States: What Are They Good For? Absolutely Nothing

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shioseki with
Jenny Herk in Florida

You may have noticed that Americans don't just live in a nation, they live in a state.  This seems great if you live in a cool state like California or a snobby one like Massachusetts, but less so if you live in some distant wilderness like North Montana [Louise, please confirm name – Ed.].

Once they were useful for attempting to distract pre-screen rugrats by getting them to count license plates on the Merritt Parkway.

But now what are they good for?

Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a smart fella and great Bostonian who unlike his successors never got to go on half million dollar vacations with Nazi-admiring plutocrats, once explained the value of states:  

“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Let's see what experiments in democracy are cooking in the labs today.

First stop: America's #1 hellhole, Florida.

A blend of Southern racism and Northern corruption, Florida has always been a place where democracy came to lie on a chaise, stroke out, and die.   And that was before pudding and torture loving Ron DeSantis came to town.

First, DeSantis and his Republican stooges, um, state legislators, decided to overturn the decision of Florida voters to allow ex-cons to vote.  To undermine the verdict of the voters, they hatched a scheme to make it a crime for such individuals to register to vote unless they had paid all of their fines and courts costs.  Fun fact: there is no way for these unfortunate souls to know what those fees and costs are.  Ergo, they can't vote, forever, exactly as the voters didn't intend:

Florida: a great place to visit, but not to live free

In November 2018, Floridians changed that by adopting [a] state constitutional amendment that automatically restored the right to vote for most Floridians with felony convictions, except those convicted of murder or a felony sex offense, who had completed the terms of their sentence.

The amendment was expected to restore voting rights to as many as 1.4 million Floridians. But on the heels of its passage, the Florida Legislature and governor limited the reach of this historic re-enfranchisement. They adopted a law requiring that certain court debts be paid before the right to vote is restored. This pay-to-vote requirement disqualified hundreds of thousands of people who owe court debts they can’t afford to pay.

The state adopted this antidemocratic system knowing there is no centralized database where potential voters can learn whether they even owe disqualifying court debts.  

Just to take a step back, why are elections for federal offices under the control of racist state laws and thirsty and hungry pudding lovers anyway?   Even in 1789, the slaveholding white men who wrote the U.S. Constitution suspected there might be a problem here:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators. 

U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 4.

Ron's come a long way since Gitmo. Or not.

But the assault on freedom concocted in Dr. DeSantis's lab doesn't stop at voting rights.  There's also the little matter of freedom of speech and thought disappearing down there.  

There used to be this small hip liberal arts college down in Sarasota, called New College, a Florida state institution.  Professors taught and students learned, or not, and all was jolly until ol' Go-Go Boots came to town:

New College of Florida’s board of trustees declined to grant tenure to five veteran faculty members on Wednesday, a controversial move that critics said stemmed from inappropriate interference from the Sarasota school’s interim president, Richard Corcoran.

The vote followed an unusually heated debate among the trustees, frequently interrupted by jeers and chants of “shame on you” from a crowd onlookers who sat through the nearly three-hourlong meeting....

Only four members of the 13-person board voted in favor of tenure.., including faculty representative Matthew Lepinski and student trustee Grace Keenan.

The five faculty members were chemists Rebecca Black and Lin Jiang; oceanographer Gerardo Toro-Farmer; Islamic scholar Nassima Neggaz; and Hugo Viera-Vargas, who studies Caribbean music. All were described as excellent researchers and teachers by dozens of colleagues and students who spoke before the board.

At the end of the trustees meeting, the typically reserved Lepinski addressed his colleagues: “I am concerned over the direction this board is taking.… I wish you the best, but this is my last board meeting.”

He later announced that he was also leaving his position in the computer science department at the end of the term, the second professor from the department to do so in recent weeks.

The tenure cases came under scrutiny earlier this month after Corcoran circulated a memo recommending that the board vote to defer or deny tenure to the five faculty members under consideration. He cited “extraordinary circumstances,” including “a renewed focus on ensuring the College is moving towards a more traditional liberal arts institution” and “current uncertainty of the needs of the divisions/units and College.”

