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    ‘I will not be silenced’: Rashida Tlaib hits back at congressional censure motion

    The progressive Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is the only Palestinian American in the US Congress, on Tuesday defended her criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and urged US lawmakers to join in calling for a ceasefire.Her comments on the House floor came minutes after Democrats paved the way for an effort to censure her for her remarks, which her detractors say disparaged Israel, and included an emotional and impassioned plea for free speech and equal treatment for Palestinians. The actual vote on whether or not to censure Tlaib is expected on Wednesday.Tlaib has been an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s staunch backing of Israel after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took at least 200 hostage. In response, Israel’s attack on Hamas-run Gaza has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. On both sides, most casualties are civilians.Tlaib has accused Joe Biden of supporting genocide and threatened that he will lose Arab American and Muslim support in the 2024 election – triggering widespread condemnation by Republicans and many Democrats.But Tlaib was unrepentant in her speech.“I will not be silenced and I will not let you distort my words,” Tlaib said. “No government is beyond criticism. The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s been used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.”Tlaib, who was first elected in 2018 and is a prominent member of “the Squad” of progressive lawmakers, grew emotional as she said: “I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable.”She added: “The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all. We cannot lose our shared humanity, Mr Chair. I hear the voices of advocates in Israel and Palestine across America and around the world for peace.“I’m inspired by … the courageous survivors in Israel who have lost loved ones, yet are calling for a ceasefire and the end to violence. I am grateful to the people in the streets for the peace movement, with countless Jewish Americans across the country standing up and lovingly saying ‘not in our name’.”Tlaib’s attack last week on Biden in a video also provoked a firestorm of criticism by including the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea”. Those words are a fragment from a slogan used since the 1960s by a variety of people with a host of purposes. And it is open to an array of interpretations, from the genocidal to the democratic.Tlaib has said she means it refer to all people leaving in Israel and Palestinian territories living in peace and equality, regardless of ethnicity or religion. More

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    The Growing Republican Battle Over War Funding

    Rob Szypko, Carlos Prieto, Stella Tan and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIt’s been one month since the attack on Israel, but Washington has yet to deliver an aid package to its closest ally. The reason has to do with a different ally, in a different war: Speaker Mike Johnson has opposed continued funding for Ukraine, and wants the issue separated from aid to Israel, setting up a clash between the House and Senate.Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress for The Times, discusses the battle within the Republican Party over whether to keep funding Ukraine.On today’s episodeCatie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to force a stand-alone vote on aid for Israel has set up a confrontation between the House and Senate over how to fund U.S. allies.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBackground readingThe Republican-led House approved $14.3 billion for Israel’s war with Hamas, but no further funding for Ukraine.Speaker Johnson’s bill put the House on a collision course with the Senate.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Catie Edmondson More

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    Tommy Tuberville is not acting: he really is Trump’s useful idiot | Sidney Blumenthal

    Tommy Tuberville plays the fool with such conviction that he makes it difficult to imagine a motive behind his idiocy. He is really, truly, actually not acting. In ordinary times others might qualify as the stupidest member of the Senate, but none have matched his performance at a moment of profound and precarious international crisis. Tuberville’s freeze on promotions of general staff officers unless the federal government denies reproductive health services – abortions – to women in the military has significantly disrupted readiness, upended the chain of command and otherwise endangered national security. Of 852 general and flag officers, he has placed 387 holds so far. By the end of the year, 90% of generals and admirals will be out of position. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, says it will take two or three years to fix. One hundred and twenty officers are now being forced to perform two jobs.When General Eric Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps, who was performing several jobs at once, suffered a heart attack, Tuberville cavalierly dismissed any responsibility. “Come on, give me a break. This guy is going to work 18-20 hours a day no matter what. That’s what we do. I did that for years,” he said.Tuberville was a football coach before he was elected the senator from Alabama. Denigrating the marine commandant, Tuberville suggested that coaching a game was as hard as running the Marine Corps. “Coach” is his identity. “Email Coach” reads the contact information on his Senate website.Donald Trump first gave Tuberville his seal of approval in Tuberville’s fight against the former attorney general Jeff Sessions. Trump had fired Sessions for recusing himself instead of suppressing the justice department investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sessions attempted a comeback in 2020, running for his old Senate seat from Alabama; Tuberville, with Trump’s support, won the GOP nomination. The Coach had no qualifications for public service other than fame as Coach: he just happened to be the lucky dummy in one of Trump’s grudge matches.By freezing military appointments, Tuberville keeps the cameras focused