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When Dawn Porter studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, she would pass the US supreme court every day. “You walk by the marble columns, the frontage which has inspirational words, and you believe that,” she recalls. “You think because of this court Black people integrated schools, because of this court women have the right to choose, because of this court, because of this court, because of this court.”

Its profound role in American life is chronicled in Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, Porter’s four-part documentary series that traces the people, decisions and confirmation battles that have helped the court’s relationship with politics turn from a respectful dance into a toxic marriage.

Porter, 57, an Emmy award winner who maintains her bar licence, remembers first year common law classes when she studied the court’s landmark decisions. “Like most lawyers I have a great admiration for not only what the court can do but its role in shaping American opinion as well as American society,” she says via Zoom from New York, a poster for her film John Lewis: Good Trouble behind her.

“If there’s a criticism of the court in this series, it comes from a place of longing, a place of saying we can’t afford for this court to lose the respect of the American people. There’s going to be decisions over time that people disagree with. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is how cases are getting to the court, how they’re ignoring precedent and the procedures by which the decisions are getting made. That’s where I would love people to focus.”

Deadlocked offers a visual montage of the court winding back in time: women and people of colour gradually disappear in favour of an all-white, all-male bench. They include Chief Justice Earl Warren, who heralded an era of progressive legal decisions such as Brown v Board of Education, a unanimous 1954 ruling that desegregated public schools.

Porter says of the paradox: “One of the things we were thinking is, isn’t it ironic that this all-male, all-white court is responsible for Brown v Board and for Roe v Wade [which enshrined the right to abortion] and you have the right to an attorney, which is Gideon v Wainwright, and you have the right to have your rights read to you. Yet when we have the most diverse court we’ve ever had, we’re seeing a rollback of some of these civil rights.”

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black man to serve on the court. A group of southern senators, almost all Democrats, sought to exploit riots in the major cities and fears about crime to try to derail his nomination. Marshall endured five days of questioning spanning three weeks and was finally confirmed by the Senate in a 69-11 vote.

There have only been two African American justices since: conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first woman to sit on the court was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative appointed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan.

“It takes a century of supreme court jurisprudence before we get a woman on the court. There’s an irony there that we have the current composition of the court and yet we have probably one of the most least hospitable courts to individual rights.”

The court’s relationship with public opinion has been complex, leading at some times, following at others. In 2015, it ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The 5-4 decision removed same-sex marriage bans in 14 states – an acknowledgment of shifting attitudes and the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Porter observes: “The court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have PR or a media representative. The supreme court can’t change public opinion but what the court can do is either set an aspirational goal or it can reflect where the country is. For the gay marriage decision, that’s where the country was. The country was supportive of same-sex marriage and the court ratifies that public opinion and makes it law.”

Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have also consistently supported reproductive rights. In Roe v Wade in 1973, the court voted 7-2 that the constitution protects individual privacy, including the right to abortion. Porter observes: “It’s not that controversial a decision by that time. More than half the states had reproductive rights access so it was only going to affect some of the states.”

At the time, Christian evangelicals were not opposed to abortion rights. “Evangelicals historically were pro-choice. This is where politics comes in and is on this collision course with the judiciary. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell realised, oh, wait, abortion is a wedge issue and there are all these Catholic voters. So they come together.

“What the evangelicals want is tax exemption for religious schools. The Catholics don’t want abortion and together they’re a powerful voting bloc. They not only say we’re going to try and get the supreme court to change but we’re going to elect a president who is going to help us.”

These religious groups duly turned against the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Sunday school teacher, in favour of the divorced former Hollywood actor Reagan. Porter continues: “What you see is kind of politics at work. How can we get power? How can we get what we want? How can we form alliances?

“That alliance is very powerful because Reagan ends up having so many appointments to the court and you see the rightward shift of the court. These kinds of monumental changes don’t happen quickly but building blocks are constructed in these earlier years, like in the 80s, and they’ve continued to this day.”

The court’s role as a political actor was never more stark than in 2000, when its ruling in Bush v Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the presidential election, effectively handing the White House to George W Bush. Porter notes: “It’s 5-4 to step in and stop the voting to determine who would be the next president of the United States. Sandra Day O’Connor later said she regretted voting with the majority.

“Also, interestingly, Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all working with the Republicans on the side of soon-to-be President Bush. Is that illegal? No. Is it impermissible? No. Is it unethical? No. Is it interesting? Yes!” Porter says with a laugh.

But the ever-growing politicisation of the court became turbocharged – perhaps irreversibly – by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, committed a professional foul by refusing to act on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, insisting that the seat remain vacant in an election year.

Step forward Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president who released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees based on advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It was an unprecedented political masterstroke that comforted religious conservatives troubled by his unholy antics and past support for abortion rights. skip past newsletter promotion

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McConnell is seen in Deadlocked asserting that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump … was the supreme court”. This clip is from an address he made in 2019 to the Federalist Society, which has played a critical role in tilting the court to the right.

The group was founded in 1982 under the mentorship of Justice Antonin Scalia to challenge what conservatives perceived as liberal dominance of courts and law schools. Among its most prominent members was Leonard Leo, who oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association.

