Crooked Media - What A Day: Rud-dunnit

 -Kyrsten Sinema, preparing to help shred that legacy

Voting Rights Week is upon us, and every last Democrat will have to make a tough final choice between “tweaking a Senate rule to keep democracy afloat” and “hoping Ron DeSantis picks friendly goons for his voter-intimidation militia.”
 

• Senate Democrats have opened debate on the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, setting up a GOP filibuster and an apparently doomed vote on whether to do something about that later this week. “If Republicans choose to continue the filibuster of voting rights legislation, we must consider and vote on the rules changes,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday, sticking to the plan in spite of continued opposition from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). 
   
• The Senate Democratic caucus met on Tuesday evening to discuss their filibuster-reform options. Ahead of the meeting, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin confirmed reports that Democrats were leaning towards a vote on reviving the talking filibuster, which would allow a simple majority to advance any bill after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) had finished reading aloud from 1984 and pissed his pants on live TV. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, Manchin has already torpedoed that plan. 
   
• Democratic leaders and voting-rights activists held out hope over the weekend that enough targeted public shaming might move the needle. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family singled out Manchin and Sinema during Monday’s MLK Day events, as did a number of Democratic lawmakers. Several West Virginia sports figures sent Manchin a letter urging him to pass voting rights legislation—though University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban asked to include a helpful footnote about how much he personally values the Senate filibuster. Thanks, Nick!

While the Senate debated measures to protect democracy, a likely contender for the 2024 GOP nomination added a fun new item to his fascist wishlist.
 

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has pitched a plan to establish a special police force to monitor Florida elections, which would answer to him. (Not to be confused with the state military force DeSantis wants to create, which would also answer to him.) DeSantis has asked the GOP-controlled legislature for nearly $6 million to hire 52 people for the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which would “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws,” acting on tips from “government officials or any other person.” 
   
• No state has such an agency, probably because it’s both unnecessary and insane. Florida’s congressional Democrats have asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate “a disturbing rise in partisan efforts at voter suppression” in the state, and highlighted DeSantis’s proposed election police. “Harmful proposals to create new partisan bodies to oversee our voting process are exactly the kind of action that demand oversight as we work to ensure that our voting process is unquestionably trustworthy,” they wrote in a Thursday letter.

The combined voting-rights bill looks almost certain to fail, but by putting every senator on the record, Democratic leaders can at least make the case to voters that electing more Democrats would put democracy protections within reach. With the GOP pursuing its authoritarian fantasies out in plain sight, it’s a case worth arguing convincingly. 

Check out the latest episode of Offline! This week, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie joins Jon Favreau to discuss her viral essay on social media and how the internet has changed the way we interact with different ideas. New episodes of Offline drop every Sunday in the Pod Save America feed. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

A gunman took four people hostage at a Texas synagogue on Saturday, during a live-streamed service. All four hostages made it out of the nearly 11-hour standoff safely; the last three managed to escape after one of them, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, threw a chair at the gunman, using security training that he had sought out after previous threats to synagogues. The gunman (who’s now dead) has been identified as Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British national who was known to security officials in the U.K. and arrived in the U.S. in late December on a tourist visa. During the standoff, Akram demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, who was convicted in 2020 of trying to murder U.S. solders in Afghanistan. President Biden called the hostage crisis an act of terror, and the FBI said it was investigating it as “a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted.”

• The January 6 committee has issued subpoenas to Rudy Giuliani and three other Trump allies who “publicly promoted unsupported claims about the 2020 election and participated in attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of election results.” The committee has also subpoenaed and obtained the phone records of Eric Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle.
   
• An underwater volcano erupted near Tonga on Saturday, killing at least three people, destroying dozens of homes, and triggering tsunami warnings around the world.
   
• Texas’s vigilante-enforced abortion ban will likely remain in effect for the foreseeable future, after a federal appeals court declined to send a challenge back to the lower court that previously blocked the law.
   
• Supreme Court Justice and Real Piece of Work Neil Gorsuch refused a request from Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask during official business, forcing Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who has diabetes, to attend oral arguments remotely. 
   
• The U.S. now believes that Russia could launch an attack on Ukraine “at any point,” according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
   
• AT&T and Verizon have agreed to delay their 5G rollout near certain airports, after major airlines warned of a “catastrophic disruption” to flight schedules and asked the Biden administration to intervene.
   
• A 2020 Census memo cited “unprecedented” political interference by the Trump administration, as Trump sought to exclude undocumented immigrants from the redistricting process. 
   
• Iran has demanded a guarantee from the U.S. that it won’t leave the nuclear deal again, which the Biden administration can’t legally provide. A neat reminder that Trump’s foreign policy disasters continue to harm the country and its reputation of reliability. 
   
• An Oklahoma pastor has apologized for rubbing his spit on a parishioner during a sermon on Sunday, grossing out a nation for naught: “He was bald before I spit on him, and he’s still bald today. So no miracle here.” 

Newly sworn-in Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) signed executive orders overturning Virginia’s mask mandates for public schools and a vaccination requirement for state workers on his first day in office, as well as an order banning the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia public schools. (Take that, zero Virginia public schools that were previously teaching critical race theory.) An exciting start for America’s newest pro-COVID governor! Several of the state’s largest school districts have pledged to defy the anti-mask order. Youngkin’s attempted torching of effective public-health measures comes as the Omicron wave begins to recede in New York City and parts of the northeast, but continues to fill hospitals in much of the country. The U.S. reported an average of 800,000 daily cases over the past week, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned on Sunday that the surge hadn’t yet peaked for the country as a whole: “The next few weeks will be tough.”

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DirecTV will drop OAN from its lineup, a major blow to the far-right propaganda network.

COVIDtests.gov soft-launched a day early, and it’s shockingly easy to use. Order your four free rapid tests now!

New Jersey has become the second state to require Asian American and Pacific Islander history as part of its public school curriculum.

Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S., will run for a seat in the Ohio House.