Ezra Klein: “I grew up in Orange County and now live in San Francisco, and the recall reflects a deeper pathology afflicting the state I love: California is littered with well-meaning ideas to increase democratic participation that have decayed into avenues that organized interests use to foil the public will.”
“We have become what Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford political scientist, calls a ‘vetocracy’ — a system defined by how easy it is, and how many ways there are, to block action.”
Just released: The 2020 Census of American Religion, including interactive maps that detail the religious makeup for every county in America.
“Michael Avenatti, the brash attorney who became a leading foe of then-President Donald Trump, faces criminal sentencing in New York on Thursday afternoon for a brazen botched scheme to extort athletic apparel giant Nike out of up to $25 million,” CNBC reports.
“Avenatti’s troubles won’t end after Manhattan federal court Judge Paul Gardephe sentences him in the Nike case, in which prosecutors have asked a prison term of around eight years… The 50-year-old California lawyer faces two more pending federal criminal trials.”
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J.D. Vance (R) told NBC News that he isn’t worried that his past criticism of Donald Trump will hurt his chances of winning the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio.
Vance said that while he believes that Trump “gets a certain kick out of people kissing his ass,” but the former president views those who do as “weak.”
He added: “I think that he respects people who can defend themselves, who have their own ideas.”
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) has raised nearly $2.3 million since launching his Senate bid in April, The Hill reports.
“The vast majority of contributions to Ryan’s Senate campaign — 96% — were under $100.”
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) is not just considering a bid for U.S. Senate, he’s actively preparing for it — but only if Herschel Walker decides not to get into the race against Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Said Carter: “I’m not interested in political suicide. I ain’t gonna run against Herschel Walker in the state of Georgia. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.”
Rick Hasen: “It’s been almost a week since the Supreme Court issued its most significant ruling on voting rights in nearly a decade, and each time I read Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the angrier I become. I’m angry not only about what the court did but also about how much of the public does not realize what a hit American democracy has taken.”
“In an opinion thick with irony, Justice Alito turned back the clock on voting rights to 1982. His decision for a six-justice conservative court majority reopens the door to a United States in which states can put up roadblocks to minority voting and engage in voter suppression with few legal consequences once a state has raised tenuous and unsupported concerns about the risk of voter fraud.”
Jonathan Chait: “Martyrs are the most potent symbols for a radical movement. The John Birch Society commemorated an American missionary killed by Chinese communists in 1945 (the first death of the Cold War, the society’s followers believed). Horst Wessel, a German storm trooper killed by communists in 1930, inspired an eponymous song that became a Nazi anthem.”
“The anti-anti-Trump right has dismissed the insurrection as overblown, a protest march gone bad, perhaps ill-considered but never posing any serious threat to the republic. The far right’s highlighting of Babbitt’s death sends a different message: The insurrection was good. Babbitt’s effort to penetrate the defensive barrier was brave, and the stopping of her charge a crime.”
“By throwing himself behind this message, Trump is endorsing the most radical interpretation of his presidency. January 6 was not a minor misstep after a successful era, as fans like Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham now say. It was the heroic culmination of a righteous uprising.”
“A group seeking Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s (R) ouster has yet to gather enough signatures to force a recall election, nearly two years after getting started and with just over a year before the 2022 primary,” the Associated Press reports.
Washington Post: “The early contours of the infrastructure blueprint have won the White House’s support, but the IRS provision in particular is drawing opposition from well-funded conservative groups, which are strongly opposed to expanding the reach of a tax-collection agency.”
“Twenty four states have seen an uptick of at least 10% in Covid-19 cases over the past week as health experts and the federal government keep pressing for more people to get vaccinated,” CNN reports.
Said former Biden adviser Andy Slavitt: “We should think about the Delta variant as the 2020 version of Covid-19 on steroids. It’s twice as infectious. Fortunately, unlike 2020, we actually have a tool that stops the Delta variant in its tracks: It’s called vaccine.”
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) has called for a criminal investigation into what she described as former President Donald Trump’s “intense efforts to interfere” with the counting of ballots in last year’s presidential election, the Arizona Republic reports.
Washington Post: “Parts of northern Syria will quickly face a massive and deadly humanitarian crisis if the U.N. Security Council fails this week to extend a resolution allowing the United Nations to deliver aid across the Turkish-Syrian border, according to relief workers, Syrian civilians and the Biden administration.”
“Russia has promised for nearly a year to veto any resolution allowing cross-border aid to continue, viewing its distribution to areas held by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Moscow, as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty. The Biden administration favors expanding cross-border aid to Syria, and the debate over the resolution has emerged as a high-profile test of whether the United States and Russia, at a moment of escalating tensions, can identify issues on which to forge common ground.”
“President Biden and his team have entered a ‘do more with less’ phase of his economic agenda, dictated by the political realities of a closely divided Congress,” the New York Times reports.
“Biden aides say they have found creative ways to stretch federal dollars, often by leveraging private investment, in order to maintain the president’s top goals for his economic program. But they have had to scrap other targets as a result, and Mr. Biden is now barreling toward another round of potentially difficult compromises, this time forced by moderates in his own party, over the second half of his agenda, known as the American Families Plan.”
FiveThirtyEight: “To be sure, this shift is small — Fox News is still king among Republicans. But the growing popularity of OANN and Newsmax is important: According to our research, Republicans’ stances on certain issues might be better predicted by their television news habits than by whether they identify as conservative, moderate or liberal.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “It doesn’t matter much politically that Republicans aren’t prepared to govern. For the most part, out-parties just don’t matter much during mid-term elections or when there’s an incumbent president seeking re-election. But the evidence for that is based on normal parties in normal election years, and there are at least two ways that Republicans may be risking disaster.”
“One is about candidates. We’ve seen Republicans lose elections they could have won by nominating fringe candidates. It’s still unlikely, but certainly possible, that they could wind up with another round of that in 2022 and 2024 — or that otherwise generic or better candidates could turn themselves into fringers by spending more effort trying to impress Trump than appealing to actual voters. Trump’s nomination endorsements are a key wild card. At times they’ve seemed strategic, with Trump picking good general-election candidates and backing ones who were going to win anyway. But at times he’s seemed arbitrary, choosing the best flatterer or otherwise undermining the party’s interests.”
“The other risk is that the party could wind up incapable of running a regular campaign because its feels obliged to follow whatever Trump says, rather than what’s popular in their districts — that at worst, Republicans run on contesting the 2020 election. Perhaps that still would make little difference, and Biden’s popularity will be more important than whatever the out-party says. We can’t be sure that evidence from previous elections applies, because nothing like that has ever happened.”
“Allen West’s final days as Texas GOP chairman are ending with an explosion of the kind of intraparty drama he has become known for throughout his tenure,” the Texas Tribune reports.
“On Wednesday, long-simmering tensions between West and the party’s vice chair, Cat Parks, boiled over as he called her a ‘cancer’ and ‘delusional and apparently deranged’ amid a dispute over a party committee project. Parks is a cancer survivor.”
“Former president Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer,” the Washington Post reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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