Is he more deadly to democracy than Trump?
In my latest interview on Background Briefing with Ian Masters, we discuss Ron DeSantis.
Here’s the link: https://www.backgroundbriefing.org/2023/05/28/background-briefing-may-28-2023/
This post first appeared on Common Dreams on May 25, 2023.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) wants to be the 47th president of the United States. He’s running on his record as governor, which an overwhelming majority of Americans should find alarming. Armed with a Republican legislature that rubber stamps his every whim, DeSantis’s most celebrated accomplishments defied the will of most Americans:
And most recently, a vivid illustration of his dangerous view of the First Amendment emerged – once again defying the wishes of most Americans.
DeSantis: Leading the Way to Illiteracy
On March 25, 2022, DeSantis signed the “K-12” bill – one of three state laws aimed, at least in part, at reading or instructional materials in schools. It’s an integral element of his ongoing attack on public education.
The law bans the use of any instructional materials in classrooms, in school libraries, or on school reading lists that are “not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented, or is inappropriate for the grade level and age group for which the material is used.”
A key provision allows any parent or resident to lodge a complaint for anything that violates the law’s amorphous standard. So far, among the books removed from circulation in one of Florida’s school districts are Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Now another victim is focusing attention on DeSantis’s unpopular crusade.
DeSantis: Pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator
At President Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Amanda Gorman delivered The Hill We Climb – a 700-word poem – to great acclaim. Then she published it as a book, but a parental complaint under DeSantis’s new K-12 law led a Miami-Dade county school committee to limit student access to it.
The parent was Daily Salinas, who has attended Proud Boys rallies and posted anti-Semitic tropes on social media (deleted after the Miami Herald revealed her identity on May 22 and the group Miami Against Fascism highlighted them in an expose’ on Twitter the next day).
Salinas completed the complaint form in her own hand, and the form itself merits scrutiny as a marvel of ignorance and illiteracy:
TITLE OF THE MATERIAL IN QUESTION: “The Hill We Climb”
AUTHOR-PUBLISHER: “Oprah Winfrey”
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ABOUT THIS MEDIA: Box checked: Remove the challenged material from the total environment
That’s the sum total of what it took to start the DeSantis process that culminated in removing Gorman’s acclaimed book from a public elementary school library. To summarize:
“We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what ‘just is’
Isn’t always justice.
“And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”
Salinas also complained about four other books. Only one – Countries in the News: Cuba – remained available for all students in the school. The others, including The Hill We Climb and The ABC’s of Black History (which was written for ages five and up), are now kept in the middle school section of the media center where elementary school students won’t see them.
Salinas, along with one of the many school committees that now live in fear of a governor known for political retaliation, accomplished all of that destruction in just a week.
How did she miss Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech?
Gorman said that she wrote the poem “so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment. Ever since, I’ve received countless letters and videos from children inspired by The Hill We Climb to write their own poems.” She added, “A school book ban is any action taken against a book that leaves access to a book restricted or diminished.”
DeSantis: Conning the Public
DeSantis asserts that criticisms of his assault on the First Amendment are a “book ban’ hoax. “Hoax” has a familiar ring. I wonder where he heard it.
“Exposing the ‘book ban’ hoax is important because it reveals that some are attempting to use our schools for indoctrination,” he said, claiming that “inappropriate materials have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries….”
Snuck?
As a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, DeSantis knows that he’s running a con. He’s exploiting and amplifying culture war issues to win Trump’s MAGA crowd. To borrow Amanda Gorman’s phrase, DeSantis has put Florida in another “historical moment.” Now he wants the entire country to join him there.
But Gorman’s poem is a message of hope, as its concluding lines demonstrate:
“The new dawn blooms as we free it,
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Watch the video of Gorman delivering her message on Inauguration Day. Then imagine a country where just one person of marginal literacy can fill out a form that will prevent your child from reading it.
That’s only one scene in Ron DeSantis’s vision for America.
Chaos surrounds the U.S. debt ceiling; scandals surround the Thomases, and big questions surround the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming decisions.
Click here for my May 17, 2023 interview on Radio Parallax.
