Attorney General Barr has notified Congressman Nadler that he will not appear before the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow because he doesn’t believe that, as a Senate confirmed cabinet official, he is subject to questioning by committee staff – just by the elected members of the committee. Here’s the reasoning from the DOJ spokesperson:
The simple truth here is that despite doing what he was hired to do today – screen fire for the President, not be the US attorney general – today’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go well for the Attorney General. Sure, his audience of one will likely be happy. While the Republican members of the committee all got their Fox News rebroadcast worthy performances in for that same audience of one, it still did not go well. And AG Barr isn’t going to risk things going even worse tomorrow when committee staff counsel do the questioning, because it prevents Gym Jordan and Mark Meadows and Gohmert and the disgraced cop from Louisiana and that whackjob dentist from Arizona from protecting both the AG and the President.
The Attorney General has also announced that he will not comply with the subpoena for the redacted material in the Special Counsel’s report.
We are at the point where events are outpacing the people involved with them. The more that the AG or the President or the White House Counsel or the Republican caucuses in the House and the Senate try to exert control, the more things are actually careening out of control. Pressure is now building for Congressman Nadler to hold the Attorney General in contempt and seek to force his compliance. The same for the other Democratic committee chairs in the House who are being rebuffed in regard to AG Barr and several other administration officials. The Democrats have now reached the point of no return. They can either start pursuing penalties and punishments for AG Barr and others stonewalling their committees or they acquiesce to the almost fifty year long pursuit to establish the anti-constitutional unitary executive theory as both de facto and de jure law and reality in the US. A reality that states that a president can always do whatever they want, whenever they want, and that the other branches of government and the citizenry must acquiesce and comply.
I expect that the House Democratic chairs will pursue contempt citations and sanctions against the administration officials who are stonewalling their legitimate oversight requests. I also expect that the AG and the White House Counsel will attempt to fight these. The Democrats must not relent here. If they do, then they become accomplices to placing the President above the law, making him unaccountable, uncontrollable, and uncontainable, and making the Constitution of the United States a dead letter foundational law.
There is some good news, however:
BREAKING: House Judiciary Committee chairman says Robert Mueller is tentatively scheduled to testify publicly May 15. #WBZ
— Liam Martin (@LiamWBZ) May 1, 2019
And I expect that the Special Counsel’s Office, or, rather, its former members, will leak for effect as necessary to push back against what the AG is trying to do. Last night’s leak about Special Counsel Mueller’s letter objecting to what AG Barr was doing with and saying about the report he prepared may have been the first leak, but it will not be the last!
Open thread!
Jeffro
This is all in line with what any innocent, “TOTALLY EXONERATED!!!” administration would do, right? I mean, that’s just obvious.
Chief Justice Roberts, please pick up the white courtesy phone, History is calling…
Jeffro
You should have encouraged trumpov to resign – “declare victory and go home” – GOP. You should have let the Mueller Report come out without any obstruction, let the chips fall where they may (including impeachment and removal from office). You should have done it quickly. You should have realized that the truth, ALL of it, UNredacted, is going to come out eventually. You should have gotten it done as quickly as possible and limped into 2020 with President Pence and the pretense of clean hands here.
Now we are going to make you pay for every last bit of it. We’re going to drag this out as long as it takes, with 2020 being the hard stop. And then we’re going to put so much sunlight into your hidey-holes that even SPF 150 won’t save you.
I’m warming up the tar…who’s got the feathers?
Mike in NC
Lock them all up and throw away the keys.
Betty Cracker
I’ve been boycotting cable news for a while as a self-care measure, but I tuned into Maddow tonight, and BOOM, Hillary Clinton was on. Find that clip and watch it. DAMN!
Mai Naem mobile
Impeach both mfkrs already. Barr and Trumpov. My head is exploding from the shit these assholes are trying to get away with. Klobuchar said that McGahn was calling Republican Senators last year to discourage them from voting for legislation for securing elections. Wtfuckity fuck? And then the shit about the State Dept spending money at MarALugo. Then the shit about the House Intel Committee not getting counter intelligence updates. All these fuckers need to go straight to prison. If Obama had done 1/10000th of what Trumpov has done he would have been impeached and gone.
Eric U.