Porter says: “Leonard Leo is one of the most fascinating and yet not widely known political actors in our contemporary history. The Federalist Society realises: we can have influence in grooming judges and who’s getting appointed to the lower courts. Leonard Leo takes that on steroids and eventually becomes the person who former president Trump looks to create his list of potential supreme court nominees.

“In recent years Leo has secured a multibillion-dollar war chest in order to continue to groom and populate the lower courts with very conservative ideologues. Amy Coney Barrett is a product of that. Kavanaugh is a product of that. All the greatest hits are with Federalist Society influence.”

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, has called it “the scheme”: a decades-long plot by rightwing donor interests to capture the supreme court and use it to accomplish goals that they cannot achieve through elected officials. The Federalist Society is a receptacle for “dark money” – millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.

Porter adds: “The problem with private entities like the Federalist Society having so much influence and power is that there’s no insight into the source of their funds. We certainly do know that it’s not a coincidence that some of the interests of some of the most conservative folks seem to be being served by these appointments.”

Last year the rightwing forces achieved their greatest victory with a decision that once seemed unthinkable: the overturning of Roe v Wade after nearly half a century. Most Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion with 14 banning the procedure in most cases at any point in pregnancy. About 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling.

Porter had wanted to believe the court she admired as a student was a bulwark in defence of individual liberties. “Every pundit, every organisation, said Roe is going to be overturned and yet it was still hard to believe that 50 years later, when so many people rely on that decision, that it actually could be overturned.

“I will say it really did personally impact my feeling about the court. Reading the decision, there’s ignoring of history. It’s not a well-written opinion, it’s not coherent, and that’s really hard. We all need to believe in things and we all need to believe that these are the smartest people and that they’re able to put aside their personal beliefs and that didn’t seem to be the case.

“It was more than disappointing. It’s somewhat comforting that we have such a strong reaction to it but I see the cases of the women who have been so harmed by this decision. There are people have been forced to carry pregnancies to term that were not viable, people who just stay pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant. You want to think America is better than that.”

As the final episode of Deadlocked acknowledges, the court faces a crisis of legitimacy. A series of extremist rulings out of whack with public opinion have come at the same time as ethics scandals involving the rightwing justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. The share of Americans with a favourable opinion of the court has declined to its lowest point in public opinion surveys since 1987: 44% favourable versus 54% unfavourable, according to the Pew Research Center.

Porter adds: “Every single person we spoke to for this series regardless of their political background – and we have Scalia’s former clerk, who wrote the decision broadening access to guns; we have Ted Olson, who argued Bush v Gore for President Bush; we have Don Ayer, who was a Reagan justice department official – is concerned about the reputation of the court and what the future holds if the court continues to chart its own path and not realise the delicate balance of our tripartite system of government.

“What if the court sides with a Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election next year? That’s what we’re talking about and a lot of the people who did the insurrection are still out there; we didn’t arrest them all. We’re in uncharted waters. It’s not a game and I don’t think anyone wants to actually put this to the test of: will our democracy survive?”

Working as Donald Trump’s lawyer, or just being his lawyer’s lawyer, is a tough gig. The former president’s tight-fisted ways, not to mention his legal problems, are trickling down through Trumpworld’s legal ecosystem.

On Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, sued the former New York mayor for more than $1.3 million in allegedly unpaid legal fees dating back to 2019. That lawsuit, Costello says, is a consequence of Trump’s own refusal to pay Giuliani for years of work as Trump’s personal attorney.

Lawyers for Trump have landed in legal jeopardy due to his lies. They’ve been forced to testify against him, sanctioned, fined, stripped of law licenses, sued, and indicted. But none are in as much trouble as Rudy.

Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges in Georgia for alleged interference in that state’s election. He was also found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers and will likely be ordered to pay them damages. He’s an unindicted co-conspirator in the US Justice Department’s criminal case against Trump related to January 6. His law license is suspended in New York, and he could be disbarred in DC. A former assistant says in a lawsuit that Giuliani raped her. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in a new book, claims he groped her on January 6. An FBI agent says a bureau investigation found Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while he assisted Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Giuliani denies any wrongdoing related to each of these allegations. A spokesperson for him called Hutchinson’s claims “a disgusting lie.”

Giuliani encountered many of those problems while he was working for Trump—apparently with a hope, but not an enforceable promise, of remuneration. The former president not only contributed to Giuliani’s fall from famed prosecutor to defendant, but has mostly declined to pay his legal fees. Costello’s suit against Giuliani—his former client—came after he personally accompanied Giuliani to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters in an attempt to get the president to pay up. Trump, who has previously used a PAC he controls to pay some of what he owes Giuliani, along with others, reportedly recently raised around $1 million at a fundraiser aimed at helping Giuliani.

It’s not clear if Giuliani has received any of that money. But he clearly has not paid Costello. Giuliani complained in a statement Tuesday that Costello’s bill “is way in excess to anything approaching legitimate fees.” Still, Costello said in an interview that the reason his former client hasn’t paid him is “because he hasn’t been paid by Donald Trump.”

Giuliani is the second high-profile client Costello has sued this year. The other is Steve Bannon. Costello’s firm, Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron, in February sued Bannon—who was convicted last year of contempt of Congress (he’s appealing) and indicted in New York for defrauding a nonprofit (he pleaded not guilty)—for more than $480,000 in unpaid fees. Costello also represented Bannon in 2020 following his federal indictment on similar fraud charges, prior to Trump pardoning Bannon. A federal judge in July ordered Bannon to pay up. So far Bannon has apparently not done so.

