Opinion

If last week was considered Joe Biden's no-good, very bad week, there's a case to be made that this week was Donald Trump's no-good, even worse week.

Let's look at all of the legal cases and investigations that seem to be pushing forward against Trump despite his best efforts to repel them with lawsuits and delaying tactics. The good news for Trump is that it appears the Department of Justice (DOJ) has decided that all of the obstruction of justice Trump perpetrated in plain sight during the Russia investigation is not worth prosecuting. Unless they make a move very quickly, the statute of limitations is about to run out on that front. So much for Robert Mueller's sanguine pronouncement that we needn't worry about his refusal to recommend indictment because, of course, they could always do it after the president left office.

As President Biden marked the anniversary of his first year in office Wednesday, the reviews have come in. A raft of pundits and pollsters describe him as “limping,” “struggling” even “failing.”

Have you people lost your minds?

The Age of Trump empowered many "zombie ideas," both here in America and around the world. Fascism is the most dangerous of those zombie ideas. There is also the Big Lie that the 2020 Election was rigged or somehow stolen.

Donald Trump is no longer president, but zombie ideas continue to grow in number and force, devouring the unprepared or those who have left themselves vulnerable through carelessness or negligence or, in some cases, who are willing human sacrifices. America's democracy crisis is in many ways a story of zombie politics, about how lingering social, political, economic and other problems nourished an abomination that could no longer be easily denied or ignored.

As Merrick Garland explained in his big speech earlier this month, the way to dismantle a criminal conspiracy is to start at the bottom and work up. It’s a slow process, but it can be devastatingly effective.

That’s why the fifty-nine Republicans who cast fake electoral votes are a gift to investigators seeking to understand Trump’s role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election. These pseudo-electors impersonated public officials in a bid to overturn a presidential election.

Remember: With Republicans, every accusation is a confession.

Nowhere is that more true than in the discourse around fair elections and voting rights, both of which Republicans stand firmly against. On Wednesday, Senate Democrats attempted to pass a bill that would both protect voting rights and strengthen elections against blatant Republican sabotage. In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lied and said that Democrats don't care about "securing citizens' rights," but just "about expanding politicians' power."

In a legal blow for Donald Trump, the Supreme Court has cleared the way for presidential records dating from his time in office to be turned over to a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump, through his lawyers, had sought to shield over 800 pages of information from the panel, citing executive privilege, which allows for a president to withhold certain information from public release. But in a 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court on Jan. 19, 2022, rejected a request to block the documents from being handed to Congress.

And oh yeah – they also want to address the fact that in this country we have too few guns readily available to irresponsible, untrained and unvetted people. Their so-called “constitutional carry” provision ought to fix that problem quick as a bullet fired in a road-rage incident.

Honestly, though, it’s a neat trick, especially in an election year. Fake problems are infinitely more susceptible to fake solutions by fake leaders than are real problems, which tend to be complicated and bring the risk of potential failure to those who dare try to fix them.

Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.”

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the 60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: they’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for sixty years now.

Power is the ability to get what you want, even in opposition to others. In our two-party system, the party in power can pass legislation the other party may oppose.

Democrats thought they were in power, but Biden’s inability to pass his Build Back Better legislation casts doubt on how much power Democrats actually have.

There has been a lot of garment rending and hand wringing the last few days over a new Gallup poll which shows that party identification amongst voters has shifted dramatically over the past few months from Democratic to Republican. Coming as it does at the one-year mark of the Biden administration, this does seem to portend doom for Democratic hopes for midterm election success in November. Party identification is one of the traditional predictors of future results, and this one doesn't look good. The shift in 2021 was the largest shift since 2006, as Gallup reported:

On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%). However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

It is a dramatic shift to be sure. But it's important to realize that at the beginning of last year there was another dramatic shift away from Republicans, likely because of the events surrounding the election and the deadly COVID surge of winter 2021. Reversion to a relatively common partisan split isn't surprising.

There’s a way of looking at reproductive rights that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. With these rights, women have control over their bodies, yes, but they have something more – standing in our society.

Access to abortion is more than “freedom to choose.” It means parity, in theory, with men. It means having the political equality of a full and free citizen. It’s the Declaration of Independence made manifest.

We’ve been warned for decades about the growing threat of white nationalism in the United States. Back in 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray acknowledged that white supremacy is the fastest growing domestic terror threat in the country, accounting for the large proportion of the FBI’s resources. Wray eventually described the J6 insurrection last year, as an act of domestic terror.

This reality is often drowned out by an avalanche of falsehoods perpetuated by the media, especially conservative media. The greatest threat to US security is posed by the existential enemy from outside, we are told. Islamic extremists, or criminals making their way across the border, are the greatest obstacles for national security.

Over the course of 2021, 19 U.S states passed 34 voter restrictions that are already impacting the electorate.

The County Judge overseeing the office in Harris County Texas tweeted Monday, for example, that she's been forced to deny seven times as many vote-by-mail applications after Texas passed their voter suppression laws.