“McConnell set the precedent”: Democrats consider expanding Supreme Court if Trump replaces Ginsburg

A growing number of Democrats have called for the party to expand the Supreme Court if Senate Republicans push through President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before Election Day.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who blocked former President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee 11 months ahead of the 2016 election, announced on Friday that the Senate would vote on Trump’s nominee with less than 45 days to go before ballots are cast. The move would potentially create a 6-3 conservative majority on a court with lifetime appointments.

Should Republicans deny Ginsburg’s deathbed wish that she “not be replaced until a new president is installed,” some Democrats favor expanding the court — if they are able to win control of both the White House and the Senate in November.

“Mitch McConnell set the precedent. No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said on Friday. “If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court has had nine justices for more than 150 years, but that number was set by Congress following decades of fluctuation — not the Constitution. Democrats would first need to abolish the filibuster — once a taboo idea in party circles before it was endorsed by Obama earlier this year — in order to stifle Republican opposition.

Expanding the Supreme Court — an idea unsuccessfully pushed by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt more than 80 years earlier — gained steam after McConnell blocked Garland’s nomination for 11 months, prompting some Democrats to accuse him of “stealing” the seat.

“The Republicans packed the court after Scalia’s death when they denied President Obama his choice,” Brian Leiter, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told NPR. “Now they want to pack it further — and more consequentially, given that they would appoint a conservative to replace the liberal Ginsburg. If they pack the court, the Democrats would be crazy not to do their own court packing.”

McConnell’s announcement that he would hold a vote on Ginsburg’s replacement with only weeks to go before the election added fuel to the fire.

“If Sen. McConnell and @SenateGOP were to force through a nominee during the lame-duck session — before a new Senate and President can take office — then the incoming Senate should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court,” House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., tweeted. “Filling the SCOTUS vacancy during a lame-duck session, after the American people have voted for new leadership, is undemocratic and a clear violation of the public trust in elected officials. Congress would have to act and expanding the court would be the right place to start.”

But it is unclear whether Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would get behind such a plan after warning the party it would “live to rue that day.”

“I would not get into court packing,” Biden said during a primary debate last year. “We add three justices. Next time around, we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility the court has at all.”

Ginsburg herself pushed back on proposals to expand the court following the Garland controversy.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she told NPR last year. “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

“If anything would make the court look partisan,” she added, “it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'”

Though Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., did not directly address expanding the court, he warned that all bets were off if Republicans move forward with a nominee.

“Let me be clear: if Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year. Nothing is off the table,” he reportedly said on a call with Senate Democrats. “Everything Americans value is at stake.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also did not address expanding the court but left open the door to launching a new impeachment probe into Trump or Attorney General William Barr when pressed on the issue during an interview with ABC News.

“We have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now, but the fact is we have a big challenge in our country,” Pelosi said. “This president has threatened to not even accept the results of the election.”

Trump responded to the interview by claiming that Republicans would sweep the election if Democrats launched a new impeachment push.

“I think my numbers will go up. I think we’ll win the entire election. I think we will win back the House. I think we’re going to win the House. I really do. I think we’re going to win the House, anyway,” Trump told Fox News, arguing that he was “doing what constitutionally I have to do.”

Democrats have few options to obstruct the Senate’s Supreme Court process, and it is unclear how much support there is for expanding its ranks. But legal experts have proposed reforms which would blunt the impact of a highly partisan court. Some have suggested term limits for judges, as well as allowing federal appeals court judges to cycle through terms on the Supreme Court.

Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, and Ryan Doerfler, a law professor at the University of Chicago, authored a paper earlier this year proposing reforms to reduce the court’s power. Congress, they asserted, can require a supermajority for certain decisions and insulate certain laws from judicial review.

The reforms “would shift important policy disputes from the judicial arena to the small-D democratic one,” Doerfler told NPR, “thereby substantially reducing the importance of which party has effective control of the courts.”

Donald Trump may kill off democracy — but Mitch McConnell was the real murderer

Ever since Donald Trump’s oversized suit-clad carcass first befouled the Oval Office, there’s been talk in the media about if and when he would cause a constitutional crisis. The assumption underlying this discourse is that a constitutional crisis would hit us like a thunderbolt and we would collectively realize, all at once, that the very fate of our democracy was on the line. Instead, there’s been a series of mini-constitutional crises, from Trump stomping all over our laws against foreign emoluments (an old-timey phrase for being bribed by foreign leaders), obstructing justice during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s role in Russian election interference, blackmailing the Ukrainian president to extract dishonest election assistance and about a dozen other instances it would be tedious to list.

The result has been a steady erosion of the political norms and laws that protect our democracy, culminating in Trump’s last big push to steal or corrupt the 2020 presidential election.

If Trump successfully does that, it could well be the killing blow for our tattered democracy. But it’s important to understand that the credit for orchestrating the demise of our once-great nation should largely go to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a man possessed by the same lust for power and moral turpitude as Trump, but not hobbled by Trump’s stupidity or short-sightedness.

It was McConnell who recognized long ago that he could leverage the undemocratic power of the Senate as a weapon to invade and conquer the federal courts, and then use the latter to vacate any effort by the voters to exert real influence on how this country is governed. During Barack Obama’s presidency, McConnell deliberately slow-walked the confirmations of Obama’s nominations to the federal bench, leaving dozens of seats empty. When Trump was elected, McConnell hit the gas, packing the courts at record speed with an assembly line of nearly identical conserva-bots whose main attributes were youth and a willingness to forgo any intellectual rigor to rubber-stamp the right-wing agenda.

With the death of the Supreme Court’s liberal lion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell has a real opportunity to complete his mission of crushing democracy completely. Sure, there will still be elections and Democrats may win lots of them, especially this year with so many liberals fired up to throw Trump out of office. But with a possible 6-3 conservative majority on the court, McConnell knows that conservatives can nullify most efforts by those elected officials to pass progressive legislation. McConnell can even stop worrying about Chief Justice John Roberts, who occasionally has a bout of conscience and votes with the liberals to uphold precedent or follow constitutional law.

That commanding court majority won’t just serve as a firewall against new laws passed by a Democratic House and Senate. It will also give Republicans an opportunity to undo decades of progress in human rights. McConnell stole dozens of federal court appointments that legally belonged to Obama, but his crowning jewel, of course, was the theft of the seat left open when Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016. Using the laughably thin pretext that you shouldn’t seat a Supreme Court justice during an election year, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” were McConnell’s exact words. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Right now, Democrats are understandably up in arms about McConnell inventing this “not during an election year” rule and then dropping it the second he had a chance to seat a judge during not just an election year, but right in the thick of a presidential campaign.

But in truth, McConnell’s blatant hypocrisy was visible long before that, when he first filled the seat that he stole with Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch. The American people most certainly did not want Trump to fill that seat. The American people picked Barack Obama to fill that seat, when they elected him in 2012. They then chose Hillary Clinton, by a margin of nearly 3 million votes over Trump, to fill that seat.

Consider also that the American people picked Al Gore over George W. Bush in the 2000 election — by about 500,000 votes. If it were up to the American people, it’s arguable that seven of the nine current Supreme Court would be Democratic appointees.

We also know from polling that 62% of Americans believe that the person who fills Ginsburg’s seat should be the person who wins the election.

Trump is a notorious, pathological liar, but we can’t let that get in the way of seeing that McConnell is just as rotten, and much craftier about being evil, to boot. McConnell loves to resort to high-minded rhetoric about democracy, but he’s clearly laughing up his sleeve the entire time. If Americans had a real democracy, McConnell wouldn’t even hold his leadership position: A majority of Americans have been voting for Democrats in Senate races for years, but Republicans control the upper chamber of Congress because the Constitution gives disproportionate power to rural states with small but overwhelmingly conservative populations.

Even this unfair stranglehold on power isn’t enough for McConnell, however, which is why he has lied, cheated and stolen his way to control the federal judiciary. He intends to use that same judiciary to steal even more power for Republicans at the ballot box, because conservative judges are only too happy to hand down rulings on voting rights and gerrymandering that allow Republicans to further eviscerate Americans’ ability to choose their own leaders.

The ugly, hard truth is that the constitutional crisis has been going on for years, and the architect of our demise isn’t Donald Trump. He’s just a loudmouth bully Republicans can hide behind to get what they’ve always wanted — to hold onto power without being accountable to the voters.

Sure, this presidential election is important, but getting rid of Trump isn’t enough to save us. If Democrats can pull off this election, we will need drastic reform — starting with packing the courts and major voting-rights legislation — simply to begin to undo all the damage done by McConnell and his crew. Not because that’s good for the Democrats, although that would be a likely side effect. But because our democracy is taking its last breaths, and without major intervention it will be lost to us for good.

Trump tells “Fox & Friends” that Ginsburg’s dying wish may have been a “hoax” concocted by Democrats

President Donald Trump on Monday told “Fox & Friends” that he believed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wish may have been a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.

During the interview, the president was asked about Ginsburg saying that she did not want to be replaced until after the 2020 presidential election.

“I don’t know that she said that, or was that written out by Adam Schiff and Schumer and Pelosi,” the president said. “I would be more inclined to the second.”

As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, Ginsburg’s dying wish was “conveyed by the granddaughter.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

“Didn’t work hard enough”: Trump suggests Obama was too lazy to appoint judges on “Fox & Friends”

President Donald Trump suggested his predecessor was too lazy to fill judicial vacancies.

The president is rushing ahead with a nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court, although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for months ahead of the 2016 election.

“You know, we won the election, and elections have consequences,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.” “It’s called you pick people from the Supreme Court, and you pick judges, too. We have, we’re going to have almost 300, about 300 judges at the end of my first term, which will be a record.”

“It’s a record, and that happened because President Obama left us a tremendous number of justices and judges that he couldn’t, either couldn’t fill or didn’t work hard enough, or maybe he thought Hillary [Clinton] was going to win, and he didn’t push it,” he added.

Arizona Senate race may determine future of Supreme Court — and McSally is down in 12 straight polls

The Arizona Senate race took on a new significance after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, giving Democrats a glimmer of hope that they can block President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace her on the bench.

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., was appointed to the seat previously held by the late Sen. John McCain after losing her own Senate race to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., in 2018. Because McSally was appointed, her race is technically a special election, and the winner of the race could be sworn in as soon as results are certified. Such a scenario could take place as early as Nov. 30, according to the Associated Press.

Former astronaut Mark Kelly has led McSally in 12 straight polls, including all but one poll since July 1, according to FiveThirthyEight. Kelly could potentially give Democrats an additional vote in their fight to prevent Republicans from confirming Ginsburg’s replacement before Inauguration Day, depending on how the timing plays out.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who blocked former President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee 11 months ahead of the 2016 election, announced on Friday that the Senate would vote on Trump’s nominee despite Ginsburg’s dying wish that she “not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

Trump on Monday said that he would announce his nominee by Friday or Saturday in hopes she will be confirmed by the election. Trump said his shortlist is down to five people, though he is widely expected to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia who has drawn concerns among Democrats for her criticism of Roe v. Wade.

Though Republicans hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate, they have already seen some defections. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement that she opposes taking up the vacancy ahead of the election. However, the senator made no mention of whether she would oppose a confirmation during the lame-duck session following the election.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she opposes taking up the nomination ahead of the election, but would support whomever the winner of the election nominates.

A third defection would likely result in a tie that would be broken by Vice President Mike Pence, while a fourth defection would doom the nominee. If the fight stretches into November, Kelly could replace McSally before the vote.

“This U.S. Senate should vote on President Trump’s next nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court,” McSally tweeted on Friday, warning supporters that “if Mark Kelly comes out on top, HE could block President Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee from being confirmed.”

Kelly called for Ginsburg’s replacement to be decided by the winner of the election.

“When it comes to making a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, Washington shouldn’t rush that process for political purposes,” he said in a statement. “This is a decision that will impact Arizonans, especially with an upcoming case about health care and protections for pre-existing conditions. Arizonans will begin casting their ballots in a few weeks, and I believe the people elected to the presidency and Senate in November should fill this vacancy.”

Arizona law requires the election to be certified by Nov. 30, which could be delayed by up to three days if results are held up. Former Arizona Solicitor General Mary O’Grady told the AP that those deadlines are firm.

“I don’t see ambiguity here,” she said.

It is unclear whether the Senate or Republican Gov. Doug Ducey can do anything to delay the certification.

“We’d given this no thought prior to yesterday’s news,” Daniel Scarpinato, Ducey’s chief of staff, told The New York Times. “This all seemed theoretical. Now it is not. At first blush, it appears we have a limited role. But we are going to research the law, and we are going to follow it.”

Former Republican Party lawyer Timothy LaSota predicted their may be “some legal wrangling if it’s close.”

“But if it’s not close, there won’t be,” he added. “There has to be a close race that’s important enough for people to fight over.”

Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., leads McSally by an average of 6.7%, according to RealClearPolitics, and has outraised her by $46 million to $30 million.

“This race was already as high stakes as it could possibly get,” Democratic strategist Andy Barr told NBC News. “It was already going to potentially determine the majority of the Senate. It was already going to potentially determine the success or failure of the next Supreme Court nominee, and Joe Biden needs Mark Kelly to do well to help him win the state.”

The 2020 Emmys give us stars, just like us! At home, waiting for something good to happen

There is no way that the 72nd Emmys, aka the Pandemmys, aka the No People’s Choice Awards, could have been normal. The red carpet pageantry, the celebrity glad-handing, the candid moments caught on camera when the stars drop their practiced smiles or chose not to laugh at a joke that bombs — all of that got tossed out the window from the moment we all started social distancing for our lives.

What it could have been was bolder … if it weren’t brought to us by the notoriously staid Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. It is possible to engineer an entertaining awards telecast in the COVID-19 era – MTV’s recently aired Video Music Awards proved that, celebrating music by creating distant spaces for performers and making the outside world their stage.

A yen for high daring runs in music industry’s blood stream, and its videos are an extension of that. Television is by its very definition a medium whose most successful shows cast a broad net, and that’s why DJ D-Nice busted out tunes that are only slightly younger than “I Love Lucy” as the telecast cut to commercials.

Boldness was off the menu for the night, but awkwardness was very much the catch of the day. Technically, the ABC telecast was quite a production feat. Nominees streamed in live from 100 different feeds going all at once from locations around the globe.

The statues were delivered to the winners’ doorsteps by people wearing puffy suits designed to look like tuxedos crossed with hazmat gear, save for nominees in the Talk Variety and Reality Competition categories, who received mystery boxes that opened by remote, revealing a spring-loaded hand and an explosion of glitter.

Reality Competition winner RuPaul Charles, host of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” was delighted; the eponymous Emmy-winning host of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” appeared to be slightly bemused.