“We’ll get it, but not yet,” Costello said Tuesday.

Costello, whose biography touts his 40-plus year of litigation experience, told me Tuesday that Bannon was the first client “I’ve ever had to sue for fees.” Giuliani was the second.

Bannon and a Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Costello, like Giuliani, has participated in some of his client’ legally risky activities. In 2020, Costello received a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive from John Paul Mac Issac, the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop where Hunter reputedly left his laptop and failed to pick it up. Costello passed it on to Giuliani, who worked with Bannon to publicize much of the material. Hunter Biden, represented by high-powered lawyer Abbe Lowell, has threatened to sue Costello, along with others involved in revealing contents of the device. Lowell recently followed up on some of those threats, suing a former Trump aide involved in distributing laptop material. He also sued the IRS over two agents’ revelations about Hunter’s alleged nonpayment of taxes.

Costello said he is not concerned by the lawsuit threat. And he said he does not regret his work for Giuliani and Bannon, even though they stiffed him. He said he believed in that work, maintaining that his former clients are being persecuted for their politics.

“The whole idea here is to bleed people associated with Donald Trump dry financially,” he said. “That is a way to cancel them.”

Democrats won a whole lot of elections in 2022, in no small part on their vow to strengthen and defend democracy. But if they hope to turn the issue into a sustained political winner, they have to deliver on that promise by showing voters what a pro-democracy governing agenda actually looks like.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is set to make a big move in this direction by unveiling a big change on Tuesday that will implement what’s known as “automatic voter registration” statewide.

Automatic registration makes getting on the voter rolls something you have to opt out of, rather than actively sign up for in advance. An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically

registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.

“I see voter participation as key to strengthening democracy,” Shapiro told me in an interview, noting that he is “committed to ensuring free and fair elections, and to making sure every eligible voter can make their voice heard.”

The insight behind automatic voter registration is that the registration process often creates a bureaucratic barrier that needlessly dissuades voting and is sometimes manipulated by vote-suppressors. By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.

In Pennsylvania’s version of automatic registration, residents who are obtaining new or renewed driver’s licenses and state ID cards will be automatically moved through the voter registration process unless they opt out — provided they are eligible to vote. This will be achieved using the governor’s control over state agencies that administer processes involving driver’s licenses and voting registration.

The change could be dramatic. Shapiro said the state has calculated that 1.6 million people who are eligible to vote in Pennsylvania are not registered, and his office estimates that automatic registration could add tens of thousands of new residents to the voter rolls.

All this has the makings of an important experiment. Perhaps no Democrat campaigned as aggressively in defense of democracy in last year’s midterm elections as Shapiro did. As state attorney general in 2020, he fought Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss, and in 2022, Shapiro vowed to use the governorship to prevent a future stolen election, parlaying all that into a landslide victory over ultra-MAGA opponent Doug Mastriano.

In Pennsylvania, the state GOP continues to elevate election deniers to positions of local importance, in effect feeding doubts about the state’s voting system itself. But if automatic voter registration is well received in Pennsylvania, it could act as an antidote to that MAGA mania.

That’s because efforts to weaken public confidence in elections often seek to exploit existing public beliefs that the system is cumbersome and prone to human error and hacking, even if those beliefs are wrong. If automatic registration can make the voter rolls more accurate and make the system of enrollment and registration more efficient and user-friendly, that could make voters less susceptible to that sort of demagoguery.

“The answer to people undermining faith in our democracy is to give people a democracy that works,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. He added that automatic voter registration shows voters that “the people who are attacking our democracy are wrong” and that “the people who are running our elections are trustworthy.”

This is why those who win elections by vowing to protect democracy should deliver on a broader pro-democracy program. In Minnesota, Democrats who gained ground at the state level passed such a package earlier this year. Such policies, which include expanded early voting, same-day registration and no-excuse absentee voting, are all designed to make election systems more functional and inclusive.

Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.

Offering a concrete pro-democracy agenda is a good way for Democrats to keep reinforcing that positive dynamic — and keep putting MAGA on the defensive.

Someone in the congressional office of Rep. Angie Craig is having fun with acronyms.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Democrat unveiled a bill taking aim at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the federal government nears a shutdown at the end of the month. Party in-fighting has left the Republican leader struggling to pass a spending plan to fund government services.

Craig’s bill would block members of Congress from receiving their scheduled pay if the government shuts down and federal workers are furloughed. She is calling the legislation the My Constituents Cannot Afford Rebellious Tantrums, Handle Your Shutdown Act, or the MCCARTHY Shutdown Act for short.

The Democrat said her tribute to the House speaker, if passed, would make sure lawmakers experience the same lost paychecks as regular Americans.

“Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans are ready to shut down the federal government and put the livelihoods of working families at risk — while still collecting a paycheck,” Craig said in a statement. “[I]t’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck.”

According to the bill text, lawmakers’ pay during the shutdown period would be held in escrow until the final day of the session, when it would be released for payment so as not to violate the law prescribing congressional salaries.

