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Trump’s obsession with Deep State conspiracy 'delusional', John Boehner says
Donald Trump’s obsession with the Deep State conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent secret government of bureaucrats and intelligence officials existed to thwart his agenda in office, was destructive and delusional, John Boehner says in a new book.“Let me be diplomatic here,” the former speaker writes in the memoir, On the House. “That’s horseshit.”Boehner’s view chimes with that of Steve Bannon, a key propagator of the theory who was Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and a senior White House strategist.Trump, senior aide Stephen Miller and others have repeatedly blamed the Deep State for their problems. Bannon has said the theory is “for nut cases” and “none of this is true”.Boehner was a congressman from Ohio for 24 years, a figure in the Washington firmament, House speaker from 2011 until his retirement in 2015 – a period he spent in fierce opposition to Barack Obama.His memoir will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.His criticism of Trump comes as no surprise, not least because an extract of the book ran in Politico last week. Boehner is heavily critical of Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. Leading figures in the pro-Trump establishment duly lashed back.The Fox News host Sean Hannity responded to being called “one of the worst” by tweeting: “John Boehner will go down in history as one of the worst Republican speakers in history. He’s weak, timid and what’s up with all the crying John?”Boehner was a famously lachrymose House speaker, apt to tear up in simple nostalgia or when in the presence of the pope.Hannity added: “There was not a single time I was around him when he didn’t just reek of cigarette smoke and wine breath.”Boehner plays up to his somewhat clubbable image, his cover image a portrait with wine glass and cigarette. But his rebuke over the Deep State theory, which Trump, key aides and reporters continue to espouse now he is out of power, may still sting.Boehner examines the wellsprings of the theory, writing: “The Deep State as a boogeyman is not an idea the Trump Republicans invented out of whole cloth.“As long as I’ve been in politics, politicians have railed against this group or that group in Washington as the villains standing in the way of whatever they’re trying to do. I too railed against ‘the establishment’ as a young hothead.”Boehner says there is indeed “an entrenched bureaucracy that likes to protect the status quo”. But he says posturing against it took a “nastier turn” under Trump.Even before the former president took up the lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden which was repeatedly thrown out of court but still sent supporters to storm the US Capitol, he claimed the Deep State posed “a threat to democracy itself”.Boehner calls such talk “very destructive – not to mention delusional”, and defends the work of most bureaucrats and also lobbyists.“Playing hardball or ‘creative disruption’ or whatever you want to call it can and does work sometimes,” he writes. “Knee-jerk defenders of President Trump would often say that’s what he was up to whenever there was some new pronouncement of action that didn’t make sense.“Well, they may have been right in some cases … but having to constantly point to the Deep State as this boogeyman responsible for all these problems just seems … weird.” More
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Katie Hill: Matt Gaetz backed me but he must quit if nude-photo reports are true
The Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz insisted on Monday he would not resign, amid a scandal over alleged sex trafficking.
At the same time, the former Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill, who resigned amid a scandal over the non-consensual sharing of explicit images, said she and Gaetz formed an “unlikely friendship”, when he was “one of the few colleagues who came to my defense”.
Gaetz is reported to have shared nude pictures of women with colleagues. Hill’s pictures were shared and published without her consent.
Though she paid tribute to Gaetz for supporting her, Hill wrote: “If recent reports are true, he engaged in the very practice he defended me from – and should resign immediately.”
Federal prosecutors are reportedly examining whether Gaetz and an ally paid or offered gifts in exchange for sex with underaged girls. Part of the investigation is reportedly examining whether Gaetz, 38, had sex with a 17-year-old and violated federal sex trafficking laws.
The investigation was first reported by the New York Times, which also said Gaetz took ecstasy, an illegal drug. CNN has reported that Gaetz allegedly showed nude photos of women he slept with to colleagues in the House.
Gaetz denies wrongdoing. He also claims to be the victim of attempted extortion.
On Monday, he wrote for the Washington Examiner. Saying he wanted to “remind everyone I am a representative in Congress, not a monk, and certainly not a criminal”, he added: “This is how DC works. The guilty and wrong point fingers at the innocent and right … And no, I am absolutely not resigning.”
