(MON 4/25/22)

EU Score: Democracy 2, Authoritarianism 1 … By now you know about incumbent French President Emmanuel Macron’s (pictured) decisive, but relatively narrow, 58.5% to 41.5% victory over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s runoff elections (Associated Press). Macron had won his first term over Le Pen in 2017 by a 66% to 34% margin. 

It was just one of two victories for liberal democracy over authoritarianism. Also on Sunday, in Slovenia the opposition liberal party had received nearly 34% of the vote while the governing conservative party had just 24%, with 97% of the ballots in the parliamentary election counted, the AP says. The winning Freedom Movement can now form a new coalition government with the New Slovenia party (7% of the vote), Social Democrats (more than 6%) and the Left Party (4%). 

Of Le Pen and Jansa: France’s Le Pen has ties with the Kremlin going back to her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen and 1968, when Russia ran the Soviet Union (which says something about the bi-polar political philosophy of populism). Just days before Sunday’s French runoffs, she laid out some foreign policy priorities, according to Salon.

They include an attitude toward NATO that sounds very Trumpian:

•Limit military support to Ukraine.

•Leave NATO’s integrated command.

•Relaunch “strategic rapprochement” between NATO and Russia as soon as peace between Moscow and Kyiv can be secured (really?). 

Slovenia’s defeated incumbent prime minister, Janez Jansa, is an ally of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the authoritarian populist who won a fourth consecutive landslide just three weeks ago, and he is an admirer of Donald J. Trump, who is still trying to win the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Jansa has been in office just two years, clearly not long enough to smother the local free press as Orban has. 

Name to watch: Leader of Slovenia’s winning Freedom Movement and thus likely the nation’s next prime minister is Robert Golob.

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Speaker fixed? … Late last Friday The Hustings initiated a weekend Twitter poll (@NewsHustings) that asked whether House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would become next speaker, replacing Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) assuming, as everyone does, that Republicans will win the chamber’s majority in November’s mid-term elections. Our poll was a response to McCarthy’s denial that he had called on Donald J. Trump to resign as president after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. 

Quell surprise – a recording surfaced.

Scroll down to the next center-column headline, “Speaker Blown,” for the whole story. 

Shortly after we posted our poll, The Wall Street Journal published an interview with ex-President Trump, who said he wasn’t pleased to learn of McCarthy’s comments in the January 10, 2021 House GOP leadership call, but said that the California congressman ultimately never advised him to quit and quickly reversed his stance “once he found out the facts.” 

That must have been one helluva visit to Mar-a-Lago McCarthy made later that month. 

Anyway, our poll predicted overwhelmingly that McCarthy was “toast”, with more than 80% for the affirmative, until news of the interview spread. It would still look bad for the once and future speaker…

•McCarthy becomes speaker: 23.2%

•McCarthy is toast: 76.8%.

This is of 155 votes cast. It should be clear this is not scientifically balanced. But it is a good gauge of our readers’ thoughts. Twitter reader comments appear in the left and right columns.

•••

Former Sen. Orrin Hatch … (R-UT) served in the upper chamber from 1977 to 2019 and has been remembered for his ability to his friendship with liberals, especially the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). But the longest-serving Republican senator (sixth overall) also allied with President Trump and was one of the key figures in assuring the Supreme Court’s conservative majority (per The New York Times). He died Saturday in Salt Lake City, at the age of 88.

--Todd Lassa

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(FRI 4/22/22)

In the era of American politics before Donald J. Trump, the man who would be next year’s House speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would now be toast. After he tweeted that the book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America's Future is “totally false and wrong” reporting he had “a plan” to remove then-lame duck President Trump from the White House after the January 6 Capitol insurrection and before President Biden’s inauguration January 20, authors of the book released an audio recording proving he had said just that in a phone call to other House GOP leaders.

Authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns are reporters for The New York Times. Read the newspaper’s story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/us/politics/trump-mitch-mcconnell-kevin-mccarthy.html

In a recording of the January 10, 2021 call, McCarthy asked the other Republican leaders about the mechanism for invoking the 25^th Amendment to remove Trump, whom he faulted for “inciting people” to attack the Capitol. Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, asked McCarthy whether Trump might resign over it. 

McCarthy was doubtful, according to The New York Times, but he told the group of GOP leaders he had a plan to tell Trump of the impending impeachment resolution in the House of Representatives and that it was time to go.

“What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” McCarthy said.

On January 11, according to the NYT, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told two longtime advisors he expected a sufficient number of Republicans to vote to convict Trump, which held the possibility the former president would not be allowed to run again. 

By the end of the month, McCarthy had kissed Trump’s ring on a surprise weekend visit to Mar-a-Lago. On February 13, eight Republican senators joined 50 Democrats and Independents to convict, nine short of the two-thirds vote necessary. That May, McCarthy stripped Cheney of her number-three position in the party’s caucus leadership (Cheney denies she leaked the January 8 call recording). 

Still the future speaker?: McCarthy yearns to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as House speaker, of course, under the expectation that Republicans will obliterate Democrats in this November’s mid-term elections. Will he maintain sufficient support of both traditional Republicans and MAGA Republicans to win re-election for California’s 23^rd District? Thanks to a new congressional district map, McCarthy has not just two Democratic challengers, but also Republican Jay Obernolte, incumbent for California’s 8^th District, according to Ballotpedia. The state’s non-partisan primary is June 7. 

Meanwhile, a likely subpoena of McCarthy from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection, on which Cheney is one of two Republicans, looms.

--Todd Lassa

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(THU 4/21/22)

Scroll down to below this post to read "(Ketanji Brown) Jackson Deserves Better."

More arms for Ukraine … President Biden Thursday announced an additional $800 million in military aid for Ukraine (AP) but warned that Congress will need to approve additional funds to maintain U.S. support. This is on top of $2.6 billion already contributed to Ukraine’s war effort against Russia. The latest tranche goes for heavy artillery, 144,000 rounds of ammunition and drones for an escalated battle over the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. …

Tweet this … Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he’s secured the $46.5 billion necessary to buy Twitter outright, at $54.20 per share, NPR reports. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the world’s richest person says he has lined up $25.5 billion in loans from Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other banks, and will shell out the remaining $21 billion from his personal fortune. ...

Mask mandate appeal coming … The Justice Department says it will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that struck down the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask mandate on public mass transit including commercial airplanes, NPR’s Morning Edition reports. The CDC asked the DOJ to appeal the ruling by a federal judge in Tampa, Florida, that lifted the mandate earlier this week.

The CDC did not follow proper rule-making procedures, Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said in a 59-page opinion Monday. The CDC says that wearing a mask on buses, subways, airplanes and other public transit “remains necessary to protect the public health.”

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WED 4/20/22

Masks Off

Some airline passengers removed masks mid-flight Monday after a federal judge overturned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national public transportation mask mandate to fight the COVID-19 virus. U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, in Tampa, Florida, said in a 59-page opinion that the CDC did not follow proper rule-making procedures in issuing the mandate.

Mizelle’s ruling does not preclude local authorities and private companies from mandating their own masking requirements, The Washington Post reports, though United, Delta, Southwest and American immediately lifted their requirements –- even triggering removal celebrations on some in-air flights –- and the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina), Miami and Portland (Oregon) airports are among those announcing they will no longer require masks, per local TSA directives, according to the New York Post. Lyft and Uber also have lifted the mask mandate for drivers and passengers.

New York’s subway system and LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports, and San Francisco International are reportedly maintaining mask mandates. There has been a surge in new East Coast cases of the BA.2 omicron variant in recent weeks.

This left the Biden administration and the CDC scrambling Wednesday to determine how to respond. See left and right columns for more.

