Group items tagged

Texas is the last big battleground in the GOP's nationwide efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Georgia and Florida have also passed new voting restrictions, and President Biden on Saturday unfavorably compared Texas' bill to election changes in those states as "an assault on democracy."

The bill would newly empower partisan poll watchers by allowing them more access inside polling places and threatening criminal penalties against elections officials who restrict their movement. Republicans originally proposed giving poll watchers the right to take photos, but that language was removed from the final bill that lawmakers were set to vote on this weekend.

Another new provision could also make it easier to overturn an election in Texas, allowing for a judge to void an outcome if the number of fraudulent votes cast could change the result, regardless of whether it was proved that fraud affected the outcome.

GOP legislators are also moving to prohibit Sunday voting before 1 p.m., which critics called an attack on what is commonly known as "souls to the polls" — a get-out-the-vote campaign used by Black church congregations nationwide.

Major corporations, including Texas-based American Airlines and Dell, have warned that the measures could harm democracy and the economic climate. But Republicans shrugged off their objections, and in some cases, ripped business leaders for speaking out.

Texas already has some of the country's tightest voting restrictions and is regularly cited by nonpartisan groups as a state where it is especially hard to vote. It was one of the few states that did not make it easier to vote by mail during the pandemic.

"Even as the national media minimizes the importance of election integrity, the Texas Legislature has not bent to headlines or corporate virtue signaling," they said in a joint statement.

Since Trump's defeat, at least 14 states have enacted more restrictive voting laws, according to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice. It has also counted nearly 400 bills filed this year nationwide that would restrict voting.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chaired Trump's presidential campaign in Texas, offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could produce evidence of voter fraud. Nonpartisan investigations of previous elections have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. State officials from both parties, including in Texas, as well as international observers have also said the 2020 election went well.

This kind of weakness, failure to speak out publicly and lack of legislative action on substantive policy matters created a political vacuum for extreme voices like Reps. Gaetz and Greene, who have gained a foothold in the GOP with their politics of grievance, conspiracy theories, nativism, nihilism and dishonesty

Owning the libs, whining about the transgendered in women's sports, promoting the discredited stolen election lie, and above all else, pledging fidelity to Trump have emboldened the extremists and given voice to their crackpottery.

The main objection from House and Senate Republicans, at first, centered on the lopsided structure of Pelosi’s initial proposal, that would have seen a majority of members appointed by Democrats, who would have also held unilateral subpoena power.

By the penultimate week of April, Pelosi had deputized Thompson to lead talks as she felt the homeland security committee was an appropriate venue, and because the top Republican on the committee, John Katko, was one of only 10 House GOP members to vote to impeach Trump.

Minutes after House Republicans elevated Elise Stefanik to become the new GOP conference chair on 14 May, Thompson and Katko unveiled their proposal for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission.

As Hoyer had anticipated when he suggested that Pelosi also offer equal subpoena power to Republicans, McCarthy struggled to demonize the commission, and several House Republicans told the Guardian that they found his complaints about the scope unconvincing.

Underpinning McConnell’s alarm was the fact that Democrats needed 10 Senate Republicans to vote in favor of the commission, and seven had already voted to impeach Trump during his second Senate trial – a far more controversial vote than supporting an inquiry into 6 January.

As the final vote hurtled towards its expected finale, the Senate minority whip, John Thune, who also switched his position to side with McConnell, acknowledged McConnell’s arguments about a commission jeopardising Republican chances to retake majorities in the House and Senate.

Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.

The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.

then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.

Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say

as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”

After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.

Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.

there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result

If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.

Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism

Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans

Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.

But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”

“They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did

A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed

When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.

Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.

He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”

indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies

I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine

I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal

do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?

reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”

A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.

Whatever the Republican Party does, it faces an ugly fight. The fracture that so many politicians on the right have been trying desperately to avoid may soon happen. But if the party has any hope of playing a constructive, rather than destructive, part in America’s future, it must do two things.