The memo, which has drawn criticism from the faculty union leaders and national organizations advocating for academic freedom, also referenced the school’s recently overhauled board of trustees and administration.

In January, Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed six trustees with a mission to reform the small liberal arts college. In its first two meetings, the trustees voted to terminate then-President Patricia Okker and dismantle the school’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion. ...interim provost Bradley Thiessen [had] approved the applications of all five candidates in February while standing in as interim president prior to Corcoran’s arrival....

Another new priority for the school is to “be a beacon of free speech to the nation,” the plan states. To achieve that aim, it says, incoming freshman will be required take courses in “the importance of free speech and inquiry,” and the school will host lectures on “the status of free speech nationally and around the world.

Florida's new vision for public schools

The free speech bit was a nice ironic touch. It's also part and parcel of Florida's authorization of vigilantes to yank books from school libraries under the transparently fraudulent rubric of “parents' rights,” which in Florida means the right of self-appointed censors to decide what your kids can read in violation of your parental rights.

We used to think that academic freedom in public institutions was protected by the First and especially the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but these days, who knows?

It's gotten so bad that even the mighty and mighty evil Walt Disney Co. has sued to prevent Florida from further violating its rights to express its views:

Disney filed a 77-page lawsuit in federal court, charging DeSantis and other officials with violations of the contracts clause, the takings clause, due process and its First Amendment right to protected speech. In its lawsuit, Disney says, "This government action was patently retaliatory, patently anti-business, and patently unconstitutional." The company is asking a federal judge to declare the board's action "unlawful and unenforceable."

It's beginning to look like we'll have to leave our visit to other laboratories of democracy for another day (Texas's assaults on our country and our rights could take a dozen posts by itself), but before we go, let's remember what's going on.

The idea that states were somehow “sovereign” has a long history in America.  In fact, we even fought a war over it.  Although you won't learn any of this in Florida schools, state sovereignty lost. 

To reconstitute the shattered Union, the reconstructing fathers enacted among others the 14th Amendment which states in part:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

U.S. Constitution, Amend. XIV, Sec.1.

What happened?  For the first time in the 253-year history of The Massachusetts Spy, we blame – Both Sides.  The white extremists doing business as the Republican Party led the attacks of freedom and democracy in Florida and other states.  But their opponents, until very recently, put up almost no resistance.

And who can blame them? It's exhausting enough to keep with with national politics.  A lot of us didn't have the time and energy to worry about what was going on in some state capitol 600 miles or more from where we lived. As a result, while we were sleeping, our state-level democracies were stolen from us.

Even under the post-14th Amendment understanding of state power, as the great Janelle Bouie noted,

As a unit of governance, a state legislature is both unusually powerful, with broad discretion over large areas of public policy, and unusually open to partisan and ideological capture through luck, timing and open manipulation of the rules. Part of the political story of the past decade (and farther back still) is how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have used these facts to their advantage.

We're starting to think that the problem with federalism is federalism itself.

We hate to disagree with the great Louis D. Brandeis, but on the basis of the evidence, we'd have to say that federalism is terrible and needs to be cabined to the maximum extent possible by all three branches of the Federal Government: the Executive, acting primarily through the Justice Department enforcing the 14th Amendment, the Legislative Branch by passing laws to enforce the promises of the 14th Amendment, and the Judiciary, alas currently dominated by bent Republicans who use federalism as a tool to prop up white supremacy.

If we end up in a country in which half of us live in states made unfree (and undemocratic) by out of control and invariably Republican state Governors and legislators, we will have traded our freedom for a mess of pudding. 

To us, that seems much worse for liberty and democracy than some Stanford Law students interrupting a bent Federal judge.

While you were sleeping

By Washington Correspondent Nellie Bly
with Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Last week we reported on the Good Friday murder of the legal rights of 150 million American women by a bent whackjob judge in America's jurisprudential center, Amarillo, Texas. 

