Video Courtesy of CNN

Dear Commons Community,

For anyone watching the impeachment trial yesterday, it was obvious that the House Managers especially Jamie Raskin were well-prepared and presented a cogent argument as to why Donald Trump should be impeached.  Trump’s lawyers, on the other hand, gave a rambling defense that at times was incoherent.  The 30-minute video above are the opening remarks from Trump lawyer, Bruce Castor, Jr.  who reportedly enraged Trump.  The former president was particularly angry at Castor for acknowledging the effectiveness of the House Democrats’ presentation.

At the end of the day, the Senate voted  to proceed with Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment trial, narrowly rejecting constitutional objections after House prosecutors opened their case with a harrowing 13-minute video capturing the deadly Capitol riot he stands accused of inciting.  Though the presentation stunned senators who lived through the rampage into silence, only six Republicans joined Democrats in clearing the way for the case to be heard. The 56-to-44 vote was the second indication in two weeks that Mr. Trump was all but certain to be acquitted.

Maggie Haberman has an article (see below) in today’s New York Times that focuses on Trump’s defense lawyers and their “meandering” performance.

Tony

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New York Times

Meandering Performance by Defense Lawyers Enrages Trump

By Maggie Haberman

February 9, 20219, 2021

On the first day of his second impeachment trial, former President Donald J. Trump was mostly hidden from view on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., moving from the new office that aides set up to his private quarters outside the main building.

Mr. Trump was said to have meetings that were put on his calendar to coincide with his defense team’s presentation and keep him occupied. But he still managed to catch his two lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David I. Schoen, on television — and he did not like what he saw, according to two people briefed on his reaction.

Mr. Castor, the first to speak, delivered a rambling, almost somnambulant defense of the former president for nearly an hour. Mr. Trump, who often leaves the television on in the background even when he is holding meetings, was furious, people familiar with his reaction said.

On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the angriest, Mr. Trump “was an eight,” one person familiar with his reaction said.

And while he was heartened that his other lawyer, Mr. Schoen, gave a more spirited performance, Mr. Trump ended the day frustrated and irate, the people familiar with his reaction said.

Unlike his first Senate impeachment trial, just over a year ago, Mr. Trump has no Twitter feed to do what he believes he does better than anyone else — defend himself — and to dangle threats of retaliation over the heads of Republican senators who serve on the impeachment jury.

So the former president was forced to rely on a traditional method of defense — lawyers in the well of the Senate chamber, and allies spreading word about their plans to defend him against the charge of “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the deadly assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 by a mob of supporters.

In the lead-up to the trial this week, Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers said he seemed to be taking his second impeachment more or less in stride, preoccupied with his golf game and his struggling business, and trying to ignore what was happening in Washington.

But the fact that he struggled to retain a full team of lawyers for the trial was a source of concern to some of his aides. None of the lawyers from the first impeachment trial who defended Mr. Trump returned for the second round. And most of the team he initially hired abruptly parted ways with him days before the trial began.

Several of the former president’s advisers and associates said they cringed at the performance by Mr. Castor, a former prosecutor from Pennsylvania who spoke first after the House Democratic managers presented their impeachment case using graphic videos of the Jan. 6 attack, delivering a meandering defense.

An adviser to Mr. Trump, speaking on background as the lawyer was making his defense, insisted that Mr. Castor had always planned to try to reduce the temperature in the chamber because the former president and his aides anticipated an emotional presentation by the Democrats.

But Mr. Castor undercut that by declaring at the outset that he and Mr. Schoen had switched their presentation order because the Democrats’ case had been so good.

That one of his own lawyers praised the prosecutors surprised and infuriated Mr. Trump, people familiar with his reaction said. And other Trump allies said privately that some members of the legal team seemed surprised by the raw clips from the riot that the Democrats showed, even though the House managers had signaled for days that was their plan.

Mr. Schoen presented a more forceful argument, with the type of intensity that Mr. Trump prefers. Mr. Schoen, who is based in Atlanta, argued that the trial itself was unconstitutional because the former president is no longer in office, and that the effort sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights.

But even with his acquittal all but certain, Mr. Trump was far from satisfied with the arguments made on his behalf.

