Opinion

For months, as Democratic voters in California seemed complacent in the face of the Republican effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, much of the national political and punditry class in the media claimed California would send dire warnings to the Democratic Party.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

Larry Elder was the leading GOP candidate in California's recall election Tuesday. The talk-show host lost by a mile. He conceded last night, but not before raising doubts about the election's legitimacy.

As the Editorial Board's Lindsay Beyerstein wrote:

A convergence of three unsettling headlines appeared for my morning reading the day before the nation observed the 20-year commemoration of the tragic deaths of almost 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. The very day of the remembrance ceremonies, the 7-day average for loss of American lives to the ongoing COVID-19 catastrophe was 1,666, as we rapidly approached a death toll of 660,000 Americans.

This article was originally published at Idaho Capital Sun

So, again, with feeling: Anti-vaccine GOP leaders are lawless. Their followers are often criminal. (I mean this literally.) I'm going to keep repeating myself no matter how many times they claim to be "fighting for their freedom." I'm going to keep calling on the government to put an end to lawlessness no matter how much they hue and cry about "tyranny." Criminals are "free" to break the law, too. Then they are found and punished. The president was right to say the unvaccinated are the problem. His mandate forces tens of millions of them to get vaccinated. They are literally robbing the rest of us of our freedom.

This is important to point out, because the discourse so far keeps framing the question as one between freedom and government, as if government and freedom were opposites. Sure, they are opposites — if you are a conservative. That the discourse is framing them as antipodes is a consequence of the last half-century being dominated by the Republican Party's preferred ways of looking at the world. "Negative liberty," as Isaiah Berlin put it, is only one meaning of liberty, and it is, furthermore, often the narrowest, brittlest and dumbest.

On Monday, Republican recall hopeful Larry Elder refused to say whether he would accept defeat if he failed to unseat Democratic incumbent Gavin Newsom. The far-right radio host urged his supporters to go to the StopCAFraud website to report election voting "irregularities." The site, which was funded by Elder's campaign, claimed that "statistical irregularities" proved that the California governor had won the recall election by fraud. The catch was that the election wasn't until Tuesday and no votes had been counted.

In the post-Trump era, Republican losers follow a simple formula: Cry fraud, file frivolous lawsuits and fundraise off of them. You will lose in court, because there is no fraud, but it doesn't matter because every loss burnishes the GOP's "stabbed in the back" narrative.

The overwhelming rejection of the effort to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom is a powerful message for those Republicans who think their future lies with Donald Trump and Trumpism. It doesn't.

The vote was roughly 2-to-1 against the recall. That's a landslide by any measure. Indeed, when the results are certified, Newsom may have beaten the recall by a larger margin than his 2018 victory in the gubernatorial race.

Let's talk about Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt for a moment.

He's tall. He's folksy. He has a decent chance of becoming the next governor of Kansas. And he has a distressing history of playing footsie with fascism, catering to the worst impulses of his party. Sure, the A.G. is the state's “chief legal officer and top law enforcement official." But Schmidt, shall we say, goes above and beyond.

"The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion."

What forthright American declared such words? Bill Maher? Christopher Hitchens? Emma Goldman? No. They come from the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under George Washington, approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797.

Right now, Democrats are working to pass a $3.5 trillion package that will provide long overdue help for working Americans.

The final bill hasn't yet been determined, so we don't know the exact dollar amounts for all its policies. We'll probably find that out in late September or early October. For now, the Democrats' budget resolution frames what's in the bill.