@Jeffro: Roberts does seem really concerned with his place in history. We may survive after all
randal m sexton
Subpoena the shit outta that guy ASAP.
dimmsdale
OK, Adam, so I’m guessing Barr gets a contempt citation but would not, himself, be threatened with jail. Also, I don’t sense any appetite on the part of Dems to accept the Unitary Executive/ Supreme Dictator (or whatever you want to call it) model that the scumbag right is trying to push the country into–which would mean contempt citations for all the White House aides who may refuse to answer subpoenas on instructions from the cake of dung in the White House. My questions: do contempt citation have to be physically served? If the next step after contempt citations is jail, who’s gonna do it? Am I nuts to assume the Whiter House will push this as far as it can go, up to and including putting subpoena’ed aides under armed guard? (I am NOT a conspiratorial person by nature, but given that there is no bottom with these people, it’s a fair assumption.) We are truly in uncharted territory here, the kind of state-of-play that all the Founding Fathers’ checks and balances were designed to avoid. Where do you see all this leading?
James E Powell
@Betty Cracker:
Here it is. Start at 20:27
Adam L Silverman
Well we have an answer to Senator Harris’s question:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html
Bill Arnold
John Mitchell, nineteen months.
BruceFromOhio
Is this where the Tree of Liberty gets watered with blood? Asking for a friend.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: 2020 may not be the hard stop. Most incumbent presidents in the modern period get reelected to a second term. That is why it is imperative that the Democrats start cutting nuts over this.
BruceFromOhio
@Betty Cracker: *laughs* It’s in the can, I jumped into last night’s recording thinking it was there, and shoot, it was only Tuesday. Time to go look…
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: I have it saved on the DVR. I will watch after the hockey is over. Did Maddow do her usual set up, 30 minutes or so explaining whatever the point is she’s getting too? I just want to know if I can fast forward through a half hour of explaining the origins of the name Hillary.
plato
Rethugs fuck up 24×7
Dems clean up 24×7
The vicious cycle that ought to be broken.
dimmsdale
@Eric U.: Ya know, people keep saying that, but the unspoken assumption is that Roberts’ sense of what America is, what a just and civil society is, is the same as ours. What if he’s altered his views to match Barr’s or Lindsey-Loo Graham’s, or the Mercers’?
Jeffro
They have to know they can’t sustain this…what are they going to do, ride a wave of stonewalling, obstruction, lying, and Congressional FUs into November 2020? They’re THAT sure that Roberts will just roll with all this? Do they really think the next (Dem) administration won’t make hay of this for four or eight years? Are they looking at some sort of demographic changes or party identification shifts that are known only to them and not the eighty kajillion polls/studies/surveys that have come out over the past four decades?
I mean, you can make the case on moral grounds that these people have to go. You can make it on legal grounds. You can make it on ethical grounds. You can even make it on trumpov’s favorite grounds, ratings, ’cause frankly even their own voters are tired of this shit and get that it’s all in the service of rich and cruel people.
We are NOT going to let you forget, GOP, we are not going to “look forward, not back”, we are not going to let this shit slide. You’re all going down the tubes/falling on your swords/lying out your asses, and for whom? Donald J multiple bankruptcy, porn-star-payoff, Trump U settlement, money laundering, Putin blowing, racist, serial sexual assault artist, veteran and POW bashing, tax-return-hiding, praise-me-at-Cabinet-meetings, afraid-to-talk-to-Mueller Trumpov.
That’s who you’re crapping yourselves for. We hope you’re happy, ’cause we’re going to leave you in those dirty diapers a good, long time…
Adam L Silverman
@dimmsdale: There are three possible follow ups here from the House Democrats if he refuses the subpoena to testify. Hold him in contempt and 1) send the House Sergeant at Arms with the Capitol Police to take him into custody, bring him back to the Capitol, and then they hold him in the jail in the basement, 2) refer the contempt citation to the US Attorney for DC with a request for criminal proceedings to be started, 3) go to Federal civil court to enforce the subpoena. Or, I guess, 4) some combination of 1, 2, and/or 3. Those are the only direct enforcement options available to them. The indirect enforcement option would be to defund the Department of Justice in the FY 2020 appropriation or continuing resolution, but that isn’t going to personally hold the AG to account.
justawriter
We still have suites available at Guantanamo don’t we? Plus experienced “investigators”?