Ms. Harris faces the prospect of being called on to break ties on confirming Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees, some of whom have drawn GOP criticism and would likely have to be confirmed on party-line votes. She is also expected to be a negotiator—and potentially a tiebreaking vote—for the administration’s legislative priority: passing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Mr. Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, has a long and respectful relationship with GOP leader Mitch McConnell.

North Dakota GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer said Senate Republicans have a cordial relationship with Ms. Harris and will have to be open to working with her. “I think the fact that she was a senator is helpful—both to her and to us,” he said. “Because she understands the culture of the Senate and personality of the Senate.”

“I became confident then that she was running for president,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) of Ms. Harris’s questioning of Mr. Kavanaugh in 2018.

On one closely watched issue, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa offered an amendment to prevent a hike in the minimum wage to $15 an hour during a pandemic

Democrats want to include a $15 minimum wage in the Covid relief bill, but her measure could have been complicated for centrist members

But before a roll call vote was called, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who is the chair of the Budget Committee and a champion of the $15 minimum wage, intervened and said his proposal would actually make the jump to $15 over five years, not right away as Ernst had formulated in her amendment.

The budget resolution that passed is not the Covid relief bill. It simply sets the stage for Democrats to be able to use a process known as "budget reconciliation" to pass the relief bill on a party-line vote, possibly in late February or March, after the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is complete in the Senate.

The House already passed the budget measure earlier in the week.

Biden has said he is willing to go forward without the support of Republicans, but he's also stressed that he's willing to make certain concessions if it will earn bipartisan support.

Congressional Democrats have also made clear that they think time is of the essence on the proposal, and a deep divergence remains between Biden's $1.9 trillion and the $618 billion GOP proposal.

The counterproposal still includes $160 billion to battle the pandemic, but Republican senators want to send smaller, more targeted relief checks and only extend unemployment benefits through June, not September.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated during a briefing this week there are certain "bottom lines" that Biden wants to be in the next round of Covid-19 relief

"His view is that at this point in our country, when 1-in-7 American families don't have enough food to eat, we need to make sure people get the relief they need and are not left behind,"

Republicans are unhappy Democrats are resorting to the aggressive tactic, though, arguing it will set a partisan tone for the rest of Biden's presidency and that he's not operating as the political unifier he pledged to be

The 10 Senate Republicans who met with the President to discuss his relief package are pushing for talks to continue

"I didn't take this job to keep it," he said.

After receiving a government whistleblower's complaint last month, Democrats have alleged Trump used his public office for personal gain, holding up $391 million in military aid to Ukraine and then pressuring its leader on a July 25 phone call to investigate both a political rival and a conspiracy theory related to the 2016 election.

They've been particularly focused on the first ask, an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, whose owner had been probed by the former Ukrainian general prosecutor. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.

"It's painful to me to see this kind of amateur diplomacy, riding roughshod over our State Department apparatus," Rooney said. "I've got great respect for the professional diplomats that protect America around the world."

"I'm not considering anything right now other than getting all the facts and learning more about it," Rooney said. "I'm a business guy, okay? I'm used to being open to all points of view -- and making the best decision I can. But there's a lot of water still to flow down under the bridge on this thing."

He's in the minority of the House, and neither a rabble-rouser nor a part of the leadership team. When asked by a reporter if he had any anecdotes to share about Rooney, Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat of Florida, asked whether the article would be for the local newspaper.Rooney has carved out a reputation for not being shy in breaking from the party, particularly on environmental issues. He's one of the few House Republicans devoted to combating climate change. He supports a tax on carbon emissions and is a critic of the state's sugar industry. And he is one of about a dozen House Republicans to vote against Trump's emergency declaration diverting billions of dollars away from military construction projects towards the wall.

Rooney is free from much political pressure due in part to his vast personal wealth, driven by his success as the CEO of the investment company Rooney Holdings, the majority owner of Manhattan Construction Company. But the transition from business to elected official has not been entirely pleasant."This is kind of a frustrating job for me," Rooney said. "I come from a world of action, decisions, putting your money down and seeing what happens. This is a world of talk. It's very difficult for me to just stand up and talk."