Jimmy Kimmel, returning for his third time to host the Emmys, mostly kept the night moving along; at least the telecast only went four minutes over its allotted three hours. To the credit of the producers in charge of wrangling all of those remote links, none of the winners’ speeches dropped — and in fact, the whole casual vibe of it all made the night feel less stale.

“What could possibly go right?” Kimmel joked as he stood in front of a wall of screens showing actors, producers and directors in casual settings. The answer is, more than you’d like.

Any Emmys that’s remarkable for running smoothly can be considered a win. This telecast, held in the midst of a pandemic and with most of its celebrities coming to us from their homes or exclusive gatherings in parts unknown, held the salubrious appearance of intimacy and commiseration. Kimmel’s monologue did not mention the words “president” or “Trump” once. In fact, the only reference to that entity at all was in his reassuring us that the auditorium where the production was taking place was mostly empty: “Of course I’m here all alone. Of course we don’t have an audience. This isn’t a MAGA rally. It’s the Emmys.”

There were few firebrand political statements except in cases where such call-outs were expected. “Watchmen” star Regina King and “Mrs. America” co-lead Uzo Aduba, both Emmy winners on Sunday, wore shirts with Breonna Taylor’s name on them, while “This Is Us” star Sterling K. Brown traded the usual button-down under his suit jacket for a Black Lives Matter t-shirt.

As Mark Ruffalo accepted his Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy for his work in the limited series “I Know This Much Is True” he recited his usual list of thank-yous before launching into a warm but fervent plea for the audience to “vote for love and compassion and kindness.”

Ruffalo’s audio was remarkably choppy, as were the feeds for other nominees, which we’ve gotten used to in our Zoom-facilitated age. Oddly, though, this was part of the charm along with the blend of casual with couture.

Nobody dropped out during the telecast, but that also meant the surprises were relatively few. This year’s round of Emmys was largely defined by three titles: HBO’s “Succession,” HBO’s “Watchmen,” and Pop TV’s “Schitt’s Creek.” Those familiar with Emmy voter habits would call the strong showings of the first two titles in that list a foregone conclusion, but the full comedy sweep for “Schitt’s Creek” was a surprise, if not altogether blindsiding.

That show’s cast gathered in Canada inside of what seemed to be a formal reception venue with glass walls and a great deal of ventilation. Everyone was masked until the winners got up to make their acceptance speeches, each delivered with a share of genuine surprise, natural happiness and appreciation.

When you think about it, the “Schitt’s Creek” conquest makes complete sense in 2020. For most of its six seasons its audience was minuscule. After the Canadian production was picked up by (and gobbled up on) Netflix, the fanbase swelled. The show’s recently-aired finale season was accompanied by a full-throttle media blitz ensuring that even those who had never heard of the Roses at least checked out a few episodes.

Meanwhile one-time Emmy darling “Modern Family” didn’t even crack the nominations for the top prize.

Then, after people retreated into their houses and the world fell into contentious chaos and despair, what better antidote was and is there than a sweet, heartfelt show about entitled people learning to live with and love their neighbors?

The moment and year were ripe for this little series that could, earning multiple awards for series co-creator Dan Levy (Best Supporting Actor, Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing, an award he shares with Andrew Cividino), Outstanding Lead Actor for Eugene Levy, Outstanding Lead Actress for Catherine O’Hara, Outstanding Supporting Actress for Annie Murphy, and Outstanding Comedy.

Outstanding Drama Emmy winner “Succession” didn’t score a complete conquest in its nominated categories, but it netted individual awards for star Jeremy Strong for Lead Actor, an Outstanding Writing Emmy for series creator Jesse Armstrong and an Outstanding Directing Emmy for Andrij Parekh for helming the “Hunting” episode, which includes the memorable “boar on the floor” cringe-fest.

In an era defined by corrupt media empires and a loveless ruling class, “Succession” is an apt choice, as is “Watchmen,” the Limited Series Emmy winner which also scored an Outstanding Writing for series creator Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson for the superior “This Extraordinary Being” and an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy for Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who accepted the honor by paying tribute to Black women.

The Outstanding Actress in a Limited Series win for series star King was all but preordained; she’s won four Emmys within the last six years. “Watchmen” lost to Netflix’s “Unorthodox” in the Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series; still, overall it won 11 of HBO’s 30 Emmy wins in 2020.

HBO always comes up wealthy during awards season, and its streak continued on Sunday, scoring wins for “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” in Outstanding Variety Talk Series and Ruffalo.

Those were the foreseen wins – Ruffalo’s limited series, in fact, is brazen Emmy bait. Zendaya’s Emmy clinch for Outstanding Actress in a Drama for her tour de force turn in “Euphoria,” on the other hand, was very much a stunner, making her the youngest person to win in that category. She beat “The Morning Show” star Jennifer Aniston, “Killing Eve” stars Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer (last year’s winner), “Ozark” lead Laura Linney and the Queen herself, “The Crown” star Olivia Colman.

Similarly shocking but more expected was Aduba’s Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series for her dead-on portrayal of Shirley Chisholm in FX’s “Mrs. America,” which also created a charming comedy moment when, directly after her thank you, she yelled offscreen, “Mom! I won!”

And there were wins for Aniston’s “Morning Show” co-star Billy Crudup for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama plus a repeat for Julia Garner, who won her second Supporting Actress in a Drama Emmy for her turn on “Ozark.”

Even in years when the winners list is predictable, the show itself has a chance to stand out for all the right and wrong reasons. Kimmel’s third at-bat as the Emmys host was a peculiar blend of the two. His past awards turns were memorable for his generally avuncular comportment dappled with a few off-color jokes. Without an audience, there weren’t any opportunities to, say, have the “Stranger Things” cast hand out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Instead, he opened with a bit that went on too long using archival footage of audiences from awards shows past to create the illusion of a live awards show, finally shattering the ruse when one of the snippets included a shot of him in one of the seats.

A lot of the scripted skits were like that – cute moments that overplayed their hand by a beat or five. Some production choices worked quite well nonetheless, particularly the decision to invite essential workers to present some of the awards, including a truck driver, farmer, a teacher and a nurse — all women — as well as a delivery person and a pair of sibling doctors.

A few celebrities showed up live to remind us that this is still a Hollywood self-congratulatory fest, including Tracee Ellis Ross, Jennifer Aniston and “Fresh Off the Boat” star Randall Park walking the production’s distanced presenters walkway with an alpaca. Why?

“It’s fun,” Kimmel explained in his monologue, “and right now we need fun. My God, we need fun.”

Familiarity, too. Jason Bateman showed up early in the telecast once the producers cut to Kimmel in a mostly empty auditorium with cardboard cut-outs of celebrities in the seats, major league baseball-style.

He had a brief exchange with Kimmel before exiting. Aniston, whose presenter gig ended with a pyro gag that almost got out of hand, appeared to zip home in order to be present in case an Emmy were delivered to her door, and who was waiting for her but her “Friends” Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow? Clap-clap-clap-clap.

But here’s the thing about an audience-free Emmys telecast: although those of us watching at home weren’t subjected to artificial laughter, we didn’t get the thrill of witnessing uncomfortable silence or even groans at Kimmel’s clunkier moments, such as a strained bit with Anthony Anderson goading Kimmel into yelling Black Lives Matter.

Elsewhere, while introducing the Talk Variety category, Kimmel quipped that there was only one American nominee, mentioning Stephen Colbert (and eliciting an indignant “hey!” from Oliver) before joking after Oliver’s win, “I will be reporting him to ICE tomorrow.”

Not only is that in poor taste, it’s also incorrect. Oliver became an American citizen in late 2019. Anyway, congratulations to John Oliver and kudos for rocking a hoodie on what is supposedly the most prestigious night of the year for TV.

That was a forgettable moment. The night’s most indelible came from the Television Academy’s 2020 Governors Award recipient Tyler Perry, whose acceptance speech was a collage of memory, history, pride and inclusion. He talked about receiving a quilt from his grandmother that he failed to value, only to realize when he was much older what it represented.

In referring to his expansive studio, he said, “she couldn’t imagine me owning land that was once a Confederate army base, where Confederate soldiers plotted and planned on how to keep Blacks enslaved.”

“And now, on that very land, Black people, white people, gay, straight, lesbian, transgender, ex-cons, Latin, Asian, all of us come together, working. All coming together to add patches to a quilt that is as diverse as it can be — diversity at its best. I stand here tonight to say thank you to all of the people who are celebrating and know the value of every patch and every story and every color that makes up this quilt that is our business, this quilt that is our lives. This quilt that is America.”

This is also a way to consider 72nd Emmys, a patchwork of screens and anticipation that came together and despite all concerns, held. One day we’ll go back to awards shows that can be held without fear of going down in history as super spreader events, but for now we can say there as some comfort in gazing at TV’s stars and realizing that, in this way, they are kinda sorta like us.

Trump’s eugenics obsession: He thinks he has “good German genes,” because he’s a fascist

Over the past five years or so, I’ve had no problem using the “F” word (fascism) to describe what’s been happening under President Trump and the Republican Party. I wrote about it here in Salon all the way back in 2015, noting that I wasn’t the only one. In fact, it was his fellow Republicans who were the first to use the term to describe him. All you have to do is go back and read that full-page newspaper ad Trump took out in 1989, headlined “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police,” to understand his fundamental authoritarian nature.

Even though we knew from the beginning that we were dealing with an essentially authoritarian leader, our awareness of it has sometimes been subsumed amid the sheer chaos of daily news over the past five years. But if you look at the various issues Trump is most obsessed with, whether it was the lurid obsession with terrorist violence and refugees during the 2016 campaign or his preoccupation with immigrants, the pardoning of war criminals, his flirtations with dictators, the endless threats to jail his political opponents and muzzle the press, the valorizing of the Confederacy and the openly racist “law and order” campaign of this year, it’s pretty clear what gets him excited — along with his devoted following.

But wait, you say: Donald Trump only cares about himself! He’s not interested in anything as abstract as “issues,” not even the ones that tickle his lizard brain. But these are not mutually exclusive things. You see, Donald Trump genuinely believes he is scientifically superior to all those “others” and that they must be kept in check, with whatever level of violence may be necessary.

He doesn’t talk about this a whole lot, but it definitely comes up from time to time. Just this past weekend in Minnesota, in the midst of one of his most rambling, racist rallies in a long while, Trump said this, startling quite a few people who perhaps weren’t aware of his deep and abiding belief in eugenics:

As a historian who has written about the Holocaust, I'll say bluntly: This is indistinguishable from the Nazi rhetoric that led to Jews, disabled people, LGBTQ, Romani and others being exterminated. This is America 2020. This is where the GOP has taken us. https://t.co/CHMLg804mp

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) September 20, 2020

The last time he brought this up was in May when he visited a Ford plant to praise the organization for some PPE initiative:

He's a big believer in "blood and soil." https://t.co/gYQUwJy56H

— digby @digby56.bsky.social (@digby56) May 21, 2020

Trump is poorly educated, so he probably doesn’t even know that such language evokes Nazi Germany’s eugenics program and Adolf Hitler’s theory of the “master race,” especially when discussing the notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford. But it’s clear enough that regardless of the historical context, Trump is on Ford’s wavelength when it comes to eugenics.

He’s talked about “bloodlines” line before, weirdly telling a group of British businessmen in 2018 that “you’ve all got such good bloodlines in this room.You’ve all got such amazing DNA.'” He obviously didn’t know anything about their “bloodlines,” but made the assumption they must be amazing because they were a bunch of rich, successful white, men.

According to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio, he does believe in a “racehorse theory of human development.” It’s all about the breeding.

“I’m a big believer in natural ability,” Trump told me during a discussion about his leadership traits, which he said came from a natural sense of how human relations work. “If Obama had that psychology, Putin wouldn’t be eating his lunch. He doesn’t have that psychology and he never will because it’s not in his DNA.” Later in this discussion, Trump said: “I believe in being prepared and all that stuff. But in many respects, the most important thing is an innate ability.”

Perhaps Trump’s conviction that DNA — not life experience — is everything explains why he proudly claims that he’s “basically the same” today as when he was a boy. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” he said. “The temperament is not that different.”

The racehorse theory of human development explains Trump’s belief in his suitability for political leadership, despite the fact that he has never held office. He’s absolutely convinced that America’s problems will be solved by his God-given management skills, bankruptcies notwithstanding. You are either born with superior qualities — the right DNA — or you are not. And people get what they deserve. In his case, that includes the White House.

According to D’Antonio, Donald Trump Jr. also told him that he believes in the racehorse theory as well, and that he too is “in the high percentile on the bell curve,” although his father scores even higher.

In Trump’s case, the belief that he has “great genes” means that he is not required to study or consult experts or really ever bother to learn anything. He explained this to the Washington Post back in 2016:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”

This was most recently demonstrated in his bizarre comments at the CDC last March:

!!! https://t.co/1V47k7dyB6

— digby @digby56.bsky.social (@digby56) September 21, 2020

You’ll note that he mentions once again that his uncle, John Trump — an electrical engineer and inventor — taught at MIT, which he believes confers on him the same level of intelligence because of their shared genes.

For Trump, this isn’t just idle talk about an accomplished relative. It is central to his understanding of the world and his ability to navigate it. He simply does whatever he feels like in the moment, secure in the knowledge that it must be right because his instincts are superior to any book learning due to his great “bloodlines”:

It’s easy to laugh at Trump’s foolishness or assume that he’s just blathering on as usual. But consider his obvious willingness to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the deadly pandemic for his own purposes. As he has put it, “We’ll let it wash over the country” and achieve “herd mentality.” Or what about the horrific conditions at the border over the past three years, most recently the accusations that doctors are performing hysterectomies and other sterilization procedures on immigrant women against their will. Think about what former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor reported: “This was the president of the United States who looked at me and told me, when we’re deciding who to let in to the U.S., he didn’t want us to accept people who had quote, ‘missing toes or funny foreheads.’ This is how the president talks about human beings.”

Trump’s absurd talk about his “good German genes” doesn’t sound so funny when you consider his policies. Somewhere along the line, all these words of his and all the actions of his administration come together in a pattern in which his belief in eugenics fits right in with a program that looks an awful lot like that “F” word.

Why America’s political fights are as fake as pro wrestling

I recall being devastated when I learned that the professional wrestling I watched as a kid was fake. How could combatants show such contempt for their opponents in the ring and yet all work for the same company?

Years later, I felt similar distress when I learned that our national politics is as fake as pro wrestling. On television, our leaders appear to do battle—they tear up speeches, name call, and thump their chests. But behind closed doors, our two dominant political parties are working for the same group of wealthy donors.

As academic studies have shown, the wishes of ordinary Americans have little or no impact on the makings of federal government policy. (The single exception to this rule is for issues that don’t impact the bottom line of the investor class, such as reproductive rights and identity politics; on these issues ordinary Americans can sometimes get their voices heard.) In other words, your opinion about most important issues carries zero weight unless you are a major donor or a bundler of donation checks. These truths about American politics help explain why the largest single voting bloc in America—nearly half of eligible voters—choose to stay home on election day.