on himself as he struts up and down the field. He is not up for re-election until 2026, but since he has placed his hold on military officers his campaign contributions have rocketed from a negligible amount at the beginning of this year to nearly half a million dollars by July. His hold has turned into his sweet spot for a Trumpian grift. Every day is game day.But Tuberville’s gain is more than the military’s defeat; it is the Republican party’s loss, at both ends of Tuberville’s play. He is wilfully and enthusiastically hammering national security while inflaming the abortion issue. Since the Dobbs decision Republicans have been desperately seeking to escape the political consequences of their decades-long crusade culminating in the supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade. Tuberville has contrived a unique formula to wage the culture war by undermining the military, or, more likely, had that formula engineered for him.Idiots can still be useful idiots. There are larger purposes involved in his scam kulturkampf. His subversion of the military is not just collateral damage. It is not the unintended consequence, but the overriding motive. His abortion ban is both context and pretext. Tuberville has opened Trump’s strategy for a second term to replace the professional class of officers pledged to the constitution with a collection of flunkies who will salute his command, legal or not. Tuberville is a blunt instrument, but, however crude, he is the available tool.The Heritage Foundation – which has produced a blueprint for a Trump second term, the 2025 Transition Project, which includes firing the entire federal civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists, and invoking the Insurrection Act on day one of Trump II to deploy the military against political dissidents – has evidently been behind Tuberville’s attack on the military. It circulated a letter of several far-right ex-military figures to Senate leaders demanding that they “Support Senator Tuberville’s Fight Against Woke Military”, which they denounced for “advancing the leftwing social agenda”.Heritage published an article by one of its fellows claiming that Tuberville is the “one man” standing in the way of a dastardly conspiracy led by Biden: “Replacing the officer class of police and military ranks with politicized ideologues who will bend to a transformative dogma is a strategy that has worked in places like the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela … Tuberville, thus, is stopping the promotion of woke apparatchiks.” Like Trump, the Heritage cadres project their own scheme on to their enemies.For months, the leaders of the Senate of both parties allowed Tuberville to stand on the rule that gives every senator the right to put a hold on an appointment. They tolerated Tuberville’s stupidity in order not to alter the sacrosanct rule, an anachronism that makes every senator a king. Behind the scenes, they importuned him to relent. Some Republicans suggested that if he lifted his hold on the entire military officer corps, they wouldn’t care if he chewed on a smaller bone. Perhaps he might put a hold on Derek Chollet, the highly competent and experienced counselor in the state department, who has been nominated to be the under-secretary of defense for policy, or maybe other worthy appointees. Their broader cynicism fell before his dim-witted cynicism. No dice.Coach is not team friendly. He is not clubbable in the most exclusive club in the country. Tuberville was unembarrassed when a group of military spouses, the Secure Families Initiative, blasted his “political showmanship” and urged him to stop using “military families as leverage”. He was unashamed when veterans’ groups pointed out that he had failed to donate his Senate salary to veterans’ charities as he had promised. He did not care when the Veterans of Foreign Wars begged him to stop. He was indifferent when the secretaries of the army, navy and air force asked him to end his blockade. “Just another example of woke propaganda,” Tuberville tweeted.The former CIA director Michael Hayden, a retired air force general, tweeted in response to a question about whether Tuberville should be removed from the armed services committee: “How about the human race?” Tuberville, in faux alarm, called the sarcastic remark a “politically motivated assassination” and reported Hayden to the Capitol police – a good basis for another fundraising plea to the yahoos. Hayden replied: “I was surprised to wake up this morning and discover that many Maganuts had lost their minds over my suggestion that ‘Coach’ Tuberville not be considered a member of the human race. I stand by that view. I’m wishing you all a nice day even the intransigent Tommy Tuberville.”Finally, on 1 November, several Republican senators, all veterans, vented their wrath in an extraordinary display of exasperation. They blew away Tuberville’s excuse that he wasn’t damaging readiness as “ridiculous”.“We are going to look back at this episode and just be stunned at what a national-security suicide mission this became,” said Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska. “I do not respect men who do not honor their word,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa.The Senate rule may now be amended. With the approval of the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, Senator Jack Reed, the chairman of the armed services committee, has introduced a bill to allow a vote on military nominations in batches without unanimous consent. The Reed bill would pass if nine Republicans joined the Democrats.Tuberville remains unyielding despite the equivalent of his blackball from the club. His communications director, Steven Stafford, a longtime Republican operative, sent an email to anti-abortion groups to mobilize them, so “that any Republican who votes for this will be primaried. In my view, if enough mushy middle Republicans come out in opposition, then this is over. But they only need nine squishes. And they will get there if we don’t act.”The email violated Senate ethics rules prohibiting “official resources” for being used for campaign purposes. Republican senators were enraged at the threat. “I have some words and they’re not polite so I’m not going to say them,” said Senator Ernst. The chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, Senator Steve Daines of Montana, issued a statement calling for Stafford’s “termination”.Tuberville instinctively reacted with abject cowardice. “That was not me,” he said, blaming his staffer. “He did a ‘no no.’ It wasn’t my statement. I totally disagree with that. We’re teammates here.” He wanted back in the good graces of the club. Stafford was compelled to make a Soviet purge-trial like confession: “It is not the opinion of Coach, it was not on behalf of Coach.” Coach left his wounded behind. Think Ted Lasso as moronic and malignant.Tuberville’s stupidity is both vain and in vain. By his damage to others he invariably damages himself. He projects his stupidity through blind arrogance and compounds it through pride in his presumption of superior knowledge. “Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government – wasn’t set up that way,” Tuberville has said. “You know, the House, the Senate and the executive.”Defending his hold on military promotions, Tuberville treated an interview on CNN in July as a teaching opportunity. “I’m totally against anything to do with racism,” he began, before instantly going off the rails. “But the thing about being a white nationalist is just a cover word, for the Democrats, now, where they can use it, to try to make people mad across the country. Identity politics. I’m totally against that. But I’m for the American people. I’m for military.” When the interviewer told him that white nationalists believe in white supremacy, he replied, “Well, that’s some people’s opinion … My opinion of a white nationalist, if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist, to me, is an American … Well, that’s just a name that it’s been given.” When the interviewer raised “real concerns about extremism”, Tuberville answered: “So, if you’re going to do away with most white people in this country, out of the military, we got huge problems.”In his stupidity, Tuberville confuses his ignorance with ingenuity. He is scornful when challenged. His stupidity may appear to be a brand of fanaticism, but that would mistake his mule-like stubbornness for a leap of faith. On his mission from God, Coach thinks he is the highest authority. His smugness protects against doubt. Nobody can fool the fool who fools himself. He plays three-card monte tricking himself that wrecking the military is owning the libs. His malice is a defense mechanism. The greater the outrage against him, the greater his certainty, if not celebrity and fundraising. Coach wants to be seen as the hero. The greater his apparent futility, the more he believes he is a giant among men. He is fourth and goal, calling the play for a touchdown. Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war!Before the 2020 election, even though he was not yet elected to the Senate, Tuberville plotted the rejection of electoral college certification of the results. “You’ll see what’s coming,” he said. “You’ve been reading about it in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate.”On January 6, as the mob rampaged through the Capitol, approaching the Senate chamber, Tuberville, sworn in as a senator three days before, played a sycophantic Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern bit role. Trump phoned Tuberville. At first, he misdialed Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who handed Tuberville his phone. Tuberville informed Trump that the Secret Service had just evacuated Mike Pence, who Trump was pressuring to reject certification. “They’ve taken the vice-president out,” Tuberville told Trump. “They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go.” Later, Tuberville had lapses of memory of the time of the call and what Trump said to him. “I don’t remember, because they were dragging me. They had me by the arm.” Tuberville was one of eight Republican senators to vote against certification.One obscure aspect of Trump’s coup was his foiled attempt to place his loyalists within the CIA and the Pentagon. He was resisted by the CIA director Gina Haspel, the secretary of defense Mark Esper and chairman of the joint chiefs, General Mark Milley. Trump had come into the presidency thinking of the senior military as “my generals”, a personal palace guard, but one by one he forced them out. “A bunch of dopes and babies,” he called them. “Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. He has been especially hostile to former chairman of the joint chiefs, Milley, who resisted Trump’s idea to bomb Iran after he lost the election to foster a crisis before the electoral college vote on January 6. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told him.Milley believed that Trump might stage a coup, a “Reichstag” moment to precipitate the suspension of the constitution, and he told the congressional leadership about the military: “Our loyalty is to the US constitution.” After January 6, Trump felt “my generals” had betrayed him. Where was his Mike Flynn?When Milley’s thwarting of Trump’s secret plan to strike Iran was exposed in an article by Susan Glasser in the New Yorker in July 2021, Trump was furious. He had brought the memo he had ordered Milley to produce to Mar-a-Lago along with other national security documents. Agitated by the revelation, he waved the papers before some supporters at his Florida estate, saying of Milley and the military “these are bad, sick people”. He falsely claimed that it was Milley who was pushing him to attack Iran. “This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the defense department and him … This was done by the military and given to me.” This incident at Mar-a-Lago now figures in the federal indictment of Trump for mishandling classified documents.At his retirement on 29 September, Milley pointed said: “We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Trump responded by trashing him as a “Woke train wreck,” whose treason was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”Now, Tuberville is performing Trump’s early retribution against a military that he believes confounded his coup and preparing the groundwork for his takeover in 2025, which will include replacing the nation’s top military command with his lackeys to impose the Insurrection Act against opponents – “my generals”, at last. It doesn’t matter whether Tuberville fully understands the play. He just has to run his pattern.
    Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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    Peter Meijer, a Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Is Running for Senate in Michigan

    The one-term representative of Michigan who was defeated by a Trump-backed primary challenger is aiming for a political comeback.Peter Meijer, the one-term Republican congressman who lost his seat after voting to impeach President Donald J. Trump, has announced he is running for Senate in Michigan, jumping into a crowded primary in a key battleground.“We are in dark and uncertain times, but we have made it through worse,” Mr. Meijer said in a statement announcing his candidacy on Monday.Mr. Meijer, an heir to the Meijer supermarket empire and an Army Reserve veteran who served in Iraq, joins a field that includes Mike Rogers, another former representative who served seven terms in the House and led the House Intelligence Committee, who announced his candidacy in September.Also running in the Republican primary are James Craig, former chief of the Detroit Police Department; Nikki Snyder, a member of the State Board of Education; Dr. Sherry O’Donnell, a physician and former 2022 congressional candidate; Sharon Savage, a former teacher; Ezra Scott, a former Berrien County commissioner; Alexandria Taylor, a lawyer; J.D. Wilson, a technology consultant; and Michael Hoover, a businessman.The crowded Republican field reflects a party eager to make gains in Michigan after Democrats swept to victory in the state in 2022. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer handily won re-election that year, part of a political trifecta as Democrats won total control of the state government.President Biden narrowly won in Michigan in 2020 and the state is considered a battleground in next year’s presidential election.Mr. Meijer, 35, is competing for the seat held by Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat who announced this year that she would not seek a new term in 2024. The race for the open seat is competitive but has been leaning toward the Democrats, according to a projection by the Cook Political Report.Ms. Stabenow’s retirement set off a frenzy among ambitious Democrats in Michigan who are now aiming to succeed her.Among them is Representative Elissa Slotkin, a moderate and former C.I.A. analyst who has earned a national profile and scored victories in several close races for her House seat. Also in the running are Nasser Beydoun, a businessman from Dearborn; Hill Harper, an author and actor; Leslie Love, a former state representative of Detroit; Pamela Pugh, the president of the State Board of Education; and Zach Burns, a lawyer and Ann Arbor resident.Mr. Meijer was elected to represent his Grand Rapids-based district in 2020. He was thrust into the national spotlight just days after taking office when he voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.Only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump survived the retribution from Republican voters that followed. Mr. Meijer narrowly lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, John Gibbs, who was boosted by Democrats and who was defeated by his Democratic opponent in the general election.After Mr. Meijer’s announcement, the Michigan Democratic Party criticized him in a statement for, among other things, his position on abortion rights — an issue that helped put Democrats over the top in 2022. More

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    Speaker Johnson, Israel, government shutdown and Virginia – podcast

    The new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, faces the tough task of uniting a fractured Republican party, and preventing a quick-approaching government shutdown. Jonathan Freedland and Marianna Sotomayor of the Washington Post discuss what we have learned about his approach to the job from his first week with the gavel.