Millard Filmore
@randal m sexton:
I fully expect Barr to take the 5th quite often if he goes in front of a House hearing.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: I hear you, but the Ill Douche’s numbers are historically low even in these superficially good times. He appears to be losing the Blue Wall states he ‘won’ back in 2016. And we are still 18 months’ worth of non-stop Russia/Barr/contempt/House oversight/etc hearings pounding away from now until the election. I think 18 months ago, Sean Spicer (who?) still was working for this clown.
Anecdote but not data of course: even my air quote “libertarian” friends are like, “this guy is nuts and we need to get him out of there”. And my Dem friends are even more rabid than they were leading up to 2018. I like our chances.
[email protected]
@Adam L Silverman: OK, granted it can be talky, she can be very talk-at-you in her delivery, but she’s thorough. And as she has said on numerous occasions lately, “we had the show all lined up, and then the news cycle made other plans.” So she and the production staff are coming up with a show on the fly. Ugh, what do you do? Gloss shit over and hope the lesser lights (like some bruce or sheila from Ohio) can keep up, or, take a breath, provide the context, and then deliver the news? Prefer the latter, thanks. If it isn’t your speed, there’s a button labelled FF with with a right-facing arrow on the remote. Mines’ kind of worn down from commercials.
kindness
I understand they can send the House Sgt at Arms out to detain and bring in someone who has refused a subpoena in DC proper, but how big is the House ‘jail’ to hold people and how long can they hold them? Asking for a friend.
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: @James E Powell: Here you all go:
Jay
Word of warning, the Trump Campaign is sending out a fake “Congressional District Cencus”, a scam $15 per person “processing fee”, that threatens legal action if the recievers don’t respond, with “markers” pretending it’s “official”,
Mail Fraud, targetting the elderly,
https://mobile.twitter.com/JustSumGuy176/status/1123302427325689856
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: They’re counting on the historic trend of the modern presidential period holding: that incumbent presidents tend to be reelected. They’re counting on eking out a narrow victory again in the Electoral College. And they’re counting on that then being the last election the US has. Because should that happen, the President and the Republicans will only be encouraged to push things as far as possible.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
As always, I’m a little worried that Democrats are going to reflexively back off, so as not to come off as “uncivil”; but I’m hopeful that they won’t. I don’t think Maxine Waters or Elijah Cummings, to name two, have any shits left to give about being civil. Nadler and Schiff I don’t know about. But I think we’re safe to think they’re getting a whole lot of pressure from the younger members, who also have few shits to give about civility.
Adam L Silverman
@justawriter: Those are for the 60,000 people on the QAnon sealed indictments list.
Jay
@Millard Filmore:
And that’s another charge of Contempt of Congress.
Jeffro
@Millard Filmore:
Why take the 5th if you can toss around “I can’t recall” 40 or 50 times?
Dem MOCs, please point out all day every day that well, you know, this is kind of unusual for a CINC who’s “FULLY EXONERATED!!”, to say nothing of the nation’s – not the president*s – chief law enforcement officer.
Hirono and the other Senate Dems got the ball rolling but good today. Just cut loose and call it out, call it all out for what it is. A complete abdication of DOJs duty to enforce the rule of law, in the service of the most obviously corrupt POTUS* in American history. Hell, even Coons was having none of it and saying so. Go, go, GO.
Adam’s analysis is spot-on: Dems either go all in here, or just lay back and watch the criminals get away with it.
Timurid
@Adam L Silverman:
And 2020 is going to get cooked harder than one of Donald’s steaks.
The fight over the Mueller report is meant to prepare the battlefield for that, making it clear that when the administration and its allies (domestic and foreign) blatantly tamper with the election, they cannot be held accountable.
Cheryl Rofer
Creative legalizing is also exploding.
Jay
@kindness:
When the jail is full, they just handcuff them to the plumbing in the boiler room.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: I’m not saying the trend will be maintained. Especially as he’s running into the other trend: that incumbent presidents who are primaried in the modern period are not reelected even if they win renomination by their party. But we have to prepare ourselves for the reality that the 2020 election will not go the way we want. And that is why it is imperative that the House Democrats, as well as states with Democratic governors, legislatures, or both do not unilaterally disarm themselves or fail to step up and fight when it is necessary. Right now it is necessary for the House Democrats to fight. I expect they will. But expectations, like hope, is not a strategy.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman:
That is not hyperbole, and I agree. They are all in. Hopefully, our side is too.
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro: Three words
I
don’t
recall.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: I see they’ve got Richard Viguerie on a consulting contract.
