Hartmann Report

The only way Republicans can hold onto power is with their phony proclamations of “voter fraud” as the excuse to restrict the franchise to white people through restrictions, purges, and intimidation. Two years ago, Texas Republicans set out to rig the 2022 election, passing into law Senate Bill 1 over the objection of Democratic legislators who left the state to try to block its passage... This follows a decade of similar attempts to suppress the vote of anybody who isn’t white and middle aged/middle class. As the Texas Civil Rights Project noted, in just the first 4 years after corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013, Texas Republicans closed 1,173 polling places in counties — predominantly Black and Hispanic — that had previously been protected from manipulation by the VRA.

It’s time to call a fascist a fascist, speaking of CNN’s upcoming attempt to rehabilitate Trump with a sanitized “Town Hall” and a mostly MAGA audience... Next week, CNN will take a shot at normalizing American fascist movement leader and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, a man who openly embraces murderous Nazis, Vladimir Putin, white supremacy, misogyny, religious bigotry, and political violence. They will feature and fete a career criminal who over 20 women have claimed raped or sexually assaulted them.

So, what do we do? A woman called into my radio/TV program yesterday, sobbing. She’s both terrified and angry about the way the GOP is scapegoating queer youth and the impact it’s having on her daughter and her friends. You can click on the audio file at the end of this article to hear it for yourself... Black people in America know this phenomenon well. It’s called “weathering”: the slow, steady, daily drip-drip-drip of closed doors to opportunity, microaggressions, and distrust, all punctuated by the occasional violent or even deadly all-out attack.

The only businesses Republicans support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors & giant monopolies - and none of those are good for average Americans or the US economy… “The chief business of the American people is business.” — Calvin Coolidge. As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn. All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans destroy small business

Gun Culture Enshrined: The Second Amendment. "To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup." —Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century There’s an old saying, paraphrasing Hitler, that “the winners write history.” American culture grew out of genocide, slavery, and white supremacy, and guns have been central to this history, although the white “winners” have largely excised this from modern historical narratives. But the founders knew what was up.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — a Bizarre confluence of events could be setting America up for a real crisis in a year and a half. — A new study explains why Republicans are working so hard to make it more difficult for students and young adults to vote. — Earlier this week I wrote about a woman from Oklahoma who had to go to Kansas to get an abortion to save her own life. Soon, even Kansas may be shut down as a place of refuge for women in crisis. — Bed, Bath & Beyond is a poster child for the damage Reagan’s deregulation of capitalism has caused America. — Senator Dick Durban says a SCOTUS ethics overhaul is coming. — A new ocean warming study is so distressing, writes Julia Conley, that some scientists don’t want to talk about it. — Video of the Day: Wow. Hakeem Jeffries is so good at this. — Crazy Alert! This is what happens to people when they take money from fossil fuel billionaires.

This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded… In yesterday’s Daily Take, I laid out a scenario where Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans could crash our economy by forcing a default on US debt, producing what could easily be a depression as deep and deadly as the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. When I discussed this with people on the radio yesterday, several responded with incredulity. “Why would the Republicans,” they asked, “who generally represent the interests of corporations and the rich above all else, risk crashing the stock market and economy where those very same wealthy people have their money invested?” The question itself reveals a misunderstanding of how things work for the morbidly rich.

The US government has never, in our country’s entire history, defaulted on its debt. Neither, in recent history, have most other advanced democracies. Debt default is very much a Third World thing… Kevin McCarthy is playing with fire, and he’s on very shaky constitutional grounds. He believes that he can hold hostage payments for goods bought and services already provided to the federal government — debts of the United States — in exchange for forcing the Biden administration to go along with draconian cuts to veterans benefits, food stamps (SNAP benefits), Medicaid, the Inflation Reduction Act (particularly its subsidies for green energy), and the permanent establishment of Trump’s massive tax cuts for billionaires. Republicans started using the so-called “debt ceiling” — based on a law passed back in 1917 — as a cudgel to beat up Democratic presidents in 1995 during the Clinton administration. It was one of Newt’s “bright ideas.” Clinton and Obama went along with the GOP, but now their demands have become so extreme that President Biden is threatening a veto (if the bill even gets through the Senate, which it probably won’t).

If it seems to you like women in Red states are the subjects of witch hunts, you’re right. And it has nothing to do with “life”: it’s all about economic and political power. Jaci Statton wanted her baby, but the fetus wasn’t developing properly and was dying inside her. If it wasn’t removed from her uterus it might kill her, too. She was experiencing vaginal bleeding, high blood pressure, debilitating cramps, and “intense nausea.” As reporter Ben Felder wrote for The Oklahoman: “The longer the fetus remained inside her, the higher risk she would be for internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure, and even a stroke.” She and her husband first went to a nearby hospital, but — like one-in-six hospital beds in America — it was run to earn money for the Catholic Church and so refused to provide her with any help beyond fluids

I’m proposing Congress change the rules of how the Court operates around decisions in which they invoke the Constitution to change or strike down laws. America was never intended to have kings or queens, unaccountable to the people, ruling for life. But that’s what we have, because Congress and the White House never seriously pushed back against a power grab executed by the Supreme Court itself. It’s time to reduce the Court’s power in a way that agrees with the Constitution. We’ll almost certainly have to wait until the next time Democrats control the House, Senate, and White House, but that could happen in another 20 months, so we need to start planning now. I’m proposing Congress change the rules of how the Court operates around decisions in which they invoke the Constitution to change or strike down laws. Instead of operating along partisan majority lines, I’m suggesting they must have an absolute consensus — a unanimous decision — on any decisions involving the US Constitution.