Although we are not known for our optimism, we ventured to predict that “this gruesome opinion is in our view unlikely to survive the tender mercies of even the bent Fifth Circuit.”  It turns out we were only sort of right.

The Fifth Circuit in action

The Republican-bent Fifth Circuit, unable to stomach the indefensible outcome of Amarillo Matt's “opinion,”  decided he couldn't reverse a 23-year-old decision approving mifepristone.  But to the surprise of no one, they appeared to endorse large chunks of the insane reasoning of his opinion.

As to standing, which requires plaintiffs to have a distinct and palpable injury (rather than just a sad about being on the losing side of a political or policy battle), the Fifth Circuit first reversed the burden of proof by requiring the defendants to prove that plaintiffs didn't have an injury, rather than requiring that plaintiffs allege a plausible and real injury.

Having turned standing on its head, the Fifth Circuit found merit in plaintiffs' preposterous claims that they were injured by the approval of mifepristone because some day they (supposedly doctors) might have to treat someone for complications of mifepristone, among all the other business that comes into an emergency room.  Since the incidence of such complications is proven to be extraordinarily low, the claim is inherently ridiculous.

Nonetheless, the Fifth Circuit found that these forced-birth doctors would face supposedly “enormous stress and pressure” by treating women who had taken the drug.  Whether the stress and pressure was enormouser than the usual stress of dealing with emergencies in, wait for it, the emergency room caused by anything else, like school kids whose bodies have been shredded by high powered weapons of war following an exercise of Second Amendment rights, is unknown.  

In any event, as we pointed out as long ago as last week, the complication rate from pregnancy is far higher than from mifepristone.  So use of the drug can be expected to decrease stress and pressure in the ER, and banning it will increase ER visits and the stress and pressure attendant thereto.

But the stupidity and mendacity of the Fifth Circuit didn't end there.  As a second injury, they cited the possibility that forced-birth doctors might have to treat mifepristone patients with procedures that could constitute an abortion in supposed violation of their constitutional right to deny health care to critically ill patients at whim.

That injury too is irrelevant at best.  Outlawing safe and legal abortion will lead to botched illegal abortions.  The treatments for those abortions could be the same as the ones these doctors are too full of the Holy Spirit to treat.  So granting them the relief they seek (outlawing mifepristone) won't address their supposed injury (doing their jobs).

On the supposed merits of the forced-birthers' claim, the Fifth Circuit said that their challenge to the 2016 loosening of FDA restrictions on the use and dispensing of mifepristone might well succeed. Again, they illegally flipped the burden of proof to require the FDA to prove its approval process was flawless, rather than demanding that plaintiffs prove it was arbitrary and capricious.

This was probably because the plaintiffs submitted no competent science-based evidence tending to establish that the 2016 and 2020 amendments were not well founded in science and law.  That is because there is no such evidence, either before those amendments or in the years since the conditions were changed.  

Finally, in considering the balance of equities and interests in letting the Amarillo injunction ruin the lives of women, the Court placed weight on the truly bats*** crazy argument that the 1873 Comstock Act prohibition on mailing abortion drugs had any, repeat any, relevance to the question of whether the FDA acting under its separate statutory authority properly approved mifepristone in 2000 or modified its approval in recent years or whether the FDA's science-based approval process should be set aside indefinitely.

As a final grab at the pussies of 150 million American women, the Court placed zero weight on the interests, needs, hopes, fears, and rights of those women to safe, legal medication abortion.  

"Your interests don't matter on appeal of a stay, dear."

Perhaps you are now wondering as to who appointed these clowns to the once-distinguished Fifth Circuit bench.  If you had zero Democrats on the panel (two appointed by the Tangerine-Faced Defendant and one by George W. Bush), you won!  Your bet, that is, not your legal rights.

The Department of Justice, properly appalled by this travesty of judicial review, kicked it to the Supreme Court, six of whose members took away the rights of all Americans to an abortion just last year.  What happens next is anyone's guess.