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This post first appeared at Common Dreams on May 19, 2023.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) wants special counsel John Durham to testify in his “weaponization” hearings. Created as part of a dark deal that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made with far-right Republican extremists to secure his speakership, Jordan’s new subcommittee claims to be investigating “the politicization of the FBI and the Department of Justice” against Republicans.
So far, Jordan’s subcommittee has found nothing. Durham didn’t find anything either, but he spun his report with useful GOP soundbites that are sufficient to achieve Republican objectives:
Muddy the scene. Arouse the mob. And accuse adversaries of your own nefarious deeds. Then exploit the resulting confusion and chaos.
In fact, John Durham is now a case study in the GOP’s weaponization of the Justice Department.
Trump Mastered “Weaponization”
Any genuine “weaponization” probe would have started with former President Donald Trump and his attorney general, William Barr.
Trump had found his Roy Cohn.
“Weaponization” Rises to a New Level
In March 2019, Barr had been on the job for only two months when Mueller gave him – but not the public – his 448-page report. It proved that:
Mueller secured convictions against Trump’s top campaign advisers, and he expressly refused to exonerate Trump personally. But notwithstanding powerful evidence proving Trump’s obstruction, Mueller believed that he could not indict a sitting president.
Immediately, Barr issued a deceptive “summary” of Mueller’s report that kneecapped the actual findings. Relying on Barr’s summary, Trump then tweeted one of the more than 30,000 lies spewed during his presidency:
“No Collusion. No Obstruction. Complete and Total EXONERATION!”
Barr’s summary drew an immediate, albeit private, rebuke from Mueller himself because it created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.” Barr wasn’t confused. He knew exactly what he was doing. And no one could challenge Trump’s or Barr’s lies because Barr didn’t release Mueller’s report to the public for another three weeks.
A year later, a federal judge blasted Barr’s pre-release “distortions” and “lack of candor.” The court questioned “whether Attorney General Barr’s intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller Report — a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds” with it. Barr made “a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings… to the contrary.”
After-the-fact judicial condemnation didn’t matter to Barr. He had weaponized Trump’s false mantra that the FBI’s Russia investigation had been a “hoax” and that Mueller had “exonerated” him.
Durham Became Barr’s Henchman
Barr didn’t stop at confusing the public about Mueller’s damning conclusions. He appointed federal prosecutor John Durham to search for evidence supporting Trump’s key talking point: The FBI was out to get him and had no basis for starting the Russia investigation.
Barr took a personal interest in the assignment. In the fall of 2019, he and Durham traveled to Italy and asked officials for evidence that might discredit the Justice Department’s Trump-Russia investigation. Italian officials had nothing to help them, but they did offer a tip: Trump was engaged in suspicious financial activity.
Uh-oh. The Italian tip required a criminal investigation. But rather than assign the matter to another prosecutor, Barr added it to Durham’s plate. Notably, Durham’s final report doesn’t mention the tip or what became of it.
Meanwhile, Durham’s search for FBI abuses or institutional animus toward Trump reached a dead end. So he changed course and tried to blame the Clinton campaign for promoting the suspicious Russia links surrounding Trump.
Durham’s revised mission failed too. His final report acknowledges that, after Wikileaks published hacked Democratic emails, the FBI opened its investigation based on information from an Australian diplomat. The diplomat said that a Trump campaign aide told him that Russia had damaging material on Clinton. At that point, even Durham admits, there was “no question that the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” the Trump-Russia connection.
But Durham believes that the FBI should have started with a “preliminary investigation” before moving to a “full investigation.” That’s not exactly the blockbuster that Trump and his allies had wanted him to find.
Durham Leaves a Legacy of Professional Disgrace
Durham’s final report is an effort to justify the time (four years) and money (more than $6.5 million) wasted on his probe.
Durham charged no high-level FBI or intelligence official with a crime. He has only three prosecutions to show for his pursuit of the Trump/Barr agenda.
Several attorneys on Durham’s team tried unsuccessfully to protect him from his misguided deference to Trump and Barr. His deputy, as well as a prosecutor, resigned in protest.
But as Durham lost trials and the respect of colleagues, he won a new friend:
“While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work,” the Times wrote. “They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together….”
Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who drafted the special counsel regulations that should have governed Barr’s and Durham’s conduct, observed:
“The special counsel is supposed to be someone who cannot be reasonably accused of laundering an attorney general’s dirty work… Indeed, no one involved in developing these regulations thought that a prosecutor who has regular Scotch-sipping sessions with the attorney general would ever be remotely fit for the job.”
Durham’s report doesn’t undermine any of Mueller’s conclusions. Nor does it conflict with DOJ Inspector General Horowitz’s conclusion that Trump was not the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.
Rehashing criticisms of certain investigative procedures that the Justice Department and FBI Director Christopher Wray corrected years ago, the report “does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies that the [Justice] Department and the FBI now have in place to ensure proper conduct and accountability in how counterintelligence activities are carried out.” The report’s only substantive recommendation is that the FBI create a new position to help ensure the integrity of politically sensitive investigations.
But none of these facts will prevent Durham’s report from becoming a worthy addition to Trump’s rhetorical library of lies. And when Durham appears before Jordan’s subcommittee, watch Republicans lift phrases from the report, ignore context, and weaponize it.
On second thought, don’t watch any of it.
This post first appeared at Common Dreams on May 12, 2023.
If you vote for a Republican, you’re selecting someone who – once elected – is unlikely to support your views on the issues that matter to you most. Instead, here’s what you’re choosing:
Guns
The vast majority of Americans favor simple and effective gun control measures. They want:
But elected Republicans oppose all of those measures.
Women’s Rights
The vast majority of Americans want to preserve a woman’s right to control her own body.
But elected Republicans unite to enact legislation that outlaws abortion altogether – even for rape, incest, or the health of the mother – or that moves the period of any permissible abortion ever closer to the date of conception and before a woman even knows she’s pregnant.
The Debt Ceiling
Americans want a functional government that doesn’t face a financial crisis every time Republicans decide to hold the nation hostage to their unpopular demands. When Donald Trump was president, neither party in Congress created a debt-limit crisis.
But with President Joe Biden in the White House, elected Republicans have:
Cult of Trump
Most Americans want honest, courageous, and hard-working leaders with personal integrity.
But elected Republicans refuse to condemn their leading candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination, notwithstanding:
Democracy
Most Americans want the United States to remain a democracy. Our forebears fought and died in wars to secure and defend it. In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, congressional Republicans blamed Trump for the January 6 riot. They described it as a heinous and unprecedented attack on the U.S. government.
But now elected Republicans pretend that it never happened, calling the insurrectionists “tourists” engaged in “peaceful protest.”
Voting Rights
Most Americans want to make voting easier. After all, it is the bedrock of any democracy.
But elected Republicans pursue voter suppression with a vengeance – literally. Committed to the opposite of democracy, they enact legislation that makes casting a ballot more difficult for those who are likely to vote against them.
Government Priorities
Most Americans support higher taxes on the rich.
But elected Republicans oppose taxes on the wealthiest Americans, while urging reductions in government spending that target, among other vulnerable groups, veterans, Social Security recipients, Medicare beneficiaries, poor mothers, and infants.
Climate
Most Americans want the government to take seriously the existential threat of climate change.
But elected Republicans ignore or ridicule it, while promoting activities that contribute to the destruction of the planet.
Culture Wars
Most Americans despise the polarization that has infected the body politic.
But elected Republicans use culture wars – including the rejection of science – to promote illiteracy and ignorance across a range of issues, deepening the schisms among us. In addition to the topics listed above, here are two more examples:
Your Vote Should Matter
Stated simply, if you vote for a Republican, you’re probably voting against your personal preferences for the nation.
You’re voting against democracy, which is supposed to honor voters’ desires.
You’re voting for those who claim to care what you think, but use such rhetoric to seduce you.
You’re voting for people whose sole agenda is the acquisition and retention of power. Other than Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) desire to retain his slim, four-person GOP majority in the House of Representatives, there’s no reason for him or any true party leader to tolerate the continuing presence of Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who was a disgrace long before his recent federal indictment for fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and false statements.
Eventually, the actions of elected Republicans betray them – and most of their supporters. But until it’s personal and GOP voters actually feel the impact, they won’t care.
Because in America today, that’s what it means to be a Republican voter.
The Belly of the Beast 