Federal workers who are furloughed generally do not receive pay while the government is shut down. In the past, Congress has stepped in and passed legislation retroactively to make workers whole for the wages they lost, but the missing pay can lead to financial anxieties and hardships while the shutdown persists.

The last shutdown — dubbed a partial shutdown, since certain agencies remained open — was the longest in U.S. history, lasting 35 days from late 2018 into early 2019. The impasse stemmed from then-President Donald Trump’s demand for federal money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

During that saga, more than 100 lawmakers pledged to refuse their paychecks since the shutdown was the fault of Congress and the White House. Such proposals stretch back to at least to 2013, when some members moved to cut off Congressional salaries during a spending impasse.

This time, right-wing lawmakers are trying to pressure McCarthy into demanding spending cuts that would run counter to an agreement he made with President Joe Biden. They have threatened to oust McCarthy as speak if he doesn’t follow through.

“[I]t’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck.”

• Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.)

Hardliners even managed to torpedo a bill to fund the Pentagon, which is typically among the easiest to get GOP members behind.

McCarthy can lose no more than four Republican votes to get legislation passed, and it would need to be something that can clear the Senate, where Democrats hold a threadbare majority.

“I want to make sure we don’t shut down,” McCarthy told Fox News over the weekend. “I don’t think that is a win for the American public and I definitely believe it’ll make our hand weaker if we shut down.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that both chambers were being pushed around by “a small band of hard-right Republicans.”

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland told a House committee on Wednesday that Republican threats to defund the FBI would be "catastrophic" if carried out and that the Justice Department did not exist to do anyone's political bidding.

Garland pushed back against Republican lawmakers who have criticized the Department of Justice for its handling of the indictments of Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

"Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate," Garland told the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

"I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people."

Some of Trump's hardline Republican allies have called for a defunding of the FBI to protest its investigation into and prosecution of more than 1,140 Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to overturn his election defeat.

Garland warned that carrying out that threat would leave the nation "naked" to everything from the "malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party" to "domestic violent extremists."

"I just cannot imagine the consequences of defunding the FBI," Garland said. "They would be catastrophic."

Wednesday marked Garland's first testimony before Congress since two historic firsts: the department's criminal charges against a former U.S. president and against a sitting president's adult child.

It also comes a week after the Republican-led House launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, related to Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings and as congressional inaction threatens to cause the fourth partial U.S. government shutdown in a decade beginning next month.

The White House has dismissed the impeachment probe as politically motivated and unsubstantiated. The committee's ranking Democrat, Jerrold Nadler, on Wednesday accused Republicans of wasting "countless taxpayer dollars" on investigations into Biden "to find evidence for an absurd impeachment."

Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Garland last autumn, has twice secured indictments of Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified records and for his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has pleaded not guilty to those charges and to two state criminal indictments he faces in New York and Georgia.

The former president has repeatedly verbally attacked Smith, potential witnesses, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the election subversion case, saying the prosecutions he faces are politically motivated.

Republicans have also been critical of the department's handling of a five-year-long tax investigation into Hunter Biden, 53.

The younger Biden was set in July to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts and to agree to enroll in a program to avert a gun charge as part of a deal with the then-U.S. Attorney for Delaware, David Weiss.

The deal collapsed after a federal judge questioned its terms.

Shortly before that, an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower who worked on the criminal tax probe also claimed that the Justice Department stymied Weiss from pursuing more serious tax charges by failing to appoint him sooner as special counsel, so that he could pursue the cases in either Washington, D.C., or Central California. Hunter Biden lives in California.

Amid mounting Republican criticism, Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel so he could continue to investigate and possibly pursue tax charges in other federal districts.

Weiss' office this month charged Hunter Biden with three counts related to purchase and possession of a firearm while he was using illegal drugs. He intends to plead not guilty.

Republicans on Wednesday grilled Garland about the Hunter Biden case.

"Has anyone from the White House provided direction at any time to you personally or to any senior officials at the DOJ regarding how the Hunter Biden investigated was to be carried out?" Republican congressman Mike Johnson asked.

"No," Garland said.

The attorney general also defended how the investigation was carried out under Weiss, saying he never "intruded" into Weiss' work and telling Congress that Weiss always had "full authority to conduct his investigation" as he saw fit and only recently sought special counsel status.

It seems like only yesterday that we were on the cusp of defaulting on the debt and many of us were predicting that the kamikaze Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives was going to make it happen. They sure sounded serious. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was unable to keep that extremist right flank under control and they were threatening to unseat him under the rule they insisted he adopt in order to get the votes he needed to attain office if he didn't meet their demands. With a four-vote margin, he had almost no room to maneuver. After the interminable 15 rounds of voting and all the backroom deals he had to make to get the gavel back in January, the prospects for a deal looked very slim. Yet, with all that working against them, McCarthy and President Biden surprised everyone by managing to pound out an agreement that could get the required number of votes in both chambers of Congress. A number of House Republicans were livid, especially the Freedom Caucus, and refused to vote for it. But Democrats filled in the gaps and saved McCarthy — and the country — from catastrophe at the last minute.

