegal immigrants?
Do you think the FBI is protecting the Biden family?
The reporters on the RRT team who work under Baron are Jackson Walker, Ray Lewis, and Kristina Watrobski. Walker was hired by Sinclair less than two months after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2023. Walker spent his college years writing for The College Fix, a national right-wing student publication. On X, Walker frequently highlights when his stories are circulated by Libs of TikTok, an anti-LGBTQ activist. Walker retweeted a post by Libs of TikTok that highlighted one of his articles and described the LGBTQ community as a “child mutilation cult.” Lewis is a 2023 graduate of Rutgers University. Prior to joining Sinclair, he was an intern at the New York Post, a right-wing tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. Watrobski is a 2020 graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh and previously worked for a Sinclair affiliate in Albany.
Baron, according to three sources, has the authority to assign and publish RRT articles without any editorial oversight. In addition to appearing on the evening news broadcasts, RRT’s articles are automatically syndicated to hundreds of local news outlets, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS. According to two of the sources who spoke to Popular Information, this frequently caused rancor among the news staff of Sinclair affiliates, who were concerned about the posting of biased or inaccurate content on their websites.
Sinclair defended Baron’s work but acknowledged that local affiliates have objected to stories produced by the RRT on numerous occasions. “The Rapid Response Team has published several thousand stories,” Sinclair spokesperson Jessica Bellucci told Popular Information. “On perhaps one or two dozen occasions we have gotten questions from a station about those stories and had a healthy dialogue – sometimes leading to the stories being changed.”
Despite confirming the conflict between the RRT and local affiliates — and other aspects of Popular Information’s reporting — Bellucci also told Popular Information that “the statements made in your email are flatly untrue.” She suggested that Popular Information may be “misinforming us about having sources” and was only pursuing the story “in pursuit of your sixteenth minute of internet acclaim.” Bellucci accused Popular Information of “attacking our reporters for doing their job, reporting on stories that may be unpopular.”
The only specific statement Bellucci disputed was the characterization that Baron and the RRT work “outside of the normal editorial process.” Bellucci did not dispute that the Baron and the RRT team operate independently. Asked to clarify what other aspects of Popular Information’s reporting, if any, are “untrue,” Bellucci did not respond.
According to the sources who discussed Sinclair’s editorial process on the condition of anonymity, reading stories produced by the RRT was not the only issue that made Ramirez’s role in the evening broadcast untenable. Sinclair’s national leadership frequently booked guests from far-right groups, including Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. When Ramirez challenged the dubious claims made by these guests, he was admonished and instructed not to interrupt them. Sinclair’s leadership, including Livingston, emphasized that many of Sinclair’s affiliates were not in big cities, and the content of the broadcast had to reflect the sensitivities of those viewers. Representatives of progressive groups were almost never booked as guests.
The evening broadcast was also required to include “packages” produced by Sinclair’s Washington, D.C., bureau. Some of these packages had a strong right-wing bias or made unsubstantiated claims. Of particular concern were packages by Sinclair National Correspondent Kayla Gaskins. For example, after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, Gaskins produced a piece questioning whether the bank was “too ‘woke’ to function.”
This package featured an interview with Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, who said the bank’s downfall was the result of “[n]ot hiring the brightest people but hiring people based on what they look like or where they fall on the social register” and were too busy “playing the woke game” to head off problems. Marcus presented no evidence to support his claims.
The piece also featured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Congressman James Comer (R-KY) making similarly unsubstantiated claims, clipped from Fox News, blaming the bank’s collapse on “woke” politics or DEI initiatives. After featuring on-camera comments by Marcus, DeSantis, and Comer, Gaskin notes in the last five seconds of the piece that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blamed former President Donald Trump’s deregulatory policies.
Another piece by Gaskin in April 2023 falsely claimed that “children in Washington state will soon not need their parents’ permission to switch genders.” But legislation, which became law in July 2023, is limited to homeless youth, and “doesn’t change the state’s medical consent laws.” In Washington state, “those under age 18 don’t generally have the right to make medical decisions without parental consent.”
The law deals exclusively with parental notification when a young person arrives at a homeless shelter. Previously, the shelter was generally required to notify parents within 72 hours. Under the new law, when a young person is seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, the shelter has the option of instead contacting “the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, which could then attempt to reunify the family if feasible.” The purpose of the law is to encourage vulnerable homeless youth, who may be estranged from their parents, to obtain shelter rather than living on the street.
Gaskin’s piece uncritically quotes Landon Starbuck, president of the anti-LGBTQ group Freedom Forever, claiming the “state is stepping in and medically kidnapping kids from their parents.” This echoed a false claim, circulated by Donald Trump Jr. and others online, that the law allowed “the state to TAKE CHILDREN AWAY FROM PARENTS that do not consent to their child’s gender transition surgeries.”
(I always forget Truthout is still around, until I see a story they’ve published. Here’s this one.)