He also wrote that his “lifestyle of yesteryear may be different from how I live now, but it was not and is not illegal. I defended Katie Hill’s ‘throuple’ when her own Democratic colleagues wouldn’t. I just didn’t think it was anyone’s business.”
Hill resigned from Congress in October 2019, amid fallout from an acrimonious divorce and a relationship with a member of staff.
“Matt was the first member of Congress who publicly and unapologetically defended me,” she wrote for Vanity Fair, “saying that while I might have made mistakes, I was a victim in this circumstance. At one of the darkest moments of my life, when I was feeling more alone than I ever had, Matt stood up for me – and that really mattered.”
She also said she argued with Gaetz after he spoke about Andrew Gillum, another Florida politician embroiled in scandal, in a way she said was “bi-phobic and bullshit”.
“We didn’t talk much after that,” Hill said.
Of Gaetz’s alleged sharing of nude pictures, Hill wrote: “Sharing intimate images or videos of someone without their consent should be illegal, plain and simple. It shouldn’t matter if it was done to hurt someone, as with revenge porn, or to brag about your sexual conquests, like Matt has been accused of doing.
“In fact, I’ve spent the last few months advocating for a bill called the Shield Act to be included as part of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which just passed the House and is headed to the Senate. If enacted, it will become a federal crime to knowingly distribute an intimate visual depiction of someone without their permission.
“While we don’t know enough to determine whether what Matt allegedly did would constitute distribution, this legislation clarifies that it’s a crime whether you intend to hurt someone or not by sharing their images. Even if he was just showing off and meant no harm to those women, it’s still unacceptable.
“Unfortunately, Matt voted against the bill.”
Hill has said she considered suicide, telling the Guardian: “I felt that if I just checked out entirely I could never … show that you can make a mistake and recover from it or that you can go through a horrible experience and then rise again.”
She has published a book, started a podcast and remained active in Democratic politics.
Gaetz is a prominent Trump ally but he has eagerly attacked Republicans disloyal to the former president. He has received scant support from his own party.
Last week, Barry Bennett, a former Trump adviser, told the Daily Beast: “For something like this, a 10ft pole is not long enough.” More - in US Politics
The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds
Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterAs Georgia Republicans face backlash over new sweeping voting restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to oppose similar restrictions advancing in other states.Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next major battlegrounds over voting rights. Texas Republicans last week advanced legislation that would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and give partisan poll workers the ability to record voters at the polls, among other measures. In Arizona, Republicans are moving ahead with an audit of ballots from the presidential race while also advancing legislation that would make it harder to vote by mail.Nationally lawmakers have introduced 361 bills to limit access to the ballot in some way, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifty-five of those bills are advancing in legislatures.After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola faced criticism for waiting too long to speak out against the Georgia legislation, advocates have been heartened by swift corporate condemnation of the Texas measure. American Airlines, which is based in Texas, said on Thursday it was “strongly opposed” to the Texas legislation. Microsoft and Dell also spoke out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced on Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law.Joe Straus, the former speaker of the Texas house of representatives, also came out against the measures on Thursday, tweeting that businesses had “good reason” to oppose the bill. “Texas should not go down the same path as Georgia. It’s bad for business and, more importantly, it’s bad for our citizens,” he said.Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said those statements were significant and could help sway lawmakers, including Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Gutierrez has been involved in fights over voting rights for more than a decade and said he could not recall another instance where there was the kind of broad opposition to the bills that exists now.“A lot of us are thinking that Texas is the next Georgia, but I think the big difference is all these prominent voices weighing in are coming in much earlier,” he said.Attention on Texas, one of the lowest-ranking states for voter turnout in 2020, escalated this week after lawmakers advanced a measure that appears squarely aimed at preventing local officials in urban areas from taking creative measures to expand voting access. In addition to blocking drive-thru and 24-hour voting, two popular options offered in Harris county, home to Houston, in 2020, the law also prevents officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters. In addition the bill imposes new requirements on people who assist voters and gives local election officials less flexibility in allocating election equipment.The measures would clearly empower partisan poll watchers. One measure allows poll watchers to record voters at the polls if they “reasonably believe” they are receiving illegal assistance. Another provision makes it harder for local officials in charge of an election precinct to remove poll watchers during voting.“It is a huge deal because of how many incidents we see in Texas of poll watchers misbehaving and needing to be disrupted for a good reason,” Gutierrez said.Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen“This is an invasion of privacy, it’s an invasion of ballot secrecy, it could be potentially very intimidating,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for the Election Innovation and Research, who works with Republican and Democratic election officials across the country. “Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen.”In Arizona, a state Joe Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, activists are also pushing a slew of anti-voting measures. One priority is a bill that would make changes to a list voters can join to automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election. About 75% of Arizona voters are on the list, according to the Associated Press (AP), but lawmakers want to enable the state to remove voters from the list if they don’t vote by mail in at least two consecutive elections. About 200,000 voters who didn’t vote by mail in 2018 or 2020 would be removed from the list, according to the AP.