We suspect that Sulky Sam Alito and his, um, confederates are looking for some way to send the case back to Amarillo for more endless factfinding without making any ruling on the law, which if followed would require the whole mess to be rubbished, but frankly no outcome is out of the question, including a holding that the FDA itself is unconstitutional.

What's the moral of the story?  You probably have guessed it by now: none of this would have happened had not 55% of white women voted for the Tangerine-Faced Grifter in 2016, who larded the bench with eighth-rate extremists to entice forced-birth evangelicals to vote for a depraved sex offender.

It's not like we weren't warned:

Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, seized on the court’s ruling to warn that Mr. Trump, her presumptive Republican opponent, poses a threat to women. She recalled his suggestion this year that abortion be banned and that women who violate that ban be penalized. She also said that with other states also seeking to restrict access to abortions and with Republicans seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, proponents of abortions rights could not afford to let up. 

“We’ve seen a concerted, persistent attack on women’s health and rights at the federal level,” Mrs. Clinton said in a statement. “Meanwhile, Donald Trump has said women should be punished for having abortions.” 

That was on June 27, 2016.  What were supposed advocates for women's rights saying after Hillary sounded the alarm?

A few weeks later, noted feminist Maureen Dowd laser-focused on the real issue facing women in the election, which is what Hillary had said about Monica Lewinsky 20 years earlier:

After the Monica affair, she deflected questions about Bill’s cheesy behavior by summoning up the specter of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Now she deflects questions about the emails and foundation ethical tangles by summoning up the specter of the Vast Alt-Right Conspiracy. 

I'm sure that the women who may be forced into unsafe abortions or forced birth if Trump's bent courts outlaw mifepristone will be much comforted to recall how Hillary stood by her horndog husband when Maureen said she shouldn't, because that was the real issue facing women in 2016.

Even supposedly more progressive minds didn't appreciate the stakes of that election.  Here's a report from The Guardian on August 2, 2016:

By the way, if all of the idiots who had voted for Jill Stein had instead voted for Hillary Clinton, American women would not today be living in fear that their right to a safe medication abortion would be stripped from them.

And with the catastrophe imminent our brilliant pundits (in this case Kathleen Parker) still didn't hear the sounds of Zeroes coming in low over Diamond Head:

So she told her many devoted readers in The Washington Post on November 4, 2016.

When Trump filled the Supreme Court seat stolen from Merrick Garland with some pompous reactionary, here's what Kathleen had to say:

Watching the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, one might easily find oneself wishing Gorsuch were president of the United States.

Alas, he's not. But Gorsuch's selection to replace Antonin Scalia is the sanest act committed by a president whose first 60 days have left him with an approval rating under 40 percent and persistent questions about his stability.

For those of you who haven't been paying close attention since then, Gorsuch was one of the six bent Republican Justices who stripped American women of their rights over their own bodies just last year.

The point is not just to drag pompous bloviators like Kevin's sister and Parker.  The point is when it comes to American democracy at this moment, don't calm down.  We won't be fine no matter who wins.  If a Democratic candidate did something you didn't like, e.g. refusing to divorce her tomcatting husband, think very carefully about the alternative.

We're sorry if your feelings are hurt.  We're sorry if you have to get off your ass and vote in each and every boring, stupid election, even the ones for the Tennessee legislature.

But we'd be even sorrier if next week we learn that thanks to our Republican-bent courts, women who thought they could obtain a safe legal medication abortion start looking at their coat-hangers with a new and desperate eye.

Legal News: 150 million women lynched in Texas

By Legal Editor Scott V. Sandford and
Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki reporting from America's Legal Capitol

AMARILLO, Tex. – The desolate windswept prairie of Amarillo, Texas seems like an unlikely forum for limiting the rights of 150 million or so American women who might become pregnant someday, but in Republican America, no forum is too obscure to take away rights or enforce minority Republican rule.  In other words, Tobago rules the world! [No one will ever get that conflicts joke so stop it – Ed.]