    Plus, as we prepare for next week’s off-year elections, Jonathan speaks to Carter Sherman about Virginia – the last remaining southern state without extensive abortion restrictions. They look at why results there could prove pivotal for Republican chances in 2024

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    Renegade review: Adam Kinzinger on why he left Republican ranks

    Adam Kinzinger represented a reliably Republican district in the US House for six terms. He voted to impeach Donald Trump over the insurrection and with Liz Cheney was one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee. Like the former Wyoming congresswoman, he earned the ire of Trump and the GOP base.A lieutenant colonel and air force pilot, Kinzinger read the terrain and declined to run again. In his memoir, he looks back at his life, family and time in the US military. He also examines the transformation of the Republican party into a Trumpian vessel. With the assistance of Michael D’Antonio, biographer of Mike Pence, he delivers a steady and well-crafted read.Kinzinger finds the Republicans sliding toward authoritarianism, alienating him from a world he once knew. On 8 January 2021, two days after the Trump-inspired coup attempt, he received a letter signed by 11 members of his family, excoriating him for calling for the president to be removed.“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!’ the letter began. “We were once proud of your accomplishments! Instead, you go against your Christian principles and join ‘the Devil’s army’ (Democrats and the fake news media).”The word “disappointment was underlined three times”, Kinzinger counts. “God once.”Elected in 2010 with the backing of the Tea Party, once in office, Kinzinger distanced himself from the Republican fringe. The movement felt frenzied. Hyper-caffeinated. He cast his lot with Eric Cantor, House majority leader and congressman from Virginia. “Overtly ambitious”, in Kinzinger’s view, Cantor also presented himself as “serious, sober and cerebral”. Eventually, Cantor found himself out of step with the enraged core of the party. In 2014, he was defeated in a primary.Cantor was too swampy for modern Republican tastes. Out of office, he is a senior executive at an investment bank.Simply opposing Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act wasn’t enough. With America’s first Black president in the White House, performative politics and conspiracy theories took over.Kevin McCarthy, deposed as speaker last month, earns Kinzinger’s scorn – and rightly.“I was not surprised he was ousted,” Kinzinger told NPR. “And frankly, I think it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”On the page, Kinzinger paints McCarthy as weak, limitlessly self-abasing and a bully. He put himself at the mercy of Matt Gaetz, the Florida extremist, prostrated himself before Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia extremist, and endured 15 rounds of balloting on the House floor to be allowed the speaker’s gavel – an illusion of a win.McCarthy behaved like “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”, Kinzinger writes. The California congressman even tried, if feebly, to physically intimidate his fellow Republican.“Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber,” Kinzinger remembers. “As [McCarthy] passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.”Apparently, McCarthy forgot Kinzinger did stints in war zones.Kinzinger also takes McCarthy to task for his shabby treatment of Cheney, at the time the No 3 House Republican. On 1 January 2021, on a caucus call, she warned that 6 January would be a “dark day” if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.McCarthy was having none of it. “I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference,” he said. “She speaks for herself.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.These days, McCarthy faces the prospect of a Trump-fueled primary challenge. But he is not alone in evoking Kinzinger’s anger. Kinzinger also has tart words for Mitch McConnell and his performance post-January 6. The Senate minority leader was more intent on retaining power than dealing with the havoc wrought by Trump and his minions, despite repeatedly sniping at him.When crunch time came, McConnell followed the pack. Kinzinger bemoans McConnell’s vote to acquit in the impeachment trial, ostensibly because Trump had left office, and then his decision to castigate Trump on the Senate floor when it no longer mattered.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger bristles, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.”Kinzinger devotes considerable space to his own faith. An evangelical Protestant, he is highly critical of Christian nationalism as theology and as a driving force in the Republican party. He draws a direct line between religion and January 6. Proximity between the cross, a makeshift gallows and calls for Mike Pence to be hanged was not happenstance.“Had there not been some of these errant prophecies, this idea that God has ordained it to be Trump, I’m not sure January 6 would have happened like it did,” Kinzinger said last year. “You have people today that, literally, I think in their heart – they may not say it – but they equate Donald Trump with the person of Jesus Christ.”In his book, Kinzinger echoes Russell Moore, former head of public policy of the Southern Baptist Convention: “Moore’s view of Christianity was consistent with traditional theology, which does not have a place for religious nationalism. Nothing in the Bible said the world would be won over by American Christianity.”Looking at 2024, Kinzinger casts the election as “a simple question of democracy or no democracy … if it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don’t think there’s any question I would vote for Joe Biden”.