“This is a really important piece of our election system. It’s been in place just like it is for more than a decade. People trust it, they love using it,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, which is lobbying against many of the proposed changes. “This year, obviously fueled by all the conspiracy theories we saw going into and after the election, Republicans in the state legislature are attacking it.”Advocates are also concerned about another bill that would require voters to provide either their driver’s license or voter registration number along with their birthday when they return a mail-in ballot (Arizona currently uses signature comparison to verify the identity of mail-in voters). Those requirements would pose difficulties for many Native American voters, said Torey Dolan, a Native vote fellow at Indian law clinic at Arizona State University.Dolan said that it can be difficult to find out a voter registration number online and noted that the bill currently did not allow for the use of tribal identification cards as a form of identification. Many Indigenous elders, she noted, were not born in hospitals and have delayed birth certificates, and therefore have approximate birthdays.“Arizona election law, before this cycle, was not equally accessible to Native Americans,” she said. “As more barriers go up, it only exacerbates that gap from access.”Aside from legislation, Arizona Republicans are also moving ahead with more efforts to stoke uncertainty about the results of the 2020 election. The state senate, controlled by Republicans, is moving ahead with a recount and audit of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous, months after the state certified the election. The county has already completed an audit of its voting equipment, which found ballots were counted correctly.One of the four firms the senate hired to lead the audit is led by Doug Logan, who has publicly said he believes there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 and advanced other conspiracy theories about the election, according to the Arizona Mirror.“Can you imagine the outcry if Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin in 2016 in a state senate, had decided they wanted to, six months after an election, start an audit of the ballots of an election that was already certified and the people were already in office?” Becker said.“And then they hired the consultant, someone from out of state who had publicly argued that Hillary won the election and the election was fraudulent? That’s a mirror image of what’s happening in Arizona right now.” More
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McConnell tells CEOs critical of voting restrictions to ‘stay out of politics’
Republicans’ standing as the party of corporate America appears to be under threat after Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, told chief executives critical of voting restrictions to “stay out of politics”.Last week Coca-Cola, Delta and dozens of other companies condemned a new election law in Georgia while Major League Baseball announced it would move the All-Star Game from the state in protest.“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” McConnell told a press conference in his home state of Kentucky on Monday. “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”He warned companies against giving into advocacy campaigns. “It’s jaw-dropping to see powerful American institutions not just permit themselves to be bullied, but join in the bullying themselves,” he said.McConnell also issued a written statement that claimed Georgia’s new law has been portrayed unfairly and bemoaned “a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people”.Railing against the “Outrage-Industrial Complex”, the senator went on: “Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic leftwing signaling.“From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the second amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”He did not elaborate on the warning, but the comments imply a significant rupture after decades in which big business tended to favour Republicans and give them the lion’s share of campaign contributions, enjoying the benefits of low taxes and limited government regulation.Now, however, companies face greater pressure to show they are socially responsible actors and take stand on political issues. The new restrictions in Georgia and elsewhere are widely expected to have a disproportionate impact on voters of colour.The White House denied McConnell’s claim of a coordinated campaign to mislead the public. The press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We’ve not asked corporations to specific actions; that’s not our focus here.“Our focus is on continuing to convey that it’s important that voting is easier, not harder, that when there are laws in place that make it harder, we certainly express an opposition to those laws.”Former president Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. He failed in dozens of court challenges and his own attorney general, William Barr, reported no significant irregularities.Even so, legislators in 47 states this year have introduced 361 bills imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Georgia, which Joe Biden won narrowly, will strengthen identification requirements for absentee ballots and make it a crime to offer food or water to voters in a queue.Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, both major employers in Georgia, were condemned by activists for remaining silent on the issue there but eventually yielded. Ed Bastian, the chief executive of Delta, said: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.”James Quincey, the head of Coca-Cola, described the law as “unacceptable” and a “step backwards”.Some Republicans have suggested embracing a new identity as a party of the working class. Trump issued an angry email statement on Saturday denouncing “WOKE CANCEL CULTURE” and calling for a boycott of Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta and other companies.“Never submit, never give up!” he wrote. “The Radical Left will destroy our Country if we let them. We will not become a Socialist Nation. Happy Easter!” More
Obstructing Governance as a Substitute for Public Policy
It is hard to figure out why it seems so difficult to be a white guy in today’s America, even though I am a white guy and should be able to figure it out. The problem seems to be that there are just too many people in America who are not white guys, or even white guys and gals combined. Whenever this feeling seems to overwhelm some white guys, their solution to the perceived problem is to try to preclude something that non-white guys want: entry into the country, voting rights, equal opportunity, racial justice, access to meaningful health care and, way too often, the simple desire to live in peace or continue to live at all.
