Hartmann Report

Looking back, although about half of the founders were practicing their own form of voter suppression as slaveholders, most held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley v. Valeo case and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC). In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read it in his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy that was run of, by, and for the rich.24 He said in a 1788 speech that there were “two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property.”25 He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

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He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just daily reliving his old hits, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days... I hear it frequently on my radio/TV program: Americans are baffled about what's happened to Donald Trump. He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would only do with him. He's gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened? The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career. He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.

If you think it should be harder to take away your vote than your gun, double-check your voter registration (especially if you live in a Red state) and show up this fall! Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking. First, the background.

How long will it take us to reject this new McCarthy era that Trump, Vance, and their allies are hell-bent on inflicting on us? It appears that groups aligned with Donald Trump and JD Vance are preparing to reboot an American version of the old East German Stasi, this time with government workers in their crosshairs. I remember the Stasi well.

The work of our day is to restore the idea of America — an egalitarian democratic republic — and then help it realize its full potential after all these many long years… What is the “idea” of America? The core of the American identity? Trump, Vance, and the GOP say they’re all about patriotism; in fact, they’re promoting a white Christian identity form of nationalism, which is an entirely different thing. A dark, dangerous, and deadly thing. Incompatible with our Founders’ idea of America.

For the past forty-plus years, Republicans — just like dysfunctional HOAs — have been stealing from America's future… The GOP's 43-year tax-cuts-for-billionaires-while-we-ignore-the-needs-of-the-country grift has an analogy in condos and homes across America that might help voters understand how it works and how they've gotten away with it. Fully 84 percent of all homes and apartments built and sold in 2022 came with a homeowner's association (HOA), and an estimated 27 percent of all homeowners nationwide currently live in a property controlled by an HOA. And many are very unhappy about the experience.

Wealthy white men have had the right to vote in America since the beginning of our republic. It’s been a very, very different story for women and Native Americans. Women’s voting rights took a long time. Native Americans’ took longer. The struggle for women’s voting rights began in April 1776, when 32-year-old Abigail Adams sat at her writing table in her home in Braintree, Massachusetts, a small town a few hours’ ride south of Boston.

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It's being reported that after a steady, 25-year decline in infant mortality, America saw a full 3 percent increase in dead babies during the first Dobbs year… Newborn babies are the latest victims in the ongoing Republican War On Women™. The most recent deadly aspect of the crisis started with Donald Trump proudly putting three anti-abortion Catholics on the Supreme Court, promising America that they'd overturn Roe v Wade. He sure delivered on that; it was probably the only promise he's kept in his entire life. Multiple pregnant Red state women have, over the past year or so, told harrowing stories about almost dying before doctors were willing to give them healthcare for fear of going to prison because of draconian state abortion bans. But now we learn that GOP policies aren't just capable of killing women; they appear to have killed at least 20,000 newborn babies in 2022, as Red states across the country instituted abortion bans in the wake of the Dobbs decision by six Republicans on the Supreme Court. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reported that after a steady, 25-year decline in infant mortality, America saw a full 3 percent increase in dead newborn babies during the first Dobbs year. (Statistics for 2023 will come out next year.)