The congressman's experience as a former ambassador in the George W. Bush administration has given him an appreciation for the witnesses who come before him. He said he's eager to hear from acting ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor next week, whom he called "a very well respected career diplomat."

But so far, few Republicans have joined Democrats in even considering that the President committed a crime. Many GOP congressmen say there was no quid pro quo between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky on that now-famous July call, while others say Trump's conduct was inappropriate but not impeachable.

Rooney has also taken issue with Mulvaney's defense of the President's actions. The acting White House chief of staff said on Thursday that the Trump administration "held up the money" for Ukraine because the President wanted to investigate "corruption" related to a conspiracy theory involving the whereabouts of the Democratic National Committee's computer server hacked by Russians during the last presidential campaign.

Democrats have argued that even if no favors were exchanged, Trump committed an impeachable offense in asking a foreign country to interfere in a US election. But Mulvaney's comments undermined a key GOP stance that the President's actions were not impeachable, asserting that there was no quid pro quo and the aid eventually went through to Ukraine. Hours after the news conference on Thursday, Mulvaney released a statement reversing his prior comments.

Unfortunately, the GOP long ago decided to sign on for that job, and Hill’s  challenge didn’t have much effect on ranking member Devin Nunes, who set the tone for the day by immediately repeating those same conspiracy theories. Once he had hummed a few bars, the rest of the GOP band joined in as they played the greatest hits, including the Steele dossier, Bruce and Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS.

“It was not a party of privilege or white supremacy. Those dubious honors belonged to the Democratic Party,” he said, which remained predominantly in the Southern states until the 1960s civil rights movement, when a major political realignment occurred.

Six weeks before his death, Lincoln addressed a crowd outside the Capitol, prepared to begin his second term in office. The country was emerging from the worst crisis in American history — a war that had killed hundreds of thousands and divided the North and South.He concluded the address, saying: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

In that polarized moment, Holzer said, Lincoln didn’t blame fake news and enemies of the people. He emphasized humility, talked openly about his flaws and used a brilliance of language not to punish and humiliate but to inspire.

A letter from Giuliani to then-President-elect Zelensky requesting a meeting in his capacity as the President's personal attorney.Text messages that show Parnas' communications with Zelensky aides where he pursued a meeting between Zelensky and Giuliani and provided negative information about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.A previously undisclosed letter from Giuliani to Zelensky asking for a meeting in mid-May of last year.There are also cryptic text messages suggesting that Yovanovitch's movements were being tracked.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called the impeachment hearings against Trump a "decency check" on American government.

After nearly a month of waiting, we appear to have a trial date. Several things still need to happen, but if the House transmits the articles of impeachment on Wednesday as expected, that kicks off a series of events that culminate in Trump's Senate impeachment trial beginning next Tuesday.

Asked if the trial will be over by the time Trump is slated to deliver his State of the Union address -- scheduled for February 4 -- Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said, "I wouldn't bet on that myself." President Bill Clinton gave his 1999 State of the Union address in the midst of his own impeachment trial.

"I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God."

The next step is a vote in the House to appoint impeachment managers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she'll announce their names Wednesday morning. That vote sets off choreographed steps that lead us to a trial.

While Trump on Monday pushed the idea of Republicans simply dismissing the charges, it is growing clear there will be a substantive trial and, depending on how the arguments go, there's a pretty good chance there will be witness testimony, too.

The question of whether to vote on dismissing the articles before the trial is clearly splitting the GOP. Sen. David Perdue, a Georgia Republican who talks to Trump and advises him regularly, said he is still interested in the motion to dismiss and hinted Republicans may need to step up and force a vote on it. But GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, now a key Trump ally, said flat out that a motion to dismiss was not realistic and should not happen. Read more on the divide.

The Senate could vote on a resolution laying out parameters for the trial.