Since the coronavirus forced businesses to shut down, our economy has lost 40 million jobs, and millions more workers have had their wages cut or been forced to work part-time. Desperate to maintain their profits, many large corporations are planning additional massive layoffs. The temporary relief provided to working people included onetime $1,200 stimulus checks and $600 unemployment supplements that expired this summer. Tens of millions of Americans cannot pay their rent and are at risk of eviction. The lockdown has also forced U.S. cities and states to cope with plunging sales and income tax revenue by slashing social services and depleting their pension funds savings to pay bondholders. Many experts are predicting a new pandemic of homelessness if nothing is done.

In this environment, Congress returned from its summer vacation and chose to do nothing to help working people. This should not surprise us. The major donors to Congress are doing just fine. They were saved from any loss by the CARES Act passed in March in which, as the rapper Ice Cube recently explained it, “[Congress] just pulled $3 trillion out their ass and gave it to their friends.” In fact, the amount injected into financial markets to save their friends, i.e., donors, was closer to $10 trillion when Federal Reserve credit is added to U.S. Treasury allocation.

The country faces other crises. But our leaders’ ability to even propose solutions is constrained by their allegiance to the donors. The West Coast of the United States is literally on fire due in large part to climate change. Yet neither party will take on fossil fuel production. Republicans deny the science surrounding greenhouse gases while the Democrats wish away emissions by supporting unproven technologies to capture carbon emissions from ongoing fossil fuel operations. Neither approach comes close to saving the planet.

Most Americans would like to see an end to foreign wars and a reduction in the military budget that consumes over half our country’s resources. But these voices cannot be heard because wars are too profitable for the investor class and because the arms manufacturers donate so generously to both political parties. While Democratic lawmakers like to tell viewers of cable news that President Trump is a madman and a Russian agent, they overwhelmingly approved giving him $740.5 billion to wage wars throughout the globe, although Congress has not declared war on another nation since 1942, and despite the Constitution’s mandate that Congress must declare war before unleashing death and destruction on other nations.

In 2019, the United States spent more money on our military than the next 10 countries combined. A recent study at Brown Universityestimated more than 800,000 people dead and 37 million people displaced in U.S.-led wars since 2001, at a cost of $6.4 trillion to U.S. taxpayers. As long as the U.S. continues squandering its resources on war, it cannot solve other issues like the destruction of the environment, crumbling infrastructure, access to health care, and education. Yet, because of the war industry’s ownership of both political parties, no serious debate is even allowed. Joe Biden has already assured war-industry donors that if he’s elected, there will be no major reductions in military spending.

The connection between military spending and the destruction of the planet could not be more clear. First, the U.S. military is the biggest polluter and consumer of fossil fuels in the world. Then it was recently reported that as Oregon battles the worst wildfires in living memory, more than half of the state’s National Guard helicopters are unavailable to help fight the fires as they are deployed in Afghanistan.

At least in professional wrestling, we were allowed an open debate about the merits of corporate ownership of the combatants and about the extent to which the epic battles between the Sheik and Dick the Bruiser were choreographed. But in our national politics, open debate has effectively been squelched because it is too threatening to the donors.

For example, tens of millions of Americans have lost their health insurance during the pandemic. Yet little debate is permitted in the halls of Congress or in the corporate press about national health coverage or Medicare for All, something every other government in the civilized world provides to its people. Indeed, our neighbor to the north has been far more successful at limiting the spread of COVID-19 than the U.S. due in large part to its universal health care system. As a Canadian health official recently explained, “People [in Canada] don’t have to pay for a test,” and they aren’t “worried that if they got sick they would not be able to get care.” Also, the structure of the Canadian system makes it easy for officials to cooperate and consolidate their approach, both nationally and provincially.

But to have an honest debate about health care in the U.S. would threaten the profits of a private health insurance industry that claims a large cut of our health care dollars and imposes on us a nightmarish morass of paperwork and bureaucracy. Yet this useless industry, which provides no actual care for the sick, writes large checks to lawmakers in both political parties and is thus protected in the halls of Congress and in the corporate press.

Even in the Democratic Party, where 85 percent of Democratic voters support Medicare for All and where a candidate for president ran on that platform and nearly won the nomination, debate has effectively been suppressed. Some will recall that vice presidential nominee Senator Kamala Harris was once a cosponsor of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill in the Senate. But she quickly reversed her position, presumably after hearing from the major Democratic donors. This betrayal of the people didn’t earn her many votes in the presidential primary. But it did earn her a spot on the party’s national ticket. At August’s Democratic National Convention, any discussion of Medicare for All was effectively prohibited. Even Senator Sanders was not allowed to discuss his signature issue during his speech at the convention. Further, the party’s leaders successfully defeated an attempt to include the overwhelmingly popular proposal in the party’s platform.

There is one group of Americans, besides mega-donors, who have the power to get their voices heard. They are professional athletes. In August, Milwaukee Bucks players went on strike to protest the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake. There was reportedly significant momentum among a certain group of players to walk away from the season to protest police brutality and the disproportionate use of deadly force by cops against Black men and women. So serious was the threat posed by these players that former President Barack Obama was enlisted to talk the players out of striking. While the NBA season was saved, the episode showed the potential power of professional athletes who someday might join with the voiceless majority of Americans to demand some of the things the big-money political donors won’t let us have—such as health care, jobs, a living wage, the preservation of the planet Earth, and an end to foreign wars.

This billionaire governor’s coal company might get a big break from his own regulators

West Virginia environmental regulators are proposing to reduce the fines that a coal company owned by the state’s governor could pay for water pollution violations that are the focus of a federal court case. The move comes after the company stopped paying penalties required as part of a settlement four years ago to clean up its mines across the Appalachian coalfields.

Environmental groups allege that the Red Fox Mine, a large strip-mining site in southern West Virginia owned by Gov. Jim Justice’s Bluestone Coal Corp., continues to exceed discharge limits for harmful substances. The suit could result in substantial payouts — the maximum potential federal penalties are nearly $170 million — that would go to the U.S. Treasury.

In the weeks before a trial in the case, lawyers for Bluestone filed documents detailing a draft deal worked out separately with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. The state agency, whose administrator is appointed by Justice, has agreed to settle the violations for a fine of $125,000, according to a court filing by the environmental groups’ lawyers. (State and federal governments share the authority to enforce water pollution rules.)

Lawyers for Bluestone are asking the judge to throw out the federal case, saying the state settlement and hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal fines the company already paid for the same violations should resolve the matters.

Lawyers for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and other groups say the state settlement doesn’t moot their suit, and they urged a federal judge not to grant Bluestone’s request to throw out the case. They called the state action “a self-dealing administrative order” and said the proposed penalties “are insufficient to deter future violations, leaving a realistic prospect of continued noncompliance.” At best, the lawyers say, the amount paid would offset potential fines in the federal court action.

The fight to force Justice’s empire to follow pollution rules, the groups say, symbolizes the larger ongoing fight over how aggressively to regulate an industry that remains politically powerful, even as its economic influence declines.

The state’s environmental regulators are seen as friendly to coal companies, so the reduced fines are in keeping with prior actions. In one significant example from a decade ago, a $20 million federal settlement with Massey Energy revealed that West Virginia officials were not even reviewing disclosures that Massey had filed reporting thousands of water pollution violations.

“Coal companies pollute,” said Vivian Stockman, executive director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. “There seems to be little consequence to carrying on business in disregard for the law. This has been the case over decades.”

The proposed settlement is the latest in which government agencies overseen by Justice have had to regulate businesses owned by Justice, a billionaire whom Forbes has labeled the richest person in the state. He owns a vast array of businesses, including coal mines, resort hotels and agricultural interests, many of them regulated by the state agencies that report to him.

An investigation this year by ProPublica found that companies run by the governor’s family have accumulated $128 million in judgments and settlements in cases brought by vendors and other businesses and government entities over unpaid bills. Justice companies that own or are affiliated with the historic Greenbrier Resort have said in court filings that they are “near financial insolvency.”

Mike Carey, a lawyer for Bluestone Coal, called any suggestion that the company is getting preferential treatment “completely baseless.”

The court records filed in the federal case indicate that state regulators first proposed the settlement more than a year ago, and that it then included a suggested penalty of $883,000. But in its new proposal, which must face public comment before it is finalized, WVDEP proposed a $2.1 million fine, but then dropped that to $125,000. The agency noted that’s the maximum allowed under state law but did not explain why it had earlier proposed a larger amount.

While Justice’s adult children have day-to-day control over the family’s business operations, the governor continues to guide the empire. Justice has repeatedly said his role as governor poses no conflict, and he wants nothing from the state for his businesses or his family.

The last tussle over the governor’s coal mines came to a head in 2016, when weeks before Justice won that year’s general election, his company agreed to pay a $900,000 fine for past violations, penalties for future violations and millions of dollars for new pollution control measures.

The deal resolved more than 23,000 water pollution violations between 2009 and 2014 by Justice mines in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama, then under the umbrella corporate parent, Southern Coal Corporation, according to court records filed as part of that settlement. (Southern Coal, like Bluestone, was also owned by the Justice family.)

“This settlement is designed to bring the companies into compliance with the Clean Water Act and requires actions that should prevent future violations,” Assistant Attorney General John Cruden said at the time.

But hundreds of times since that 2016 federal deal, those mines discharged more solids, iron, manganese, aluminum and other pollutants than allowed by their environmental permits, the company’s own public reports show.

Justice’s companies have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for those violations, which are fairly common and seen as a cost of doing business in the coal industry. In August 2019, the environmental groups filed suit against Bluestone, alleging excess discharges of selenium, which can be toxic to fish and other aquatic life.

State and federal agencies have somewhat overlapping authority to regulate coal industry pollution. Federal law also allows citizens to file suit over Clean Water Act violations, both to seek fines, payable to the government, and to force measures to stop further violations.

Then, this year, the Justice companies “apparently stopped paying” some of the stipulated penalties, citing the lawsuit, according to a court filing by the plaintiffs. In a May report to federal regulators, Bluestone Coal marked a list of some of those selenium violations as “in litigation payment not applied.”

A federal judge has cited that report and noted unpaid stipulated penalties for 40 selenium violations that date back to July 2018.

A spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency said that the earlier settlement does not allow Bluestone to stop paying stipulated penalties, but she declined to say what action, if any, federal officials might take “because this is an active enforcement case.”

Carey said that the report indicating those fine payments were being held back because of the litigation “was an error.”

In a court filing Tuesday, Carey indicated that a $35,000 payment for some of the fines was made on Sept. 4. Carey also alleged that the environmental groups had offered during settlement negotiations to resolve their lawsuit, and give the company three years to come into compliance, if Bluestone Coal would donate $600,000 and 850 acres of land near the New River Gorge, a scenic area, to the West Virginia Land Trust, a group that tries to protect wilderness in the state.

Bluestone Coal lawyers had earlier tried to have the selenium case dismissed, arguing that it was preempted by the 2016 settlement.

But in a ruling in June, U.S. District Judge David A. Faber in Bluefield, West Virginia, declined to throw out the case, saying that the continuing violations, and Bluestone Coal’s failure to comply with a timeline for installing a treatment system, showed the need for the citizen suit. Then, in July, Faber issued a second ruling that found Bluestone liable for the selenium violations. The judge noted that Bluestone Coal could be liable for more than 3,000 days of water permit violations, which could amount to a maximum fine of $169.2 million, according to the citizen groups.

On Tuesday, Faber postponed a Sept. 23 bench trial meant to determine a remedy for the violations. Instead, he scheduled a hearing that day on Bluestone’s request to have the case thrown out.

Like his political ally President Donald Trump, Justice has been clear that he wants to curb government regulations meant to protect the environment, especially as those apply to the coal industry and other fossil energy operations.

In his first State of the State address in February 2017, Justice said that, under his administration, the state Department of Environmental Protection would stop saying “no” to business and industry. A week later, he belittled WVDEP inspectors when he told a natural gas industry group that they would have to stop showing up for work with “a tank top and flip-flops on” and looking like they “haven’t shaved in three months.”

At the WVDEP, Justice put in charge a former coal company executive and energy industry consultant, Austin Caperton. In an early speech once he took office as WVDEP secretary, Caperton said he “doesn’t trust” the science that says human activities such as burning fossil fuels are warming the planet, a position that puts him at odds with mainstream science.

As recently as 2017, the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement issued a report outlining continuing failures by the state to police water pollution by coal companies. OSMRE has said it is continuing to monitor WVDEP’s efforts to improve oversight of the coal industry.

Over the years, selenium pollution has been especially tricky for coal companies to deal with, presenting expensive and long-term treatment challenges. Violations have prompted other citizen group lawsuits like the one against Bluestone and scientific studies that warned of stream damage from the selenium discharged by mining operations.

In response to questions about Bluestone Coal and its policing of the coal industry more broadly, the WVDEP provided a statement that indicated it was considering a change in the selenium limits for the Red Fox permit that, if approved, would “resolve that component of the enforcement action for the site.”

This story was co-published with Mountain State Spotlight, a new nonprofit newsroom covering West Virginia.

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Mitch McConnell’s dark Supreme Court gamble: He thinks he can win — no matter what happens

Mitch McConnell’s political interests are not identical to Donald Trump’s, although there’s certainly some overlap. That’s the first and most important principle to keep in mind in trying to figure out what will happen in the epoch-shaping battle that now looms over not just the presidential campaign but over America’s future — the battle to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

There’s a second principle at work here too, nearly as important: McConnell never picks a fight he doesn’t think he can win. Many things can be said about the memorably ruthless Senate majority leader, who already stands as one of the most important American political figures of the last 50 years, and few of them are complimentary. (According to rumor, plenty of those things have been said by members of his own caucus.) But no one has ever accused McConnell of being idealistic or standing on principle, or — worst of all, to his mind — of being politically naive.

In other words, if McConnell believed that a hell-for-leather push to confirm whatever Federalist Society-anointed, fundamentalist-friendly right-wing zombie Trump chooses to nominate (or, to be more accurate, is instructed to nominate) was likely to blow up in his face, he wouldn’t do it.

In fact, not doing it would seem to be the easier path, at first glance. Confirmation of the aforementioned expensively-educated, family-oriented undead Ringwraith is by no means a sure thing: It might not work at all, or it might come down to Vice President Mike Pence breaking a 50-50 deadlock in the U.S. Senate. (We’ll return to those possibilities in due course.)

