Crooked Media - What A Day: Doocy Goosied

 -U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, on Sarah Palin

It’s easy to call the GOP “authoritarian,” but it would be unfair to suggest that Republicans are solely focused on plans to steal the next election. Balanced reporting would reveal that they’re also plotting retaliation against the people investigating their last attempt.
 

• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who’s been advising current House GOP leadership ahead of the midterms, on Sunday compared members of the January 6 committee to a “lynch mob,” and suggested they would be jailed if Republicans regain control of Congress. “The wolves are gonna find out they’re now sheep, and they’re the ones who are, in fact, I think, going to face a real risk of going to jail for the kind of laws that they’re breaking,” ranted Gingrich on Fox News.
   
• Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) pointed to Gingrich’s comments as a warning. "A former Speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent January 6 attack on our Capitol and our Constitution," she tweeted on Sunday. “This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.” In the meantime, Republicans are doling out punishments wherever they can: Virginia’s new GOP attorney general immediately fired Timothy Heaphy, the top staff investigator with the January 6 committee, from his day job as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia. 
   
• The upswell in GOP threats comes as the panel focuses its probe on Donald Trump and his inner circle. Chairman Bennie Thompson confirmed on Sunday that the committee had already spoken with former Attorney General Bill Barr and Defense Department officials about Trump’s unexecuted plan to use the military to seize voting machines. That bananapants plan came to light in a draft executive order that the National Archives turned over to investigators.

In reality, threatening January 6 investigators is just one element of Republicans’ plan to attempt another coup under the guise of combating voter fraud. 
 

• Another element is installing more coup-friendly election administrators, and new fundraising data from Arizona shows how intently Trump allies are working on it. State Rep. Mark Finchem, the Trump-backed GOP candidate for Arizona secretary of state, raised more than $660,000 in 2021. That wasn’t the highest fundraising total among Republican candidates (silver linings, baby!), but it’s more than the combined total of the two leading Democrats (think about that silver lining, from before!).
   
• Meanwhile, Arizona Republicans have spent the first month of 2022 introducing two-dozen bills to suppress the vote and overhaul the way state elections are run, with proposals that run from requiring voters to provide fingerprints, to expensive “anti-fraud ballot paper,” to a stipulation that all ballots be hand-counted by default. Several of those bills were introduced and co-sponsored by Finchem himself, and all of them follow both official and partisan clown audits of the 2020 election that found zero evidence of widespread fraud. 

There’s no clearer distillation of the Republican Party’s wholesale abandonment of democratic principles in the “post-Trump” era than Newt Gingrich calling for the investigators of a violent insurrection to be thrown in jail. It was meant to scare Democrats out of going for the GOP’s jugular; hopefully, it will do the opposite. 

Check out this week’s episode of Offline! This week on Offline, author Jenny Odell joins Jon Favreau to discuss lessons from her book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” and how what we choose to focus our attention on doesn’t always need to be productive. New episodes of Offline drop every Sunday in the Pod Save America feed. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which probably spells the end of race-conscious admissions programs in higher education. Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a right-wing group which targeted both a public and a private university as part of a years-long legal strategy to wipe out affirmative action across the board. Lower courts have sided with the universities. The Supreme Court last upheld the (limited) consideration of race in college admissions in 2016, with a 4-3 vote in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, but that was before a popular-vote-losing president stacked the bench with reliable far-right operatives. The current conservative majority is far more likely to overturn precedent in service of GOP culture war.

• Fulton County, GA, judges have approved a request from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to convene a special grand jury to investigate Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s presidential-election results. The grand jury will be seated on May 2 for a period of up to a year. 
   
• In other ominous Supreme Court cases, the justices have agreed to hear a case that could narrow the reach of the Clean Water Act, potentially clearing the way for developers and corporate polluters to absolutely fuck up some wetlands. 
   
• The Court rejected House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s challenge to proxy voting in the House, a system that GOP members have happily taken advantage of since its implementation. 
   
• The Arizona Democratic Party formally censured Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) on Saturday over her refusal to reform the filibuster to pass voting-rights legislation.
   
• Sarah Palin’s libel case against the New York Times, which was set to begin on Monday, has been delayed until February 3 because Palin tested positive for COVID. Palin said last month that she would get vaccinated “over my dead body.”
   
• Thousands of anti-vaxxers descended on Washington, DC, on Sunday for a rally against vaccine mandates. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made yet another Holocaust comparison during his anti-mandate rant, drawing condemnation from the Auschwitz Memorial and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
   
• British Prime Minister and Irrepressible Party Freak Boris Johnson had an indoor birthday party in June 2020, in further violation of the U.K.’s COVID lockdown.
   
• At least seven Virginia school boards have sued Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) to block his executive order lifting school mask mandates. 
   
• Local and federal law-enforcement agencies have opened investigations into antisemitic flyers that were distributed to hundreds of homes in Miami Beach and Surfside, two Florida cities with large Jewish populations. 
   
• A Florida school district canceled a professor’s civil-rights history seminar for teachers, citing “critical race theory” concerns that had nothing to do with the content of the lecture.
   
• The thing to know about Don Jr. is, he is taking all of these investigations in stride and just basically doing fantastic. 

The Pentagon has put 8,500 troops on heightened alert as Russia continues to scale up its military presence along the Ukrainian border. Those troops, if deployed, would be sent not to Ukraine but to NATO territory in Eastern Europe as part of a larger alliance “response force.” NATO said earlier on Monday that it would send more military equipment to defend eastern member states and deter any wider aggression from Russia. The State Department on Sunday ordered diplomats’ families to leave the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, authorized nonessential diplomatic staff to leave, and urged U.S. citizens to leave the country. On Saturday, the U.K. said it had intelligence that Russia was pursuing a plot to install a pro-Moscow government in Ukraine. Russia has continued to deny that it’s plotting anything at all.

Omicron-fighting antibodies persist for at least four months after a Pfizer booster shot, according to a new study.

Democrats have likely avoided the worst-case redistricting scenario, thanks to courts tossing out extreme GOP gerrymanders and their opportunity to draw an aggressive map in New York.

Cash stipends for poor mothers changes their babies’ brain activity in ways associated with higher cognitive skills, according to new research, in a pretty strong argument for reviving the expanded child tax credit.

The Georgia Department of Corrections has shut down the state’s oldest prison, which had been sued by the Southern Center for Human Rights over its horrific conditions.