So, now that the mass shootings have started again in earnest in America after seemingly taking a small break during the height of pandemic restrictions, it is again mostly white guys out front depriving lots of others of their lives and sense of security. Of course, who can forget the hordes of white guys storming the US Capitol a few months ago trying to prevent their fearless leader from the perceived insult of a permanent return to his beloved mansion in Florida.
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It is worth asking who these white guys are who continue to board their trains to nowhere, callously leaving misery, destruction and even death in their wake. Some are among the really challenged people in America. Among other things, they seem to be intellectually incapable of seeing the connection between incredibly easy access to firearms and mass human slaughter in the American landscape. Find an assault weapon, and you are likely to find a challenged white guy.
However, those white guys fueling the nation’s resistance to humane immigration policies, to easy access to the polls to affect democratic change, to a racial reckoning and equal opportunity, to universal access to meaningful health care, and even to a comprehensive public health response to the pandemic are all on the same trains to nowhere, along with their gun nut buddies. Tragically, they enable America to fail and they empower each other to add critical mass to their efforts.
Many of these white people live in neighborhoods with a lot of other white people, only some of whom share their views. Some live in more diverse neighborhoods or pockets of poverty where they often hide their views until, for some reason, they have had enough of “others” and snap. But a whole bunch of these white people were among the 74 million people who voted for Trump in the last election.
Thwarting Efforts to Govern
Worse yet, they and their Republican cohorts are now determined to thwart any Biden administration effort to govern. Governing is not the same thing as being a government. Governing is, in its most basic sense, the exercise of authority thru the making of policy and the administration of that policy. President Joe Biden often has the authority to act, but to exercise that authority within America’s constitutional framework requires collaboration with, and the cooperation of, other institutional elements of that framework.
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}Take immigration policy as an example, since there is often talk of “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Biden administration can determine policy and administer elements of that policy through executive action. It can humanely allow Latino children to enter the United States and then make sure that they have a bed, a blanket and enough food to sustain them. After that, figuring out how these immigrant minors should be processed and treated becomes much more complicated, unless it is viewed as a component of a much larger US immigration problem that requires “comprehensive reform.”
Enter Congress, enter the Republicans in Congress, enter the white guys on the trains to nowhere and that comprehensive reform is almost certainly doomed. So, what happens to the children? With some luck, they disappear into the fabric of the world of undocumented immigrants striving to find a place in a nation where a lot of white guys don’t want them to be.
Although the immigration example is bad enough, there is more bad news from the white guys on the trains to nowhere. They don’t seem to want anybody but themselves to have a go at voting. It would be nice to say that this effort will fail in that exceptional “model democracy” known as America. But hold on, the white guys have a plan: You change the voting rules to get better results. This is easier than changing the policies, programs and personalities that many of the voters rejected under the old rules.
Just to make sure that nobody mistook the latest white guy effort at voter suppression for a serious effort to make voting easier, those wacky Republicans in the Georgia legislature, aided and abetted by the Republican governor, just criminalized providing food and water to their fellow citizens waiting in voting lines. That is, of course, only part of what they did, but enough to fully demonstrate the lengths to which the white guys on the trains to nowhere will go to preserve their shrinking political influence.
