Wednesday, September 6, 2023

September 5, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

September 5, 2023

SEP 6

On Saturday, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden went to Florida, where he surveyed the damage, praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and told the people of Florida: “Your nation has your back, and we’ll be with you until the job is done.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a red state or a blue state, the president’s going to show up and be there for the community.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis declined to meet with the president, apparently fearing a backlash from anti-Biden primary voters, but Republican senator and former Florida governor Rick Scott did meet with Biden and praised his rapid response to the hurricane.

Biden’s promise to the Republican-dominated state of Florida even in the face of DeSantis’s pettiness was a striking contrast to former president Trump’s withholding of federal aid from Malden and Pine City, Washington, almost exactly three years ago, when a September 2020 wildfire destroyed 15,000 acres and 85% of the buildings, including 65 homes. Trump held up Washington governor Jay Inslee’s request for a disaster declaration, which frees up federal funds, for more than four months out of spite at the Democratic governor.

It was Biden who finally approved the declaration days after taking office. According to Emma Epperly and Orion Donovan Smith of the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review, when he heard the declaration was finally in place, Malden Mayor Dan Harwood teared up in relief. “Our citizens are going to be able to go forward now,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. It’s a very, very good day.”

Yesterday the three most senior civilian officials in the Department of Defense responsible for their branches—Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth—wrote in the Washington Post that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL, though it turns out he lives in Florida) is actively eroding “the foundation of America’s…military advantage” with his blanket hold on military promotions.

Tuberville says he launched the hold in protest of the military’s policy of ensuring that military personnel can obtain reproductive health care, including abortions, but as the authors of the Post op-ed say, his policy “is putting our national security at risk.” More than 300 of our critical posts have acting officials in place, and three of our five military branches—the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps—have no Senate-confirmed service chief.

In defense of his position, Tuberville has begun to attack the military leaders whose promotions he is opposing, much as former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson lashed out repeatedly at Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley for his support for diversity and inclusion in the military. In their op-ed, the secretaries warned of the danger of politicizing our military and noted that the damage Tuberville is inflicting on the service will echo for years as today’s colonels and captains gather that their service is not valued by members of Congress.

Tonight, Secretary of the Navy Del Toro, who was born in Cuba, said on CNN: “I would have never imagined that…one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting communist and other autocratic regimes around the world. This is having a real negative impact and will continue to have a real negative impact on our combat readiness. That’s what the American people truly need to understand.”

Today marked the start of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, which has taken on a meaning far larger than the fate of a single state official and become a fight over the future of the Republican Party.

Paxton is a hard-right Republican who has based his political career on his identity as a Christian conservative advancing evangelicals’ culture wars. He has pushed Texas rightward since he took office in 2015, first challenging President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and immigration orders, then championing Trump, then celebrating his wins against “woke Biden administration rules” and defending states’ rights.

Paxton supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, filing a lawsuit drafted by the Trump campaign to challenge other states’ elections and then, when the Supreme Court declined to hear that case, criticizing both the court and other states when he spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But Paxton has been embroiled in scandals since being indicted for securities fraud just months after he took office as the state’s top law enforcement officer. That trial has yet to take place, but now he is embroiled in other scandals that have led the Republican-dominated Texas House of Representatives to pass 20 articles of impeachment against him by a vote of 121 to 23. The House started impeachment proceedings after Paxton asked for $3.3 million in state funds to pay a settlement to four whistleblowers who accused him of abuse of office and bribery in 2020 and who were fired within a month.

But the impeachment charges center around his ties to his friend and donor Nate Paul. Paxton is accused of helping Paul in exchange both for gifts and for hiring Paxton’s mistress.

The Texas Senate will conduct the impeachment trial. There are 31 members of the Senate, but one of them is Paxton’s wife, whom the Senate banned from voting after she refused to recuse herself. So to convict him, it will take 21 of the 30 state senators who can vote (his wife’s presence makes the conviction threshold 21 rather than 20). If all 12 Democrats in the Senate vote to convict, it will require 9 of the 18 voting Republicans to convict him.