Rommie
It’s something of a reverse Tick-Tock – the House Democrats have run out of time, and have to start taking serious action. They weren’t elected to sit on their hands.
Adam L Silverman
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): You can be civil, civil isn’t the problem. Nor is being polite. I’m civil. I’m polite. I say please and thank you for everything. I’m also an arrogant, egotistical asshole who knows when to use his elbows. I’m always polite when I do so.
Mai Naem mobile
@Adam L Silverman: you know Harris already knew something when she asked the questions. It was too freaking obvious she was trying to get him to either lie or say some shit he wouldn’t want Trumpov hearing.
I honestly never thought we would see the day when a Russian asset is POTUS. Not in my fucking lifetime. All the anti commie shit we listened to for decades. Just blows my mind.
BrisVegas
In whatever hereafter he resides, George III must be wondering what he did wrong.
Adam L Silverman
@Timurid: Part of Normalization.
mrmoshpotato
Watching Lawrence – video was just played with Barr saying “I don’t recall.” twice.
NotMax
Old school green-eyeshaded editor fussy enough to be bothered by the use of the term careening instead of careering.
Sad to say, that is a lost cause in American English.
/pedant
(waves to Steeplejack)
trollhattan
@Jeffro: @Eric U.:
Roberts is the new Kennedy. Did not trust Kennedy and trust Roberts even less to do the right thing. Keep going to that gym, RGB!
Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
That’s where the questioner get’s to fill in disBarr’s blanks with previous testimony, sections of the reports and other witness testimony.
I do not recall doesn’t protect from Contempt of Congress.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: Until/unless you see my put up a post that is solely the headline:
with a picture of the Old South Meeting House as the body of the post, we’re good.
khead
Today was a good day.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro:
They might. I see a lot of people arguing from opinion polling that the Democrats shouldn’t pursue impeaching Trump because most people are against it. It’s possible that that may keep them from advancing too far–or, it’s also possible that in fact Democrats will go that far, but the public really will perceive it as overreach and reelect Trump as a rebuke. Or that they’ll just rig the election somehow and get Trump reelected that way. So many possibilities.
Remember, we’re dealing with people with no shame and seemingly endless reserves of energy, and a public that isn’t fully paying attention and may never do so.
Jay
@NotMax:
Not amongst sailors,….
Harbison
I’m sorry, but the Mueller report itself is the best evidence that the Special Counsel’s office is staffed with skilled political knife-fighters.
By refusing to make clear statements that could have properly been quoted in every newspaper in the Country, they blundered. By submitting separate summaries without explicitly stating that these had been pre-cleared for release to the public, they relied on the assumption that Barr would be acting in good faith.
-or-
(and I’m not sure which is more likely)
Mueller and his team knew precisely this is what would happen because, after all, Mueller is a longtime friend of Barr’s (one of the reasons Barr was chosen for the job.)
I know you are fond of posting the illustration of the Iceberg comparing our knowledge with Mueller – can you think of a single significant fact that you learned from the Mueller report. (And I don’t count the behind the scenes maneuverings of staff to insulate themselves from professional liability because, OF COURSE, we knew that about them. The specific of what words were used and who left the room when are unimportant.
I’d submit that there are only two possibilities — either Mueller and his team failed miserably, or they are succeeding in furthering the President’s agenda because they share it.
It’s time for a John Brown to meet with a few dozen like-minded people in an AirBnB somewhere out of the way like Santa Rosa, California or Troy, New York and draft up the new Declaration of Independence.
NotMax
Need to go beyond describing what’s underway as obstruction of justice. This is subversion of justice.
Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Most ‘Merkins don’t understand at all the process of impeachment. They think it’s an up/down political vote, not a lengthy process of hearings, investigations, months long drafting of Articles by Commitee,
As a result, anyone relying on polling is relying on ignorance,
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I was going to go with jagannatha, but figured that was too obscure. Also, it was likely to summon Schroedinger’s Cat…
mrmoshpotato
I rarely watch MSNBC, so I hadn’t seen any Morning Joe commercials before.
“When you need brutal honesty…”
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Good one MSNBC. You’z hi-lar-i-ous!
Should I tune in at 6 in the morning tomorrow to see Joe and Mika admit they sucked Dump’s ass all through 2016?
rikyrah
Impeach Barr.
