Quo Vadis GOP?

[Sheilbh]

[DGuller]

[Syt]

Only the best candidates.

https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle

Thing about this guy: he served.

It was nothing spectacular. But he served. He spent a couple months loading planes in Qatar. They don't make movies about Air Force logistics guys, but he served. That's more than a lot of people did.

According to a DD-214 that is apparently attributed to Masjewski (the form that you get when you leave the service) his service might have been, well, less than stellar. After four years, it appears he left the service with a fairly low rank, even for the Air Force. But still, he served.

He could have run on that record.

He could have said, yeah, I'm a veteran. Not a hero. I went where they needed me, did what I was told, didn't win any medals. But I served.

And he'd be like any of a million other guys.

He could have run for office on his actual military record. Or he could have just said he was a vet, if he didn't want to talk about his undistinguished career.

That would have been honorable.

No one would have batted an eye.

Lot of vets served in similar roles. Nothing dishonorable about loading airplanes. Someone has to do it.
War moves on logistics.

Nothing wrong with loading planes.

Absolutely nothing wrong with being just a logistics guy.

But Macho Studs like Majewski, they've spent so much time calling anyone who wasn't a SEAL Sniper Ninja Door Kicking Green Bean Beret a soyboy, a sissy, a loser, that he's embarrassed by his own service.

Majewski wants voters to think he's some bad ass steely-eyed killer on a secret mission, but he doesn't even have the courage to be honest about his own record.

He's a coward.

But it's worse than that.  A lot worse.

See, guys like this, what they're doing is crapping on every vet who served honorably. Who did the essential jobs nobody makes movies about, the ones that never get thanked, never get the medals, but those without whom the door kickers and the SEAL teams and the fighter jocks couldn't fight.

Again, the guy served. When a lot of people didn't and that should be enough. That's what America says, right? Everywhere you turn, thankyouforyouservice. That's what we say. Right?

But it's not.

Not enough.

Not enough to have served.

No, you gotta be a snake eater.

And it's not enough, because of assholes just like Majewski, who have turned service into some dick measuring contest.

The country is full of these damn clods. With their fake wannabe SEAL beards and their paramilitary clothing and their militarized 4x4s and their goddamn guns.

All trying to out swagger each other.

Meanwhile, the guys who really did do the thing day after day have to fight for what this country promised them when America was desperate for rough men to do violence in their name, all while fake patriots sit in congress and vote against every veteran's bill.

(There's Twitter threads looking into this guy's record; apparently he left ranked E-2 after 4 years of service which apparently is also quite sketchy as you'd normally leave E-3 or E-4 at that point.)

[grumbler]

Only the best candidates.

https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle

(snip)
(There's Twitter threads looking into this guy's record; apparently he left ranked E-2 after 4 years of service which apparently is also quite sketchy as you'd normally leave E-3 or E-4 at that point.)

If he left as an E-2, he got busted in rank.  Making E-3 is automatic after 10 months as an E-2 (roughly 16 months time in service) and to E-4 after roughly 36 months TIS.  My guess is that he got busted from E-3 to E-2 for something bad enough that his CO declined to give him his automatic promotions thereafter (normally, he would have been re-promoted to E-3 after ten months in his second stint as an E-2).

[Berkut]

In MAGA world, this is ok though.

I mean, comeone, if Herschel Walker is a viable candidate, this guy is a super star.

[Tonitrus]

Shoot...if a busted down USAF 1-termer can potentially get elected to Congress, maybe I should try that after I retire. 

[Admiral Yi]

Shoot...if a busted down USAF 1-termer can potentially get elected to Congress, maybe I should try that after I retire. 

You would have to suck the orange popsicle.

[Jacob]

How subverted do you folks think the American military is by Trump, Fox, and the forces trying to overthrow American democracy?

[Admiral Yi]

How subverted do you folks think the American military is by Trump, Fox, and the forces trying to overthrow American democracy?

2/10.

The Joint Chiefs did everything right during and after the election.

I was surprised and disappointed to find out that a retired brigadier is running as the Trump supported candidate for Senate in New Hampshire.

I was very relieved by a poll released before the election that Trump's favorable had dropped from 60ish to 40ish.

[HisMajestyBOB]

A roundup of recent headlines, just in case you're under any misgivings about where the Republicans are and where they intend to take us.

A Majority of 2022 GOP Candidates Deny the 2020 Election Results

CPAC deletes pro-Putin Tweet

"Vladimir Putin announces the annexation of 4 Ukrainian-occupied territories. Biden and the Dems continue to send Ukraine billions of taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, we are under attack at our southern border. When will Democrats put #AmericaFirst and end the gift-giving to Ukraine?"

The tweet also featured an image of a Russian flag and described the annexation as "official" in an accompanying image that listed the territories.