The president’s advisers distributed more pointed “talking points” in the morning and the afternoon, excoriating Democrats later in the day for opening the case “exactly as we all expected them to: by glorifying violence and intentionally misleading on the Constitution.”

“In doing so, the Democrats set a horrible precedent for the rest of the impeachment trial by making clear they will selectively edit — which is a polite way of saying ‘lying’ — everything from video footage to remarks from legal scholars to the Constitution itself,” the talking points said.

In the first impeachment trial, which focused on Mr. Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine seeking investigations into President Biden and his son, Hunter, as Mr. Trump withheld congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, Republicans and Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued the conduct was not impeachable.

But outside of arguing that Mr. Trump’s speech before the rampage was protected by the Constitution, Republicans generally stayed away from defending the events of that day.

The lack of a defense on the central charge of the impeachment case — and Mr. Castor’s difficulty articulating a clear point — did not escape Senate Republicans.

Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, castigated Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers in explaining why he voted “yes” on the question of whether the Senate has jurisdiction in the case even though Mr. Trump is out of office.

Asked why he believed they did poorly, Mr. Cassidy replied to reporters, “Did you listen to it?”

“It was disorganized, random — they talked about many things, but they didn’t talk about the issue at hand,” he said.

Credit John Minchillo/AP

Dear Commons Community,

I have had mixed feelings about the second impeachment of Donald Trump.  Part of me wants to forget it and move on and another part of me feels that he needs to be taken to account for the carnage at our Capitol on January 6^th when five people died including a police officer trying to defend our sacred institution.  Michelle Goldberg in her column this morning puts the impeachment in proper perspective.  Entitled,   You May Want to Forget Him, but Trump’s Trial Must Be Thorough, she analyzes the pros and cons and concludes that we really must be presented with all the facts as clearly as possible even though the outcome is known. 

I hope the Democrats and House Managers can pull this off.

Her entire column is below.

Tony

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The New York Times

You May Want to Forget Him, but Trump’s Trial Must Be Thorough

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Feb. 8, 2021

Here’s a confession: I’m dreading the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, which begins on Tuesday. There are some nihilists who miss the former president’s presence in the news cycle, or who think others do, but I hated the last five years and am relieved that it’s over and he’s gone.

The Senate trial will almost certainly not bring justice, because Republican senators make up half the jury, and even if many of them privately disapprove of Trump’s insurrectionary attempts to cling to office, their base does not. If this process drags on, it will slow the urgent work of passing an economic rescue package, increasing human suffering and possibly the chance that the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene will retake the House in the midterms.

Yet it is still crucial that when the Senate trial commences this week, the House impeachment managers take all the time they need to make their case.

According to Politico, there’s tension between several managers, who reportedly want to call witnesses, and senior Democrats who just want to get the trial over with. The desire to rush is understandable, because Democrats are sacrificing valuable legislative time. But if they miss the opportunity to give the country the fullest possible picture of Trump’s treachery, that sacrifice will be in vain.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the real jury for this trial is not the Senate but the public. Most Americans have decided on Trump’s guilt: according to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, 56 percent say Trump should be convicted and barred from holding office again. But it’s still important for Democrats to tell the comprehensive story of how Trump tried to steal the election, and how that attempt ended in death and desecration.

This is necessary not just to cement Trump’s disgrace, but because his election lies are being used to justify new restrictions on voting. Trump’s attack on democracy didn’t begin on Jan. 6, and even though he’s out of office, it hasn’t ended.

“Obviously there’s a political price that you pay in looking back instead of looking forward,” said Norm Eisen, co-counsel for the Democrats in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “No one really wants to ever hear from or talk about Donald Trump again, but we have no choice.”

The argument for a quick trial is simple: There’s more than enough in the public record to convict him. “The single most important witness to what happened is Donald Trump himself, and whether he wants to or not, he’ll be forced to appear because we have the video,” said Eisen. “We have Donald Trump saying the words that, on top of a long pattern of incitement, triggered the insurrection on Jan. 6.”

But if the broad outlines of Trump’s offense are clear, significant details are not. On Fox News this weekend, Liz Cheney, one of just 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment, spoke about what could be uncovered by the ongoing criminal investigation.