Furthermore, shoving some replacement-level conserva-ghoul onto the court — almost before Ginsburg’s loved ones have finished sitting shiva — seems like a great way to galvanize Democratic voters in November, who are already pretty well galvanized. If McConnell had grudgingly announced that the Senate would hold off on considering a new nominee until after the election, at least, editorial boards and cable-news talking heads across the land would have knelt to kiss the hem of his garments, while declaiming tearfully and at great length on the quiet, masculine strength of America’s institutions. For David Brooks, Brit Hume, Mitt Romney and Van Jones, it would be a moment to set aside their almost-entirely-insignificant differences and find their happy place. (TV idea: Those four guys share a beach bungalow in Panama City? Could be fun!)

But you see, Mitch McConnell doesn’t give a shit about any of that. He cares about winning, full stop. Proceeding from the principles I outlined above, I think it’s a safe bet that McConnell has gamed all this out and concluded that playing nice with the normies is 100% a losing proposition, but that trying to jam through Trump’s moon-calf nominee will work to his benefit no matter what happens.

Let’s unpack that a little, because I know it sounds illogical. Unlike the president of the United States, McConnell can read and can count, and is highly cognizant of political reality. He understands several things about the current situation. One of those is that absent some major change in the dynamics of the presidential race, Trump is likely to lose to Joe Biden in November. Another is that with at least four Republican incumbents trailing in the polls, his own Senate majority is in serious jeopardy. (Four Republican losses, coupled with Sen. Doug Jones’ likely defeat in Alabama, would leave the Senate at 50-50 — a Democratic majority if Kamala Harris becomes vice president.)

If you’ve paid any attention at all to this self-appointed Machiavellian genius over the recent course of his storied career, you will already know that McConnell cares a great deal about that second problem, and not quite as much as one might think about the first. Sure, he’d rather have a Republican president than a Democrat, all things being equal. But in fact McConnell has already extracted maximum advantage out of Trump’s first term — dozens of young, conservative federal judges; a corporate-friendly, economically ruinous rewrite of the tax code; widespread industrial deregulation — and quite plausibly sees Trump himself as a liability at this point.

In peering at the political realm through his dark crystal, McConnell sees the Ginsburg vacancy as a double-edged sword — but both edges look equally sharp to him. He knows better than you and I that actually getting Trump’s nominee on the court is an iffy proposition. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the only Republican to oppose Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, has said she will not vote to confirm a new justice before the election. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, clinging to her expression of perpetual worry and the last waterlogged fragments of her erstwhile image as a bipartisan “moderate,” has apparently joined her. (I say “apparently” because Susan’s gotta pay cash; her credit’s no good.)

We can assume that the above-referenced Mitt Romney, currently a senator from Utah, would rather ride atop the car with the family dog than board the Trump train at this point. (It’s both hilarious and pathetic that Romney, of all humans on the planet, has become a #Resistance hero. But there we are!) That leaves 50 Republican senators whom Mitch can kinda-sorta-probably count on to vote for literally anything the ravening Trump horde demands, up to and including making the wearing of face masks punishable by death, designating QAnon the national religion and declaring the White House property of the Trump Organization.

As stated above, with Pence casting the deciding vote, that could well be enough to seat some unbearably wholesome, Altoid-breath far-right nutjob on the Supreme Court, which would certainly mean the end of Roe v. Wade, the end of privacy protections for contraception and consensual adult activity of various kinds, and almost limitless legal carve-outs for racists, homophobes, fanatical Christians and other troglodytes.

McConnell’s not dumb; he knows that outcome would drive liberals and progressive to the polls in large numbers. Trump would get crushed (which Mitch might not mind so much) and Republicans could easily lose six or seven Senate seats. Hell, McConnell himself might even lose in Kentucky, although that’s toward the outer reaches of possibility. (If you’re giving your money to Amy McGrath, his Democratic opponent, you’re pretty much lighting it on fire.)

But what a way to go! It would be the right’s biggest political victory since at least the Newt Gingrich midterms of 1994, and probably since the election of Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, McConnell doesn’t believe the Democrats have the stomach, or the votes, to undo his black magic by expanding the Supreme Court or pursuing other major reforms. Show of hands: Who actually, seriously thinks he’s wrong about that?

And then there’s the other edge of the sword: What if it doesn’t work? What if some other Republican senator with a faint vestigial connection to psychological normalcy — Ben Sasse of Nebraska or Chuck Grassley of Iowa or someone else who is temporarily able to set aside pants-pissing terror of the Trumpian legions — refuses to go along? Honestly, I halfway believe that’s the outcome McConnell is banking on.

Because then Trump’s nominee — the Christian soldier destined to smite the baby-killers — will either be withdrawn or voted down on the Senate floor, amid scenes of intense (if manufactured) drama. Liberals will celebrate, of course, and understandably so. But it could be a pyrrhic victory: Nothing could possibly rile up the evangelical base and drive Republican turnout more effectively than the sense that a great victory was snatched away — yet again! — by the George Soros-funded pedophile elite who have persecuted our president so unfairly, visited a fake pandemic upon real Americans and sent tattooed antifa warriors to burn down the malls.

Mitch McConnell doesn’t have to say any of that stuff out loud. He certainly doesn’t believe any of it, but that doesn’t matter. If that’s his plan — to win by winning or win by losing — let’s give the man credit: It’s a work of dark genius, fully worthy of his diabolical reputation. It might be enough to give Donald Trump a fighting chance (not that Mitch particularly cares) and it might just be enough to save a vulnerable purple-state Republican senator or two and allow McConnell to cling to power, like a malicious goblin digging his nails into a slanted roof and refusing to tumble off.

The only flaw in McConnell’s flawless plan is that, try as he may, he cannot actually control how things turn out, and that the benighted and confused American electorate will — at least hypothetically, or theoretically — have the final say. That part must be driving him nuts.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton: Trump’s attempts to “own” reality follows “pattern of the Nazis”

A prominent psychiatrist who spent years studying Nazi Germany called for mental health professionals to speak out ahead of the election about President Trump’s attempts to “own reality” by recasting institutions, warning of a pattern that echoes the Nazis.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished professor emeritus at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a leading psychohistorian who has written extensively about doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, has long called for mental health experts to defy warnings from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and speak out about Trump’s mental health. Lifton recently published a book entitled “Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry” and was one of the 27 mental health experts featured in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” the bestseller edited by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee in which mental health professionals assessed the president.

Lifton told Salon that the book and a Yale conference on the topic began the movement of “psychologists and psychiatrists speaking out against Trump.”

“I spoke about what I called malignant normality that was being imposed on us, and the need to be witnessing professionals who told the truth and oppose the malignant normality,” he said in an interview last week.

Lifton said that Trump’s supporters and enablers exhibit the same “cult-like behavior” that he has studied, adding that the current administration has “Trumpified” every part of the federal government, in much the same way that the German government was “Nazified” under Adolf Hitler.

Lifton spoke with Salon about the duty of “witnessing professionals” to speak out and the various parallels he sees between the Trump administration and the Nazi regime. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Explain what you mean by “witnessing professionals.”

Witnessing professionals are those who make use of their professional knowledge to confront falsehoods, malignant normality and disruptive behavior, particularly on the part of their own country. They bear witness — and rather than surrender their professionalism, they invoke their professionalism in the form of knowledge and experience to uncover destructive behavior and combat it. That’s what I see myself as doing, and others with me, in connection with speaking out about Trump.

The APA has opposed mental health professionals speaking out, citing the Goldwater rule, which holds that it is unethical to give a professional opinion of a public figure whom one has not personally examined. How does being a witnessing professional fall in line with the Goldwater rule?

Well, without going into that whole story in great detail, I would say that the Goldwater rule has been so narrowed as to become a source of quieting or repressing the thought of psychological professionals at a time when that thought is desperately needed. And I do agree that it’s completely different from making a hands-on diagnosis or having a patient. It’s rather observing public behavior and giving commentary on psychological conflicts and psychological vulnerabilities on the part of Trump, including in my case, my emphasis on what I call solipsistic behavior, or solipsistic reality. Reality consists for Trump of only what the self needs and wants, as opposed to the large-scale experience of others or the nature of evidence. So I feel it’s really a requirement on the part of those of us who can look at these matters to speak out.

Are there examples where you have seen this play out during Trump’s presidency?

Let me give you a very contemporary example that’s occurring right now. You know about Bob Woodward’s book and the evidence on tape that Trump became completely aware of the nature of the pandemic and its danger as a plague-like event on one hand, and yet at the same time spoke out publicly in ways that negated or denied this danger, dismissed it as unimportant and something that would soon go away.

Well, people point to his hypocrisy and there’s plenty of that, but I would also add that I’ve learned in my work that a person can hold two antithetical, opposite views at the same time. And in the case of Trump, he’s particularly prone to do that through his solipsistic reality. At some point, the self needs to take in the full brunt of the pandemic. And at another moment the self needs to take in or respond with the idea that it’s a hoax, it doesn’t exist. So this extreme dichotomy, this contradiction, in Trump is very much part of his solipsistic reality.

Is there a distinction between this “solipsistic reality” and someone who understands the coronavirus as a major threat, but just blatantly lies about it to preserve his political fortunes?

Well, of course they blend. So in Trump’s behavior toward the virus, there can be a combination of manipulating truth and lying directly, on the one hand, and actually believing through his solipsistic reality, on the other, that it’s no big deal and will go away. He can vary between conscious manipulation, which is lying, and solipsistic reality, which brings falsehoods. And they blend. There’s plenty of both in him.

You’ve referred to “malignant normality” a few times. Can you talk more about what you mean by that?

Well, I can tell you where I got that idea. It came from my work with Nazi doctors. I studied Nazi doctors and I spoke to a number of them. And in that situation, if a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, at the ramp, was sending Jews to the gas chamber, that was considered his job. That was what he was supposed to do. He may have had problems with it, but that was what was expected of him. That was a form of the malignant normality of that regime. Now, Trump isn’t a Nazi, but still there’s an American malignant normality that Trump and his followers impose on us, and that malignant normality has to do with lying. It’s particularly extreme in relation to the virus, but it has to do with a more general pattern of lying, a kind of paranoid grandiosity.

It has also to do with attacking and seeking to destroy anyone who questions his version of reality. All that is part of the malignant normality imposed on this country by Trumpites, which I think it’s our responsibility to expose and combat with the full knowledge and experience of our professions brought into play. So that is how witnessing professionals, again, confront and combat malignant normality.

The virus is particularly important in connection with malignant normality and in connection with Trump’s falsification of reality or his attempt to own reality, as I put it. Prior to the virus, Trump of course told falsehoods and lies and they could confuse people. If you talked about the Ukrainian president being pressed for a contribution to the American election, that’s talk between people. But with the virus, it’s an organic event. Bodies become sick, people die, it cannot be falsified.

So the country is aware of the enormous toll that the virus is taking on us. And this now brings us as professionals or citizens to a particular and difficult relationship to the president. The president is embracing policies that are demonstrated reliably to kill or result in the deaths of very large numbers of Americans. This is presidential criminality that we now find ourselves confronting. The presidential responsibility of caring for and protecting the citizens of this country has been turned on its head, with a president threatening the lives and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in relation to his corrupt policy. And that’s a really intense and accurate, I think, reflection on the state of things.

Have you been surprised by the way some top medical officials, like Robert Redfield at the CDC or Stephen Hahn at the FDA, have been willing to enable some of Trump’s rhetoric and actions during the pandemic?

Trump also follows another pattern of the Nazis. In German it’s called Gleichschaltung. The Nazis didn’t destroy professions. They attacked them, got rid of independent people, put their own people in place to head them. And then in that way the professions were not destroyed, but Nazified. Not only the professions, but all institutions. Trump, in a parallel way, Trumpifies our institutions and our professions.

So he installs political hacks into groups that are supposed to keep a close scientific view on the virus and its dangers and how to combat it. And instead we are faced with politicized versions that are false and have to do with Trump’s seeing in them some electoral advantage. So Trump’s attack on medical and scientific institutions both inside and outside of government is part of a larger process. And again, that’s part of the malignant normality he seeks to impose on us. That is really unfortunate because it’s really at the heart of American lives, and is a fulcrum for causing so many American deaths.

He’s able to do that, it seems, because he has the support of his party. No matter what he does, it seems like he’s able to keep about 40% support in the polls, and virtually 90% of Republican support. Why do you think that is? Why do his supporters, despite the pandemic and the deaths and the lies, remain so fully on board with the president?

Nobody can fully explain Republican supporters. The first thing to say is that they take on virtually the same guilt in their behavior. They share Trump’s responsibility for this criminality in the way in which American lives are taken by their policies. They vary in their attraction to Trump, and I would give a few ideas. There is a base of white supremacy. That doesn’t mean that all his followers are white supremacists, but they are a dominant group in his base and they follow him and have no complaint against his policies. There is also a cult-like quality to Trump’s hold on many followers. Some of the most extreme have a cult-like relationship to him, in which they give themselves to the cult-like leader — offer their lives and their views to him.

Some of them may be defecting, and it’s quite possible that when some additional followers who are now so intense become disillusioned or find that the guru can no longer satisfy their needs, they could turn against him, as I have found to occur in other cult-like situations. And then there is a strictly pragmatic Republican evaluation that Trump is still the best way to survive politically, and that it’s too dangerous to their survival, should they question him. I think that runs deep because patterns of rejecting the idea of a loyal opposition, of delegitimizing the opposition, had been occurring among Republicans long before Trump. Certainly from the time of Newt Gingrich.

The other thing I would say here is that one shouldn’t just say that the country is polarized and we can’t talk to each other. That’s true enough, but the polarization has been initiated by the Republican de-legitimation of opposition. The opposition is treated as wrong and evil, and they’ve lost the necessary democratic give and take of a respected, loyal opposition. That began before Trump and has led many Republicans to move all too readily into Trump’s orbit, even as he led what his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has called a “hostile takeover” of the Republican party.

There have been an increasing number of concerning statements lately. Michael Caputo, the top spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services, claimed that government officials are plotting against Trump. Roger Stone recently suggested that people should arm themselves in time for the election, and that Trump should declare martial law. Are you worried about what that can lead to?

Well, I don’t think there’s going to be a kind of a civil war, as these fanatics are calling for. But I do worry, of course. One has to worry because that Trumpites, and that now includes the Republican supporters, are doing everything possible to suppress the vote. And they do that on many levels, as has been observed. And the latest has been seeking to take over and corrupt the Postal Service, which is an extreme thing to do in American history, but also to put up barriers to voting, and especially to Black people voting, in various states. That’s going to vary state by state and very much includes Trump’s systematic attack on voting by mail, which one would have thought would be completely unacceptable to both sides during a pandemic.

Trump is also doing everything possible in his misleading and contradictory statements, and his reluctance to accept the actual outcome of the election if it goes against him. He’s doing everything possible to render the election confused and less than legitimate in many people’s eyes. So, yes, I worry about this, but I’m also heartened by an increasing recognition of Trump’s misbehavior, of what I’m calling his criminality and what others are calling his transgressions. Things don’t just bounce off him, as has been assumed, without his paying anything for it. More and more his misbehavior is being recognized, his lies and nastiness and immorality are being recognized, and the country has turned against him.