What do you think?: Should the Justice Department appeal Judge Mizelle’s ruling to the Supreme Court, or is it time to take off masks while on airplanes and public transportation? Email your comments to editors@thehustings.news and tell us in the subject line whether you’re “left” or “right” no matter whether it matches your opinion on this question. We will post civil comments … no echo chambers and no trolling … in these columns.

--Todd Lassa

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By Nic Woods

The Senate vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson April 7 to the Supreme Court of the United States should have been 70-30, or at least matched Neil Gorsuch’s 54-45, but because we seem to live in one of the most blindly partisan and disingenuous political timelines ever, it was 53-47.

While that’s one more than Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas (both 52-48) and three more than Brett Kavanaugh (50-48), Brown Jackson was far less controversial than any of them. Could anyone in the Senate say with a straight face that she lacked qualifications? Unlike Barrett, Jackson knew that what was legal and what wasn’t and what was under her purview as a judge and what sounded like it should be a senator’s problem. 

And unlike Thomas and Kavanaugh, she didn’t have to worry about past, er, discrepancies potentially derailing her nomination.

The 53-47 vote was the same number that supported her rise to her current judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals to the District of Columbia Circuit but, instead of Mitt Romney (R-UT) casting a vote her way that time, it was … Lindsay Graham, the same South Carolina Republican who suddenly had a bit of a temper tantrum because President Joe Biden picked her over his choice, J. Michelle Childs, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.

He should have known this was going to happen — while Childs is highly qualified, if she had been chosen, she would have been equally impressive and likely more qualified that those who made it to the court before her — Jackson was just a smidge more qualified and Biden was taking no chances. 

Better luck next time, Lindsey. If you allow a next time.

This brings me to what was irritating about her confirmation process. It was a dog and pony show that was beneath her. 

Since Robert H. Bork was rejected in 1987 — the last rejection of a SCOTUS nominee, for better or worse — his ghost has been haunting the proceedings for everyone who has been luckier than he and didn’t have a role to play in one of the most memorable fiascos of the Nixon administration, the Saturday Night Massacre. He also had a candid streak that revealed too much of his judicial philosophy for those senators who were willing to otherwise forgive him for following sketchy presidential orders. 

None of this was Jackson’s fault. It isn’t her fault that her credentials were impeccable and unassailable and so she had to answer to nonsense from Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri. It also isn’t her fault that they don’t seem to know that, if they aren’t satisfied with the minimum sentences of child predators as they currently stand, it’s their job to pass a tougher law. These two, like most Republicans, have been on record for disliking “activist judges,” so why were they asking a judge to be tougher than the law Congress passed?

Which brings us to a serious question and probably the biggest one from the hearings: Why do voters continue to find lawmakers who don’t seem to know what their jobs are? 

John Kennedy of Louisiana’s obligatory impression that a Harvard-educated Black woman is “articulate” and Ted Cruz’s performance are not really worthy of mention.

Someone, I guess, had to say that a Black person was articulate and it might as well be the junior senator of a Southern state. Lindsay Graham was mid-temper tantrum so he was otherwise occupied. 

And, perhaps, if Ted Cruz wants to ask serious questions about Antiracist Baby, he should ask the author, Ibram X. Kendi.  I have had several conversations with Kendi and can say such a meeting of the minds would be a technical knockout if Cruz were to allow Kendi to get a word in edgewise.

The pinnacle of disingenuousness was Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who said the right things but acted as if none of that mattered because he couldn’t get a feel if Judge Jackson was, or was not, an originalist. 

Originalism, in short, is interpreting the Constitution based on the original understanding at the time it was adopted and, if there are any changes, it would be done through the process laid out in Article V. Now, the original understanding of “people” when the Constitution was adopted did not apply to six people who have sat on the Supreme Court, in addition to incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

What do you think, Ben Sasse – is she an originalist? And what really was your point in trying to come off as the rational Republican on the Judiciary committee for the length of your speech, then not voting for her because you knew she couldn’t possibly be an originalist? https://wapo.st/3EkNUu4

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Woods is deputy editor.