“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing,” she said. “They will want to know, for example, whether the tweet that he sent out, calling Vice President Pence a coward, while the attack was underway, whether that tweet for example was a premeditated effort to provoke violence.”

People will indeed want to know this, and ideally they should know it before their senators cast votes to acquit or convict.

Similarly, in their trial brief, House impeachment managers write that once the violence began on Jan. 6, Trump didn’t take swift action to stop it: “Instead, while Vice President Pence and Congress fled, and while Capitol Police officers battled insurrectionists, President Trump was reportedly ‘delighted’ by the mayhem he had unleashed, because it was preventing Congress from affirming his election loss.” Trump’s lawyers deny this, insisting that Trump was “horrified” and that he “took immediate steps to coordinate with authorities to provide whatever was necessary to counteract the rioters.”

This is the sort of dispute that can be settled empirically. It’s probably true, as Eisen argues, that Trump’s cronies would fight subpoenas, and that Democrats don’t want to get dragged into a long, frustrating legal battle. But surely there are people still working in government who can explain the holdup in sending help to the beleaguered Capitol Police. And it would be good to hear from some of those police officers themselves, more than 80 of whom were injured, along with 65 District of Columbia police officers.

One of the nightmarish hallmarks of our time is how quickly the intolerable becomes ordinary. Just over a month after Jan. 6, the shock is already wearing off. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revived some of it in her remarkable Instagram Live account last week. Her story got sucked into a depressingly predictable debate about whether a woman recounting trauma was being hysterical, but it still demonstrated the unrivaled emotional power of first-person testimony.

The outcome of this trial may not be in doubt, but Democrats have one chance to show the country exactly what Republicans are condoning.

Karen Lewis in 2012 leading a schoolteachers’ rally at Union Park in Chicago. Credit…Nathan Weber for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

It is a bit coincidental that just as Chicago’s teachers agreed to a tentative settlement for reopening the public schools with Mayor Lori Lightfoot, averting a strike and agreeing to return K-8 students to classrooms by early March, Karen Lewis, the former long-time head of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU)  passed away.  Teachers will never forget her resoluteness as she led a seven-day strike in 2012 and butted heads with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  In an announcement, the CTU referred to her as  “a brawler with a sharp wit and an Ivy League education…

…She spoke three languages, loved her opera and her show tunes, and dazzled you with her smile yet could stare down the most powerful enemies of public education and defend our institution with a force rarely seen in organized labor.”

After Ms. Lewis stepped down as union leader, Mr. Emanuel praised his old adversary’s tenacity and advocacy for the city’s children, saying that he and she had “grown to admire each other as friends.”

Below is her obituary courtesy The New York Times.

May she rest in peace

Tony

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The New York Times

Karen Lewis, Who Fought for Chicago’s Teachers, Dies at 67

By Julie Bosman

Feb. 8, 2021

CHICAGO — Karen Lewis, a formidable teachers union leader in Chicago who battled Rahm Emanuel when he was mayor, and who in 2012 led the city’s public-school teachers in their first strike in a quarter-century, died on Monday. She was 67.

Her death was announced by the Chicago Teachers Union, which did not say where she died. Ms. Lewis had been under treatment for glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer that forced her to retire as head of the union in June 2018 after undergoing brain surgery.

The cancer was first diagnosed in 2014 and had forced her to abandon the idea, endorsed by many, of running for mayor of Chicago the following year. She had hoped to unseat Mr. Emanuel, a Democrat and former chief of staff to President Barack Obama. Mr. Emanuel was re-elected.

Ms. Lewis’s death came as the union was close to a final agreement with the Chicago Public Schools that would avert another strike, this time over the question of how teachers, students and school staff members could safely return to classrooms during the coronavirus pandemic.

The union called Ms. Lewis “a brawler with sharp wit and an Ivy League education.”

“She spoke three languages, loved her opera and her show tunes, and dazzled you with her smile,” the union said, “yet could stare down the most powerful enemies of public education and defend our institution with a force rarely seen in organized labor.”

After Ms. Lewis stepped down as union leader, Mr. Emanuel praised his old adversary’s tenacity and advocacy for the city’s children, saying that he and she had “grown to admire each other as friends.”