There was a lot of grumbling but no one took any action to unseat McCarthy. Instead, the House Republicans picked up where they left off with their performative investigations. But some of them aren't stupid and they knew they would soon get another chance to force their will on the country. While the debt ceiling deal ostensibly "capped" all spending at 2023 levels for two years, nobody said that appropriations bills which had to be finished by September 30 couldn't be cut to the bone.

And so here we are, less than two weeks before the deadline and no appropriations bills have been passed while the House GOP is at each other's throats. They may not even be able to agree on a continuing resolution to extend the deadline so they can keep the government open beyond the week after next. If McCarthy can't pull something out of his hat again, and it really doesn't seem likely, we are almost certainly headed for another shutdown.

Last week McCarthy authorized an impeachment inquiry for Joe Biden without bringing it to a vote as he had earlier vowed to do. This was widely seen as a sop to the MAGA extremists who were shrieking "Impeach!" at the top of their lungs every five minutes despite the fact that there is no evidence to support such an action. It didn't work. Not only were they unsatisfied, but they believe impeachment isn't nearly good enough.

Last week the simmering feud between Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., and McCarthy finally boiled over when Gaetz openly threatened to take the necessary steps to remove the speaker if he didn't agree to all of his demands. McCarthy finally lost his temper and responded, "If you want to file a motion to vacate, then file the fucking motion." Shortly afterward, McCarthy had to forego plans to have the House vote on a defense spending bill because he couldn't get the votes.

"How about just move the fucking spending bills?" Gaetz fired back.

So that went well. And so far, this week it's going any better. Now the Freedom Caucus itself is at each other's throats. On Tuesday, five hardcore MAGA Republicans stopped that proposed defense spending bill from even coming up for debate, once again paralyzing the House and making it impossible to move forward. This maneuver is very unusual and appears to be a tactic designed solely to embarrass Kevin McCarthy.

When asked about it McCarthy was clearly rattled:

Ask those five why they voted against it. Think about what they're voting against. They're voting against even bringing the bill up to have a discussion about it to vote on. If you're opposed to the bill, vote against the bill at the end…You could change it if you don't like it. But the idea that you vote against a rule, to even bring it up, that makes no sense to me,"

Mike Garcia, R-Ca., was also fit to be tied and called out his fellow Republicans. He said, "out of fear, they decided to vote against the rule to even allow this to come to the floor for debate, This city, Washington DC, is riddled with Chinese sympathizers." You read that right. He said those five Republicans were Chinese sympathizers.

Who else could get enough votes if McCarthy is forced out?

Things went downhill from there. Over the weekend, the Freedom Caucus and the leadership negotiated a stop-gap Continuing Resolution to take them through October 31st and avoid an imminent shutdown. It was a ridiculous agreement that no Democrats would sign on to but they thought they could bring together the GOP caucus to at least buy some more time. But no. When it came time to vote on Tuesday, the whole thing unraveled and 16 Republicans balked. McCarthy had to withdraw that one from the floor as well.

The recriminations were swift and nasty. The Daily Beast reported:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who opposed the bill's continued funding of the office of Trump prosecutor Jack Smith, took potshots online at one of the bill's sponsors, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who shot back, "You'll need more than tweets and hot takes!!" Meanwhile, The Hill reported that Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) blamed "weak Speaker" McCarthy, who hit back by calling Spartz a quitter for deciding to retire at the end of her term to spend more time with her family.

Congressman Mike Lawlor, R-N.Y., told CNN, "This is not conservative Republicanism, this is stupidity, these people can't define a win, they don't know how to take yes for an answer. It's a clown show." That is 100% correct. And it's not going to get any better.

I have no predictions as to where this is going to end up. A government shutdown seems to be inevitable, but we just don't know when it's going to happen. It's possible they'll get some kind of extension with Democrats' help if they can do it without any conditions. But Gaetz and his cronies don't seem to be in the mood for that sort of thing and they are obviously eager to call for a vote of no-confidence in McCarthy.

One big question remains, however, and it may be McCarthy's trump card in the end. As I've wondered before, who else could get enough votes if McCarthy is forced out? More importantly, what kind of masochist would want it? No, I think he's probably safe. The country, however, couldn't be in worse hands than those of this insane GOP House majority.

Late yesterday we had this strange report:

Found on a baby changing table in restroom underneath House floor:

"Declaring the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives to be vacant," from Rep. @mattgaetz, Sept. 15, 2023, 11:22am pic.twitter.com/6p7uJ2qNvh

— Matt Laslo (@MattLaslo) September 19, 2023

That it was found on a baby changing table in a bathroom is just too perfect.

Donald Trump’s former White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, saw evidence of obstruction of justice in the former president’s alleged orders to one of his long-time aides.

Cobb joined CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday to discuss the new reporting that Trump made to-do lists for his assistant, Molly Michael, on the back of the marked classified White House documents. Burnett was particularly interested in Cobb’s thoughts about how Trump reportedly ordered Michael to tell investigators, “You don’t know anything about the boxes” of classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump faces obstruction of justice charges for his alleged subversion of the government’s efforts to retrieve those documents, so Cobb took the former president’s words as an order for his staff to commit obstruction as well.

“I hear Trump — really, for the first time in terms of the way this evidence has rolled out — speaking in the terms of a mob boss, giving a direct order to somebody that he probably should have no reason to believe would lie for him, but expecting [Michael] to do so,” Cobb said. “There’s a difference between loyalty and breaking the law, and that’s not a line she was going to cross. So it really is Trump directly ordering obstruction, and that will certainly be helpful to enhance the credibility of others who will testify about the obstruction.”