On the night of Good Friday, when he thought no one notice his order to crucify American women, bent Trump-appointed “judge” Anthony Comstock [Surely, Matthew Kacsmaryk? – Ed.] issued an order purporting to ban the dispensing of or prescribing one of the two drugs used for a medication abortion, a safe procedure used by women millions of times a year to exercise their right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

The courthouse in Amarillo rules the world!

It came as a surprise to no one that this judge in this court would issue a decision free from any taint of lawfulness.  But it's worth examining the outrage closely first so that its fatal defects can be brought into the light and second to place in the context of a country whose democracy is crumbling under the unrelenting nationwide onslaught of white extremists (Hello, Tennessee!).

Let's start by examining the judge. Certainly any federal judge would approach an abortion-related legal question with an open mind, right, Washington Post?

A few months into his freshman year, he wrote a letter to the editor of the student newspaper about abortion.

“The Democratic Party’s ability to condone the federally sanctioned eradication of innocent human life is indicative of the moral ambivalence undergirding this party,” Kacsmaryk wrote, endorsing a Republican Party platform that would grant a fetus the full legal protections of a person.

Democrats, he added, had “facilitated the demise of America’s Christian heritage” and mounted a “contemptuous assault on the traditional family.”

Faith was the “driving force and line” for Kacsmaryk growing up, said [his sister] Griffith. Raised by two born-again Christians in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Kacsmaryk and his two sisters .... all learned early that abortion was wrong.

“It was known, kind of like my faith,” Griffith said.

No wonder even spineless Susan Collins couldn't vote for this zealot (after being assured by Mitch McConnell that he had the votes without her).

How did this case with nationwide reach even get to the prairie wasteland of Amarillo rather than any one of the other 384 federal courthouses in this land of the free?  Funny story:

The lead plaintiff in the abortion pills case, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, incorporated in Texas — with a “registered agent” in Amarillo — several months before the lawsuit was filed. While the group’s website does not include any location or contact information, records filed with the Texas secretary of state’s office show that the group’s mailing address is in Tennessee. 

Judge Kacsmaryk pulls the plug on women's right to choose

What a coincidence!

Now the fun stuff: Amarillo is located in the Northern District of Texas.  Right now there are 16 judges in that District.  What are the chances of the biggest abortion case in the land ending up in the lap of a forced-birth zealot?

How do they assign cases in the Northern District of Texas?  The answer is clear and precise, as set forth in ND Tex. Local Rule 83.3:

The district judges shall determine the method by which all cases are assigned to individual judges.

So just because a case is filed in the wilds of Amarillo doesn't mean that it has to be decided by the sole judge sitting in that tank town.  In fact you would think that a group of judges concerned about the potential for abusive “judge shopping” would ensure random assignment across the whole district.

If you thought that, all we can say is sister, welcome to Texas!  As our old friend University of Texas Law School Professor Steve Vladeck tells us, the rule that all cases filed in Amarillo are heard by one bent judge is not the law of the land, it's the whim of the 16 judges in the Northern District.  

We think that matters of fundamental importance to the entire nation, including at least 150 million women who might someday decide to terminate a pregnancy, should not be decided by 16 lazy black-robed hacks in Texas, but what do we know?

Moving on from the procedural to the substantive travesty of justice, let's just have a look at this hack's opinion.  Its fatal defect is found deep in its bowels.  Actually, we're just s***in' you.  It's on page 1.

The opinion starts with a whine about how the FDA supposedly delayed acting on the petitions of the forced-birth pressure groups who wanted it to rescind its 2000 approval of mifepristone, part of the two drug medication abortion regimen.  From the opinion itself, it is clear that the FDA eventually responded to the petitions, but not in the way that Judge Holy Roller liked.

The legal point buried under all this is that a federal judge has an unquestioned power under the Administrative Procedure Act [Stop snoring back there – Ed.] to order an agency to make a decision about something.  Once the agency does so (here, following the mountains of evidence proving that the drug is safe and effective), the judge can review its decision and if the judge finds it wanting (after according proper deference to agency fact-finding) it can order the agency to address whatever defects were supposedly found.