[The Brain]

How subverted do you folks think the American military is by Trump, Fox, and the forces trying to overthrow American democracy?

The military seemed really rattled around the time of the election and coup. IIRC there was some communication from the chiefs or similar along the lines of "obey the law and do your duty", which indicates they were scared af that some officers would do something stupid. And IIRC many in the military are Republicans, which today means you're an anti-democratic nutjob.

[DGuller]

I fear that "obey the law" and "defend the Constitution" are not clear enough guidelines during constitutional crises.  No one brazenly tells people to disregard laws, they just claim with varying levels of gaslighting that the law is on their side.

[Jacob]

There's the bit too, right now, where Fox/ Carlson is destroying the career of a general who disagreed with them about how the "woke / feminized" military is bad.

... seems to me Fox & friends are doing their best to bring the military on to their side by driving out non reactionaries.

[The Larch]

Realistic or alarmistic?

Inside Steve Bannon's 'disturbing' quest to radically rewrite the US constitution

By taking over state legislatures, Republicans hope to pass conservative amendments that cannot be electorally challenged


Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist in the Trump White House who is at the forefront of the Republican march toward hard-right populism, is throwing his weight behind a movement to radically rewrite the US constitution.

Bannon has devoted recent episodes of his online show the War Room to a well-funded operation which has stealthily gained ground over the past two years. Backed by billionaire donors and corporate interests, it aims to persuade state legislatures to call a constitutional convention in the hope of baking far-right conservative values into the supreme law of the land.

The goal is, in essence, to turn the country into a permanent conservative nation irrespective of the will of the American people. The convention would promote policies that would limit the size and scope of the federal government, set ceilings on or even abolish taxes, free corporations from regulations, and impose restrictions on government action in areas such as abortion, guns and immigration.

"This is another line of attack strategically," Bannon told his viewers last month. "You now have a political movement that understands we need to go after the administrative state."

By "administrative state", Bannon was referring to the involvement of the federal government and Congress in central aspects of modern American life. That includes combating the climate crisis, setting educational standards and fighting health inequities.

Mark Meckler, a founder of the Tea Party who now leads one of the largest groups advocating for the tactic, the Convention of States Action (Cosa), spelled out some of the prime objectives on Bannon's show. "We need to say constitutionally, 'No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment'," he said.

Meckler went on to divulge the anti-democratic nature of the state convention movement when he said a main aim was to prevent progressive policies being advanced through presidential elections. "The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat – or radical progressive, or Marxist which is what they are – we are going to lose the gains. So you do the structural fix."

The "structural fix" involves Republican state legislatures pushing conservative amendments to America's foundational document. By cementing the policies into the US constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge.

Were a convention achieved, it would mark the zenith of conservative state power in American politics. Over the past 12 years, since the eruption of the Tea Party, Republicans have extended their grip to more than half of the states in the country, imposing an increasingly far-right agenda on the heartlands.

Now the plan is to take that dominance nationwide.

Article V of the constitution lays out two distinct ways in which America's core document, ratified in 1788, can be revised. In practice, all 27 amendments that have been added over the past 244 years have come through the first route – a Congress-led process whereby two-thirds of both the US House and Senate have to approve changes followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states.

Meckler, working alongside other powerful interest groups and wealthy rightwing megadonors, is gunning for Article V's second route – one that has never been tried before. It gives state legislatures the power to call a constitutional convention of their own, should two-thirds of all 50 states agree.

The state-based model for rewriting the US constitution is perhaps the most audacious attempt yet by hard-right Republicans to secure what amounts to conservative minority rule in which a minority of lawmakers representing less-populated rural states dictate terms to the majority of Americans. Russ Feingold, a former Democratic US senator from Wisconsin, told the Guardian that "they want to rewrite the constitution in a fundamental way that is not just conservative, it is minoritarian. It will prevent the will of 'we the people' being heard."

Feingold has co-authored with Peter Prindiville of the Stanford constitutional law center The Constitution in Jeopardy, a new book that sounds the alarm on the states-based convention movement. "Our goal is not to scare people, but to alert them that there is a movement on the far right that is quietly getting itself to a point where it will be almost impossible to stop a convention being called," he said.

His urgency is underlined by how active the movement has become. A convention resolution framed by Cosa has passed so far this year in four states – Wisconsin, Nebraska, West Virginia and South Carolina.

The group has also been busy around November's midterm elections, using its muscle and some $600,000 (£528,252) of its reserves to support candidates amenable to the idea. "We have built the largest grassroots activist army in American history," Meckler told Bannon, probably hyperbolically.