    Renegade is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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    Lauren Boebert, Facing Primary, Is Haunted by ‘Beetlejuice’ Episode

    The “Beetlejuice” incident continues to haunt the once-unrepentant congresswoman from Colorado. The state’s old guard is lining up behind a primary challenger.At a casino bingo hall in southwestern Colorado, Lauren Boebert, the Republican congresswoman, bounced her 6-month-old grandson on her knee.“The election’s still a ways away,” she said, as the guests arriving for the Montezuma County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner trickled into the room. “And in talking with people at events like this, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of mercy and a lot of grace.”The month before, Ms. Boebert, then in the midst of finalizing a divorce, was caught on a security camera vaping and groping her date shortly before being ejected from a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” at the Buell Theater in Denver for causing a disturbance. The footage contradicted her own initial claims about the incident, and the venue’s statement that Ms. Boebert had demanded preferential treatment added to the outrage.The episode has proved surprisingly sticky for Ms. Boebert, a politician who more than almost any other has embodied the gleefully provocative, no-apologies politics of the party’s right wing in the Biden era. Several local Republican officials have since announced their endorsement of Jeff Hurd, a more conventional Republican challenging her for the nomination this year.Mr. Hurd’s candidacy has become a vessel for Republican discontent with the perceived excesses of the party’s MAGA wing. His backers include old-guard party fixtures such as former Gov. Bill Owens, former Senator Hank Brown, and Pete Coors, the brewery scion, former Senate candidate and 2016 Trump fund-raiser, who will soon be offering his endorsement, according to Mr. Hurd’s campaign.Other Hurd supporters are more narrowly concerned about extending the party’s recent run of defeats in the state, and some are one-time fans of Ms. Boebert who complain that she has been changed by her political celebrity.“That crap she pulled in Denver pissed me off,” David Spiegel, a 53-year-old road traffic controller and Montezuma party activist, told Mr. Hurd as he mingled with guests at the dinner, near where Ms. Boebert was sitting.Jeff Hurd, a moderate Republican who is challenging Ms. Boebert for the nomination this year, has received endorsements from several local Republican officials.Polls have not yet been released in the primary race, and the question of whether Ms. Boebert, whose political celebrity far exceeds her official influence in Congress, has actually fallen in favor among the party’s voters remains theoretical for now. In interviews around the district, it was easy to find supporters who still stood by her.“She’s aggressive, she’s young, she’s got better ideas than most of them,” said Charles Dial, who runs a steel fabrication and recycling business in deep-red Moffat County, which Ms. Boebert won by more than 59 points in 2022. He shrugged off the theater incident and compared the attention it generated to “what they’re doing to Trump.”But Mr. Hurd’s endorsements suggest a concern among some party stalwarts that if Ms. Boebert remains a spirit animal for the right, she may be a wounded one.In 2022, despite the solidly Republican lean of her district, she won re-election by just 546 votes. The near-loss established her as the most vulnerable of the party’s most base-beloved politicians, and has made her defeat this year a sought-after trophy for Democrats.Adam Frisch, an Aspen businessman and former city councilman who ran as a Democrat against her in 2022, is hoping to challenge her again next year, though he first faces a primary contest against Anna Stout, the mayor of Grand Junction. Mr. Frisch has pulled in nearly $7.8 million in donations, more than any 2024 House candidate besides Kevin McCarthy, the recently deposed Republican speaker, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader.Adam Frisch, a Democrat who is challenging Ms. Boebert, has pulled in nearly $7.8 million in donations: more than any 2024 House candidate besides Kevin McCarthy, the recently deposed Republican speaker, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader.In August, before the theater incident, a poll commissioned by Mr. Frisch’s campaign found him leading Ms. Boebert by two points.In a rematch with Mr. Frisch, “I’ll definitely vote for Lauren,” said Cody Davis, a Mesa County commissioner who switched his endorsement from Ms. Boebert to Mr. Hurd. “But at the same time, I don’t think she can win.”Ms. Boebert burst onto the political scene in 2020 after winning a primary upset in Colorado’s Third District, which spans the entirety of the state’s western slope and nearly half of the state’s area.Then a 33-year-old owner of a gun-themed, pandemic-lockdown-defying bar and restaurant in the small town of Rifle, she was an immediate sensation in the right wing of the party, which had transparently longed for its own answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the social media-savvy young left-wing Democratic congresswoman from New York.“She was a firebrand,” Kevin McCarney, at the time the chairman of the Mesa County Republican Party, recalled admiringly. Last year, Mr. McCarney defended Ms. Boebert in the media after she was criticized for heckling President Biden as he spoke about his son’s death in his State of the Union speech.Ms. Boebert burst onto the political scene in 2020 after winning a primary upset in Colorado’s Third District, which spans nearly half of the state. But her celebrity is far greater than her official power in Congress.For some Colorado Republicans, the primary contest for Ms. Boebert’s seat is a proxy battle in the ongoing conflict between an old guard of politicians and donors and the right-wing grass-roots activists that have come to dominate its state and county organizations.