Cobb made his point by bringing up Yuscil Taveras, the former IT director of Mar-a-Lago, who made a deal with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for immunity. The assessment from Cobb also backs up multiple legal commentators who agree that Trump’s reported orders look like witness tampering on top of his mishandling of classified documents.

Former President Donald Trump's decision to run in 2024 has put the Supreme Court in a difficult position, and several experts weighed in on the matter with Newsweek.

A case challenging Trump's candidacy under the 14th Amendment's disqualification clause is heading to next week's judicial conference, and legal analysts say it could put the high court in a tough spot to weigh in on electoral politics—a subject matter the Supreme Court has, for the most part, stayed away from.

In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, long-shot GOP presidential candidate John Castro is arguing that Trump's allegedly unconstitutional candidacy will cause him "a political competitive injury in the form a diminution of votes." Under the 14th Amendment, individuals who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the U.S. are prohibited from holding public office. Castro claims that Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot falls under the clause.

"The Trump ballot case may be the Supreme Court's toughest yet," former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyer Neama Rahmani told Newsweek. "Many of Trump's cases have been unprecedented, but this one more so, because there is so little legal precedent on which to rely on, and most of it dates back to the Civil War."

"In the unlikely event that the Justices actually disqualify Trump from running for president, that decision may be met with massive protests and civil unrest," Rahmani said. "They're going to have to decide for the first time who has standing to bring a 14th Amendment, Section 3 challenge, and whether the provision has any teeth."

Bruce Peabody, a politics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, told Newsweek that while the justices will have to address Trump's candidacy under the statute at some point, this may not be the case where they'll rule on the former president's eligibility to run for the White House.

"[The justices] like to intervene when there's legal uncertainty surrounding an issue, especially from dueling lower court decisions," Peabody said. "We don't have that on the question of Trump's eligibility, at least not yet. The justices have so many flexible doctrines available to dump this case off their laps, it's hard to imagine they won't live to fight another day."

If the Supreme Court did take up Castro's case, their decision would be limited to whether or not Castro had standing—whether a plaintiff is the appropriate person to bring a legal challenge or someone who has suffered harm or injury in a real way—rather than Trump's ability to run for office. If they sided with Castro, the case would be sent back down to the trial courts to hear whether Trump could be barred from running for office.

The Supreme Court will mostly likely proceed with caution since "The Court often deems these disputes 'political questions' that do not have any kind of judicially discoverable outcome and instead should be left to the political processes to decide," Alex Badas, a political scientist focused on judicial politics, said.

"The only way that the Supreme Court would take up one of Castro's cases is if there is a Circuit split," he told Newsweek.

Although Castro has filed multiple lawsuits across different jurisdictions in at least 14 states, Badas said it would be unlikely for any of them to result in a circuit split where one or more appeals court offers conflicting decisions on the same legal issue.

Constitutional lawyer Kent Greenfield agreed, pointing out that the Supreme Court will likely wait to see what lower courts do since the only ruling on any 14th Amendment case, has answered the question about whether the lawsuits have standing.

Greenfield told Newsweek he would be "shocked" if the justices granted standing on the case.

"There are several other serious cases in the lower courts—most notably the one filed recently in Colorado, using circuit precedent written by Gorsuch when he was on the circuit court," he said. "I think the Court will wait to see what the lower courts do and will only wade into this serious and divisive issue if there is a split among the circuits. Or, if we get to the spring and there is an important primary state in which Trump has been taken off the ballot, I could imagine the Court stepping in at that point."

"Either way, we have some months before the Court gets involved. We will need to watch what happens in the lower courts," Greenfield said.

America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a quarter-century.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), the Writers Guild of America, the actors’ union known as Sag-Aftra, Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, the Teamsters and UPS, flight attendants. The list goes on.

More than 4.1m workdays were lost to stoppages last month, according to the labor department. That’s the most since 2000. And this was before the UAW struck the big three.

Some worry about the effect of all this labor activism on the US economy, and view organized labor as a “special interest” demanding more than it deserves.

Rubbish. Labor activism is good for the economy in the long run. And organized labor isn’t a special interest. It’s the leading edge of the American workforce.

What accounts for this extraordinary moment of labor activity?

Not that workers enjoy striking. Even where unions have funds to help striking workers offset lost wages, they rarely make up even half of what’s forgone. Large corporations whose operations are hobbled by strikes often lay off other workers, as the big three and their suppliers are now threatening to do.

The reason workers go on strike is their expectation that the longer-term gains will be worth the sacrifices.

Today’s labor market continues to be tight, despite efforts by the Fed to slow the economy and make it harder for workers to get raises. So employers (like UPS) are more inclined to give ground to avoid a prolonged strike.

But something far more basic is going on here. As I travel around the country, I hear from average working people an anger and bitterness I haven’t heard for decades. It centers on several things.

The first is that wages have barely increased while corporate profits are in the stratosphere.

Average weekly non-supervisory wages, a measure of blue-collar earnings, were higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they are now.