What a judge can't do, ever, is make its own factual findings in the place of the FDA's and then reverse the FDA's decision to approve the drug on the basis of the supposed facts it found.

And even if it could do that, it could never order the agency to take a specific enforcement action (like going after makers, sellers, or users of the drug) because the decision of what enforcement action to take if any is for the agency to decide as a matter of discretion, not as a matter for a Christian dominionist ruling from his throne of tumbleweeds. 

There are insane errors of law on every page.  We have time for only a few.

As suggested earlier, the entire lawsuit was concocted by a forced-birth pressure group.  It turns out that just because you are sad about a law you don't like, you don't actually have a claim to state in federal court.  You must have suffered a real injury, or in lawspeak, “standing.” This is an important constitutional limitation on the power of courts designed to prevent them from invalidating every law or ruling they don't like.  Like here.

Like his idol Jesus Christ turning water into wine, this whackjob miraculously turned whine into injury:

Here, the associations members have standing because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place enormous pressure and stress on doctors during emergencies and complications.

(He likes to call the procedure “chemical” abortion because that makes it sound as if women are being offered Drano. Last we looked, every drug is by definition a chemical.)

But let's unpack the argument.  He says that these supposed doctors have suffered an injury because the use of mifepristone causes women to flood emergency rooms.  Aside from the falsity of the claim (mifepristone abortions are incredibly safe and complications rare, rarer than pregnancy:

 

), if mifepristone were outlawed, pregnant women would use another abortion pill, obtain surgical abortions, carry an unwanted pregnancy, or, in desperation, sicken and die from unsafe illegal abortions.

Each of these outcomes would raise the supposed pressure on the medical system.  So if the plaintiffs win their case, their purported injuries would only get worse.  That's not standing.  That's not a case.  That's Christian dominionism with a docket number.

When he finished butchering the law of standing, the “judge” turned to the merits, including a holding that the Comstock Act could be used to attack the FDA"s decision because it supposedly banned the mailing of mifepristone.

Anthony Comstock: He's tanned, rested, and ready!

Comstock?  Who he?  Until last year, Anthony Comstock was thought to be a somewhat comic figure from the distant past who fought a number of battles to harass and oppress women, and to be fair, the rest of us, by raging to outlaw birth control, free speech, art, and any number of other things he thought were obscene.

He's back, baby! As Michelle Goldberg explains:

Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped anti-vice crusader for whom the Comstock Act is named, is back from the dead.

Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month. Had this anniversary fallen five or 10 years ago, it barely would have been worth noting, except perhaps to marvel at how far we’d come from an era when a fanatical censor like Comstock wielded national political power. ...Until very recently, it seemed a relic. 

By its terms, the Comstock Act, which predates the law establishing the FDA by over 35 years, prohibits mailing drugs intended to cause an abortion.  Whether it survived the comprehensive drug regulation system established by the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 is dubious, but its irrelevance to the case at hand is indisputable.

Nothing in the Comstock Act purports, or could be read, to limit the ability of the FDA to determine the safety of a drug, including a drug that may be used for abortion.  Assuming arguendo and it's a mighty big arguendo, that the Comstock Act remains in force, nothing prohibits anyone from sending FDA-approved drugs by private courier (or carrying them in the back of their car) anywhere.

We could go on and on, but this gruesome opinion is in our view unlikely to survive the tender mercies of even the bent Fifth Circuit.

But the legal news is not all good.  Even if the decision of this High Plains Tosser is rubbished on appeal, there are other legal threats on the horizon.  There is a non-frivolous argument that state bans on abortion medication are not pre-empted by FDA approval.  There is even an argument that states like Texas can prosecute criminally good people in Massachusetts who cause abortion pills to be sent to Texas, or even let it be known that they would provide medication to Texans who travel to Boston.