What role do you think mental health professionals should play in highlighting these issues that you’ve discussed ahead of the election?

Ultimately these are political decisions, but psychological professionals like myself can uncover psychological behavior and reveal its dangerousness and what I’m calling its solipsism or self-contained nature. When we do this, we can help inform political leaders about what is at stake, and in that sense have influence on their behavior. I think it’s imperative that we speak out, because this is a profound crisis that the country faces — as great a crisis as our nation has ever faced.

Betsy DeVos vows to make standardized tests great again: 4 questions answered

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced on Sept. 3 that the government intended to enforce federal rules that require all states to administer standardized tests at K-12 public schools during the 2020-2021 school year. Nicholas Tampio, a Fordham University political scientist who researches education policy, puts this declaration into context.

1. What did DeVos say?

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, U.S. public school students have had to take federally mandated standardized tests every year.

Students got a break in the spring of 2020 when DeVos announced that states could apply for waivers due to the pandemic. “Neither students nor teachers,” she explained, “need to be focused on high-stakes tests during this difficult time.”

In September, DeVos reaffirmed her commitment to federally mandated testing. “It is now our expectation,” DeVos wrote in a letter to chief state school officers, “that states will, in the interest of students,” administer standardized tests at the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

2. How is testing data used?

As a political scientist who researches education policy, I know that money is the main lever for the federal government to influence states and local school districts. For example, the federal government sets conditions that states must accept to secure Title I funding, which supports schools where many children are being raised in poverty.

Only about 8% of the roughly US$720 billion that all levels of government spend on public schools comes from federal sources. Yet federal education money is vital because it helps state and local governments boost their budgets for the education of some of the most vulnerable students, including those with special needs.

In the spring of 2019, the DeVos team threatened to withhold $340 million in federal education funds from Arizona. Why? Because the state had not complied with the testing requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015.

In short, states may face a financial hit if they do not heed DeVos’ warning about testing. And if states lose federal funding, they may, in turn, cut their funding for local school districts.

In her letter, DeVos called federally mandated tests “among the most reliable tools available to help us understand how children are performing in school.” This data provides information to teachers, parents, policymakers and the public about how schools compare to one another. Without this data, in DeVos’ view, the American people will not have transparency and accountability in public education.

3. What challenges might schools and students face?

But getting good data during a pandemic may prove challenging. The recent precedent for large numbers of students taking standardized tests online, rather than at school or another appropriate public place, isn’t promising.

After the College Board administered Advanced Placement tests online in the spring of 2020, students and their families complained when they were not able to upload their exams.

What’s more, research shows that physical conditions where the testing happens matters. If administrators cannot adjust the thermostat in a public school building, for example, it can skew test outcomes. As a result, I’m concerned that unequal conditions at students’ homes could make students who face economic hardship or have other challenges where they live score lower than they should – making their scores a less meaningful way to measure their academic strengths and achievements.

In response to questions about whether testing will be feasible during the 2020-2021 school year, DeVos has asked chief state school officers to get more creative. “I am reminded of the old saying: Necessity is the mother of invention,” she stated.

DeVos also told chief state school officers to follow “the guidance of local health officials.” And yet, her letter lacks any specific guidance on how states could administer tests in case students cannot safely take the tests in public school buildings due to COVID-19 surges.

4. Could a Biden administration waive testing?

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s official position on education, as spelled out on his campaign’s website, doesn’t mention high-stakes testing. Nor does his campaign say anything about revising the Every Student Succeeds Act, which Congress must revisit and possibly change through an upcoming reauthorization process after the 2020-21 school year.

In her letter to the chief state school officers, DeVos observed that “statewide assessments are at the very core of the bipartisan agreement that forged ESSA.” DeVos noted that a bipartisan coalition supports administering tests this year.

One of Biden’s senior education policy advisers is Carmel Martin. A former Obama Education Department staffer, Martin until recently worked for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with strong ties to the Democratic Party that DeVos cited in her decision to proceed with federally mandated testing.

If Biden becomes president, therefore, I think it’s reasonable for schools to assume that his education team will only grant waivers, like the one DeVos issued in March 2020, in “extraordinary circumstances.”

Nicholas Tampio, Professor of Political Science, Fordham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Trump touts herd immunity approach to COVID-19 that experts warn would kill millions of people

Insisting during a town hall Tuesday night that COVID-19 will simply disappear on its own — echoing a baseless claim he also made in February, March, April, May, June, July, and August — President Donald Trump touted a so-called “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic that public health experts warn would lead to hundreds of millions of new coronavirus infections and millions of additional deaths.

“We’re gonna be OK. And it is going away,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “And it’s probably gonna go away now a lot faster with the vaccine. It would go away without the vaccine, George.”

When Stephanopoulos replied that “many deaths” would result such a scenario, Trump said: “You’ll develop like a herd mentality. It’s gonna be herd developed, and that’s gonna happen. That will all happen. But with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly. But I really believe we’re rounding the corner, and I believe that strongly.”

Watch:

TRUMP: It is going away

STEPHANOPOULOS: Without a vaccine?

TRUMP: Sure. Over a period of time

S: And many deaths

TRUMP: It's gonna be herd developed pic.twitter.com/dtJRE7XwFX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 16, 2020

Trump’s remarks came as COVID-19 continues to spread across the United States, with the nation averaging around 38,000 new cases per day over the past week. In total, the U.S. has recorded over 6.6 million positive coronavirus cases and at least 195,600 deaths, and it remains unclear when a safe and effective vaccine will be available to the public.

“This was not true when Trump said it in February,” said Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., in response to the president’s claim that the virus is going away. “It is not true today, 195,000 American deaths later. COVID-19 is not going to just ‘disappear.’ Making that the strategy leads to more preventable deaths.”

To reach “herd immunity” to the virus, experts say around 65% of the U.S. population — over 200 million people — would have to be infected. Given the current U.S. death rate from COVID-19, that number of cases would kill millions of people.

“‘Herd mentality’ is what his cult followers have,” epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding tweeted following the president’s comments late Tuesday. “‘Herd immunity’ without a vaccine is deadly. Trump’s idiocy on science is killing us.”

University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers noted that “developing herd immunity doesn’t just take time, it works by infecting over a hundred million and killing hundreds of thousands.”

“He’s describing a massacre,” tweeted Wolfers. “If you think the problem here is that he said herd mentality rather than herd immunity, you’re missing the big picture. Whatever word he spoke, the idea is to sacrifice several hundred thousand more people’s lives.”

Trump’s town hall came days after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned the number of deaths that would result from a “herd immunity” approach to the virus would be “totally unacceptable.”

“If everyone contracted it, even with the relatively high percentage of people without symptoms… a lot of people are going to die,” said Fauci, who Trump officials have attempted to muzzle as he continues to publicly warn that the fight against the pandemic is far from over, contradicting the president’s false optimism.

“If you look at the United States of America with our epidemic of obesity as it were, with the number of people with hypertension, with the number of people with diabetes,” Fauci continued, “if everyone got infected, the death toll would be enormous.”

New details emerge about Jared Kushner’s refusal to help battle COVID-19

Jared Kushner resisted taking a role in fighting the coronavirus pandemic from the very beginning, according to a new report about the White House response.

A bipartisan group of heavy hitters and business leaders met March 20 at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to discuss how to make and distribute personal protective equipment, and certain government officials urged them to return the next day to meet with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, reported Vanity Fair.

“The federal government is not going to lead this response,” Kushner told the group at the start of the meeting, seated in a chair taller than the others around the conference table. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”

Kushner had formed a “shadow task force” that ran parallel to one led by Vice President Mike Pence, and private sector representatives had pledged to produce PPEs if the federal government promised to buy them, and they wanted the president to invoke the Defense Production Act to make that happen quickly.

“We were all saying, ‘Mr. Kushner, if you want to fix this problem for PPE and ventilators, there’s a path to do it, but you have to make a policy change,'” recalled one person who attended the meeting.

Kushner got “very aggressive” and insisted they didn’t understand how government worked as well as he did, although that attendee said his arguments “made no sense.”

“It felt like Kushner was the president,” that person said. “He sat in the chair and he was clearly making the decisions.”

One attendee told Kushner that Americans were bidding against each other for the limited supply of PPE, and that person explained that businesses that wanted to help were looking for leadership from the federal government.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner replied. “That is not the role of government.”

That same person agreed that open markets could solve many problems, but he said the system was breaking under the crisis, pointing to a CNN report about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desperation for supplies.

“That’s the CNN bullsh*t,” Kushner told that person. “They lie.”

Another attendee said that prompted a rant by Kushner against the Democratic governor.

“Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state,” Kushner said. “His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

Other attendees were shocked and alarmed.

“That’s when I was like, we’re screwed,” an attendee said.

Ernő Rubik on why his famous cube is a “metaphor” for the human condition

For years I have harbored a shameful secret: I once helped solve a Rubik’s Cube, but it was entirely by accident, and I’ve been too proud to ever try to complete the puzzle again.

I wish I could brag and say I mastered the puzzle of the Rubik’s Cube through sheer cerebral power. Yet the nine-year-old version of myself who accomplished this feat was barely paying attention at the time. I was spending a weekend afternoon with my friend, Casey, who had been intermittently turning its various faces for several minutes. When he shouted an unrepeatable expletive, I looked down to see that I had almost solved the damn thing. We studied it together and finished it in a few minutes, then bragged about it to our elementary school chums. They expected us to repeat the task. We never could.

I’d always wondered what the cube’s creator, Ernő Rubik, would think of my experience, and I finally got the chance to ask him. In his new book “Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All,” the Hungarian inventor and architect goes into tremendous detail explaining how a bold thirst for knowledge has animated his life. He tells the story of how he invented the toy which bears his name, of course, and how his childhood helped turn him into the man he is today. Going one step beyond this, however, Rubik uses his cube as an allegory for the nature of knowledge itself, a field of study known as epistemology.

In doing so, Rubik makes a number of assertions, each of them quite wise. He insists that “play,” which many adults dismiss as a childish waste of time, is in fact essential to both healthy intellectual development and one’s capacity to produce great things for society. He argues that curiosity is an underrated virtue in our culture, that we should encourage people to seek knowledge simply because it is fun and cathartic rather than on the condition that the information we find yield some monetary reward. Indeed, although he is clearly not a fan of having grown up “within the economic system of state socialism,” Rubik writes that it did bring about the benefit of creating “an overall disregard for financial gain,” meaning that creative people could exercise their intellectual powers as fulfilling ends in their own right.

Perhaps most tellingly, though, Rubik says that he enjoys “the fact that the Cube is a healthy microcosm of both success and failure.” For him, of course, it was a success in that it made him “comfortably well-off” before he turned 40. Yet even if it had never become a commercial sensation, Rubik writes he still would have considered it an accomplishment for the simple reason that he was able to invent such a successful puzzle. Beyond that, Rubik notes that even people who fail to successfully solve his puzzle still learn from their efforts to do so.

The following is a transcript of an email interview with Rubik; as always, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

In what ways did your childhood plant the seeds for your ability to develop the Rubik’s Cube as an adult?

As the Cube did not follow from anything that had existed before, it would be very difficult to point to anything in particular. Having said that, I certainly enjoyed playing with brain-teasers from a very young age. I also liked the process of solitary creation, such as drawing and painting. My father was a huge influence, although in comparison, I consider myself to be a creative ‘amateur’. My father was both a designer and an inventor and was a professional in his field. In the early 1960’s he created his most famous aircraft, the R-26 Góbé, which became the classic training glider in Hungary, which was exported to Cuba, Austria, and the United Kingdom. It certainly occurred to me that every time he figured out the structure and the materials and all the details of his designs, he was solving very practical and complicated puzzles.

In what ways do you think the Rubik’s Cube is an epistemological metaphor?

The Cube is very much about understanding the complexity of our world. In some areas, like group theory or combinatorics, this link is very specific and direct. In other realms it is indeed more metaphorical: how to think about problem-solving. What is it about human nature that allows for the luxury of spending so much time and energy figuring out a seemingly impossible challenge, when the reward is nothing more than the solution itself?

To what extent, when you write this, are you using your relationship with the Rubik’s Cube as a metaphor for how a parent feels about a child, or any creator feels about their creation?

When one becomes a parent, our life changes in very substantial ways. A child becomes a central character in a father’s story for the rest of his or her life and beyond. The connection is eternal — but a child has their own, separate life. I very much care for the Cube, I do have a deep sense of responsibility, but I appreciate that the Cube’s story is not mine. He became the superstar that I never personally aspired to be.

The Cube is my creation, but the other parent must be Mother Nature. As much as I created it, it also changed me, and it opened up my life too.

You admit in your book that you “hate to write,” but you did so anyway so that you could gain a better understanding of things that we take for granted, what makes people “tick,” what makes people create new things and how they are inspired to make things that have never been created before. To what extent were you able to answer these questions in your book?

There are no definitive answers to these questions, obviously. My own thinking became clearer on these topics and I hoped I could convey some of those thoughts to the readers of “CUBED.” However, the book itself, just like the Cube, never really ends. We can always start again and again revisiting these eternal questions about humanity, and so we should.

You mention in your book that you are inspired by how the cube has brought people together. What about the cube has made this possible?

As far as community-building goes, speedcubing has been the most important development. Cubing enthusiasts have gradually created a global sport from purely grassroots effort. It all started in the early 1980’s, but really got momentum as the internet provided platforms for niche communities to find each other. Today, there are over 1,000 speedcubing competitions organised every year in over 100 countries. Friendships and even marriages were made thanks to the Cube — but I am afraid the Cube is also to be blamed for a few divorces as well.

More broadly, what lessons about curiosity do you think people could learn from your invention of the cube? It seems like a message that applies across intellectual, artistic and other professional and creative disciplines.

I think curiosity is like thirst or hunger. It’s a drive that fills a gap, scratches an intellectual and emotional itch. With curiosity, we have the feeling that something is there but we aren’t quite sure what it is. It is the flame that can ignite creativity. There is an internal drive to follow up, and a kind of promise that there may be some discovery of something that is hidden and I may be the only one to whom it is not visible. What is under the surface is the need to understand. In that sense, we are not creators but discoverers.

Puzzles bring out important qualities of ourselves, like curiosity itself among many others. Puzzles are not just entertainment or devices for killing time. For us, as for our ancestors, they help point the way to our creative potential. If you are curious, you will find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them.

Curiosity means that we do not take things for granted, that again and again we question even the fundamentals. We find the good questions because we are interested in the “how” of things. That is the only way forward. And here “forward” doesn’t mean a predetermined direction or something that can be fixed beforehand, but the openness, not just of the eye, but of the broader vision.