You see, prior voting practices in Georgia often left voters of color waiting in longer lines than their white counterparts, so instead of legislating to reduce wait times for everybody, someone came up with the bright idea of making it harder to wait in line. (This plan will work even better if the white guys also make it a crime to sell those little cooler bags to anyone who isn’t a white guy.)
The Key That Unlocks the Door
I wish I were making this up, but I am not. The Biden administration’s capacity to govern is being challenged not by people who have a sincere agenda of constructive reform for the nation, but by those same kind of white guys on their trains to nowhere who have just criminalized giving grandma a drink of water while she waits in line to vote.
Even some things as potentially lifesaving for white guys as wearing masks and seeking COVID-19 vaccines seem challenging to way too many of them. While they should overwhelmingly embrace these measures if for no other reason than if only people of color get vaccinated and white guys die off, their situation gets even more desperate. Yet the world has watched while many white guys on their trains to nowhere have overtly contributed to tens of thousands of COVID deaths in the US and continue to try to thwart coordinated government efforts to address the nation’s pandemic and public health crisis.
For some reason, even their significant contribution to the deaths of so many has failed to pause the white guys on their trains to nowhere long enough to stand back so that those of good will in government have the space they need to function and the support they need to govern.
For as long as the mindless obstruction continues, the nation’s governmental institutions will be significantly impeded from pursuing the long-delayed promise of a more just and equitable America. And it will be that much harder to demonstrate that good government is the key that unlocks the door.
*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Republican congressman condemned over Islamophobic tweet to Ilhan Omar
A Republican congressman responded to Ilhan Omar’s expression of grief about the attack at the US Capitol on Friday by comparing it to the 9/11 attacks.A police officer was killed when a suspect rammed him and another officer with his car outside the Capitol on Friday. The suspect wielded a knife and was shot dead. The other officer hit by the car survived.The attack came not quite three months after supporters of Donald Trump attacked the Capitol on 6 January, seeking to overturn the election. A police officer was one of five people who died as a direct result.Omar was at the Capitol that day. In January, she told the Guardian she “didn’t know if I would make it out” and had called her ex-husband “to make sure he would continue to tell my children that I loved them if I didn’t make it out”.Security has been heightened and the attack on Friday provoked confusion and fear.Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, tweeted: “Heartbroken to learn another [police officer] was killed while protecting the Capitol. My thoughts and prayers go out to the officer’s family and the entire Capitol police force. The death toll would have been worse if the assailant had an AR-15 [assault rifle] instead of a knife.”In response, Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina wrote: “Would have been worse if they had been flying planes into the buildings also.”Omar, who came to the US from Somalia as a child, is one of the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress.Murphy was widely rebuked.“You just invoked Sept 11 to attack a Muslim member of Congress,” wrote the North Carolina state senator Jeff Jackson, a Democrat. “I knew you a little when you were in the state legislature. This is well beneath you. It doesn’t matter how strongly you disagree with her on policy, you should represent our state better than this.”Robert S McCaw, director of government affairs for the Council on Islamic Relations (Cair), said Murphy’s tweet was “disrespectful to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, to their families and to the countless Muslim and other minority hate crime victims who were targeted in the wake of 9/11. His bigoted comments only serve to perpetuate the climate of hate that we are witnessing nationwide.”McCaw also said he hoped “Murphy’s Republican colleagues will condemn this Islamophobic attack and not just look the other way as they did when Muslim members of Congress were attacked similarly in the past.”The tweet was deleted.A Charlotte TV station, WITN, reported that Murphy has tweeted and deleted before. In October, he called now vice-president Kamala Harris “a walking disaster … only picked for her color and her race … is that how we pick our leaders now in America?”Murphy did not immediately comment.On Saturday, however, one Twitter user responding to a tweet by the congressman about Covid and immigration told Murphy he followed “Typical [Republican] MO. Never take the high road. Never provide a solution to the issue. ALWAYS stoke division.”“Awww,” replied Murphy, who was a doctor before entering Congress and worked as a medical missionary. “Sorry I triggered you …” More