Bannon's other guest on the War Room, Rick Santorum, a former Republican US senator from Pennsylvania who advises Cosa, told Bannon: "This is something that can happen very quickly. We are a lot further along than people think."

They are also much better funded than people might think. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which monitors the constitutional convention movement, estimates that it pulled in $25m (£22m) in 2020, the last year for which figures are known.

The funds were split between Cosa and other influential groups on the right. They include the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a network of state politicians and corporate lobbyists which has taken up the cry for a constitutional amendment to force balanced budget restrictions on Washington.

Much of the income is dark money, with the origins hidden. CMD has managed to identify some key donors – among them the Mercer Family Foundation set up by reclusive hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, and a couple of groups run by Leonard Leo, the mastermind behind the rightwing land grab in the federal courts.

More than $1m (£880,265) has also been donated in the form of Bitcoin.

The attraction to these groups and donors of pursuing a states route to rewriting the US constitution is easily explained. Over the past 12 years, since the eruption of the Tea Party in 2010, Republican activists have deployed extreme partisan gerrymandering to pull off an extraordinary takeover of state legislatures.

In 2010, Republicans controlled both chambers of just 14 state legislatures. Today, that number stands at 31.

"Republicans are near the high watermark in terms of their political control in the states, and that's why the pro-Trump rightwing of the party is increasingly embracing the constitutional convention strategy," said Arn Pearson, CMD's executive director.

Should a convention be achieved, the plan would be to give states one vote each. There is no legal or historical basis for such an arrangement but its appeal is self-evident.

One vote per state would give small rural conservative states like Wyoming (population 580,000) equal leverage to large urbanized progressive states like California (39.5 million). Collectively, small states would be in the majority and control would tip to the Republicans.

Last December Santorum spelled out this minoritarian vision at a private ALEC meeting. In an audio recording obtained by CMD, Santorum said: "We have the opportunity, as a result, to have a supermajority, even though we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us."

Pearson decried such thinking as "a profoundly anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic strategy that gives small rural states most control".

With the counting system skewed towards the conservative heartlands, the list of amendments that might be pursued is disconcertingly large. Though Meckler and his allies largely avoid talking about culture war issues, it is quite conceivable that a nationwide ban on abortion and a rescinding of gay marriage would be on the table.

More openly, advocates have talked about imposing balanced budget requirements on the US government that would dramatically shrink federal resources. Some have even proposed making income tax unconstitutional.

One of the more popular ideas circulating within rightwing constitutional convention circles, initially floated by the talk show host Mark Levin, is that states should grant themselves the ability to override federal statutes and supreme court rulings. It is hard to see how the federal rule of law could be sustained under such an arrangement with its unmistakable civil war undertones.

Under Article V, 34 states would have to call for a constitutional convention to reach the two-thirds requirement. Cosa has so far succeeded in getting 19 states to sign up, with a further six in active consideration.

ALEC, which sets a narrower remit for a convention focused on its balanced budget amendment, has gone further with 28 states on board.

Either way, there is a shortfall. To address it, constitutional convention leaders have invented increasingly exotic mathematical formulas for attaining the magic number, 34. "We used to call it fuzzy math, now we call it wacky math," Pearson said.

Advocates filed a lawsuit in Texas in February that tried to get the courts to force a constitutional convention on grounds that they had reached 34 states already – they cobbled together unrelated state convention calls, including some dating back to the 1800s. In July two bills were also introduced to the US House requiring Congress to call a convention immediately.

David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said the willingness to adopt outlandish logic should sound further alarm bells. It raised the stakes even higher for the November elections.

"The midterms are crucial," Super said. "Changes at state-level matter, but will not get them to 34 states. If they can take control of Congress, they could bridge the gap."

Paradoxically, what happens to Congress in the midterms could have the biggest impact on the future prospects of a states-based constitutional convention. Should the Republicans take back control of the US House and Senate they would be in a position to advance radical Republicans' demands.

"We've already seen a willingness to play fast and loose with the math on all sorts of things in Congress," Super said. "I would not be surprised if they were to make a serious attempt to adopt one of these bizarre accounting theories should they take control of both chambers in November."

That could mean a rapid dash for a convention before most Americans would have woken up to the danger.

"If the Republicans prevail in Congress, they could try to call a convention right away," Feingold said. "People should know that when they go to vote in November – this could fundamentally undermine their rights in a way that is both disturbing and permanent."

[The Brain]

I'm not terribly alarmed by the GOP using constitutional means to further their agenda. I mean they already tried a coup.

Given the general situation in the US though, it might make sense for the sensible forces to push malcontent states to leave the Union. Waiting until the sensible ones will have to be the ones to leave may be a high-risk tactic. If you provoke GOP states to leave first then the seat on the security council and the position as official nuclear weapons power according to the NPT would still be in sensible hands.