You discuss your beliefs about the importance of education while offering critiques about how we do so. Two that stood out to me are when you point out that we don’t really prepare young people to develop their potential intelligence and apply that in a meaningful way in the outside world, and your quote that “I have long hated the whole idea of quantifying intelligence with something like an IQ test and sympathize with those who think this test measures only the capacity to perform well on an IQ test.” How do you think we should change our approach to education?

Nowadays what we can really measure in the educational environment is the effort it takes for children to develop their skills.

The arguable measurement of IQ still has a unique appeal as a solid measure of intelligence, and often we forget about the other crucial aspect of human intelligence: emotion. The capacity to understand human behaviour, to feel, to decode the signs of the people around you, you need to be able to wake up some emotional resonance in them.

The Cube is one of the very few examples where the so-called edutainment is a seamless experience. The teachers happily accept it as a vehicle to teach and the students enjoy the playful learning the Cube can provide.

How can people who wish to be autodidacts (which you encourage people to aspire to be) pursue their interests in a way that separates facts from fictions, knowledge from pseudo-knowledge, developing useful skills from engaging in activities that waste their time?

People don’t necessarily “wish” to be autodidacts. They sometimes just enjoy or are curious about something so much that they spend a significant amount of time and effort to understand it properly. True curiosity is always honest and open-ended — it is the very opposite of prejudice or preconception. Just like a puzzle is always a fair thing — and if you still cheat, you’re cheating yourself!

Rubik’s book, “Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All,” is now on sale from Flatiron Books.

Trump supporters try to obstruct early voters at polling site in Virginia

On Saturday, lines to vote early in Fairfax County, Virginia — an affluent, left-trending area including the suburbs of Washington, D.C. — reached enormous lengths, with many voters telling reporters that they were spurred to vote by the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But Trump supporters showed up at the early voting site to protest, as well.

Photos and videos by Washington Informer reporter Anthony Tilghman show Trump supporters blocking the path to the early voting site, standing together waving Trump flags and chanting “Four more years!”

None of the Trump supporters visible in the footage appeared to be wearing masks.

Watch below:

Trump Supporters came over to the early voting site to protest while people are in line to Vote in FairFax Virginia. #EarlyVoting pic.twitter.com/Lkkl4o2aAc

— Anthony Tilghman (@AnthonyTilghman) September 19, 2020

As you can see here they are blocking the entrance to the voting site. #EarlyVoting #VA #FairFax pic.twitter.com/KJ6fbLdP3G

— Anthony Tilghman (@AnthonyTilghman) September 19, 2020

As you can see none of them are wearing Masks 😷 #MAGA #EarlyVoting #Virginia pic.twitter.com/lyqxxIrJb9

— Anthony Tilghman (@AnthonyTilghman) September 19, 2020

Why Trump could possibly end up “behind bars” if he loses

When former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress in July 2019, he noted that the U.S. Department of Justice has a longstanding policy against indicting a sitting president on criminal charges — and some legal experts have argued that this year’s presidential election could mean the difference between whether Trump does or doesn’t face any type of prosecution in 2021 or beyond.

Journalist Jeff Wise, in an article for New York Magazine published this week, examines the type of prosecutions that Trump, according to legal experts, could face if he loses this year’s presidential election to former Vice President Joe Biden in November.

He explained:

It may seem unlikely that Trump will ever wind up in a criminal court. His entire life, after all, is one long testament to the power of getting away with things, a master class in criminality without consequences, even before he added presidentiality and all its privileges to his arsenal of defenses. As he himself once said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” But for all his advantages and all his enablers, including loyalists in the Justice Department and the federal judiciary, Trump now faces a level of legal risk unlike anything in his notoriously checkered past — and well beyond anything faced by any previous president leaving office. To assess the odds that he will end up on trial, and how the proceedings would unfold, I spoke with some of the country’s top prosecutors, defense attorneys, and legal scholars. For the past four years, they have been weighing the case against Trump: the evidence already gathered, the witnesses prepared to testify, the political and constitutional issues involved in prosecuting an ex-president. Once he leaves office, they agree, there is good reason to think Trump will face criminal charges.

…Trump could become the first former president in American history to find himself on trial — and perhaps even behind bars.

So where to begin with the potential charges?

Trump has described the Mueller Report as a total vindication, but that isn’t what former FBI Director Mueller actually said. The Mueller Report was divided into two sections: one on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, one on obstruction of justice. Mueller concluded that the evidence of Trump’s 2016 campaign’s interactions with Russians, although questionable, did not rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But on obstruction of justice, Mueller laid out significant evidence that Trump could be guilty, leaving it up for others to make the final decision.

Wise writes that if Trump faces some type of criminal prosecution in the future, prosecutors will “have plenty of potential charges to choose from” — and they range from obstruction of justice to lying to investigators. However, Wise also notes that “any crimes he committed as president would face” some “significant and perhaps fatal hurdles”; one is that if Trump loses to Biden in November, he “could decide to preemptively pardon himself.”

Norm Eisen, who served as counsel for House Democrats during Trump’s impeachment, told Wise, “I wouldn’t be surprised if (Trump) issues a broad, sweeping pardon for any U.S. citizen who was a subject, a target, or a person of interest of the Mueller investigation.”

But Timothy W. Hoover, president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is skeptical about Trump ever going to trial on any federal charges and told Wise, “If federal charges were ever brought, it is unlikely that a trial would be scheduled or start anytime in the foreseeable future.” And Wise notes that according to some legal experts, Trump is more likely to face legal headaches at the state level because “state laws aren’t subject to presidential pardons, and they cover a host of crimes beyond those committed in the White House.”

It’s at the state level, and in New York especially, where Trump’s biggest legal dangers lurk.

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., Wise argues, is “likely to pursue” charges of “falsifying business records.”

“Unlike the federal court system, which often allows prisoners to remain free during the appeals process, state courts tend to waste no time in carrying out punishment,” Wise explains. “After someone is sentenced in New York City, their next stop is Rikers Island. Once there, as Trump awaited transfer to a state prison, the man who’d treated the presidency like a piggy bank would receive yet another handout at the public expense: a toothbrush and toothpaste, bedding, a towel, and a green plastic cup.”

Easy comfort food for fall: This creamy pumpkin sage pasta lets a can do most of the work

Like many food lovers, most of my extra time at home during the pandemic — especially during the early months — was spent in the kitchen. I was ambitious to start: I baked loaves of bread that always came out just a little too dense; I meticulously braided strands of babka with cocoa powder-stained fingertips; I read that soup dumplings should have a total of 18 pleats (it’s lucky and who couldn’t use a little extra luck right now?) and tried my best to hold and fold the flimsy wrapper without snagging it with my nail.

I tried and failed for most of them. I’d get close — 13, 14, 15 pleats — and run out of dumpling. But out of the batch, I’d get two or three that seemed just perfect, and that felt like enough to maybe, just maybe, change my fortunes. I was putting in the work, so why not?

But then I came down with a nasty case of what I’ve dubbed “culinary burnout,” hence the name of our new Salon series, “Burned Out.”

I described it in the series’ first column like this: “You stare into your pantry or refrigerator, assessing the contents, and even just the thought of pulling out items and trying to assemble them into something that resembles a meal is exhausting. I know myself, and this typically happens after I’ve poured a lot of concerted energy into meal-planning without a break, likely punctuated by a multistep project recipe.”

That’s when I knew it was time for a hard reset. I was craving comfort, but more than that, I was craving ease. This pasta recipe, where canned pumpkin does most of the heavy lifting, satisfies both those desires. The pumpkin and sage flavor combination is a nice nod to autumn, but it’s light enough that it’s fit for late summer.

For a recipe that is so simple — it comes together in about 15 minutes — it offers a lot of opportunity for diners. For a quick, cheap dinner, this pasta is great straight out of the pot as-is (with maybe just a sprinkle of parmesan cheese). But it’s also mellow enough that it serves as a great base for a more well-rounded meal. Some of my favorite add-ins include hot Italian sausage, crispy mushrooms, hearty greens and roasted winter vegetables.

Recipe: Creamy Pumpkin and Sage Pasta
4 servings

Ingredients:

1 15-ounce can of puréed pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
2 tablespoons of butter (swap in an equal amount of olive oil if you’re making a vegan version)
1 shallot, minced
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 cup of chicken or vegetable stock
4 tablespoons of heavy cream, half & half, or a dairy-free alternative (oat milk is my go-to choice in this recipe)
8 sage leaves, finely chopped
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
16 ounces of your favorite pasta (I like fusilli for this, personally)
1 cup pasta water, reserved
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. In a medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the minced shallot and the garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned.

2. Add the chicken stock and canned pumpkin to the mixture and bring to a simmer.

3. Stir in the heavy cream, sage leaves and cayenne pepper and reduce the heat to medium. Allow to cook for about 10 minutes — enough time for the sage flavor to really emerge — while stirring occasionally.

4. Meanwhile, cook your pasta in a large pot according to the package directions. Reserve about a cup of pasta water, then strain and place back in the pot.

5. Time to combine! Fold the pumpkin sauce into the pasta until all the noodles are covered. If the sauce is too thick, add the pasta water a little at a time. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Facebook launched a new climate information hub. Here’s how activists reacted

Those of you still using Facebook (maybe your parents?) may have noticed a new feature when you logged on to the platform Tuesday: a climate information hub. That’s right — the same social platform that helped bring you QAnon, anti-vax influencers, and a zillion conspiracy theories about a “rigged election” in 2020, is now dipping its toes into the fight against climate misinformation.

As you might expect, not everyone is pleased.

“Is this a joke?” wrote journalist Brian Kahn for Gizmodo. “The whole thing is a giant hand-wave to distract us from looking at the real solutions to climate change and the role Facebook is playing in corroding them.”

Facebook rolled out its “Climate Science Information Center” on Tuesday morning. According to the company’s press release, the center will provide users with “science-based” facts, figures, and data about climate change. The company says the information will come from major scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization, and will include “actionable steps people can take in their everyday lives to combat climate change.”

Facebook’s new climate feature is similar to other information hubs that Facebook has rolled out in the past few months, including one on the coronavirus, and another with voting information. “We are hopeful this climate science information center will be very effective,” said Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg to NPR. “And our experience with the COVID information hub is that there is a real appetite for people to find out more for themselves.”

The reactions from several environmental activist groups, however, have been less optimistic. Just hours after Facebook announced its climate hub, though, the company drew heavy criticism from environmental organizations, who said it was too little, too late. In a joint statement, groups including the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth called it yet another “half measure,” arguing that the climate hub represents “a small step forward but does not address the larger climate disinformation crisis hiding in plain sight.”

For example, critics pointed out that the new hub will do nothing to address Facebook’s “climate loophole,” which allows climate denial groups to amplify false information by labeling it as “opinion” content. That’s what happened in September 2019 when the CO2 Coalition successfully lobbied Facebook to remove restrictions on a story from the Washington Examiner containing “inaccurate information and cherry-picked datasets.”

In its press release, Facebook said it would continue to flag and reduce the distribution of content that its independent fact checkers deemed to be false, but the company didn’t say it would delete the inaccurate content.

The problem is, that strategy to fight fake news doesn’t have a great track record. This is the same policy that, just a few days ago, allowed an article baselessly claiming that “antifa” started the West Coast wildfires to be shared more than 71,000 times. (Facebook eventually deleted the post.)

Genevieve Guenther, founder of the nonprofit End Climate Silence, also criticized Facebook’s climate hub for peddling lifestyle solutions to the climate crisis. “The ‘solutions’ proposed in the information center are taken right out of the current fossil fuel playbook,” she told Gizmodo. “They are exclusively inadequate individual actions like recycling, turning off the lights when you leave the room, wearing your clothes longer, etc.”

If the company really wanted to address climate change, Kahn added, it would educate users on the need to curtail the power of Big Tech and Big Oil, or remind people that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of emissions.

For now, climate activists remain largely unimpressed. “Supplying facts is necessary but insufficient in our fight against misinformation,” tweeted John Cook, a research assistant professor at the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. “To adequately deal with the problem of climate misinformation, Facebook should proactively stop disinformation spreading on their platform.”

Should a horror anthology like “Lovecraft Country” be expected to speak to any particular moment?

In a recent interview with “Lovecraft Country” creator Misha Green, I invoked a work that, I suspected, would evoke a specific response: “Watchmen.” Our Zoom conversation came at the tail end of a press day during which I’m sure many other fellow journalists had mentioned that other HBO series, one that instigated choruses of heady debate and intricate analysis.

Junkets are like that: some questions get asked over and over again, and actors and producers do their level best to provide quotable variations on a theme as answers. It’s an annoying business, but it’s their job.

Still, I made a bet as to what sort of reaction that mention might elicit. Sure enough, Green’s smile took on a shade of forbearance when I asked her whether she considered the cultural heat around “Watchmen” while making “Lovecraft” and if she wondered how her series might evolve the conversation.

“No,” she gently and patiently responded, before observing that even in the midst of production, it was pointed out to her that both her series and “Watchmen” reference the race massacre in Tulsa. She responded to that observation with, “‘Lots of ways we can look at Tulsa. It’s not a monolith, guys, it’s OK.’ And I feel the same way about this moment. What’s happening in this moment has been happening for a very long time.”

But this version of the “moment” to which Green referred is a tug-of-war between discomfort and understanding — and a lot of the burden of figuring out to navigate the thorny fields of our nation’s fraught history with regard to race and racism has fallen to TV series and films, fictional and nonfictional.

“It’s odd,” Green added. “As an artist, you want to be speaking to the times. We could argue that was happening when ‘Underground’ [Green’s previous series] was becoming a thing. We can argue that it was happening before that moment.” The question is how much of an obligation artists such as Green have to provoke conversation regarding the moment and somehow move it along, and whether the audience will simply allow her and others creators to make a series centered upon people who aren’t typically the focus — a Black family in the case of “Lovecraft Country” — and see it without the weight of expectation that it must somehow make some grand, powerful statement that speaks to This Moment.

It’s easy to see why “Lovecraft Country” confuses and irritates some people in a way that differs from those who simply don’t like shows of its ilk. The disconnect has something to do with its structure: like the 2016 novel upon which the series is based, “Lovecraft Country” is a family drama whose episodes hang together like an anthology series.

“The X-Files” adopted this one-and-done structure to great success, although the most unshakable of its fans will admit that even that beloved classic was inconsistent. It could also be disgusting, even controversial in its storytelling, without anyone grilling Chris Carter about its overarching social message. Very little of the content of “The X-Files” aggravated the politically or socially choleric viewer, because its FBI cases were open and shut affairs — told in a time when the Bureau wasn’t subject to accusations of partisanship.