Who will the House managers be? It's not yet clear who Pelosi will pick to deliver arguments in the Senate on behalf of the House. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, is a good bet. Other than that? We will find out Wednesday.

One key Republican to watch in terms of votes on procedural matters during impeachment is Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. He has expressed a desire to hear from witnesses.

Sen. Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat pushing the war powers resolution to limit Trump's military actions in Iran, tweaked it this week to gain some more Republican support. He told reporters Tuesday he has 51 votes to pass the resolution through the Senate. He said GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Todd Young of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine support the resolution.

"I've got 51 declared votes on version two, on the motion to discharge, and passage. So I've got a version on which I have 51 votes, but the timing on version two is different than version one," he told reporters.

But that hasn't stopped a dozen Republican senators -- including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri -- and more than 100 House Republicans from planning to join with Trump to reject the Electoral College votes in states that Biden won when Congress convenes a joint session on Wednesday.

The effort will only delay the inevitable, as the objections are sure to fail in both the House and the Senate,

For weeks, McConnell privately warned his party against making an unforced error by forcing votes on the Electoral College objections, fully aware that questioning the results of the election when Congress meets Wednesday would expose rifts in his ranks and force members up for reelection in 2022 into an unenviable political position.

"I'm concerned about the division in America, that's the biggest issue, but obviously this is not healthy for the Republican Party either," said Sasse

A group of nearly a dozen Republican senators announced Saturday that they would vote for Hawley's objection when it was brought forward, unless a commission was created to study voter fraud, something that is unlikely.

Trump's close ally, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, tweeted on Sunday that proposing an election commission was "not effectively fighting for President Trump" and added "It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy."

But the long-term effects could stretch for years -- and into the 2022 Senate races, with Trump and his allies threatening primary challenges to those Republicans who cross him and vote against the objections. Aides to GOP members still trying to decide what to do next describe an anxious time for the party as members grapple with what choice to make.

Throughout Trump's four years in office, Republicans have often expressed frustration or looked the other way at some of Trump's efforts and rhetoric, though they rarely crossed him. But in the past month, many Republicans voted to override Trump's veto of a popular defense policy bill, the first override of Trump's presidency, and McConnell blocked his attempts to give people $2,000 stimulus checks instead of the $600 in the spending and Covid-19 bill that Trump reluctantly signed.

"There is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts," Cheney wrote. "Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states' explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution's clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans," she added.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan discouraged his former colleagues from objecting to the election results in a statement Sunday, saying it was "difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans."

"I think that if you have a plan, it should [be] a plan that has some chance of working. And neither of the two proposals that have been advanced will produce a result," said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, who added: "I don't believe it has much long-term impact on our conference."

On Thursday morning, McConnell repeatedly called on Hawley to make his case to members on why he was objecting to the results from at least one state. Hawley wasn't on the call, however, and later responded by email to the conference on his rationale. Then over the weekend, multiple senators including Romney, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania skewered any questions that the election had been compromised.

Romney specifically said the effort to overturn the election was an "egregious ploy" that "may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."

"I read Sen. Toomey's statement," Hawley said. "I recognize that our caucus will have varied opinions about this subject. That's not surprising. But I also believe we should avoid putting words into each other's mouths," Hawley wrote.

"The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans' confidence in the already determined election results," the senators said.

Nobody knew exactly how that belief would manifest itself; I certainly never expected to see platoons of insurrectionists scaling the walls of the U.S. Capitol and sacking the place in broad daylight. Still, shocking as this was, it wasn’t a bit surprising. The attempted coup d'état had been unfolding in slow motion over the previous nine weeks. Anyone who couldn’t see this coming chose not to see it coming. And that goes for much of the Republican Party.

there’s one conclusion of which I’m certain: The “fringe” of our politics no longer exists. Between the democratization of information and the diminished confidence in establishment politicians and institutions ranging from the media to corporate America, particularly on the right, there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.