The far right Court handed a major win to corporate and right-wing interests in their “Chevron” ruling last month. By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT PublishedJuly 23, 2024
Sen. Elizabeth Warren questions former executives of failed banks during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill May 16, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
Agroup of senators led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has introduced a bill to combat the Supreme Court’s seismic pro-corporate decision last month to overturn a precedent known as Chevron deference that has enabled federal agencies to issue regulations for decades.
Ten senators joined Warren on Tuesday in introducing the bill that would codify the Chevron doctrine and reform regulatory processes to make them more transparent and streamlined.
For four decades, judges have cited Chevron deference in allowing agencies and their experts to interpret laws to make rules regarding a wide range of topics, including labor rights, environmental protections, public health, food safety, and more. Ensuring that Chevron, which has been cited in over 19,000 judicial opinions, is law would prevent what experts said will be years of corporations suing to overturn a wide swath of regulations that protect the public and cut into profits.
On top of codifying Chevron, the bill would create an office to give the public more participation in agencies’ rule proposals and mandate that agencies respond to public petitions on rules that garner at least 100,000 signatures. It would also create a time limit for regulatory review and expand the parameters that agencies must use in cost-benefit calculations for a rule to include less quantifiable characteristics like combating discrimination.
“Giant corporations are using far-right, unelected judges to hijack our government and undermine the will of Congress,” Warren said in a statement. “The Stop Corporate Capture Act will bring transparency and efficiency to the federal rulemaking process, and most importantly, will make sure corporate interest groups can’t substitute their preferences for the judgment of Congress and the expert agencies.”
The bill was originally introduced in 2021 by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington). Right-wing and corporate interests have worked for many years to overturn Chevron, including by lobbying conservative justices on the subject. The Supreme Court decision last month was a major win for these groups.
The bill has been cosponsored by prominent lawmakers like Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) as well as dozens of advocacy organizations and labor unions like the AFL-CIO and UAW. The groups, whose specializations range across a wide variety of topics, say that the Supreme Court decision severely tilts the scales of power toward corporations who can now essentially pollute, abuse consumers, and more, challenging regulations made to protect the public.
“In striking down Chevron, the Supreme Court continued the trend toward transforming unaccountable judges into politicians with robes — unelected legislators and policymakers,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), one of the bill’s sponsors. “Our measure is vital to preserving expert regulation and oversight, accountable to elected representatives, and preventing giant corporations and wealthy titans from exploiting power.”
The bill is just one of several measures Democrats have taken in recent weeks to combat a slew of extremist Supreme Court decisions. Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said that Democrats are preparing legislation to combat the Supreme Court’s extremist presidential immunity decision that would ensure that Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his role in stoking the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.
Other Democrats have taken even stronger moves to combat the unprecedented corruption on the Court. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) filed articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito earlier this month, saying that both of them have clearly been incentivized by special interests to issue rulings favoring conservatives and the far right.
The moment Joe Biden said that it was better for him, his family and his country that he does not run for another term was met in my heart with a bit of sadness, but unfortunately not a great deal of surprise. We all come to that moment when we must set down our sword, let another carry the load, and finally be at peace with our fight. So to that, I give a nod to a very human Joe Biden who I feel faced the slings and arrows the best he could and allowed the country to heal from the disaster of 4-years preceding his tenure.
Trump posted that he felt the Democrats owed him a great deal of money because he spent fortunes trashing the Biden name, the Biden presidency and the future of the presidency under Joe Biden. But, Joe stepped aside. Wasn’t that what you wanted, DonDon? Some would say you have a bit of a snowflake problem; I say you are a cryin’ bitch.
So, what has changed? Did the theft of state secrets suddenly now not happen? Did he now not steal from his own charity? Did he actually not defraud his “university” (?) students? Did he now not actually assault that woman, did he not actually cheat on his wife with a porn star as she was giving birth to his son, and did he not actually bribe that porn star to keep her silence? Did he not pump up a crowd to “go fight” for a lost election? Did he not conspire to defraud a state election? Did he now not meet in private with the Russian ambassador, kicking his own staff out of the room? Did he not so incompetently mishandle an international epidemic that we are still suffering the consequences? Did he not destroy nearly every career of every person who worked with and for him? Seriously! Where is the line? What does it take? Who has to die and what has to be destroyed before this man is seen as the con-man that he truly is?
about what was happening with the Dem presidential ticket prior to Sunday’s culmination. It hasn’t been easy for any of us to just pivot to our new candidate, though her wondrousness makes it easier. There are still feelings about it. I like how this writer termed it.
Joe Did What? Trafalgar Edition by Yastreblyansky
“No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”Read on Substack
Well, I guess this certainly does change everything, and that’s refreshing.