Period
Jay
@Harbison:
As the Meuller letter disavowing the Barr Summary, ( in writing, not a phone call or email that could be disavowed or misrepresented) shows,
Meuller is giving people enough rope to hang themselves.
Jay
@rikyrah:
DisBarr,
Contempt,
Impeach,
Jail,
mrmoshpotato
@Jay: Yes.
“I don’t recall.”
“Oh, you don’t? Well, let me refresh your memory by reading your own words back to you. Let us begin.” *Stephen Colbert’s Big Furry Hat drumbeat starts*
Adam L Silverman
I’m sure everyone’s been waiting for America’s foremost legal scholars to weigh in on today’s hearing:
rikyrah
@Adam L Silverman:
I understand that.
I understand completely.
So the Democrats understand that.
In believe some do. But, not enough.??
rikyrah
@mrmoshpotato:
?????
mrmoshpotato
@Adam L Silverman: My eyeballs just decided to take a look at my brain, and now my retinas hurt.
Oh coming up! “Lindsay Graham got angry today.”
Adam L Silverman
@Harbison: I learned that 1) the instructions to Mueller were not to investigate conspiracy with the Russians against the US, but, rather, coordination, which was defined as documentable tacit or explicit agreement to work together and 2) that Mueller did, indeed, believe that the 1973 OLC guidance prohibiting indicting a sitting president applied to him and, therefore, he was conducting the investigation and preparing the report for Congress and so that Congress could take action as that is, because of the 1973 OLC memo, the only appropriate place that action can be taken to hold a president accountable under the law.
I suspected the latter. I did not know the former.
Jeffro
@Matt McIrvin:
I hear you but a lot of those people are talking heads and both-sides types. And the opinion polling is in the wake of the Barr Cover Letter, which did succeed in…not moving anyone when the Redacted Mueller Report actually hit. However, there’s a fair amount of polling showing that trumpov is way underwater, that a majority of Americans will just not vote for this scumbag next November. And now we are looking at Mueller himself testifying as to how Barr misinterpreted the Report/ran cover for his crime boss. It’s wild but it’s the only way to go after people with no bottom, no loyalty to country at all.
Again, true, but I have to believe even low-info voters will have a hard time seeing this crime cartel in action and Dems’ desire to…preserve their fellow Americans’ health care as equivalent dirty deeds. =)
Yeah, maybe. I think more of the public is more on to what’s going on here than maybe we give them credit for. We’ll see!
Adam L Silverman
@Harbison:
I don’t mean to be nit picky, but John Brown led an abolitionist raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. He had nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence.
rikyrah
Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) Tweeted:
The Beltway take on #Barr is that he’s a good man corrupted by proximity to @realDonaldTrump. Actually, he’s always been a ruthless, intellectually dishonest shill for untrammeled presidential and corporate power, made to look decent by a light dusting of Poppy Bush Family ties. https://twitter.com/howardfineman/status/1123701561568444416?s=17
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Speaking to your #2, the report explicitly names Congress as the entity holding the authority.
Adam L Silverman
The look on Senator Harris’s face is priceless!
tobie
Hillary Clinton suspects there was vote tampering in 2016 and so do I. That one Florida county is the tip of the iceberg. I’d go further and say Rick Scott and DeSantis likely didn’t win in 2018 but the GOP has made it impossible to have any election audit. I don’t know how we fight this in 2020.
Should the Democrats regain power in 2020, I would love for them to do two things: (a) stop the flow of federal monies from blue counties to red counties and (b) hire an army of tax investigators to audit all small businesses. Every home builder and plumber will squeal when they find out that they need to pay tax on every cash payment they receive and every personal expense they fraudulently claimed as a business expense.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Yes it does.
Kay
@rikyrah:
I keep looking for a silver lining, and this might be it. Everyone’s dropping the pretense that any of these people are now or ever were “good”
They all need to come clean. They’ve been promoting horrible people for 30 years, and it’s ALL coming back to bite us.
plato
@Adam L Silverman: Jeez, what an asshole.
Harbison
@Jay:
I really, really, wish you were right.
divF
@Kay: Second. Back when I still watched TV news, Howard Fineman was a bog-standard MSM both-sides-do-it shill. If he is calling out the GOP with fire and brimstone, this is a major change.
