The Ginni Thomas Affair

 

The fact that Ginni Thomas, wife ("best friend") of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas , is a certifiable, Christofascist crank is a well- known fact.  That she actively sought the intervention of the Malignant Loser's Chief of Staff to overturn the legitimate 2020 election is now added to that fact base.

Here's part of Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's blockbuster reporting in the Washington Post: 

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

"Best friend" is how the Thomases refer to each other (not "Long Dong Silver"?). 

The text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The content of messages between Thomas and Meadows — 21 sent by her, eight by him – has not previously been reported. They were reviewed by The Post and CBS News and then confirmed by five people who have seen the committee’s documents.

The fact that Ginni Thomas' damning texts would be included in the documents requested by the House Select Committee would obviously be known to Justice Thomas.  He acted accordingly:

 

The Supreme Court voted 8-1 that Trump couldn't block the Jan 6th committee from getting docs.

The one vote against was Clarence Thomas.

Mark Meadows turned over texts from Thomas's wife Ginni Thomas urging efforts to overturn the election.

What else was afraid would come out?

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) March 24, 2022

 

Unethical: Participating in the decision on a case that would lead to the disclosure of your spouse's inflammatory and incriminating texts.

Unethical and stupid: Not just participating but dissenting 8-1

— NOHat (@Popehat) March 24, 2022

 

The Woodward/Costa piece is a fascinating look into the ways key players in the fever swamps surrounding the re-election campaign of the Malignant Loser were operating to (to coin a phrase) steal the election -- specifically the question of Ginni Thomas' influence over her husband's decisions on the Court pertaining to the Malignant Loser.  It's almost certain more will come out on the "best friends" corrupt use of their positions.

BONUS:  She left no doubt she's a raving loon --

 

Just the Wife of a supreme court justice musing to trumps chief of staff about sending Biden and his family to Gitmo pic.twitter.com/ewkUJaaiDp

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) March 25, 2022

 

(Image:  Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas)

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds. 

The New York Effing Times, where there is a cognitive dissonance between the editorial page and the news pages, had an editorial on the existential threat to our democracy posed by the Trump Republican Party:

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.  [snip]

This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations. [snip]

Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.

The Times being The Times, no ink or electrons are expended examining the blame the media in general or The Times in particular shoulders for the current state of affairs.  Until and unless they come to grips with that and make changes, they're part of the problem, not the solution (not holding our breath).

As The Times editorial notes, the reckoning is underway in the form of the January 6 committee's upcoming must- see- tv:

They’ve interviewed more than 300 witnesses, collected tens of thousands of documents and traveled around the country to talk to election officials who were pressured by Donald Trump.

Now, after six months of intense work, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is preparing to go public.

In the coming months, members of the panel will start to reveal their findings against the backdrop of the former president and his allies’ persistent efforts to whitewash the riots and reject suggestions that he helped instigate them. The committee also faces the burden of trying to persuade the American public that their conclusions are fact-based and credible.

But the nine lawmakers — seven Democrats and two Republicans — are united in their commitment to tell the full story of Jan. 6, and they are planning televised hearings and reports that will bring their findings out into the open.

Their goal is not only to show the severity of the riot, but also to make a clear connection between the attack and Trump’s brazen pressure on the states and Congress to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate election as president.

Let's also get those criminal referrals ready to go, please. 

On the COVID-19 front, keep your eye on the hospitalization numbers:

As the United States continues to see a huge spike in coronavirus cases driven by the omicron variant, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, says the better way to track the variant’s impact is to look at growing hospitalizations.

The United States was averaging more than 400,000 new cases each day as of Monday, double the previous week’s rate, according to Washington Post data, and is expected to soon hit as many as 1 million cases per day. Fauci, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, said “the real bottom line that you want to be concerned about is: Are we getting protected by the vaccines from severe disease leading to hospitalization?”

Hospitalizations are up 31 percent from last week, and deaths increased by 37 percent, with about 1,500 Americans dying of covid-19 each day. Experts have warned that this surge will be driven by the unvaccinated, as those who are vaccinated and boosted would have considerable protection from serious illness.

Fauci warned of the broader dangers on CNN: “Even if the rate of hospitalization is lower with omicron than it is with delta, there is still the danger that you will have a surging of hospitalizations that might stress the health-care system.”

Where is the problem most acute?  Why, mostly in Republican- governed anti-vax, anti-mask states, of course:

Lower vaccination rates and fewer mask and vaccine mandates have created a much different environment for the omicron variant to spread in the South, leaving experts unsure whether outbreaks will end up deadlier than in the North.

Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi are among the states experiencing the sharpest increases in covid-19 hospitalizations since Christmas, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. And the situation may only get worse, as initial outbreaks in metropolitan areas spread to more poorly vaccinated rural regions.

The unvaccinated are causing great harm to the health care system in this country, as they play a major role in perpetuating the pandemic.  At this point, we're losing interest in what harm they're doing to themselves and their families.

What happens when a cosseted pro football player is humored and enabled rather than helped? This:

Antonio Brown chucked his shoulder pads, hurled his black undershirt into the stands and walked off the MetLife Stadium field shirtless, exhorting the crowd as he jogged across the end zone and into the tunnel, disappearing from view. As his team lined up for third and seven, Brown torched what remained of his career. The spectacle rested upon a fundamental fact that should embarrass so many in the NFL: Brown orchestrated an exit of his own volition.

Coach Bruce Arians announced afterward that Brown no longer plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which Brown had already declared with his behavior. That Brown, 33, could choose the time and manner of his departure, no matter how bizarre, should shame the Buccaneers and many others across the NFL. All the times Brown should have received serious help or significant punishment over the past three years, he received more chances to play football.

Each time one team grew tired of his antics, another clamored to sign him. When two women accused Brown of sexual assault and the NFL suspended him for half a season for a separate battery charge involving a moving company employee, Tom Brady leaped to rehabilitate him. When he used a fake vaccination card this year, the NFL slapped his wrist with a three-game suspension and Arians allowed competitive desperation to trump his zero-tolerance vow about Brown.

Well, any league that will tolerate the on-going shame of having Li'l Danny Snyder as an owner is pretty much capable of tolerating anything.

"Now, for something completely different,"* please head over to Infidel 753's link round-up to interesting posts he curated from around the Internet.  There's plenty to interest even the most jaded reader.  Also check out his ten most important stories of 2021 -- hard to argue with his choices!

* Yes, that was a Monty Python reference.

Official Planned DOJ Takeover, Overturning Georgia Election

By now, you may have seen the report, first published in the New York Times, that a Justice Department official conspired with one- term loser Donald "Impeached Twice" Trump to overturn the election results in Georgia.  Here are some key grafs:

The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

Fortunately, the threat of mass resignation foiled Clark's plan. 

Here's how it was conceived:

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.

Emboldened, Clark planned to have Trump remove Rosen and be named the new Acting Attorney General in order to carry out the voiding of the election results in Georgia.  When Rosen got wind of the maneuver, he demanded a meeting with Trump and Clark the evening of January 5:

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

The quintessential Trumpist weasel, Clark is now trying to deny what multiple sources have reported about his seditious actions, hiding behind legalisms about needing "sworn testimony" and attorney- client privilege.  If he's not fired immediately charged, there's no "justice."

(Image:  Trump, Clark and Rosen/ Getty Images)

A Sampler Of Comments On The Sedition Caucus (From Fellow Republicans)

(Spoiler alert -- hold your applause!)

“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world. Has ambition so eclipsed principle?” -- Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).

__________

"Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government." -- Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NB).

__________

“They are sealing themselves inside the very tomb that Donald Trump built for them. When they commit this act on Wednesday, where do they go from there? . . . These people are wholly owned subsidiaries of Trump Inc. They are functionaries like the men and women who manage his properties and mop his bathrooms and clean his hotels.” -- former Republican National Committee Chairman and Never Trumper Michael Steele.

__________

"... Missouri’s freshman Republican senator, Josh Hawley, announced that on Wednesday, 14 days before Biden will be inaugurated, he will challenge the validity of Biden’s election. Hawley’s conscience regarding electoral proprieties compels him to stroke this erogenous zone of the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominating electorate.

Hawley’s stance quickly elicited panicky emulation from Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, another 2024 aspirant. Cruz led 10 other senators and senators-elect in a statement that presents their pandering to what terrifies them (their Trumpkin voters) as a judicious determination to assess the “unprecedented allegations” of voting improprieties, “allegations” exceeding “any in our lifetimes.” [snip]

Be that as it may, on Wednesday, the members of the Hawley-Cruz cohort will violate the oath of office in which they swore to defend the Constitution from enemies “foreign and domestic.” They are its most dangerous domestic enemies." -- George Will, paleo- conservative columnist.

It should be noted that those few elected Republicans publicly refusing to join the sedition caucus do so with a wink and a nod to lies about voting irregularities and/ or saying "our hands are tied" while proclaiming their support for the "policies" of Mango Mussolini (see Sens. Portman (R-OH), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Tom Cotton (R-AR), to name a few weasels).  Most are too frightened to push back forcefully against the outrageous lies being peddled by Mango Mussolini about election fraud -- by simply stating that Biden/Harris won the election fair and square.  Cotton and Portman, for example, want a sham commission to "study" the 2020 election that's already been studied, certified and litigated up the kazoo. So, they don't even merit a golf clap for doing what their oath of office compels them to do, notwithstanding what simple moral judgement should guide them to do.