I’m going to stay angry for a long time at The Times and Politico and other big media and the “liberal” tech billionaires for the dishonest backdoor trick they pulled, when they couldn’t succeed in turning the public against Biden and shifted instead to convincing us that we had turned against Biden by ourselves, or rather that our neighbors had, through the bogus “age issue”, warning us not that Biden was a bad president, but that he’d lose because other people thought he was too old, and our punishment for supporting Biden would be another Trump term (on the basis of a polling model that has consistently failed by underestimating the Democratic vote for six years now). They recognized our deep fear of the consequences of another Trump term and exploited it, in a way that actually made Trump’s reelection more likely, using the debate disaster as evidence of a permanent degeneration (which it obviously wasn’t—Biden had never showed up in that condition before and never has since). It was irresponsible and disgusting.
I’m not too angry with the congressional party leaders, or the “centrist” representatives in their precarious suburban seats, or even the bedwetter commentariat. The fear is real, and it’s justified. What could be lost in another four years of Trumpery is almost incalculable; I’m thinking especially of the backsliding in the elimination of fossil fuels, but the “deconstruction of the administrative state” as prefigured in the Project 2025 document turns the entire civil service into an easily corrupted tool for tearing down regulations, and reduces the Justice Department into the president’s personal police agency. It really is the end of the republic, alongside plans for a federal ban on abortion, vigilante takeovers of school libraries, the insane powers for evil conceded to the presidency by the Supreme Court even as it strips the office of its power to do good. The thing is, fear is a lousy counselor, and their Fantasy Politics League plan to get rid of Biden by obliterating the primary results with some kind of pantomime competition, before or during the Democratic convention, as somebody leaked the plan to the abominable Mark Halperin (now working for Newsmax), was a terrible, senseless plan that would have flung us into even worse uncertainty than we already had. Don’t panic.
I’m certainly not angry at Biden for making the decision. Far from it! Remember that (as @nycsouthpaw just pointed out) there are two parts to what he did: stepping down from the campaign, and giving his endorsement to Vice President Harris. The first was the thing he was being pressured to do by the congressional party leadership, the timorous representatives from Nassau County and North Jersey and the Hudson Valley, the readers of Friedman and Brooks and Ezra Klein, and so on; the second was the thing those people absolutely didn’t intend for him to do, spoiling the open convention plan. He was not supposed to endorse Harris.
So it was one of those audacious, perfectly timed Biden moves that looks like a gaffe (the most famous example would be the one during his vice presidency that made marriage equality a federal reality) and changes the whole situation. Harris quickly announced her candidacy (to “earn and win” the nomination, she said, carefully), all the other conceivable candidates endorsed her too, and the campaign had raised $50 million from small donors ($100 million after 24 hours, suck on that, billionaires). Like one-eyed, one-armed Nelson at Trafalgar—I’m not kidding, folks!—the 81-year-old Biden had sacrificed his own (political) life, but had won the battle, for his legacy of a better, more free and equal America.
At least I hope so. A battle, of course, not the war. Anyway, it seems clear that Democrats are in a much better position than they were a couple of days ago, with a unity in the party we’ve seen nothing like in years, pro-Biden and anti-Biden voices embracing in the social media. Of 263 Democratic congressmembers and 23 governors, the Washington Post tally 24 hours after the announcements has 243 who have endorsed Harris and 43 who haven’t (non-endorsers include convicted felon Robert Menendez and the federally indicted Henry Cuellar, but the New York and New Jersey centrists I’ve been watching the most have endorsed, except for that freak Tom Suozzi, and so, I’m glad to report, has Speaker Emerita Pelosi). There are no alternative candidates except Marianne Williamson (old Joe Manchin sent out feelers, but was roundly rebuffed). As of this afternoon convention delegations from ten states—Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Alaska, and Wisconsin, plus Guam, had pledged support to Harris, for a total of 770 delegates out of the needed 1,986.
Meanwhile the Trump campaign, now led (with Biden’s withdrawal) by the oldest and unquestioned most cognitively disabled presidential candidate in history, is having to completely reconfigure its tactics. They are running ads complaining that Vice President Harris laughs too much and that she’s opposed to plastic drinking straws. Their vice presidential candidate “JD” Vance looks like a feeble impostor and baffles his audiences with his complaints.
Republicans have been trying to characterize the surge of support for Harris as some kind of coup attempt against Biden, as if Biden hadn’t sparked himself it with his bold move, and as undemocratic, which is somewhat ironic—
One of the most gratifying aspects of the excitement is the way the discussion of Biden’s age has given way to the discussion of his accomplishments from all quarters:
I’ll be getting to that, no doubt, but in the meantime check out this magisterial survey, “Why Biden Outclasses Every American President Since FDR,” by Nathan Newman.
Oh, and maybe one of his most surprising accomplishments will be the election of the nation’s first Black woman president.
(For me, that cleans the Anita Hill slate. It may not for her, and I wouldn’t blame her, but I’m over it now that this has happened. People learn, grow, and remediate wrongs over time. Well, good people do.)
Scottie's Playtime 