The American dream of upward mobility has turned into a nightmare of falling behind. Whereas 90% of American adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, this has steadily declined. Only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more than their parents by their prime earning years.

Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.

Meanwhile, executive compensation has gone through the roof. In 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Today, the ratio is over 398 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded. So has the pay of top executives just below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5% in 1993 to more than 15% today.

Corporate apologists claim CEOs and other top executives are worth these staggering sums because their corporations have performed so well. They compare star CEOs to star baseball players or movie stars.

But most CEOs have simply ridden the stock market wave. Even if a company’s CEO had done nothing but play online solitaire, the company’s stock price would have soared.

Stock buybacks have also soared – a huge subsidy to investors that further tips the scales against working people. The richest 1% of Americans owns about half the value of all shares of stock. The richest 10%, over 90%.

Why don’t corporations devote more of their income to research and development, or to higher wages and benefits for average workers? In a word, greed.

Small wonder that unions are more popular than they’ve been in a generation. A Gallup poll published in August found that 67% of Americans approve of unions, the fifth straight year such support has exceeded the long-term polling average of 62%.

Joe Biden has pitched himself as the most pro-union president in recent history. More surprisingly, Republican politicians are trying to curry favor with union workers as well. Both parties know that much of the working class is up for grabs in 2024.

American workers still have little to no countervailing power relative to large American corporations. Unionized workers now comprise only 6% of private-sector workforce – down from over a third in the 1960s.

Which is why the activism of the UAW, the Writers Guild, Sag-Aftra, the Teamsters, flight attendants, Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks workers is so important.

In a very real sense, these workers are representing all American workers. If they win, they’ll energize other workers, even those who are not unionized. They’ll mobilize some to form or join unions.

They’ll push non-union employers to raise wages and benefits out of a fear of becoming unionized if they don’t. They’ll galvanize other workers to stage wildcat strikes for better pay and working conditions.

For far too long, America’s top executives, Wall Street traders and biggest investors have siphoned off almost all the economic gains. This is unsustainable, economically and politically.

It’s not economically sustainable because the only way businesses can sell the goods and services American workers produce is if workers have enough money to buy them. If most gains continue to go to the top, the economy will become ever more susceptible to downdrafts and crashes.

Today’s mainstream media emphasize the feared negative effects of the current wave of strike on the US economy, forgetting that the wave of strikes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen – the key to America’s postwar prosperity.

Stagnant wages and widening inequality are politically unsustainable because they foster anger and bitterness that’s easily channeled by demagogic politicians (re: Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican party) into bigotry, paranoia, xenophobia and authoritarianism.

The current wave of strikes isn’t bad for America. It’s good for America.

Labor is not a “special interest”. It is, in a real sense, all of us.

From California to Florida, homeowners have been facing a new climate reality: Insurance companies don’t want to cover their properties. According to a report released today, the problem will only get worse.

The nonprofit climate research firm First Street Foundation found that, while about 6.8 million properties nationwide already rely on expensive public insurance programs, that’s only a fraction of 39 million across the country that face similar conditions.

“There’s this climate insurance bubble out there,” said Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street and a contributor to the report. “And you can quantify it.”

Each state regulates its insurance market, and some limit how much companies can raise rates in a given year. In California, for example, anything more than a 7 percent hike requires a public hearing. According to First Street, such policies have meant premiums don’t always accurately reflect risk, especially as climate change exacerbates natural disasters.

This has led companies such as Allstate, State Farm, Nationwide, and others to pull out of areas with a high threat of wildfire, floods, and storms. In the Southern California city of San Bernardino, for example, non-renewals jumped 774 percent between 2015 and 2021. When that happens, homeowners often must enroll in a government-run insurance-of-last-resort program where premiums can cost thousands of dollars more per year.

“The report shows that actuarially sound pricing is going to make it unaffordable to live in certain places as climate impacts emerge,” said David Russell, a professor of insurance and finance at California State University Northridge. He did not contribute to the report. “It’s startling and it’s very well documented.”

Russell says that what’s most likely to shock people is the economic toll on affected properties. When insurance costs soar, First Street shows, it severely undermines home values — and in some cases erodes them entirely.

The report found that insurance for the average California home could nearly quadruple if future risk is factored in, with those extra costs causing a roughly 39 percent drop in value. The situation is even worse in Florida and Louisiana, where flood insurance in Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans could go from $824 annually to $11,296 and a property could effectively become worthless.

“There’s no education to the public of what’s going on and where the risk is,” said Porter, explaining that most insurance models are proprietary. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t make its flood insurance pricing available to the public — homeowners must go through insurance brokers for a quote.

First Street is posting its report online, and it also runs riskfactor.com, where anyone can type in an address and receive user-friendly risk information for any property in the U.S. One metric the site provides is annualized damage for flood and wind risk. Porter said that if that number is higher than a homeowner’s current premiums, then a climate risk of some kind probably hasn’t yet been priced into the coverage.

“This would indicate that at some point this risk will get priced into their insurance costs,” he said, “and their cost of home ownership would increase along with that.”

Wildfires are the fastest growing natural disaster risk, First Street reported. Over the next 30 years, it estimates the number of acres burned will balloon from about 4 million acres per year to 9 million, and the number of structures destroyed is on track to double to 34,000 annually. Wildfires are also the predominant threat for 4.4 million of the 39 million properties that First Street identified as at risk of insurance upheaval.