The first time I heard someone casually suggest an “imminent civil war,” on a reporting trip in January 2020, I shrugged it off. But then I heard it again. And again. Before long, it was perfectly routine. Everywhere I went, I heard people talk about stocking up on artillery. I heard people talk about hunting down cabals of politically connected pedophiles. I heard people talk about the irreconcilable differences that now divide this country. I heard people talk about the president, their president, being sabotaged by a “deep state” of evil Beltway bureaucrats who want to end their way of life. I heard people talk about a time approaching when they would need to take matters into their own hands.

All of that was before the president alleged the greatest conspiracy in American history.

More than a few told me I was being “hysterical,” at which point things got heated, as I would plead with them to consider the consequences if even a fractional number of the president’s most fervent supporters took his allegations, and his calls to action, at face value. When I submitted that violence was a real possibility, they would snicker. Riots? Looting? That’s what Democrats do!

So convinced were the president’s allies that his rhetoric was harmless that many not only rationalized it, but actually dialed it up. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots. One conservative group paid a former police captain a quarter-million dollars to investigate voter fraud; he performed an armed hijacking of an air-conditioning repair truck, only to discover there were no fake ballots inside.

As the Electoral College meeting drew closer, hundreds of Republican members of Congress signed on to a publicity-stunt lawsuit aimed at invalidating tens of millions of votes for Biden. When it failed, the legislatures in several states closed public proceedings in response to actionable threats

The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law. The Texas Republican Party suggested seceding from the union. The Arizona Republican Party endorsed martyrdom. Eric Metaxas, the pseudo-evangelical leader with a devoted following on the right, followed suit. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told the president during a radio interview. “This is a fight for everything. God is with us.”

Despite all of these arrows pointing toward disaster — and despite Trump encouraging his followers to descend on Washington come January 6, to agitate against certification of Biden’s victory — not a single Republican I’d spoken with in recent weeks sounded anxious

The notion of real troublemaking simply didn’t compute. Many of these Republicans have kept so blissfully ensconced in the MAGA embrace that they’ve chosen not to see its ugly side.

it has long been canon on the right that leftists — and only leftists — cause mayhem and destruction. Democrats are the party of charred cities and Defund the Police; Republicans are the party of law and order and Back the Blue. As Republicans have reminded us a million times, the Tea Party never held a rally without picking up its trash and leaving the area cleaner than they found it.

And yet, the right has changed dramatically over the past decade. It has radicalized from the ground up, in substance and in style. It has grown noticeably militant.

Trump once told me, “The Tea Party still exists — except now it’s called Make America Great Again.” But that’s not quite accurate. The core of the Tea Party was senior citizens in lawn chairs waving miniature flags and handing out literature; the only people in costumes wore ruffled shirts and tri-corner hats. The core of the MAGA movement is edgier, more aggressive and less friendly; its adherents would rather cosplay the Sons of Anarchy than the Sons of Liberty.

There is one thing that connects these movements: Both were born out of deception

Republican leaders convinced the grassroots of 2009 and 2010 that they could freeze government spending and reform entitlement programs and repeal Obamacare

Trump convinced the grassroots of 2015 and 2016 that he, too, could repeal Obamacare, while also making Mexico pay for a border wall and overhauling the nation’s infrastructure

The key difference is that the Tea Party slowly faded into obscurity as voters realized these promises politicians made were a scam, whereas the MAGA movement has only grown more intensely committed with each new con dangled in front of them.

Make no mistake: Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history

the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.

For the past nine weeks, I’ve had a lot of highly unusual conversations with administration officials, Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures.

Based on my reporting, it seemed obvious the president was leading the country down a dangerous and uncharted road. I hoped they could see that. I hoped they would do something — anything.

From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide

Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier,

Republicans have long ignored Trump’s habit of openly using violent rhetoric that puts people at risk. GOP lawmakers, when asked whether they support what Trump says, have consistently tried to pretend they never see his tweets. Or they insist the tweets don’t matter. Or they simply refuse to weigh in on what he’s said.

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them.” At another campaign rally that year, he said of a protester: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

“The audience swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate,” he said in an interview. “He was swinging, he was hitting people and the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.”