(Cartoon:  Robert Ariail, gocomics.com)

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The bombshell reporting on corrupt, dangerous dimwit Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump's call to Georgia officials to pressure them to fraudulently change the results of the election continues to develop. There are some recent updates and reactions here and here.

Meanwhile, all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense -- Democrats and Republicans, including Trump's two SecDefs -- penned an unprecedented op/ed in the Washington Post that was clearly meant as a warning to Mango Mussolini and his sycophants in the Pentagon to stop obstructing the transition to the Biden Administration, saying in part:

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.  [snip]

Given these factors, particularly at a time when U.S. forces are engaged in active operations around the world, it is all the more imperative that the transition at the Defense Department be carried out fully, cooperatively and transparently. Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates — political appointees, officers and civil servants — are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.

We call upon them, in the strongest terms, to do as so many generations of Americans have done before them. This final action is in keeping with the highest traditions and professionalism of the U.S. armed forces, and the history of democratic transition in our great country.  (our emphasis)

David Atkins writes about the sedition caucus putsch cosplay planned for January 6:

The GOP senators carrying Trump’s water here are using as justification the fact that millions of Americans falsely believe there was election fraud. But the GOP base believes it precisely because the President and his allies in conservative infotainment media have been promoting the lies.

It’s a perfect self-referential paradox of propaganda. Lie to millions of Americans in order to justify destroying democracy, then use the fact that millions of Americans believed your lies as the reason to try to do so, regardless of the validity of the underlying claims.

Technically, the Senators supporting this effort are claiming they are not trying to overturn the election. They say they only want a “10-day audit” of the election results. The problem, of course, is that the results have been checked and double-checked repeatedly. An “audit” (which would not rise even to the level of a full recount) would accomplish nothing that has not already been done. The voting machines have been double- and triple-checked. Mail ballot envelope signatures have been checked and double-checked–and in any case, there is no longer any way to match envelopes to ballots. The Senators involved do know all of this. They just don’t care.

The immediate goal, of course, is to placate Trump and Trump’s base. Some of the Senators supporting this move are presidential hopefuls for 2024. The secondary goal is to blow enough smoke over the issue to justify new voter suppression schemes in future elections, in order to resolve the “doubts about our elections” that they themselves cynically promulgated.  (our emphasis)

In a similar vein, Tom Sullivan writes about Republicans' authoritarian urge to rule:

As others observed before me, Republicans do not want to govern, they want to rule. The first rule once was, heads they win, tails you lose. Now it is heads they win, tails “Nice constitutional republic ya got there….”

“So what’s a plutocrat to do?” asked Paul Krugman at a time before openly rejecting democracy was de rigueur for Republicans. Since they could not come straight out and say only the wealthy should have the franchise, they resort to propaganda about voter fraud, etc. More democracy, better democracy is the last thing they want.

The latest wrinkle in our Trumpist saga is the effort among elected Republicans to raise objections to the decision of voters on January 6 when the U.S House and Senate meet to accept electoral vote certifications from the states. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas proposes a special commission charged with yet another examination of electoral college votes from “disputed states.” [snip]

Anti-democrats do not want a more perfect democratic republic. They want the answer they want. They want to rule or else. Like a former client, like Donald Trump, he of the bottomless cup of lawsuits, they will keep raising objections to the will of the people, they will wear down opponents until they get the answer they want. If they lose, they try to will get even, Donald Trump-style. No presidential commission will remediate that.  (our emphasis)

 

Put succinctly --

"A cult is attempting a coup in America."

Is that the most accurate way to frame what's going on right now? Well, here's how I opened RS today... https://t.co/YpBXIw5tEn

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 3, 2021

 

Former Republican strategist turned Democrat Steve Schmidt has a tweet thread on the sedition caucus, which reads in part:

They are fighting to maintain the power of a defeated President against the sovereign will of the American people as lawfully exercised under the Constitution of the United States. They are fighting to establish a tyranny. They are deliberately poisoning 7/

Faith and Belief in American democracy. Democratic Republic’s cannot survive such a collapse. The system is rooted in the willingness of one side to cede power to another at the will of the people. There are no other systems of government except for this type that are free. 8/

The legitimacy of that system is being strangled by Trumps lies and the lies of his movement. That movement is an autocratic one with fascistic markers. It is hostile to the American Constitution, the rule of law and the highest ideas and ideals of American liberty. 9/

It's a coup that will fail, and those who enabled it will have forever marked themselves as the unAmerican betrayers of our democracy that they are.  We must dedicate ourselves to seeing that they all pay a serious price for their seditious actions.