It all comes back to the voters (including 55% of white women) who elected the Tangerine-Faced Defendant and a motley crew of spineless extremist Senators who installed three, count 'em, three forced-birthers on the Supreme Court in just four years.  

Until the voters reverse their colossal bad judgment and elect a government that unpacks the bent Supreme Court (not to mention the law west of the Hudson), American women will live in a world aptly described by Elie Mystal:

Broken News: What Those Responsible Serious Republicans Are Up To Now

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling and
Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Arguably the press coverage that led with

may have underplayed the story a little, but the announcement that a corrupt sex offender and Russian agent had finally been indicted for at least a tasting menu of his crimes seemed to take some people rather by surprise.

We call these people “Republicans.” To a man, and that's what they mostly are, they condemned an indictment they hadn't read backed by evidence they hadn't seen as the greatest miscarriage of justice since the last time a white man faced some sort of reckoning for his misdeed, which would have been the January 2021 Impeachment II of that same Queens man.

Whether out of fear of offending the indicted leader of their Grand Old Party, or the willingness to destroy the rule of law to advance their own selfish ends, the response of supposedly prominent Republicans was to throw s*** at the walls and see what stuck.

Here's billionaire finagler Glenn Youngkin's thoughtful measured response:

Glenn Youngkin seeks fairness – for Trump!

“It is beyond belief,” raged Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, that Bragg “has indicted a former President and current presidential candidate for pure political gain.”

The careful reader will note that Youngkin’s complaint is not simply that the indictment itself is flimsy. That is not what makes the charges “political.” Rather, it’s that Trump was indicted at all. 

Keep in mind that this guy hasn't seen the evidence or read the charges.  That would never have happened in his prior gig as CEO of Carlyle, a huge slush fund of finagler money (excuse me, one of America's largest and most respected private-equity investors).  Do you think Carlyle would invest one dime without reading the term sheet and going through mountains of due diligence?  For the sake of their investors, we hope not.  

Sounds kinda extreme if not unhinged.  You would think that America's media would have warned us about someone with views this extreme, perhaps through their beloved deep reporting.

What were they saying about this raving plutocrat when he was running for Governor of Virginia two years ago?

Back then, The Washington Post was singing a more soothing tune:

But Youngkin, a wealthy political newcomer, may benefit from a political climate similar to the one that helped win the governorship for Republican Bob McDonnell in 2009, the last time the GOP triumphed statewide in Virginia.

McDonnell capitalized on a backlash against a newly elected Democratic president — Barack Obama....

Youngkin, 54, who was raised in Virginia Beach and now lives in Great Falls, appears to be an effective retail campaigner who is comfortable onstage. With a personal fortune estimated at $254 million from a career that lifted him to co-CEO of the large, D.C.-based Carlyle Group investment firm, he has plenty of money for ads and field operations.

Because we all know that one of the most important qualities a political leader must have is being comfortable onstage.  Just ask President Vanna White.

We couldn't find any other example of well-respected media outlets handing out comforting platitudes about reactionary Republicans now attempting to obstruct justice and undermining the rule of law. 

Just kidding.  Here's mainstream Republican Mother Pence now (again commenting on an unissued indictment):

“The unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage,” former Vice President Mike Pence told CNN.

Mike Pence speaks out

It's only unprecedented because Ford pardoned Dick Nixon about two steps of the Watergate Special Prosecutor's grand jury, which didn't look good at the time and looks worse now.

And here's two of The New York Times's leading gasbags (Jeremy Peters and Nick Fandos) after the 2016 election: 

He is all the things Donald J. Trump could not be. A career public servant who has served in Congress and run a state. A hero to conservatives who adore his strong Christian faith and resistance to the country’s rapid social liberalization. A disciplined messenger who keeps his opinions from erupting on Twitter. 

How much influence Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, the vice president-elect, will have in a Trump White House is unknown, especially given Mr. Trump’s habit of consulting a wide circle of formal and informal advisers and then ultimately doing as he pleases. 