Trump has constantly demonized the media and encouraged his supporters to treat journalists as “the enemy of the people.” He berates and belittles reporters when they ask him questions he doesn’t like, becoming particularly incensed when female journalists challenge him.

Hanen’s decision to hear arguments on the brink of Election Day drew attention from voting rights activists. The Texas Supreme Court also rejected a nearly identical challenge last month.

Conservative GOP activists have filed a battery of court challenges over moves to expand voting options during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democrats also need to flip only nine seats to reclaim a majority in the Texas House for the first time in 20 years, and have aggressively targeted several races in Harris County.

Jared Woodfill, a former chairman of the Harris County GOP, argued that Texas election law makes no explicit allowances for drive-thru voting and that only voters who need assistance are eligible to cast a ballot curbside.

Woodfill’s lawsuit also noted that all but one of the drive-thru centers were set up “in Democrat areas of the county.” More than 40% of Harris County residents are Latino, and about one in five residents are Black.

Counting the drive-thru votes, Woodfill argued, would “call into question the integrity and legality of a federal election.”

The Texas Supreme Court, which is controlled entirely by Republicans, rejected an identical lawsuit last month.

Texas is one of just five states that did not allow for widespread mail-in voting this year during the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 18,000 people statewide.

More than 9.7 million people have cast early ballots in Texas, where turnout typically ranks among the lowest in the country. Some elections experts predict that total turnout in Texas could surpass 12 million, and Harris County officials have taken more steps than most to expand voting access.

The party removed support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from its platform that year, after 40 years of relatively consistent support. Further, for the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, there was a clear divide between the candidates on support for abortion rights, as Reagan was on the record supporting a constitutional amendment banning them.

What then was driving the gap?

Political analysts attributed this loss to the GOP’s continuing failure to win over women voters.

In the end, the explanation Hinckley offered was predictable and mundane: women were voting their economic interests.

Reagan spent quite a bit of time and energy in 1982 and 1983 trying to appeal to women. He nominated women to his cabinet and put energy into promoting accomplishments like expanded tax credits for childcare. He was not, however, willing to address the issue that his pollsters had identified as driving the gender gap; he continued to cut government benefits.

Reagan never really tried to win over Black women, for example; instead, he focused on white homemakers and professionals and tried to persuade those women that his economic policies were in their best interests.

At the same time, Democrats have recognized women more broadly as a key element of their coalition. The Democratic platform has continuously paid proportionally more attention to women’s issues such as abortion rights and family leave than the GOP platform.

That these were both bills specifically addressing women’s economic interests is unlikely to be an accident. Women drive Democratic victories, and women’s economic experiences drive their votes.

If Joe Biden manages to win in November, it is likely to be with the largest gender gap ever recorded. The question that should be on voters’ minds is what legislation women want him to act on first.

Two Senate seats in Georgia are up for grabs this week and both could end without any candidate getting more than 50% of the vote, triggering runoffs that could leave the control of the Senate in question until Jan. 5. If the Senate is split 49-49 after Election Day, Georgia will become a political ground zero.

“We may be dependent on one or two elections in Georgia after the election to get to the 51-plus votes we need,

Ms. Collins has been hit hard by the fundraising disparity, raising $24 million from 2019 through Oct. 15, a period over which Ms. Gideon has raised almost $70 million.

“Me breathing helps him raise money,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who has raised $70 million since the start of 2019, more than any other Republican, and still has been outraised by his opponent, Democrat Jaime Harrison, who has raised $109 million—a record for any Senate candidate.

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst has pulled ahead of Democrat Theresa Greenfield, 46% to 42%, in a Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll conducted between Oct. 26 and Oct. 29.

“It’s health care—it’s the No. 1 issue, it has been even before the pandemic,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.), who is chairwoman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm.

Meanwhile, unlike other vulnerable Republicans on this year’s ballot who began highlighting their occasional breaks with Trump occasionally, Gardner remained committed to the president’s priorities.