Finally, a reminder to please go check out Infidel753's link round- up for links to interesting posts from the past week from around the Internet. You can thank us later (or not)!

Hawley's Charade And Trump's Plans (UPDATED)

 

A new contestant for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024 seems to be Tailgunner Ted Cruz imitator slippery young prick Sen. Josh "Haw Haw" Hawley, the ambitious and demagogic junior senator from Mizzou. Hawley's well-publicized authoritarian stunt of objecting to the electoral vote certification will get him raves from a rapidly fading Dear Leader and support from the MAGA cult. As an elitist Stanford and Yale educated lawyer, he knows that his grandstanding move to disenfranchise 81 million Biden voters will fail bigly, but the important thing to him is not preserving our democratic republic, but the show he's putting on for a delusional Trumpworld.

The problem for Hawley is that Dear Leader will play coy about his own plans for 2024 for a long time,  in order to maintain his power and options for himself and his family, assuming they can stay out of prison. That will freeze Republicans like Hawley, who won't dare cross the Very Stable Genius. In addition, Trump's actions over the past several years point to this: he sees himself in terms of royalty, and his corrupt family as a dynasty. If he decides not to run in 2024, which is fairly likely prison or no prison, he's been grooming his complicit daughter and object of his lust Ivanka for greater things. Witness her photo ops on so many of daddy's foreign trips to build a veneer of "foreign policy" cred, and her risible empowerment scams to garner her press domestically. If daddy so commands his captive party, she will succeed him.

So while Hawley plays the short game of worshiping at Dear Leader 's ample posterior to get support and contributions from MAGA morons, he may find himself out of the Presidential picture in 2024 as his cult leader envisions the establishment of a vengeful Trump dynasty, loyal sycophants like Hawley be damned.

BONUS: Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse calls out "dangerous ploy" by "ambitious politicians" trying to tap into Dear Leader's cult.

BONUS II:  Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) cuts to the chase --

On Josh Hawley/Electoral College, @ChrisMurphyCT: "Josh Hawley and anyone who supports his effort are engaged in the attempted overthrow of democracy. There is no evidence that there was any fraud." #AMRstaff

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) December 30, 2020

 

UPDATE:  But of course --

Hawley has launched a small dollar fundraising push around his move. He sent out an email this afternoon asking donors to “stand” with him. Contributions go to Hawley’s campaign account

— Alex Isenstadt (@politicoalex) December 31, 2020

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds. Today, we're going a little heavy on the subversion of American democracy by the rotted out Republican Party.

Here's a part of what the Washington Post editorial board had to say about the banana Republican seditionists who chose Sore Loser Mango Mussolini over American democracy:

HOUSE REPUBLICANS have faced what amounts to a choice between standing for or against democracy: whether to sign on to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s delusional lawsuit to overturn the presidential election. A large majority of them failed the test. More House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), on Friday signed an amicus brief supporting Mr. Paxton, just hours before the Supreme Court unceremoniously rejected the suit. This is a disheartening signal about what these members of Congress might do on Jan. 6, when at least some Republicans probably will object to the counting of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral votes.

Mr. McCarthy and the other extremists and toadies who have signed their names to President Trump’s antidemocratic plot may think their complicity is costless, because the Supreme Court was bound to reject the Paxton lawsuit, as it did on Friday, and there are enough Democrats on Capitol Hill to foil any GOP mischief during the electoral vote counting. They are wrong. Their recklessness raises the once-unthinkable possibility that a Congress controlled by one party might one day flip a presidential election to its candidate in defiance of the voters’ will, citing claims of mass fraud just as bogus as the ones Republicans have hyped up this year.

Driving home the point, Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti have a good read on how these lickspittles put their interests and those of Sore Loser Mango Mussolini above the country's interests:

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November. [snip]

...[I]t meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.

We keep referencing this stain on our democracy and those 18 Republican State Attorneys General and 126 House Republicans who signed onto that "delusional lawsuit," because they mustn't be allowed to escape infamy and the consequences of their choosing to disenfranchise millions of voters and overturn a fair and free election.  You can toss a pebble in any direction and hit outrage being expressed.  Now outrage needs to be turned into action (for starters, see Rep. Bill Pascrell D-NJ).