But given how deep mistrust of Mr. Trump runs — not only from Democrats but also from elected officials in his own party who said he was unfit to become president — Mr. Pence, 57, could become the administration figure who offers a measure of comfort in what is sure to be a highly uncertain and chaotic time.

Yeah, it worked out just like that.  

So many mainstream Republicans, so little time.  Nikki Haley, who once had the odious job of flacking for Pres U Bum at the United Nations, joins the chat:

A day earlier, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Mr. Trump’s most prominent official challenger so far, suggested the indictment was politically motivated, writing on Twitter, “This is more about revenge than it is about justice.”

Maybe wait until you at least know what he is charged with and what evidence the DA has?  That would probably be the more constructive choice and would allow her to campaign with her dignity largely intact.  

Speaking of which, the same New York Times summed up her hideous performance flacking for Pres U Bum at the United Nations, where the country she represented was laughed at by the entire world: 

In an administration that prizes lock-step loyalty, Ms. Haley managed to hold to at least some of her own priorities, and as a result she appears to be that rarest of Trump appointees: one who can exit the administration with her dignity largely intact....Ms. Haley, who is expected to pursue the presidency one day, may eventually find herself having to defend facilitating some of President Trump’s worst policies and instincts. But she will also be able to point to more constructive roles she played. Indeed, a replacement in her mold may be the best to hope for from Mr. Trump. 

In fairness to the Times's loathsome Editorial Board, they at least admitted the possibility that she would debase herself and shred her dignity and credibility by kowtowing to the Tangerine-Faced Defendant. 

We'll serve up one more moderate mainstream Republican before we start chugging Pepto.  A graduate of Yale Law School would certainly understand the need to temper their comments until they knew what the charges and the evidence were.  Looks like Criminal Procedure is yet another subject not worthy of being taught at that cutting-edge institution:

 

He came in pretty hot.  You would think that a conservative intellectual who champions individual responsibility (like for the consequences of one's own criminal conduct) would champion the rule of law, or at least you would think that if you read The Washington Post 1,000 year ago (well, 2016):

From the perspective of a conservative, Vance paints a depressing picture of a proud, but broken, people: the cycle of dependency, the near total lack of personal responsibility, rising domestic violence, declining church attendance, laziness, etc. ...  (Reading the book inspired me to travel to his hollowed-out hometown of Middletown, Ohio, for an October big idea about how Trump really could win the election.)

J.D. Vance just wants to serve his beloved Ohioians

Rather than just collect royalty checks and give TED talks, Vance wants to do something to deal with these afflictions.

He is currently looking to re-settle from California to either Columbus or Cincinnati. His San Diego-born wife has gotten onboard, and he thinks their two dogs will adjust well.
He is filing paperwork to set up a new nonprofit group, a 501(c)(4), called “Our Ohio Renewal.”
He is scheduled to speak at about a dozen Lincoln Day dinners for county-level Republican chapters around the state in the next three months.
He recently lectured at The Ohio State University and plans to visit other campuses around the Buckeye State soon....

“.... Vance said in an interview. “The plan is to go all-in on Ohio. One of the things that concerns me is that so few people who go and get an education elsewhere … feel any real … pull for returning home. I don’t think the answer is for everyone who grows up in Middletown to come back. But we do owe something to the community.” 

In fairness, later Washington Post reporting did recount Vance's transformation from the Socrates of Butcher Holler to just another tongue-bather fighting for space in Trump's taint.  But the pre-2021 idolization of this cynical Thiel-backed narcissist didn't prepare the innocent or even the Ohio voter from the insanity and subversion Vance now exhibits.

What's the point?

The point is that any Republican who today supports Trump's campaign to escape justice and break the rule of law was never moderate, reasonable, thoughtful, or courageous.

Covering opportunistic subversive Republicans as anything but the anti-patriotic trash they are is not objective journalism.  It is wishful thinking, and its effects on the reputations of supposedly great newspapers and a democracy teetering at the brink of destruction are calamitous.