“You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns. They don’t belong there,” he said. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.”

First Street hopes that highlighting the climate insurance bubble allows people to make better informed decisions. For homeowners, that may mean taking precautions against, say, wildfires, by replacing their roof or clearing flammable material from around their house. Policymakers, he said, could use the information to help at-risk communities adapt to or mitigate their risk. In either case, Porter said, reducing threats could help keep insurance rates from spiking.

Ultimately, though, Russell says moving people out of disaster-prone areas will likely be necessary.

“Large numbers of people will need to be relocated away from areas that will be uninsurable.” he said. “There is a reckoning on the horizon and it’s not pretty.”

Lately, Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has significantly curtailed his use of the term “woke.” Whereas just a few months ago he said the word seven times in 26 seconds in a speech, he avoided it completely during the first primary debate.

DeSantis’s rhetorical retreat is likely due to recent polling showing that his once-declared “war on woke” is yielding diminishing electoral returns. But anyone hoping that this political shift would be accompanied by a policy shift will be disappointed. His authoritarian, white supremacist attacks on Florida’s public education system have continued apace.

DeSantis has enacted multiple “educational gag orders” that criminalize classroom discussions of race, gender identity, and ugly historical realities that might make white students “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.” Florida teachers, whose salaries rank 48th in the country, have seen their jobs become only more thankless. The end result is an exodus of teachers, and what Florida Education Association (FEA) head Andrew Spar has called “one of the worst teacher and staff shortages” in the state’s history. “The policies, vilification, and low pay are certainly all factors,” Spar told me. “I was shocked, going around the state and talking to teachers as we were starting the school year, hearing over and over again, ‘I’m getting out of education in general because, as much as I love working with and teaching kids, I’m really not able to do that. I just want to be able to teach.’”

Spar’s anecdotal experiences are borne out by statistics. In January 2019, when DeSantis was sworn into his first term as governor, there were 2,217 teacher vacancies in the state’s K-12 public schools. As he entered his second term in January 2023, that number had ballooned to 5,294, according to the FEA. This August, the FEA found the number of unfilled positions neared a staggering 7,000.

DeSantis’s education policies not only ban free speech in the classroom but encourage increased curriculum surveillance through what PEN America calls “educational intimidation bills” that empower DeSantis’s conservative allies to monitor and punish educators who step out of line. For example, HB 1467, signed by DeSantis in 2022, requires that every public elementary school’s website provide “a list of all materials maintained in the school library” and invites not just parents, but any “resident of the county,” to file an objection. While the law neglects to mention specific penalties, it makes passing reference to Florida statute 847.012, a preexisting law classifying the dissemination of sexually obscene material to minors as a felony. The confusion has led at least one county to err on the side of caution by restricting in-class discussions of Shakespeare—Shakespeare!—to excerpts that steer clear of racy sexual content.

“Teachers don’t know what to say, or what not to say, and so they’re opting to not say anything, not only because of fear of getting fired but of potentially getting arrested and being charged if they happen to violate this law,” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, told me.

In the realm of higher education, DeSantis’s takeover of the state university system’s honors college, New College, has seen him install six political cronies to its board of trustees, among them right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo. The partisan board fired the college’s president, appointed a DeSantis ally in her place, voted to end the gender studies program, signaled the sunsetting of tenure, and aggressively recruited male students to undo what right-wingers call the “feminization” of American colleges. The board takeover also drove 40 percent of the faculty to quit and a slew of classes to be canceled just days before the school year started.

“DeSantis isn’t choosing people who are qualified to be presidents of universities and colleges—he’s putting in people for the sole purpose of changing the philosophies of the teaching,” Fried told me. “We have multiple high-ranking leadership positions open at the University of Florida, and I don’t know who they’re going to fill them with—because if you care about academia, you’re not coming to the University of Florida right now.”

It’s not just educators who are recoiling. This March, an Intelligent.com survey found that 91 per­cent of college-bound Florida high school students “disagree with DeSantis’s policies,” along with 79 per­cent of currently enrolled college students in the state. Nearly 13 percent of graduating high school seniors cited DeSantis’s “education policies” as the reason they won’t attend a Florida state college. Among those who plan to enroll in a Florida state school, 78 percent are concerned that DeSantis’s “policies will have a negative impact on their education.” And one out of 20 state college students said they “plan to transfer because of DeSantis’ education policies.” As of early August, at least two dozen of New College’s 700 students had taken up Massachusetts-based Hampshire College on its offer to accept any New College defectors at the same tuition.

DeSantis has shrugged off any suggestions of an impending educational brain drain. Of the New College faculty departures, he said, “If you’re a professor in, like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida.” After signing a bill that defunded diversity programs in the state’s colleges, he suggested that students who disagree should “go to Berkeley.” And at the first Republican primary debate, the self-proclaimed “Education Governor” suggested he’d take the war on public schools national, stating, “We need education in this country, not indoctrination in this country.”

“Ron DeSantis is undermining all the work that was done in these last 20 years to make Florida a destination for education,” Fried told me. “He’ll be gone by the time that there’s real repercussions to his actions. But they will have a ripple impact on higher education in Florida for generations to come.”