The Chair of the Texas Republican Party and MAGA mega- loon Allen West suggested Texas might want to secede following the smack down of Sore Loser Mango Mussolini in the Republican Supreme Court.  Mikado had a response from "the Biden White House" that nails it (partial quote):

We have received your petition to secede from the United States, and have forwarded it to Congress who will act on it with their usual speed.

Any Texas citizen holding a US passport is required to surrender it immediately. Entry into the US will require a valid Texas passport. Anyone staying longer than two weeks will have to obtain a visa. Any Texas citizen (those with birth certificates issued from Texas or currently holding a Texas driver's license unless they can show a non-Texas birth certificate) in the United States have 72 hours to leave or be deported with a permanent ban on returning to the United States. This includes former Representatives and Senators from the former State of Texas.

Funding for highways, transportation, bridges, infrastructure, education and medical facilities will cease immediately. Your representatives to the US Congress are ordered to leave Washington DC immediately. [snip]

All payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Disability to Texas citizens are halted with immediate effect. Recipients will have to reapply, and Congress will decide if foreigners are allowed to receive payments from the United States government. Any funds coming from the United States federal government will be halted immediately.

Effective immediately, the independent country of Texas will no longer receive protection from the United States military. All military bases in Texas will be closed, and personnel relocated to bases in the United States, except for a contingency left to guard the Texas-US border. Effective immediately, the United States Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer operate in Texas waters, aside from actions specified by International Maritime law and custom. U.S. Customs officials will be removed from all border crossing stations immediately. We suggest you form your own navy and immigration department immediately to protect your borders against foreign invaders, drug smugglers, terrorists and illegal aliens.

It's all just too good, so check the full "letter" out.  Of course, throwing tantrums and making idle threats is just jollying up the perpetually aggrieved base and also Sore Loser Mango Mussolini's modus operandi.

Finally, we highly recommend a visit to Infidel 753's link round- up for the most comprehensive array of links to posts of interest from around the Internet.  If you feel like you want an emotional release, read his loving essay on his late mother (because it's not all politics there or here).

Sedition Then, Sedition Now, Sedition Forever

E.J. Dionne, Jr., recalls the temperamental and radical ancestors of the current crop of anti- democracy Republican seditionists by way of explaining why they're even worse than their forbears:

At least the Confederate secessionists acknowledged that Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election.

The 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican House members who asked the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the 2020 election had more impudence even than the Civil War seditionists in whose steps they followed.

Here is a translation of what they were telling a majority of the nation’s electorate and voters in states representing 62 of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes:

“We don’t like the president and vice president you chose so we simply won’t accept the result of a free election. We’ll deploy lies and phony statistics to get the United States Supreme Court to impose our will on the rest of the country. The heck with democracy. But we’ll continue to enjoy the Social Security checks, the farm subsidies and all the other money that states that voted for Biden send our way.” [snip]

Those who promote this nonsense should put up or shut up. If those House Republicans think our nation’s democratic process is illegitimate, they can demonstrate their sincerity by resigning — especially the 19 from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia who joined a lawsuit that would have annulled the votes of their states.

Yeah, he knows that won't happen.  Rep. Bill Pascrell's proposal to punish the 126 Republican Congressrats should, but most likely won't, happen either.  So, these cosplaying seditionists know they can get away with degrading our democracy just so they can prove their Trumpian bona fides to the Dear Leader and his dimwitted, frothing cult.  Good tradeoff!

But anti- democratic impulses combined with overwhelming bad faith isn't just a recent element of Republican DNA.  Right- wingers also tried to deny John F. Kennedy his electoral victory in 1960. Here's a snippet from Ronald Shafer's article about that attempted hijacking:

It was a bitter, close election, and there were furious allegations of fraud.

After Democrat John F. Kennedy barely beat Republican Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 election, a coalition of opponents plotted to deny him the presidency in the electoral college. Most were White, conservative electors from the south who opposed the young Massachusetts senator’s liberal policies, especially his support for civil rights for Black Americans.

If these electors had succeeded, segregationist Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia would have been elected president. His vice president would have been Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Both men had nothing to do with the idea.

Of course, the difference in 1960 was that neither Richard Nixon nor Sens. Byrd or Goldwater would go along with the hijacking.  That Nixon -- Nixon! --would be something of a democracy defender in his day compared to Mango Mussolini and his rat infested party of 2020 is a stark illustration as to how far this collection of charlatans has stooped in the intervening years.

It won't be over for these anti- democracy rats after Monday's electoral college vote cementing Joe Biden's victory.  It won't be over for them after he and Kamala Harris are sworn in on January 20, 2021.  It won't be over for them as long as there's a Democrat in a position to assume and wield power.  It's sedition then, sedition now, sedition forever.