Salon

By Ira Shapiro

Discovery comes most often not from finding something unknown or long hidden but from seeing afresh what has been on the table all along. — David McCullough

After all this time, is it still possible to underestimate Mitch McConnell's political skill and his destructive impact on our country?

The question came to mind most recently after reading a Washington Post article about the difficulties that Senate Republican candidates and the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) were having in fundraising. The article understandably buoyed the spirits of Democrats. But its closing paragraphs report that McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund was flush with cash, with more than $100 million as of June, and that McConnell had transferred $28 million to the struggling campaign of Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, while earmarking other large sums for the races anticipated to be most closely contested. More recently, a senior Republican operative with knowledge of GOP fundraising put the McConnell war chest at closer to $500 million....

A year ago, a stunned world watched rapt as pro-Trump insurrectionists smashed through windows and barricades at our nation's Capitol, disrupting the constitutionally mandated tally of Electoral College votes certifying President Biden's win. But that display of violence ought to have come as no surprise, as escalating threats and violence in our state houses throughout 2020 presaged the Capitol insurrection.

A year later, we must again look to our state houses for a preview of what is to come. In key battleground states, Republicans are steadily building toward a future where they can engineer election outcomes. GOP-controlled legislatures are setting the stage for another attempted coup. The next insurrection will be decentralized, coming from our state houses with the sheen of legal authority. If we do nothing to stop their plans, then as the 2024 votes are tallied in our states, the laws and rules governing the process and outcome will have been rewritten for a particular outcome: Republican wins, regardless of the votes. And an arch-conservative Supreme Court could stand poised to thwart a constitutional challenge to this state power grab. We have the opportunity to stop this in its tracks — by pouring resources and attention into key state legislative chambers and races immediately. What we do next for our states could determine the fate of our democracy.

In the year since the Capitol riot, Republicans have made their 2024 play well known. Step one in this strategy is to pass state-level laws making it harder to vote. And indeed, Republican-controlled state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in the past decade. Step two is to change state laws so that partisan actors can interfere with election processes or reject election results outright. Here too, we see the strategy in action: At least 14 states enacted laws in 2021 that give state legislatures more power over election administration and certification, or impose criminal penalties on election officials. More were proposed but not passed, including an Arizona bill that would have given the state legislature power to undo the certification of presidential electors by a simple majority vote, right up until the inauguration. Looking ahead, at least 100 restrictive bills have been pre-filed for the 2022 legislative session or will carry over from 2021. ...

For millennia, religious leaders have offered guidance, redemption and fellowship for those interested in dedicating themselves to a life of charity, compassion and hope. But what happens when religious leaders support beliefs or prevailing social customs that significantly harm others?

Today, just as in centuries before, there are religious leaders propagating beliefs that are both harmful and deadly. Since March of 2020, more than 5 million people worldwide, including 800,000 Americans, have died from the coronavirus. Americans are still dying at a rate of about 1,400 people per day. Despite these incontrovertible facts, confirmed by a long trail of death certificates, burials and cremation urns, some religious leaders around the U.S. continue to deny the severity of the pandemic and discourage others from taking basic life-saving precautions to protect themselves from infection.

On Aug. 17, Roger Dale Moon, pastor of Revelation Fire Ministries in South Carolina, wrote that he did not fear COVID-19 since "the blood of Jesus that covers me stops every kind of disease or virus that tries to enter my spirit, soul and body." He died on Oct. 19, shortly after contracting COVID-19....

Nearly two full decades of lies and wishful thinking from U.S. generals, politicians, liberal interventionists and neoconservative talking heads came into full view Sunday as the Taliban in Afghanistan surrounded Kabul while American military forces and diplomatic personnel rapidly evacuated the U.S. embassy and the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani negotiated a surrender and transition government with opposition forces.

This article first appeared in Salon.

With reports that Bagram Air Base and nearby Parwan Prison had both fallen out of Afghan government hands, Taliban spokeperson Suhail Shaheen told the BBC that his group expects a peaceful transfer of power within days and assured the people of Afghanistan, including those in Kabul, that retribution and revenge would not follow....

On Thursday's edition of ABC's "The View," co-host and conservative pundit Meghan McCain equated the insurrection with the protests against police violence during the summer of 2020.

"When I think of people doing things in the name of political violence, I just think of terrorists, I just think this is crap that happens in other countries," McCain said of the insurrectionists and rioters who capitalized on Black Lives Matter protests last June. "I worry about this line that has been moving and moving and moving since last summer, and now we see this."

Comparing the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol to last summer's race riots is a concerted right-wing effort to defend Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial. ...