Robert Downen and Zach Despart of the Texas Tribune yesterday reported that the impeachment trial is expected to focus on Paxton’s infidelity to his wife. He told his staff about the extramarital affair at the center of his relationship with Nate Paul in 2018, when he promised it was over and he was recommitting to his marriage. But, in fact, he didn’t. To hide the affair from his wife and his deeply religious constituents, impeachment managers say, Paxton worked with Paul to get a job for his girlfriend and hide the relationship, and then used his office to help Paul weather lawsuits and bankruptcy.

The Republican Party in Texas is split over Paxton much as the country is split over former president Donald Trump. Some say that Paxton’s extraordinary behavior warrants impeachment and trial and that, after all, a majority of Republicans in the Texas House were so concerned they impeached him.

But others insist that he is, as he claims, a victim of political persecution. They maintain that a flawed man can do God’s will, and they support Paxton no matter what his failings out of support for his political crusades on their behalf. J. David Goodman reported yesterday in the New York Times that right-wing donors have embarked on an expensive, high-pressure campaign to convince Republicans in the Texas Senate to vote against conviction, threatening to primary anyone who votes against Paxton.

Still, his approval rating among Republicans has dropped by 19 percentage points since April, while his disapproval rate has more than tripled since last December.

In other court news, a Florida judge this weekend struck down a state congressional map pushed through the legislature by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, saying it violates the state constitution by diluting Black voting power. The state will automatically appeal.

Today, three Republican-appointed federal judges struck down Alabama’s new congressional map after the state legislature ignored a court order to redraw the state map to include a second majority Black district since the state map put in place after the 2020 census likely violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The judges wrote that they were “disturbed” by the state legislature’s refusal to correct its illegal maps. “We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature—faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district—responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district.”

The court will appoint a special master to draw Alabama’s congressional map, but Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall, a Republican, has already appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Wisconsin, where Republicans have called for impeaching Supreme Court justice Janet Protasiewicz for violating ethics codes by calling the state’s congressional maps “unfair” and “rigged,” a state judiciary disciplinary panel has dismissed those complaints. Republicans drew the congressional map in Wisconsin so fully in favor of their party that in 2018, Democratic candidates for the state assembly won 54% of the popular vote but Republicans “won” 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats, only three seats short of a supermajority that would enable them to override a veto by the Democratic governor.

And finally, U.S. district judge Tim Kelly sentenced former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio today to 22 years in prison. This is the longest sentence handed down for any of the January 6 rioters, though far shorter than the 33 years prosecutors had requested. Kelly also handed down sentences significantly below the guidelines for the crimes Proud Boys leaders committed: Joseph Biggs was sentenced to 17 years; Zachary Rehl, 15 years; and Ethan Nordean, 18 years. Dominic Pezzola, who was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but guilty of other crimes, received a 10-year sentence.

Tarrio is the last of the gang to be sentenced and was not present at the January 6 attack, underscoring the wide reach of a conspiracy conviction.

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Notes:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/06/texas-ag-ken-paxton-praises-texas-rips-georgia-pro-trump-rally/6564017002/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/politics/ken-paxton-texas-settlement/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/04/politics/ken-paxton-impeachment-texas-attorney-general/index.html

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/04/ken-paxton-affair-impeachment-trial-marriage/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/us/ken-paxton-impeachment-conservative-lobbying.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxtons-securities-fraud-trial-delayed-until-end-of-impeachment-trial

https://www.kxly.com/news/nearly-three-years-after-babb-road-fire-malden-continues-to-recover/article_31c871dc-30bf-11ee-af56-63698f9780b2.html

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/feb/04/biden-approves-disaster-assistance-for-washington-/

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/jan/16/trump-is-blocking-aid-to-malden-pine-city-fire-vic/

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/02/biden-desantis-hurricane-00113833