Whereas “Lovecraft Country” has confrontations with racists and racism baked into its very premise by centering Black protagonists in segregated 1950s America. This gives rise to certain expectations of inserting meaning and profundity within stories about slimy monsters, warlocks and demons. The novel’s author Matt Ruff purposefully pits Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) and Leti Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) against a white sorcerers’ cult known as the Sons of Adam; in the second episode table-setter it’s revealed that Atticus shares a bloodline with a founding member whose forebear raped one of the hero’s ancestors.

What’s leading to no shortage of confusion among “Lovecraft” detractors is Green’s choice to follow an anthology format that’s fallen by the wayside. Today’s definition of anthology series characterizes one-season dramas that follow a major arc with little to no deviations from the path between premiere and finale. But the “Lovecraft” narrative is more comparable to “Tales From the Crypt,” with many stories fused to the spine of a season-long arc and Tic’s journey.

Obviously this is not some seamless chimera. The defining characteristic of “Lovecraft Country” is its tendency to veer down backroads en route to each waystation. With the sixth episode set to air, we’ve already messily danced with several terror tales, some illustrative parables about aspect of the Black American experience alloyed to a larger story that is, for all intents and purposes, a typical gothic horror piece.

H.P. Lovecraft’s catalogue consists of short stories held together with tentacles, goo and his penchant for bigotry. This makes the heroes’ Blackness in 1950s America a clapback in itself, a state that contains many stories, mostly triumphant and much of it in confrontation with terror.

The potent and recently-aired fifth episode, “Strange Case,” shows Ruby Baptiste (Wunmi Mosaku), half-sister to Leti, falling under the spell of the mysterious Braithewaite family associate William (Jordan Patrick Smith), who slips Ruby a potion that transforms her into a white woman. Initially horrified, William invites Ruby to spend the day walking through the world in white skin – and sure enough, she discovered all the ease and privilege that comes with moving through the world as a white woman. At one point, she even gets an ice cream cone for free.

Highlighting this is the ironic prominence of Janet League’s recorded recitation of “Dark Phrases” from Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” playing in the background as Ruby, in Hillary’s skin, sits unmolested on a bench in a white neighborhood, the sun shining down on her:

somebody/anybody
sing a black girl’s song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you

Thusly won over by her magic boon, Ruby heads to a luxury department store and scores a position she’s long coveted – she made an associate manager and goes by Hillary. The price of her transformation spell (besides an expiry that leads to painful, gooey skin-shedding) is that as Hillary, Ruby hears how her white colleagues talk about Black people, specifically the Black clerk the store deigned to hire. All the jokes the white salesgirls make about their Black colleague could, and do, refer to Ruby. They just don’t know it because she’s camouflaged.

Ruby’s subterfuge ends after a night of her co-workers’ racist tourism to a club to the South Side where the department’s manager attempts to rape the Black sales clerk. The next day Ruby gives her notice – as Hillary, of course – and as a parting gift assaults the manager, bloodily sodomizing him with her stiletto heel as she sheds her fake whiteness. Ruby makes sure he sees that it was a Black woman that he held in such high esteem and, in the end, had screwed him for once, in a very loose matter of speaking.

This is a Lovecraftian pulp tale like all the others; it can also be interpreted as an unsubtle tale of passing. Beyond that, a scene in which Michael K. Williams’ Montrose, a closeted gay man, joins his lover at a drag pageant and releases his shyness to joyfully dance as he is makes this hour a commentary about society’s impositions on our identity. But that aside fits only as well as the viewer allows for it.

As the interviewing manager points out to Hillary, she has more than enough education and skills for a management position, but those are Ruby’s accomplishments. Ruby’s Blackness was her only barrier; in her real skin, she was barely able to submit an application. And this is a situation Mosaku has firsthand knowledge of, as a Nigerian-born actor living in Britain.

“I’ve experienced it. My sisters have experienced it. My mother has experienced it. My father has experienced it. I know that my skin color in a room full of the wrong people – regardless of my education, my ability, my drive, my enthusiasm – will be a hindrance,” she shared.

How do you tell that story in a way that hasn’t been told before? With a lot of blood, guts and squishy sound editing.

The ninth-inning twist in “Strange Case” is that Ruby isn’t the only one wearing another person’s skin, a revelation that violates her anew. But the fallout of that will have to wait, since this week “Lovecraft” takes a step back to show us Atticus’ tour in Korea, viewed through the eyes of his old lover Ji-Ah (Jamie Chung) who hints at the end of the previous episode that somehow she has seen his future.

Viewers who take issue with the means by which “Lovecraft Country” joins one story to the next have a point: characters commit shocking acts that don’t immediately appear to have a purpose beyond creating additional obstacles for the characters to surmount. The connective tissue linking tale to tale, cliffhanger style, may be this season’s weakest link.

But people with an affection for horror anthology shows of yesteryear learn to roll with the rubbery explanations as to how the heroes wriggle out of traps because, with a few notable exceptions, we’re in it for the simple adrenalized jolts.

Non-white creators telling their stories in this space are still a rare sight, for that matter. Green is one of the few Black genre creators working on TV, let alone on HBO. (Another is “Get Out” director Jordan Peele, an executive producer on the series.)

“It’s really weird because we’ve been working on this show for three and a half years now, and I wake up every day as a Black woman,” she said. “So in making the show, that wasn’t a thing. Because by default, that’s the world I live in, and seeing Black people in these spaces is not strange.”

“But I also wonder,” she adds, “do white men think about that when they make their stories about themselves? Do they worry about…that double consciousness? So, I don’t. I just go with, this is what I love. It has people that look like me, and you’re allowed to interpret what you want to interpret from it… If you want to really know something or understand something, you can find a path towards that understanding.”

We can enjoy the “Lovecraft Country” ride for what it is: a collection of windows into terror that shift from one week to the next. Or depart, if you haven’t ready. Green’s aim is to tell many stories within an epic narrative, and she should be afforded the change to run with that desire, unencumbered by expectations to speak to any “moment” aside those of her own creation.

Progressives call for Senate showdown, Supreme Court reform: “We can, and must, fight”

As mourners left flowers and signs outside the U.S. Supreme Court building through Friday night and into Saturday following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to force through her replacement with just weeks until the November election while progressive Ginsburg’s dying wish that she “will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lawmakers and organizers promised to fight the GOP’s hypocritical effort to shift the court right.

Citing Ginsburg’s dying wish that she would “not be replaced until a new president is installed,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., declared that “we can, and must, fight.” That fight to “preserve our democracy and move forward,” the congresswoman said, “will require each and every one of us, from the streets to the Senate, to grow in courage, strength, and strategy.”

You do not need to, nor should you, ignore your fears – there is plenty to be afraid of – but we have possibilities before us.

We can win, we can succeed, but we cannot do it alone. We will need the people.

We must get to work.
Everyone matters.
Everyone has something to give.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 19, 2020

McConnell — who in 2016 led Republicans’ months-long blockade of Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama‘s nominee to the high court, citing the upcoming presidential election — said on Friday, with less than two months until the next election, that the Senate will vote on Trump’s nominee. The president took to Twitter Saturday to urge the GOP-controlled upper chamber to approve his unannounced pick “without delay.”

The majority leader and president’s position — though widely expected, particularly given their ongoing joint effort to remake the federal judiciary by ramming through right-wing lifelong appointees — provoked pushback from top Democrats, including the party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden. The former vice president said that “voters should pick the president and the president should pick the justice to consider.”

With voting already underway for the 2020 elections, Ruthie’s “most fervent wish” was for her replacement not to be named “until a new president is installed.” We must honor her wish.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 19, 2020

While noting Ginsburg’s legacy as a trailblazing advocate for equality and justice, Biden and congressional Democrats called on elected Republicans to follow their own made-up rules. Referencing the majority leader’s 2016 remarks about Garland and giving “the people a voice,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in a statement Saturday that now, “McConnell is cementing a shameful legacy of brazen hypocrisy.”

Sanders added that “thankfully not all Senate Republicans agree” with plowing ahead to confirm a Trump appointee, noting that Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has said that she is against an appointment this close to an election and “would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee.” Since then, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine — who faces a difficult re-election battle this fall and trails her Democratic opponent in the polls — has announced a similar position.

For those unaware: Schumer below is quoting what McConnell said in 2016. https://t.co/5zX1OUF8Lz

— Jake Tapper 🦅 (@jaketapper) September 19, 2020

Four Senate Republicans would have to join with all Democrats to block Trump from appointing a third justice to the court — following Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The arithmetic for a potential confirmation vote now appears balanced on a knife’s edge. Although Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the most consistent Trump critic among Senate Republicans, has not taken a public position on filling Ginsburg’s seat, former Utah politician Jim Dabakis tweeted on Friday: “A high-level Romney insider tells me Mitt Romney has committed to not confirming a Supreme Court nominee until after Inauguration Day 2021.”

If those three senators commit to voting no, McConnell would have to hold all 50 other Republicans together to confirm a potential Trump nominee — with Vice President Mike Pence potentially casting the deciding vote in a 50-50 tie.

As Sanders pointed out, other GOP senators have previously stated that they would be opposed to a confirmation vote this close to an election — specifically, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who chairs the Judiciary Committee and would preside over hearings for a potential nominee. According to Sanders, “The right thing to do here is clear. The Republicans in the Senate know it, and many of them have stated it clearer than I could. We should let voters decide. Period.”

Graham, who currently faces a surprisingly tight re-election battle against Democrat Jaime Harrison, said in October 2018 that “if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election.” But although Graham was once a Trump critic, he has since become one of the president’s most obsequious followers, and appeared to shift his position on Saturday:

I fully understand where President @realDonaldTrump is coming from. https://t.co/qlhtEwTCdX

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 19, 2020

David Sirota, senior adviser and speechwriter to Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, suggested a strategy in his newsletter on Saturday: immediately announcing a progressive primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who will be up for re-election in 2022. Although Schumer on Friday stated his opposition to confirming a new justice, quoting McConnell’s comments from 2016, Sirota noted the minority leader’s record on fast-tracking Trump judges.

“That means Schumer needs to face maximum pressure every single day to use all possible power that his caucus has — and it has power — to stop a Trump appointment,” Sirota argued. He explained that “the Senate runs on the unanimous consent system — which basically means that to do its most basic business, all senators must consent. In this situation, Senate Democrats have the power to use that system to grind everything to a halt.”

Schumer has moved aggressively to protect his left flank recently — making climate a priority, joining forces with Warren on debt forgiveness, and Bernie on an amendment to cut Pentagon funding. This SCOTUS fight will only increase pressure on him.

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 19, 2020

Progressive organizers and political commentators also raised alarm about Trump’s latest list of potential nominees — warning, as Bill Blum wrote for The Progressive, that “if Donald Trump gets to appoint a single additional justice to the court, our children and our grandchildren will be paying an epic price for decades to come.”

Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson said in a statement that “the fate of our rights, our freedoms, our healthcare, our bodies, our lives, and our country depend on what happens over the coming months.”

After mentioning Ginsburg’s record on reproductive rights as well as Republican efforts to appoint justices who support overturning Roe v. Wade and cutting off access to abortion, Johnson added that “it would be an absolute slap in the face to the millions of Americans who honor and cherish Justice Ginsburg’s legacy if President Trump and Mitch McConnell were to replace her with someone who would undo her life’s work and take away the rights and freedoms for which she fought so hard.”

Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., responded to Ginsburg’s death by underscoring the importance of voting in the general election. In a Saturday email to supporters, Harris wrote that she and Biden “know, like you do, that the most important thing we can do to protect that legacy is not just winning the White House, but electing a Senate majority that will confirm fair-minded Supreme Court appointees who believe in equal justice under the law.”

As Common Dreams reported Friday, given concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and Republican efforts to limit election participation, progressive advocacy groups including Stand Up America are encouraging Americans to “vote as early as possible, whether they do that by mail or in person.”

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, voiced her opposition to the Senate confirming a Trump appointee in a statement Friday night and suggested on MSNBC that the justice’s death could energize voters:

As I just told @chrislhayes: We understand what Justice Ginsburg's legacy means. We know what's at stake. And we will fight. pic.twitter.com/XYjwJXQqrH

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) September 19, 2020

Ginsburg’s death and the political battle it sparked have also renewed calls for expanding the Supreme Court by at least two seats — which could be accomplished by congressional legislation, since the size of the court is not dictated by the Constitution. Elie Mystal, The Nation’s justice correspondent, wrote that “should Democrats ever hold that power again, they must act. The addition of two justices is simply a proportional response necessary to right the wrongs committed by McConnell. The addition of 10 justices, as I have advocated, puts the Supreme Court on a path toward long-term reform.”

“This must be our fight now. We must do everything we can to stop McConnell from filling Ginsburg’s seat and, however that turns out, we must retake political power and reform a Supreme Court that has been irrevocably broken by McConnell’s ongoing hypocrisy,” Mystal continued. “That fight seems daunting, but it is no more difficult than the battles Ginsburg herself fought and won over the course of her storied career.”

Thank you @MondaireJones. As @brianefallon said last night, THERE IS ONE PLAY, and this is that play. https://t.co/l2fLbKLwyN

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) September 19, 2020

University of Michigan professor Juan Cole concurred, writing that “if the Democrats win both the presidency and the Senate, they must do something about the dictatorship of the minority on the court, and they ought to come in prepared to introduce serious reform so that our laws reflect the will of our 330 million people rather than that of a few corrupt billionaires allied with hypocritical religious fundamentalists.”

At least one progressive in Congress issued a similar call in the wake of Ginsburg’s death. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. — who recently won a contentious Democratic primary against Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass. — tweeted on Friday night that “Mitch McConnell set the precedent. No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year. If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

How income-tax secrecy benefits Trump and hurts you

As Donald Trump fights to keep his tax and business records from Manhattan prosecutors it’s time to alert Americans that tax returns used to be public. Congress could make them public again. If it did every honest taxpayer would benefit.

In 1924 how much the rich paid the taxman was front-page news. Newspapers back then published lists that revealed who was really rich (John D Rockefeller stands out) and those who were either poseurs claiming great wealth yet paying little tax or were likely tax cheats who failed to report their income fully.

Strong evidence exists that Trump is both a poseur and a cheat, as we’ve shown again and again at DCReport since we published Trump’s 2005 income tax return three years ago.

Cheating is easy for people so rich who own corporations outright thanks to Congress, which since not long after 1924 has wrapped tax returns in extreme secrecy. That secrecy is a huge boon to rich business owners lacking in scruples and the opposite of how Congress treats workers, pensioners and most stock market investors.

Lack of trust

Congress doesn’t trust most Americans to file honest tax returns. That’s why taxes are withheld from paychecks and pension checks before workers and retirees get paid. And Congress requires employers and pension plans to tell the IRS how much was paid.

Stock market investors, in the last decade, have had their profits independently verified by investment houses because of a law Congress passed after I wrote about simple techniques for underreporting stock profits. Before this law, investors could easily inflate the price they paid when they bought stocks, improperly understating their reported profits.

In contrast, Congress trusts people who own their own businesses to fully report their incomes and never take inappropriate deductions. There is little independent verification. Donald Trump and the Trump Organization with its more than 500 separate businesses fit this model of unverified income to a T.

“Lost” children

Independent verification works. IRS officials note that in the 1970s Congress required that all children be issued Social Security numbers. To take the child tax deduction, parents then had to name each child and list their Social Security number. Seven million American children suddenly disappeared, at least from tax returns.

Our tax system is riddled with unproductive loopholes, including a big one Trump lobbied for that benefits real estate owners who buy property entirely with borrowed money.

Reagan on tax fairness

President Ronald Reagan, who sought office as a tax rate cutter and then delivered, opposed such favors and argued against a system that “allows the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.”

Reagan complained that loopholes “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10% of his salary, and that’s crazy,” he said a 1985 speech at a Georgia high school.

“What we’re trying to move against is institutionalized unfairness. We want to see that everyone pays their fair share, and no one gets a free ride. Our reasons? It’s good for society when we all know that no one is manipulating the system to their advantage because they’re rich and powerful. But it’s also good for society when everyone pays something, that everyone makes a contribution,” Reagan said.

Ever heard Trump say anything like that?

I’ve been researching tax secrecy and cheating because I’ll be on an American Bar Association panel Oct. 2 with Professor George K. Yin of the University of Virginia, a former chief of staff for the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Pamela Fuller will moderate the panel, for which lawyers can get Continuing Legal Education credits. I’m not a lawyer but have taught tax and other legal issues at Syracuse University’s College of Law since 2009.

Secrecy wrapper

What struck me while reviewing the secrecy issue was that restoring the law from 1924 would have saved our country a lot of pain, allowed prosecutors to do their work efficiently, and ended any doubt about whether Trump is an honest taxpayer or a criminal tax cheat who belongs behind bars.

Just peeling back part of the tax secrecy wrapper could go a long way to make our tax system fair while discouraging crooked tax filings.

Under existing law, the tax returns of corporation owners like Trump are untouched, unless the IRS audits. If not, whatever the business owner puts down is accepted as accurate. It’s a system that invites cheating. Reports and studies by the IRS, the Taxpayer Advocate, the Government Accountability Office, experiments designed by economists and tests devised by state governments all show that integrity in taxes requires independent verification and enough audits to make the least honest comply out of fear of prosecution.

The problem for honest taxpayers is that Congress has for decades been reducing the size of the IRS. Since 1999, the economy has grown 70%, adjusted for inflation, while the number of tax auditors has been cut by a third and the number of tax collectors halved.

Few tax crime cases

Our government has nearly stopped trying to identify criminal tax cheats. Under Trump, Americans filed nearly 154 million individual tax returns in 2018. The IRS recommended just 1,824 taxpayers for prosecution.

Under Trump, the odds are just one in 84,000 that the IRS will recommend prosecution for tax crimes, an all-time low. Such tiny odds make tax cheating arguably the lowest risk white-collar crime in America. During the Obama years, tax enforcement was more rigorous than under President George W. Bush, but only moderately more so.

The record low number of IRS criminal referrals under Trump is less than half the 3,896 cases referred for prosecution in 2014, the peak year for Obama administration actions against suspected tax cheats. In both years most of the cases recommended for indictment involved drug traffickers or corrupt politicians, not business owners who cheat our government.

Prosecutions are plummeting even faster. Federal tax prosecutions in 2020 were down more than 73% from 2015, according to data that by federal court order the IRS must turn over to Syracuse University researchers.

A silver lining?

The collapse of tax law enforcement has a silver lining, sort of. The shriveling tax law enforcement numbers indicate that in this one area Trump is no hypocrite since he’s not pushing our government to prosecute others for things he has done.

And Trump at least files tax returns. More than 800,000 high-income Americans didn’t file a tax return in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The awful truth is that the IRS is not even attempting to contact a half million of these prosperous tax scofflaws, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed earlier this year.

How many high-income Americans failed to file tax returns during the Trump era won’t be known unless the Inspector General looks at the issue again. But does anyone believe that Trumpian rhetoric encourages integrity in our tax system?

Trump and Congress responsible

Trump is not solely to blame here. Congress has for decades been trimming the IRS budget. The odds of audit under President Ronald Reagan in 1988 were around 10%; today it’s around 1%. Reagan also wanted and got corporations to pay higher taxes under the 1986 Tax Reform Act.

The combination of few audits, inadequate staff to pursue high-income people who don’t even file tax returns and the secrecy provisions of the tax code are a boon to rich business owners short on scruples. The question we should ask ourselves is why do we elect lawmakers in both parties who trust business owners but not the rest of us? Why do we tolerate rules that help one segment of the rich cheat on their taxes?

Rampant cheating at top

Reviving the law that made tax returns public, or at least modifying it to partially back the secrecy wrapper, would go a long way to reducing the rampant tax cheating at the top. So, would authorizing the IRS to let any inquiring citizen know whether any other person has filed a tax return.

Tax secrecy is so prophylactic that the IRS cannot even say if someone is under audit.

Candidate Trump claimed he was under audit, citing it as an excuse for withholding his tax returns. It was a phony argument since the release of a filed tax return has zero impact on the return or the taxes owed.

Trump was asked to produce audit letters. He ignored the requests.

An IRS audit letter is an anodyne document that reveals only what year and what type of tax return is being examined. Thus, Trump’s claim could have applied to just one of his hundreds of businesses or to, say, the value he put down on a gift to his youngest son,

Given Trump’s thoroughly documented history of lying there’s no reason to believe he was in fact under audit.

Manhattan case

The Manhattan prosecutors already have Trump’s New York State tax returns and the information that the IRS routinely shares with state tax authorities. The grand jury subpoenas Trump is fighting are for records of his accounting firm, Mazars USA. Those records, including the emails and draft returns, would be crucial to nailing a tax crimes case against Trump, his three oldest children, the Trump Organization and perhaps others who enabled their conduct.

The Manhattan case appears to be a garden variety tax cheating case notable only in that it evidently went on year after year. The subpoenas are for records dating to 2011, which is long before Trump assumed office in 2017. It is also long before he made hush-money payments to a porn star and a Playboy model.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with the hush money payments and other actions he testified that he took at Trump’s direction, Trump is “Individual 1” in that federal case. Trump was not indicted because of the Justice Department’s policy is to not indict sitting presidents.

There’s good reason to believe Trump knows the accounting records he wants to keep secret will reveal he is a serial tax cheat deserving of a long prison sentence.

Wisdom of the ancients

First, Trump lost two income tax fraud trials over his 1984 state and city tax returns, a story I broke four years ago. The trials showed that Trump not only fabricated more than $600,000 of phony tax deductions, but he also altered one return to put his tax accountant’s name on the return he filed. The accountant, Jack Mitnick who was also Trump’s longtime tax lawyer, testified that he never signed the tax return in evidence.

Second, Trump has gone to extreme lengths to hide accounting records. Trump and his crew came up with one absurd excuse after another to hide records of the Grand Hyatt Hotel from New York City auditors. Eventually, the auditors proved that Trump tried to cheat the city out of almost $3 million for a single year, as I reported in The Making of Donald Trump.

Third, the tax and business documents that Mary Trump, the president’s niece, gave to The New York Times showed he and his siblings are calculated tax cheats. The president’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, resigned from the federal bench to shut down a judicial inquiry into whether she is a tax cheat. (A nice privilege that judges grant themselves, terminating ethics investigation if a judge who resigns.)

Tax secrecy is a modern concept. In ancient Athens, where democracy began, public officials had their transactions recorded in stone, and individuals who failed to keep accounting records were not allowed to leave Athens.

It’s time to embrace the wisdom of the ancients. Tax secrecy benefits cheaters, not honest taxpayers. Donald Trump’s fear that prosecutors might see his tax and business records makes that clear.

3 ways McConnell’s drive to replace Ginsburg could be derailed

Reacting to the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on late Friday, Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky warned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was likely up late plotting ramming through her replacement while he still has control of the Senate and with few impediments.

Reflecting on how McConnell blocked hearings for Judge Merrick Garland after he was nominated to the court in President Barack Obama’s last year in office, Tomasky said no one should expect McConnell will chart the same course when it comes to whomever Donald Trump nominates less than 50 days before the November 2020 election.

“It’s sick because, as we know, this same McConnell back in 2016 thought that February of an election year—February, not September!—was too late for a president to name a new justice in an election year. But that, of course, was when the president was a Democrat,” the Daily Beast columnist wrote before adding, “Place yourself in the White House private residence, or down in Louisville, at Chez Mitch, when the news about Ginsburg was conveyed Friday. Do you think either of them took even 30 seconds to reflect on her service to her nation?”

With that in mind, the longtime political observer noted there are three possible scenarios where quickly placing another conservative on the high court could be derailed.

At the top of the list would be Democrats serving notice to McConnell that, should he try and force the issue and get a vote in before the election, they will expand the number of justices on the court if they take control of the Senate and the White House after the election.

As Tomasky put it, “Some Democratic senators who might have Mitch’s ear, say Joe Manchin, will go to him. And Mitch will say: F*ck off. However, the Democrats have a card to play here, if Joe Biden will play it. The number nine (of Supreme Court justices) is neither in the Constitution nor law. Biden, and Chuck Schumer, can say: If you fill this seat now, if Biden wins, we’re expanding the Court to 11 or 13, and your majority is dead. And they should be ready to do it.”

Secondly, the Senate Majority Leader may read the tea leaves when it comes to polling on the issue of a late Supreme Court replacement with the election in the offing and, if sentiment is overwhelmingly against it, may take a pass lest he damage the Republican Party even more than Donald Trump has already done. As the columnist put it: “As I’ve often written, our democracy is corrupted and screwed, but it’s still enough of a democracy that public opinion actually matters.”

Lastly, McConnell who is desperately trying to hold onto power in the Senate may be able to save some GOP-held Senate seats that are poised to flip if he holds off.

“Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, not up for re-election, has apparently said she will not confirm a justice until the next president is sworn in,” he wrote. “That’s one. Democrats would need three more to say that they’ll follow Murkowski’s lead. Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, and Martha McSally seem the obvious choices. There are others. It all depends on the degree of progressive mobilizing in those states, to make those GOP senators know that if they acquiesce to McConnell’s games, they will lose.”

Offering a glimmer of hope, he added, “So all is not lost yet. But gear up for a fight. And as you do, always leave time in your mind for this remarkable, towering American. Everything we do in this corrupt period should be to honor all that she stood for.”

You can read more here (subscription required).

Free speech advocates denounce Trump move to ban TikTok, WeChat apps

In what free speech advocates say is a violation of the First Amendment, the Trump administration Friday announced a ban on TikTok and WeChat from app stores in the United States.

“This order violates the First Amendment rights of people in the United States by restricting their ability to communicate and conduct important transactions on the two social media platforms,” Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said in a statement. “The order also harms the privacy and security of millions of existing TikTok and WeChat users in the United States by blocking software updates, which can fix vulnerabilities and make the apps more secure.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the ban—set to go into effect on Sunday and which follows a controversial executive order issued by President Donald Trump in August—and claimed the popular apps pose a security threat to the United States.

“Today’s actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party,” Ross said. “At the president’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations.”

But free speech watchdogs and advocates denounced such reasoning condemned the move.

As @EFF has explained, there are very serious First Amendment arguments against banning Americans from accessing an app. https://t.co/0BeiJxytUP

— Freedom of the Press (@FreedomofPress) September 18, 2020

This executive order is setting a dangerous precedent in the U.S. Choosing to ban entire platforms like TikTok and WeChat harms free speech rights. https://t.co/VKQJNoEtru

— Access Now (@accessnow) September 18, 2020

My kids aren't allowed to download TikTok on their phone. So why am I worried about efforts to ban TikTok? Because app banning threatens free speech, and less intrusive measures are available to address security issues. Read this: https://t.co/eFF1X8CVzK…

— Peggy Hicks (@hickspeggy) August 11, 2020

The order requires that WeChat—which has millions of U.S. users who rely on the app to stay in touch and conduct business with people and companies in China—end payments through its service as of Sunday and prohibits it from getting technical services from vendors, according to the Associated Press.

Similar technical limitations for TikTok don’t go into effect until Nov. 12, shortly after the U.S. election. According to reporting from the AP, TikTok has 100 million U.S. users and 700 million globally.

In an interview with Fox Business on Friday, Ross, appeared to misunderstand how mobile app technology works when he attempted to clarify what the order means for TikTok, saying by Sunday the app’s users “won’t have access to improved apps, updated apps, upgraded apps, or maintenance.”

As critics point out, a downloaded app without the ability to access updates poses serious security and privacy risks for users.

As for WeChat, Ross said, “For all practical purposes it will be shut down in the U.S., but only in the U.S., as of midnight Monday.”

In an article published last month—when President Trump initially announced plans to ban the apps—Eva Galperin, David Greene and Kurt Opsahle of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) criticized the Trump administration’s claims that banning the apps would be an effort to combat overreach of the Chinese government.

“It is ironic that, while purporting to protect America from China’s authoritarian government, President Trump is threatening to ban the TikTok app,” they wrote. “Censorship of both speech and social media applications, after all, is one of the hallmarks of the Chinese Internet strategy. While there is significant cause for concern with TikTok’s security, privacy, and its relationship with the Chinese government, we should resist a governmental power to ban a popular means of communication and expression.”

Additionally, according to the EFF article, banning the apps, which many Americans already have downloaded onto devices, would pose a security threat:

As courts have held, code is speech, and the Supreme Court has recognized that software is a protected means of expression (addressing age warnings for video games). Just as bookstores have a right to sell books protected by the First Amendment, so too do app stores have a right to distribute protected software. Of course, it would be up to Apple and Google to challenge a purported distribution ban on their app store.

As a practical matter, an app store ban would not be particularly effective, as close to 100 million people in the U.S. already have the app. However, an inability to get updates—as a result of a ban—would create a security nightmare. Major vulnerabilities left unpatched would leave TikTok users susceptible to a variety of attackers, up to and including the Chinese government.

U.S. corporations include Oracle have been negotiating terms for a potential buy-out of the company, but, according to the AP, “details remain foggy and the administration is still reviewing it.”

On Friday, the AP reported, TikTok expressed “disappointment” over the move and said it would continue to challenge the president’s “unjust executive order.” WeChat owner Tencent said that it will continue to discuss ways to address concerns with the government and look for long-term solutions, according to the AP.

“In implementing President Trump’s abuse of emergency powers, Secretary Ross is undermining our rights and our security,” said ACLU’s Shamsi. “To truly address privacy concerns raised by social media platforms, Congress should enact comprehensive surveillance reform and strong consumer data privacy legislation.”