“I was still standing with her until her little escapade,” he said, referring to Ms. Boebert’s behavior during “Beetlejuice.”After that, Mr. McCarney endorsed Mr. Hurd.A 44-year-old attorney from Grand Junction, Mr. Hurd is, by his account, a lifelong conservative but a newcomer to politics. The son of a local medical clinic director, he attended the University of Notre Dame and was planning on becoming a Catholic priest when he met his wife, Barbora, at an American Enterprise Institute seminar in Bratislava. He went to law school instead.Soft-spoken and cerebral — he cites the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” as his favorite book — Mr. Hurd holds similar policy views to Ms. Boebert on gun rights and conservative but less absolute views on abortion.He is presenting himself as a reprieve from the turmoil, tabloid headlines and Trump-centricity that Ms. Boebert has represented to her detractors.Mr. Hurd appears only peripherally in his first campaign ad, in which Barbora describes her journey to American citizenship after a childhood in Communist Czechoslovakia and warns that “we can’t take this freedom for granted” — a Reagan-revivalist pitch that also nods toward his concern about the risk of authoritarianism within his own party.Mr. Hurd is presenting himself as a reprieve from the turmoil, tabloids and Trump-centricity that Ms. Boebert has represented in the eyes of her detractors.Asked if he had voted for Mr. Trump in past elections, Mr. Hurd declined to answer, but then described a vision of the Republican Party where “we believe in, you know, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power in elections.”“When we as Republicans lose an election,” he went on, “we need to figure out how we go about winning the next one.”Ms. Boebert was early and vocal in promoting Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.For some Colorado Republicans, the primary contest for her seat has become a proxy battle in the ongoing conflict within the party between an old guard of politicians and donors and the right-wing grass-roots activists that have come to dominate its state and county organizations — a fight in which 2020 election denial is a major dividing line.Others are simply concerned that Ms. Boebert could easily lose to Mr. Frisch, a self-described conservative Democrat. “We all know what happened last cycle,” said Bobbie Daniel, a Mesa County commissioner who supported Ms. Boebert last year and is now backing Mr. Hurd. “There wasn’t a lot of room for error.”Mr. Frisch’s near-victory came as a surprise in a race that few in either party expected to be competitive. “We got blown off by everybody,” Mr. Frisch recalled. His campaign effectively ran out of money two weeks before the election, at which point his operation was “just me doing another couple of thousand miles in the pickup truck,” he said.He will not have that problem this year. Mr. Frisch and outside Democratic groups have already reserved $1.2 million in advertising for the race — more than any other 2024 House race so far and more than 100 times what Republicans have spent in the district, according to Ad Impact, a media tracking firm.Drew Sexton, Ms. Boebert’s campaign manager, noted that her campaign last year spent little time trying to shape voters’ impressions of Mr. Frisch, and argued that 2024 would be a different contest.“A lot of folks sat out the midterm election, whether it was apathy or a belief that there was a red wave and they didn’t need to participate, or just the fact that President Trump wasn’t on the top of the ticket,” he said. “Those folks are going to come back in droves this cycle.”On the stump, Ms. Boebert has worked hard to show supporters that she is not taking their votes for granted. In her speech at the Montezuma County dinner, she had only one applause line about investigating the Biden family and had many particulars about water policy. There was also contrition.“You deserve a heartfelt, humble apology from me,” she told the crowd.Many of her backers have accepted the apology, if not unconditionally. “Lauren’s made it harder for herself,” said Kathy Elmont, the secretary of the Ouray County Republican Party, who has supported Ms. Boebert since her first campaign. “But I look at it as a Christian.” She recalled the passage in the Gospel of John in which Jesus admonishes a crowd against stoning an adulterous woman: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”But Mrs. Elmont pointed out that wasn’t the last of the story. “He ended with, ‘And sin no more,’” she said. More

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    Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America

    The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, knows how he will rule: according to his Bible. When asked on Fox News how he would make public policy, he replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” But it’s taking time for the full significance of that statement to sink in. Johnson is in fact a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy.He was most candid about this in 2016, when he declared: “You know, we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic. Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy.Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade.The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults.Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America?When rulers insist the law should be driven by a particular religious viewpoint, they are systematizing their beliefs and imposing a theocracy. We have thousands of religious sects in the US and there is no religious majority, but we now have a politically fervent conservative religious movement of Christian nationalists intent on shaping policy to match their understanding of God and theirs alone. The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker, by a unanimous vote, have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.The philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard eloquently explained that religion is a “leap of faith”, not susceptible to reasoned discourse. The framers of the constitution and Bill of Rights thought the same. Under the first amendment, Americans have an absolute right to believe anything we choose and courts may not second-guess whether a believer’s truth is supported in reason or fact. For a believer, their belief is their “truth”, but for the republic, it is simply one of millions of beliefs across a country where all are free to believe. Thus, a scriptural originalist is by definition incapable of public policy discussions with those who do not share their faith.The grand irony is that being a “scriptural originalist” is oxymoronic. The colonies were first populated by those fleeing the theocracies of Europe – a fact the founders knew and respected. Millions were killed during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish and Roman inquisitions, because only one faith could rule. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, as well as many other kings and queens, ordered apostates killed, imprisoned or exiled. Current theocracies underscore this historical reality. The Pilgrims fled England because they were at risk of punishment and even death for observing the wrong faith. So did the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians. Despite the ahistorical attempts of rightwing ideologues to claim we are or were a monolithic “Christian country”, this was always a religiously diverse country, and they did not all get along at first. Jews arrived in 1654. Early establishments faded away in the early 19th century as they could not be sustained in the face of our diversity.The primary drafter of the first amendment, James Madison, was keenly aware of these realities as he reflected on the dangerous history of theocracies in his famous Memorial and Remonstrance, opposing Virginia taxes for Christian education, asking: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”Madison further invoked the Inquisition, stating that a bill funding religious education through taxes “degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in religion do not bend to those of the legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.” US history is proving him correct.Johnson isn’t just talking about a tax to support his brand of Christian nationalism, though the right’s religious movement, with the approval of the supreme court, has gone all out to ensure that as many tax dollars flow to their mission as possible. Johnson has asserted the hackneyed conservative theory of original intent – that the constitution must be interpreted precisely according to what the founders said – but with a twist. According to Johnson, George Washington and John Adams and all the others “told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today”. The founders, according to Johnson, were scriptural originalists and he’s here to take us back to their “true” Christian beliefs. In fact, the founders’ 18th-century enlightenment values directly repudiate Johnson’s 21st-century theocratic dogma.The Constitutional Convention itself shows how little support there is for the view that America started from a dogma-soaked worldview. During debates, Benjamin Franklin proposed bringing in a member of the clergy to guide them with prayer. Only three or four out of 55 framers agreed. The matter was dropped.Less than a decade ago, it looked like the religious right had lost the culture wars. The turning point seemed to be the decision in Obergefell v Hodges in 2015, which established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. “It’s about everything,” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson mourned, “We lost the entire culture war with that one decision.”But instead of surrendering, the truest believers vowed to supplant democracy. They doubled down on furiously grabbing political power, to force everyone else to live their religious lives. Led by the likes of Leonard Leo, a reactionary Catholic theocrat who is chair of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Dobson and many other Republicans, including the then little-known Mike Johnson, remade the supreme court and instituted stringent religious litmus tests for Republican candidates. Unable to control the culture, they have mounted a legal-political crusade against all who refuse to embrace their religious worldview.In little over a year, since Dobbs, the theocrats have converted their belief in the divinity of the fetus and disdain for the life of the pregnant into law, in one Republican-dominated state after another. But that is just a preview. Johnson and his crusaders would like to insert their scriptural originalism into every nook and cranny of federal law and public policy, to create a blanket of religious hegemony. Conservative governors and legislators have shamelessly invoked their God as the legislative purpose behind such draconian limitations.In the US, the peaceful coexistence of thousands of faiths was made possible in great part by the separation of church and state, which was demanded by Baptists in Massachusetts, Virginia and other places where they were being ostracized, taxed, flogged, imprisoned and even killed for their beliefs. That separation, which is the wall that protects religious liberty and prevents religious hegemony, was engraved in the constitution. How cruel an irony that some of the spiritual descendants of those persecuted Baptists should, like Mike Johnson, pervert American history and the constitution to impose a theocracy that would mean the end of democracy.
    Marci A Hamilton is a professor of practice and the Fox Family Pavilion non-resident senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania More