Here’s a headline for our sick times.

The Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA. This is the act passed in 1986 that requires hospitals that accept Medicare to screen and at least stabilize all emergency patients regardless of ability to pay. They can’t just ship uninsured people in unstable condition off to another hospital, in other words. The people who receive the treatment still get billed for it, but at least treatment is not denied.

“After Roe v. Wade was overruled in 2022, the Biden administration issued guidance clarifying that if a pregnant patient arrives at a hospital with an emergency condition that could only be stabilized with an abortion, the hospital is required to provide that care — regardless of state law,” Rolling Stone reports. But Idaho is challenging this, arguing that states — not the federal government or, heaven forbid, doctors — should decide what emergency treatment women are entitled to receive. The Idaho abortion ban does (in theory) allow for an abortion to save a woman’s life, but as with Texas the language is vague enough to leave doctors guessing as to how close to death a woman has to get before she can have an abortion. If they guess wrong as far as the state is concerned, doctors can face criminal charges, the end of their careers, and prision time.

A bunch of lower courts sided with the feds over Idaho, but on January 5 the Supreme Court lifted the lower court injunction, reinstating the ban until some vague future time when they hear arguments and issue a ruling, in which we assume the majority will still side with Idaho.

No rush, there, justices. It’s not like women are dying or anything. Oh, wait …  See also.

Earlier this week Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote a piece for Slate headlined Republican Officials Openly Insult Women Nearly Killed by Abortion Bans. It begins,

For many years before S.B. 8 passed in Texas and was then swept into existence by the Supreme Court, and before Dobbs ushered in a more formal regime of forced childbirth six months later, the groups leading the charge against reproductive rights liked to claim that they loved pregnant women and only wanted them to be safe and cozy, stuffed chock-full of good advice and carted around through extra-wide hallways for safe, sterile procedures in operating rooms with only the best HVAC systems. Then Dobbs came down and within minutes it became manifestly clear that these advocates actually viewed pregnant people as the problem standing in the way of imaginary, healthy babies—and that states willing to privilege fetal life would go to any and all lengths to ensure that actual patients’ care, comfort, informed consent, and very survival would be subordinate.

As you probably know, one of the ways states were shutting down abortion clinics before Dobbs was to enact absurd “health and safety” building requirements for abortion clinics and only abortion clinics. Lithwick and Stern continue,

A recent filing by the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan T. Skrmetti, a Republican, captures the dynamic all too well. Skrmetti has been fighting a lawsuit filed by a group of Tennessee women denied emergency abortions under the ultranarrow medical exception to that state’s ban. The women plaintiffs suffered an appalling range of trauma, including sepsis and hemorrhaging, because they could not terminate their pregnancies. The attorney general’s response to their complaint is a scathing, shockingly personal broadside against the victims of the ban. He accused them of attempting to draw “lines about which unborn lives are worth protecting” by imposing a medical exception “of their own liking.” He mocked them for asserting that ostensibly minor conditions like “sickle cell disease” might justify an abortion. And he insisted that the lead plaintiff, Nicole Blackmon, lacks standing, because she underwent sterilization after the state forced her to carry a nonviable pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby. The attorney general viciously suggested that, if Blackmon really wanted to fight Tennessee’s ban, she could have tried for another doomed pregnancy.

Abortion bans are beloved by misogynists. The bans allow women-haters to pretend they ocupy a moral high ground as they abuse and belittle women on a grand scale. This is why there is no reasoning with, or compromising with, them. They will not rest until all abortions are banned, and if women suffer and die they don’t care. As Sarah Jones wrote in New York magazine, “Abortion bans aren’t meant to save lives but to empower the lawmakers who write them. They envision a world with themselves at the top, passing judgment on all those beneath them. A person is disposable because someone in power decides they are such.”

Back to Lithwick and Stern:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff have evinced similar hostility toward plaintiffs in the Lone Star State who brought a nearly identical suit. The lead plaintiff in that case, Amanda Zurawski, was denied an abortion for three agonizing days after her water broke in the second trimester, leading her to develop sepsis; she nearly died in the ICU, and may never be able to get pregnant again. Paxton’s response? Because she might now be infertile—as a direct result of Texas law— Zurawski lacks standing to sue. When the case went to trial, Texas’ lawyers asked profoundly insulting questions of the plaintiffs. “Did Attorney General Ken Paxton tell you you couldn’t get an abortion?” they pressed each woman after pressing them for invasive details about their failed pregnancies. One plaintiff vomited on the stand after recounting her horror story.

These arguments are echoed by red-state attorneys general around the country, like Idaho’s Raúl Labrador, who proclaimed that women forced to carry dangerous, nonviable pregnancies merely “disagree with the legitimate policy choices made by the Idaho legislature.” (Should an Idaho resident suffering excruciating pain from a failing pregnancy drive to the statehouse rather than the emergency room? Labrador seems to think so.) Critically, these lawyers and politicians and activists are gaslighting their real victims. During a hearing over Zurawski’s case at the Texas Supreme Court, Beth Klusmann of the Texas attorney general’s office shifted the blame onto doctors: “If a woman is bleeding,” Klusmann said, “if she has amniotic fluid running down her legs—then the problem is not with the law. It is with the doctors.”

Elements of the abortion criminalization movement for years have claimed there is no actual medical reason ever to get an abortion, and I take it a lot of politicians are refusing to let go of this myth. And that’s because their contempt for women cannot be satiated if they have to show them some consideration and compassion.

Do read all of the Lithwick and Stern piece. Slate usually lets you read a few things for free before they put up the paywall, and if you hit the paywall open it in a private or incognito window. I don’t subscribe and I could read it. This is a powerfully written statement of the box these women-hating politicians have put women into. Women are nothing but incubators to them. The concludion:

If you have opted to move through the political landscape under the view that flawed persons are disposable and potential persons are flawless, the benefit of the doubt will always be afforded to the unblemished, someday rosy-cheeked soul that resides inside of the actual living human with the actual uterus. Indeed, the very instant that the hypothetical perfect babe becomes a real-life, in-the-world girl, a future pregnant woman is also birthed, and she will begin a long journey toward putative moral decay: potential miscarriage, poverty, health challenges, and other ostensible infirmities that will make her too flawed to be trusted to make judgments about her own future pregnancy. The tie will always go to the fetus, perfect in its secret unknown-ness. The mother will never be able to show that she wanted the pregnancy enough, took good enough care, made every correct predictive decision. And as such, the state will happily dismiss her interests as not only irrelevant, but self-serving, greedy, and dishonest. That it’s being said aloud in courtrooms, in pleadings, and in affidavits should not surprise anyone.

The pregnant woman has always been the fallen and the damned. Now, according to red states, it’s acceptable—necessary, even—to ensure that she knows this, from the very moment of conception until the moment she loses the power to make any choices about how she gives birth. Even if she dies, she was forever that which stood in the way of flawless, purest life.

And the Sarah Jones piece at New York magazine is worth reading also, although you have to be more persistent to get through the New York paywall sometimes. This looks at a Texas woman, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, who was murdered by the state of Texas. She suffered from serious health complications through most of her life that went untreated because Texas is one of the worst states in the nation about paying for health care for the poor. Texas still has, as it has had for many years, the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation. When Glick became pregnant her body simply couldn’t sustain the pregnancy. She sought medical help several times, and the Texas health care system pretty much just ignored her, until the day she died before the paramedics could revive her. Doctors reviewing her records have said that if she had received an abortion when she first presented with a clearly disasterous pregnancy, she probably would be alive now. Sarah Jones concludes,

Women, having sinned, cannot be sinned against. Perhaps they got pregnant when they shouldn’t have, or did something to make a pregnancy go south. Maybe Alvarez should’ve worked harder, and pulled herself out of poverty with nothing but personal grit at her disposal. The fault is hers, and hers alone, to these lawmakers. A fetus, though, has yet to fail and thus deserves salvation.

This makes for cruel policy. When it is put into practice, both woman and fetus can die. Alvarez is buried with her daughter Selene, who was delivered by emergency C-section but did not survive her mother’s demise. Abortion bans aren’t meant to save lives but to empower the lawmakers who write them. They envision a world with themselves at the top, passing judgment on all those beneath them. A person is disposable because someone in power decides they are such. Alvarez’s death was preventable, but in its own way, inevitable. There will be more like her as long as conservatives get their way.

I’ve been saying for years (see this post I wrote in 2006, for example) that the difference between the so-called “pro-life” and “pro-choice” opinions isn’t whether one perceives a fetus as a human being, but whether one perceives a woman as a human being.

Trump’s stupid, insulting rant at the judge who will be sentencing him in a few days may not have been the dumbest thing Trump said this week. Possibly even dumber was something he said at his Fox News “town hall” Wednesday night that is getting less attention. But you can read about it at The New Republic. Tori Otten writes,

Donald Trump says it’s OK that he got paid by foreign governments while he was president because he was “doing services” for them.

Trump participated in a Fox News town hall Wednesday night instead of the Republican primary debate. At one point, he was asked about a recent congressional report that found he made almost $8 million from nearly two dozen foreign governments during his first two years in office.

“You know, it sounds like a lot of money. That’s small,” he said.

He then said that it was fine he had received so much money because it was payment for accommodation at his various clubs and hotels.

“I was doing services for them,” Trump explained. “People were staying in these massive hotels, these beautiful hotels.”

“I don’t get $8 million for doing nothing.”

The Constitution, of course, says that presidents may receive nothing from foreign governments or monarchs for any reason, without the consent of Congress. Trump never asked for permission. And he clearly doesn’t grasp the principle behind the clause.

But back to yesterday’s courtroom outburst, which I’m sure you heard. This might have made sense if it were a jury trial, but it ain’t. This was real stupid. If I were Judge Engoron I’d be considering how much of a lesson Trump needs to be taught.

But of course the Stupid of the Week, possibly a Stupid for the Ages, was the immunity argument offered to a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week. The lawyer in this case, D. John Sauer, is probably not stupid. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He got his law degree from Harvard. This suggests he has a brain in his head, somewhere. But then he also served as Solicitor General of Missouri and Deputy Attorney General for Special Litigation in Missouri, I have long suspected there are microbes in the water in Jefferson City that eats people’s brains. I can’t say I remember Sauer from when I was living there, but the state is so infested with political wack-a-doos you need toads flying out of your ears to be noticable.

But assuming Sauer is not stupid, one suspects that the argument he offered to the D.C. Circuit was Trump’s idea, and Sauer by now has realized there is no arguing with Trump. Sauer must expect some serious money from this gig to so seriously fry his reputation as a lawyer. At least the episode has generated some amusing memes.

Earlier this week George Conway wrote for the Atlantic that Sauer had walked into a trap. I suspect Sauer knew the problems with the argument all along. His choices were to talk into the “trap” or resign as Trump’s lawyer. The only one who didn’t see the trap was Trump, and it appears he still doesn’t see it.

REPORTER: Do you agree with your lawyers that you could not be prosecuted if you ordered Seal Team 6 to kill a political opponent?

TRUMP: A president has to have immunity pic.twitter.com/ntLHSCDBF8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2024

Of course, we’re talking about a grown man who thinks magnets don’t work if they get wet.

Trump wouldn’t be the first person who cannot understand the difference between “breaking the law” and “enacting policies I don’t like.” But he should have learned the theme song from the old Baretta teelevision show — don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

Trump’s claims for absolute immunity for anything he did as POTUS will be heard tomorrow by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  Live audio of the oral arguments will be streamed on YouTube. Even more fun, Trump plans to attend the hearings. We’ll see if he can behave himself.

Jumping the gun a tad, Trump’s lawyers filed a motion today asking that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismiss the charges pending against Trump in the Georgia election interference case, claiming he had immunity for all that stuff. Yes, badgering a Georgia secretary of state to “find” votes for him is part of his presidential duties, obviously.

In other news, Judge Tanya Chutkan appears to be a victim of “swatting.”

Yesterday ABC News reported that Jack Smith has a lot of previously unreported details about Trump’s refusal to stop the violence on January 6 (do read it all, if you haven’t). Dennis Aftergut writes for Slate,

We already knew about Trump resisting the entreaties of aides, family, and political allies who begged him, once violence began, to immediately call off the dogs of insurrection. He fiddled for 187 minutes while Rome burned.

So what’s new about the evidence that ABC reported Sunday?

Trump’s reported statements are loaded with cruelty, self-interest, and abandonment of allies. It becomes indisputable that he was using his most violent followers to try to override the voters’ will and keep himself in power.

There is also new evidence that ties the Trump campaign directly to the fake electors plot.

So let’s hope the courts get this stupid “immunity” issue out of the way quickly so we can get on with the trial.

Three years. Three years ago we didn’t know about the fake electors. Most of us didn’t realize that Mike Pence had been pushed to reject the electoral ballots and send the decision back to the states. It was a few days before we appreciated how violent the riot in the capitol had really been.

Ed Kilgore makes the point that, three years ago, the majority of Republian politicians were alarmed and disgusted about January 6. Now they’ve come to love it. It was just a demonstration. It was a demonstration that injured at least 140 law enforcement officers. It caused or contributed to the deaths of nine people. It was an attempt to use violence to keep Trump in power after he lost a fair election

Since then, MAGA has escalated. About a third of Republicans now believe the FBI was behind the “riot.” Trump still wants you to know he won the 2020 election. If anything, he has escalated the crazy. I haven’t seen the ad, but The Messenger reports that Trump has a new video ad in which the voiceover claims God made Trump to lead the nation.

The ad, which has a run-time of two minutes and 44 seconds and was shared on Trump’s social media network Truth Social, alleges that God created the former president for the purpose of leading the nation.

“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office, and stay past midnight at a meeting of the state, so God made Trump,” the narrator says.

You’d think God would have noticed that in his first term Trump liked to spend most of his days watching television. It was widely reported that his “workday” started at 11 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. Messenger also points out that Ron DeSantis made a similar ad in 2022 to win re-election as governor. But it earned him some ridicule, too. This is the sort of ad that would turn off most people, I think.

I’ve been reading the Tim Alberta book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Talk about escalation. Evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has long had its freak show elements — think snake handling — but they used to be tucked away in rural America. But now the freak show is televised, and getting freakier. Alberta went around the country reporting on churches large and small, and part of the story he tells is that evangelical church-goers are leaving “traditional” Christianity and flocking to churches that offer a heavily politicized Christianity that conflates Christianity with America and Jesus with Trump. Or else they want one with big entertainment value.

One very poignant story he tells is about a pracher who had built a hugely successful megachurch near Kansas City. And then at some point he “found Jesus” and realized what he was offering was spiritual junk food. He began to preach sermons that were based on actual Christian theology, and his parishoners deserted him. Now he gets a handful of people to show up for service in his huge, empty church, when he used to get thousands.

I believe I may have mentioned the reports of parishoners refjecting the Sermon on the Mount for being too “woke.”

Organizations that keep track of these things, like Pew, say there is significant movement away from Christianity in the U.S. In 1972, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian, Now it’s about 64 percent. Evangelicalism claims to be growing, but what’s happening is that they’re getting a bigger share of the shrinking number of Christians. Alberta quotes Christians blaming “the Democrats” and “the Left” and demonic forces — all the same thing, apparently — for this decline. And to “fight back,” they are escalating the freak. They’re going all out on anti-LGBTQ, misogyny, and Trump.  And then they wonder why so many people don’t like them. Must be a plot!

At the junction of Trump’s plot to become President for Life and the Evangelical freak show is Mike Johnson.

As reporting from the fall showed, Johnson has deep ties to a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation—a network of politically ambitious church leaders, largely pulled from a kind of Christianity called Neo-Charismatic Pentecostalism. NAR leaders (typically known as “apostles”) have been credited with stoking the large and influential Christian nationalist contingent at the Jan. 6 insurrection. …

… The Neo-Charismatics are part of the Christian right, but it’s different from the old Christian right. The Christian right with the Moral Majority in the 1980s was about certain social conservative values. These people are not the same, because we’re in the world of spiritual warfare, where your adversaries are literally understood as being under the influence of demons.

This crew is part of the Christian Right, but they’re more dangerous than the old Jerry Falwell Sr. Christian Right. The New Charismatics think that they are obligated to fight physical war against their enemies, since their enemies are demons. It’s okay to kill gay people and liberals and what not. The New Charismatics aren’t being held back from mass homicide by religious scruples as much as by the criminal justice system.

It’s okay to bear false witness against Joe Biden and other Democrats because you’re serving a greater good, which is, um, power for Republicans and for Trump. Because they’ll stop abortions, see. That’s all that matters. And that’s why they support sleezebags like Trump and Herschel Walker, whose campaign Alberta analyzes. That Walker actually pushed girlfriends into getting abortions doesn’t register. All that matters is getting power.

This year we’re going to see if Trump can evade the criminal justice system and win another term. And if those things happen, I don’t see how the damage can be undone.

Here’s a hopeful note from Jamelle Bouie.

What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020. In 2022, Trump-like or Trump-lite candidates lost competitive statewide elections in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in the House, winning back the chamber with a razor-thin margin, and Democrats secured governorships in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin, among other states. Democrats overperformed again the following year, in Kentucky and Virginia.

“Since 2016,” wrote Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in a post for his newsletter last summer, “Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on.”

If that trend continues this year, then there’s hope we can restore something approximating sanity.

The New York Times is reporting that Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds. Of course we kinda knew that, but it’s good to see it spelled out. No paywall.

Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.

The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.

Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.

The Constitution, of course, says that presidents may receive nothing from foreign governments or monarchs without the consent of Congress. Trump never asked for permission. And I like the bit about China.

Back when trump took office in 2017 there was a lot of grumbbling that he didn’t divest himself of his businesses, or at least put them into a blind trust. In this Reuters article from January 2017 a Trump spokesperson said that profits generated at Trump’s hotels by foreign governments would be donated to the U.S. Treasury. I guess that didn’t happen, either.  The Times article quotes Erick Trump saying that any profit the company earned on the hotel stays was returned to the federal government through a voluntary annual payment to the Treasury Department.. But the Chinese bank has a lease at Trump Tower (since 2008) that Eric didn’t think should count.

Typical:

House Republicans also dismissed the revelations, arguing that there was nothing wrong with Mr. Trump receiving revenue from foreign governments while he was president but that Mr. Biden’s family’s business was corrupt.

IOKIYAR. So far the House Republicans have failed to produce evidence that Joe Biden took any money from any corrupt “family business.” From Rolling Stone:

In December, House Republicans formally opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, alleging after years of fruitless investigations that the current president — as well as his family — have enriched themselves through corrupt business dealings with countries like Ukraine and China. Republicans have struggled to justify the decision to plow forward with impeachment proceedings despite a lack of concrete evidence against President Biden. That irony is not lost on Oversight Democrats, who wrote that as Chairman of the committee Rep. James Comer intentionally halted the production of documents “relating to President Trump’s receipt of foreign payments—from China or any other country—and launched an investigation of President Joseph Biden’s son, which to date has produced no evidence of any constitutional or criminal wrongdoing by President Biden.”

For more laughs, see Aaron Blake at WaPo, Trump lawyers’ doozy of a filing on voter fraud. It begins,

Prosecutors have repeatedly described Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020 as effectively manufacturing a pretense for illegally overturning the election. Special counsel Jack Smith said in his indictment of the former president that fake electors were meant to “create a fake controversy” that could be used on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a new filing, Trump’s legal team appears bent on helping prosecutors make that case.

The article (no paywall) goes on to describe the arguments and “evidence” in Trump’s latest legal brief in his appeal for presidential immunity in his federal Jan. 6 case. It’s hysterical. It even quotes “reports” that may not exist.

In other news: I hadn’t seen anything in WaPo by Paul Waldman or Greg Sargent, two of my favorite writers, for a while. I have learned they’ve both left WaPo; I don’t know why.  Paul Waldman has a Substack — blog? thing? whatever.  If Greg Sargent is writing for anybody, I haven’t found it.

WaPo has an expose of the Gateway Pundit site, which is about time. GP is the source of a lot of the toxicity and misinformation that keeps MAGA alive. Why hasn’t Hoft been buried under lawsuits already?

Speaking of liars, Trump is now pushing a conspiracy theory that Liz Cheney destroyed evidence.

“Why did American Disaster Liz Cheney … ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY most of the evidence, and related items, from the January 6th Committee of Political Thugs and Misfits. THIS ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR MY LAWYERS TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR, AND PRESENT, A PROPER DEFENSE OF THEIR CLIENT, ME. All of the information on Crazy Nancy Pelosi turning down 10,000 soldiers that I offered to to [sic] guard the Capitol Building, and beyond, is gone.”

Um, and of course this isn’t true.

Now, Trump has seized on House GOP claims that some records are missing from the archives of the House select committee that investigated Jan. 6, including Trump’s actions. The Democratic chair who headed the committee denies anything was lost; instead, he says some sensitive materials were withheld from the House archive to protect witnesses.

But here’s the kicker: The special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — although not for the Capitol insurrection itself — says the withheld materials have already been provided to Trump as part of discovery in the case.

At TPM, see The New Argument That Might Save Trump’s March Trial Date. Interesting.

Washington Monthly reports on a piece of legislation signed by Trump, the VA MISSION Act, that privated a lot of veterans’ health benefits.

… the legislation set up a parallel private sector network—the Veterans Community Care Program or VCCP—which pays private sector providers to treat more than a third of the nine million veterans enrolled in the VHA.

The Veterans Community Care Program promised to give veterans speedier access to high-quality care if they couldn’t get a timely appointment at the VHA or had to drive too long to get to one. Instead, as many studies have documented, VCCP care is of lower quality than that provided by the VHA. It also takes longer, on average, to get an appointment with a VCCP provider than it does with one at the VHA, and perhaps most importantly, the cost of this private sector program is soaring. Between 2014 and 2024, expenses for veterans’ care in the community quadrupled from $8 billion to $31 billion, accounting for a third of the budget for veterans’ medical services.

So a lot of tax dollars go into a lot of pockets, but this isn’t doing veterans much good. Sounds like a Trump plan.

I’ve been writing at Patheos about attempts to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Oklahoma is planning to fund a virtual Catholic charter school. This would be, in effect, a religious public school, and it would have been clearly unconstituitional until recently. But what’s interesting is that Leonard Leo and a network of right-wing religious and legal nonprofits appear to be positioning this school as a test case for the Supreme Court. The legal crew that was behind the Dobbs case that ended Roe v. Wade is deeply involved. So are a lot of characters with connections to Supreme Court justices Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch. See Christian Public Schools In The U.S. ?

SCOTUS has already eliminated the old prohibitions about using tax dollars to pay for sectarian religious instructions in Carson v. Makin, 2022, They might very well greenlight the Oklahoma charter school. This would theoretically open the door for other religions to open schools and get taxpayer funding. But there is language in the Carson decision about  ‘history and tradition’ that might be elaborated upon to argue that the tax privilege only applies to Christianity.

Let’s tiptoe into this new year very gently, and just gossip a bit. I take it Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago was kind of a downer. Melania was absent (her mother is sick, but Melania hasn’t exactly been glued to Trump’s side for months). Second, according to magazine accounts the “A List” at this party consisted of Roger Stone, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Mike Lindell, and Rudy Giuliani. The entertainment was an Elvis impersonator, Vanilla Ice, and a guy in a ninja turtle costume.

I’M SORRY WHAT https://t.co/S4CU1pyuUe pic.twitter.com/uPf5PFesZq

— Tom Sauer (@thomasbsauer) January 1, 2024

That’s just sad. Now, aren’t you glad you weren’t there? Full disclosure, I had a glass of wine and went to bed about 10 o’clock. And I’m perfectly content with that.

Put this in the “some days you can’t catch a break” department. You remember Christian Ziegler, the Florida GOP chair married to a co-founder of Moms for Liberty who was accused of assault? by a woman with whom he and his wife had enjoyed threesomes? Ziegler gave the police a video of his visit to the woman, which he said shows consensual activity. Now the police are considering charging Ziegler with making the video without the woman’s consent.

Speaking of Moms for Liberty, Josh Marshall has been chronicling the adventures of Clarice Schillinger of Pennsylvania, who “runs two Moms for Liberty-esque SuperPACs, Keeping Kids in School PAC and Back to School Pac.”

She was also a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2022. Here she is hanging out with President Trump back in better times. She and Trump talked about “how the moms are upset and how we’re going to save America. And the grandmoms and the caregivers, all of us. When you touch our children, it’s about the future of democracy. This is what happens.”

Now Schillinger has been arrested touching children in the form of punching out a sixteen year old at a booze-drenched birthday party she threw for her seventeen year old daughter at the homestead in Doylestown, PA.

This is the Pennsylvania Inquirer — seriously, read this  —

Multiple teenagers were assaulted by intoxicated adults during the Sept. 29 party at Clarice Schillinger’s Doylestown home, according to a police affidavit. Police say that Schillinger’s intoxicated boyfriend punched one teen in the face and assaulted another. That teen also was punched in the eye by Schillinger’s intoxicated mother, who also chased that teen around the kitchen, the affidavit said.

As teenagers tried to leave the home on Liz Circle, Schillinger — who police said had supplied the more than 15 minors at the party with a basement bar stocked with vodka and rum, played beer pong with them and encouraged them to take shots with her — ordered them to stay.

She then punched one young man in the face three times, according to the affidavit, which said video footage showed Schillinger lunging toward a group of teenagers in the foyer and having to be restrained.

So now there’s two things to be grateful for. You weren’t at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve, and you aren’t related to Clarice Schillinger. The whole family sounds demented.

Josh Marshall has an update today on more of Schillinger’s political activity, which sounds about as hinky as that party.

This is going to be one mother of an election year, folks. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. You all know you’re always welcome to come here and vent, any time.

Item One, Maine’s decision that Trump is ineligible to run for POTUS. The Hill reports that right-wing radio host Larry Elder (I’d never heard of him) predicts the Maine decision will “set the country on fire.” Except it won’t. Trump’s thugs will send threats to the Maine Secretary of State, who probably will need extra security for a while. But that’s all that’s going to happen.

Presidential election polls notwithstanding, IMO Trump and his MAGA movement are not beloved by most Americans. I’m betting that the true MAGA, fanatical believers are maybe a quarter of the adult population. Trump’s current “favorability” is at 42 percent, but I’m betting a chunk of that 42 percent doesn’t feel strongly enough about Trump to go out and riot for him. These are low-information voters who aren’t paying that much attention and just habitually vote for Republicans.

And when the country is not set on fire, someone should look up this Larry Elder guy and point that out.

The Election Law Blog thinks that the Maine decision will make it more likely that the SCOTUS will review the issue. I have a hard time believing the majority will support the Colorado and Maine decisions, but how they disagree is going to be interesting by itself. I bet John Roberts even now is trying to think up a way to keep Trump on ballots without negating the text of the 14th Amendment. Good luck with that.

Item Two, new reporting on the fake electors scheme. CNN —

Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.

These people are so busted. If only we had an uncorrupted judiciary now. Trump would be in jail already.

Item Three, Nikki Haley’s history problem. I wasn’t surprised that she whiffed on a question about the cause of the Civil War. I am surprised that the event at least got a little traction in the news. Whether it hurts her campaign is still to be seen. Her “clarification” didn’t help her any, I don’t think.

There’s also this:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has launched four billboards in Iowa attacking Republican presidential candidates for their “anti-history record” as they spend the weekend campaigning in the Hawkeye state.

The billboards, which will be in Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, come as Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley faces criticism over her remarks at a town hall event in New Hampshire in which she failed to mention slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

The former South Carolina governor suggested the cause of the war was “basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” She later claimed the voter who asked her the question was a “Democrat plant.”

The ads the DNC is launching target Haley for her comments, as well as the records of her fellow GOP candidates Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Trump. The three currently top the GOP primary field in the state, according to Decision Desk HQ and The Hill’s aggregation of polls.

I agree, and note that four billboards is a small expense as campaign expenses go.

You might remember last April’s school shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville. I know, they all run together in memory sometimes. But this one inspired a few Democratic members of the Tennesse legislature to demonstrate for gun control legislation. And the Republican majority silenced them. Even if you don’t remember the school shooting, I bet you remember the Tennessee Three — Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson. They tried to move the needle on gun legislation in Tennessee, and failed. They’ve since all been reinstated.

Today the New York Times tells the story of some parents from that Nashville school who tried to get the Tennessee legislature to see sense. In brief, they failed. But what makes the story interesting is that these were white, Christian, mostly conservative, upper-income parents, mostly the moms. And they got no more respect than the Tennessee Three.

Ms. Joyce and other Covenant parents felt they stood a better chance than anyone at cutting through the divisions on gun control. Among them were former Republican aides, gun owners and lifelong conservatives who could afford to spend days at the legislature. …

… But the Tennessee legislature proved more hostile than the Covenant parents imagined. And when Ms. Joyce heard just one more gun rights supporter dismiss the parents’ concerns after days of restraint, her patience snapped.

The shooter at Covenant “hunted our children with a high-capacity rifle,” Ms. Joyce cried out, her voice cracking, as she confronted the gun rights supporter in the Capitol rotunda. He walked away, but not before suggesting she listen more closely to his arguments.

“I have held my composure,” she said, now openly angry despite the crowd that had gathered. “I have stayed calm. I have been silent and quiet and composed. And I am sick of it. Listen to me.”

The shooter in Nashville was a trans man named Aiden Hale. He killed three nine-year-old children and three adults and was shot dead at the scene. Hale was under treatment for an emotional disorder that had caused concern among his family. Yet he was able to legally purchase the firearms in his possession that day — an AR-15 military-style rifle, a 9 mm Kel-Tec SUB2000 pistol caliber carbine, and a 9 mm Smith and Wesson M&P Shield EZ 2.0 handgun. The parents wanted a law “that would allow judges to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed to be a threat to themselves or others,” the Times reported.

Nope; that was a nonstarter. The idea was dead on arrival before the legislative session got underway. Instead, the Republican majority wanted a bill that would allow people with enhanced carry permits to take handguns into schools. When a mother demanded a justification for more guns in schools, a legislator scoffed at her, saying that if Aiden Hale hadn’t gad guns he could have run the students over during recess.

I take it these parents had never been treated so shabbily before in their lives. They had assumed that if they were reasonable and well behaved they would at least be listened to. Nope.

Eventually Tennessee did pass some bills to enhancee school security, but no gun control bills of any sort that I can find.

Today WaPo has a retrospective on Sandy Hook, or rather the gun control laws that didn’t happen after Sandy Hook. The article interviews four current and three former senators, all Democrats, who had voted against gun bills after Sandy Hook. And now they are sorry. I notice that no one bothered to interview Republicans to see if any of them are sorry.

The Sandy Hook parents interviewed sounded a lot like the Tennessee parents. They were grieving. They were ignored. And nothing gets done.

In other news, see Florida teen kills sister during fight over Christmas gifts, sheriff says.

“They had this family spat over who was getting what and how much money was being spent on who,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told a news conference Tuesday.

The argument continued as the family made their way from the store to their grandmother’s house in Largo, Fla. The brothers were each in possession of a gun, the sheriff said.

“They get to grandma’s house [and the 14-year-old] takes out his gun and tells him he’s going to shoot him in the head,” the sheriff said.

The older brother said he didn’t want to fight and asked his younger sibling to get out of the house, he added. Their uncle and sister, Baldwin, attempted to turn the situation around.

“You all need to leave that stuff alone … It’s Christmas,” Baldwin told them while standing outside the property, according to Gualtieri.

The 14-year-old, after allegedly threatening to shoot his sister and her baby, is accused of shooting Baldwin in the chest while she was holding her son in a carrier at 1:45 p.m. She fell to the ground and was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Her baby was not injured.

Seconds after the shooting, the 15-year-old brother came outside holding his own handgun and shot his younger brother in the stomach, Gualtieri said. The 14-year-old was unarmed when his brother shot him, he said, and is in custody in stable condition at a hospital.

The 15-year-old then fled, tossing his weapon into a yard nearby, Gualtieri said. He was later taken into custody at a relative’s house.

Gualtieri said that both teens were arrested and that only one of the two weapons was recovered at the scene, expressing concern that the missing gun would eventually be picked up and used in another crime. Audio of the incident was captured on a neighbor’s camera, Gualtieri said.

“The problem is, we got way too many kids out there with way too many guns,” Gualtieri said, adding that he hoped gun laws would change. “We need to get serious, and we need to get tough.”

Exactly why teenagers needed to be carrying guns to go Christmas shopping and on to Grandma’s house escapes me. But I’m sure somebody would argue that if they hadn’t had guns they would have just run each other over in their pickups.

But, y’know, sometimes it’s the gun. Someone with poor impulse control loses it and starts shooting. If that 14-year-old hadn’t had a gun, his sister would still be alive. It’s that simple. And as far as school shooters are concerned, I suspect shooting is the attraction. If shooting, especially with absurdly high-powered firearms, were no longer possible, I rather doubt we’d suddenly see a rash of vehicular homicides on school grounds.