Kay
@tobie:
It’s a dilemma. It’s also a problem that the attorney general is a gross corrupt hack who will probably launch political prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies (Joe Biden) if he hasn’t already. I think it’s going to be very difficult to win. Not impossible, but very difficult. Challenging :)
Kay
@divF:
I imagine a kind of massive airing of dirty laundry. Let’s just get it all out and see what we have. The scope of the problem.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Umm, I’ll take Speech or Debate Clause for 500, alex.
Adam L Silverman
@tobie:
Sort of. Florida election law states that all absentee ballots, which in Florida has become de facto vote by mail, must be received at the supervisor of election in the voter’s county by close of polls on election day. There are three ways to do this: 1) drop them off at an official absentee ballot drop box; there are usually placed at county facilities around the county like the public libraries, 2) drop them off at the supervisor of elections’ office, 3) mail them in far enough in advance so they are delivered to the supervisor of election no later than close of the polls on election day.
In November 2018, specifically the days running up to and including election day 2018, the largest mail processing facility in south Florida was closed as a crime scene for processing to recover potential evidence because Caesar Sayoc’s defective mail bombs were processed through that facility. We have video, made by the south Florida local news stations, of official postal service bins stuffed full of absentee ballots. Absentee ballots that were not delivered because the facility was shut for crime scene processing. None of those absentee ballots, which came from the majority Democratic counties of Miami-Dade and Broward, were counted because they were not received by the legally mandated deadline. Given how close the margins were in both the Senate and governor’s races, we will probably never know, because these ballots were never counted, who actually won the election based on actual votes cast. I also do not understand why neither Gillum nor Nelson’s attorneys didn’t seek a court order to have these counted as they were not delivered due to law enforcement action in an unrelated matter, not because they weren’t posted in sufficient time to be delivered by the deadline.
patrick II
An echo of Dick Cheney:
What we really need is for republicans to stop using the political process as a criminal weapon.
Adam L Silverman
@plato: Yep, but the look on her face. It was amazing!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@rikyrah: Wow, Howard is shrill.
mrmoshpotato
@Adam L Silverman: Oh Chris Matthews. You creepy bastard.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Come on, everyone knows that Paul Revere brought the Declaration to Brown on the Bonhomme Richard and if he see his shadow we have six more months of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Bingo!
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: OT: Did you get the email I sent you?
tobie
@Kay: I feel like all committed Dems should decamp to places like Detroit and Milwaukee for a bunch of stints between now and election day to help get as many people as possible registered and to make sure they go to the polls. That’s the only valuable activist thing I can think of doing.
@Adam L Silverman: If I recall correctly, there was some claim made shortly after the election that all ballots in that one delivery station were turned over to the appropriate boards of election on time but I can’t recall where I read it and don’t know who vouched for these claims. That doesn’t change that we’ve never done a hand recount of a single county in Florida. In 2018 the only ballots counted by hand were those rejected by the machine, so who really knows how accurate the tabulation equipment is.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: yes.
Adam L Silverman
@tobie: I hadn’t heard that, but I’m not digging into it till tomorrow and if I’m wrong I’ll stop using that explainer.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Very good.
rikyrah
@tobie:
Said it before…
The rest run for November 2016 were the state elections in Kansas the year before. Those tallies were so off the polls, it never made sense. There is a reason why States with voter suppression laws were chosen….that gave them the cover.??
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
You give them way too much credit.
Remember that they do not do logic. Getting from one level to the next is all they know. Another thing they don’t know is that their direction always ends badly. The reason it’s taken 70 yrs for them to get to this point is that they worked somewhat within the system up to 20 yrs ago, at which time they had to break the rules to get what they wanted. Most of the time a part of a government has tried to do what the republicans are trying to do, they have used force and killed a lot of people. But the republicans only kill people that can’t shoot back, like kids at school or people who can’t/won’t shoot back. They are exactly the people you think they are.
Ruckus
@Jay:
Another chance to respond to republicans. Using my best navy approved descriptive phrases.
Ruckus
@tobie:
You wanna make big money? Fix the tax bullshit that lets large corps rake in billions in profit and not pay a cent in taxes. Your way just spends all that time and energy looking under the sofa cushions for loose change. Meanwhile Scrooge McRichBastard swims in piles of cash because there really isn’t anything else to do with that much.
Medicine Man
I really hope the Dems do not relent. My overriding concern is still that some of them may not understand the nature of the fight they’re in. There are some issues were compromise is not an option.