In the years before that, Ms. Lewis, a former chemistry teacher, called the mayor a bully and a liar in the pages of local newspapers as she negotiated for a new contract for the 26,000 teachers she represented in the nation’s third-largest school system.

The success of the 2012 strike, which lasted seven days, followed by a smaller walkout in 2016, helped organized labor remain a powerful force in Chicago, one of the country’s last major union strongholds.

“Our city has lost a great voice,” Stephanie Gadlin, a former spokeswoman for Ms. Lewis, said in an email on Monday.

Karen Jennings was born on July 20, 1953, on the South Side of Chicago into a family of teachers. She attended the city’s public schools.

She considered entering medicine but chose teaching instead after she “fell madly, passionately in love with it,” she told Dartmouth’s alumni magazine in 2011.

She had transferred to Dartmouth after first studying at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and music in 1974, received a master’s degree in education at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago in 1993 and an M.F.A. from Columbia College Chicago in 2002.

She later spoke of having felt isolated at Dartmouth, which admitted its first women in 1972, as a Black woman.

“Dartmouth was a really bad experience for me, but it made me stronger,” she told the magazine, adding: “It was clear that women weren’t wanted. That did teach me that top-down decisions usually take a while for people to buy into.”

She married Arnold Glenn after graduation, and they settled in Oklahoma. The marriage ended in divorce. Returning to Chicago, she soon joined the faculty of one of the city’s top high schools, Lane Tech, on the North Side. In 2001, she married John Lewis, a fellow teacher there.

Her husband survives her. They had lived in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Lewis traced her career in organized labor to when she was serving on a local school council and witnessed a power grab by a principal who was using his position to enrich his friends.

“That got me involved with the union, which I saw as the only protection against unfairness,” she told the Dartmouth magazine.

Ms. Lewis taught from 1988 to 2010, when she was elected union president, a demanding job that required her to navigate the complex politics of Chicago and its sprawling, frequently troubled school system while representing tens of thousands of teachers and staff members.

It wasn’t long before she was faced with a bitter contract dispute between the union and the city. Teachers said they had been promised a four percent pay raise that was never delivered; Mr. Emanuel, who had pledged to make major changes to the school system after being first elected in 2011, pushed for longer school days and tougher teacher evaluations.

The teachers took to the picket lines, leaving some 350,000 students out of class but winning raises, though as a concession to the city the union agreed to let students’ test scores factor into teachers’ evaluations.

Some debates were lost: Ms. Lewis couldn’t stop the mayor from closing nearly 50 schools deemed underperforming or underused. She argued that the closings would destabilize neighborhoods and have an unfair impact on Black and Latino families.

She also resisted, unsuccessfully, what she saw as excessive standardized testing and repeatedly argued that the achievement gap, particularly in large, segregated cities like Chicago, was caused by poverty.

Ms. Lewis was elected to a second three-year term as union president in 2013.

She was widely discussed in 2014 as a mayoral contender, but before she could declare a run she found out that she had a brain tumor. She threw her support behind another of Mr. Emanuel’s opponents, Jesus G. Garcia, then a county commissioner.

Mr. Garcia won enough votes in the mayoral primary to force a runoff with Mr. Emanuel, but lost to him by a wide margin in the general election in 2015. (Mr. Emanuel chose not to seek a third term in 2019.)

Even after she retired from teaching, Ms. Lewis often spoke of her lingering affection for the classroom.

“I’ve measured my success as a teacher by the hugs at the end of the year,” she once said, “by the conversations with kids who say, ‘I never thought of it that way.’”

Dear Commons Community,

Representative Liz Cheney, R-Wy., yesterday defended her vote for former President Donald Trump’s impeachment a day after her own state party officially rebuked her.

“The oath that I took to the Constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment, and it doesn’t bend to partisanship; it doesn’t bend to political pressure,” Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

On Saturday, the Wyoming Republican Party voted 74 to eight to censure Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, who was one of only a handful of GOP lawmakers to vote for Trump’s impeachment for allegedly inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot that stormed the Capitol. At the time, Cheney issued a scathing statement against Trump for his “betrayal.”

“The notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged was a lie, and people need to understand that..We need to make sure that we as Republicans are the party of truth, and that we are being honest about what really did happen in 2020 so we actually have a chance to win in 2022 and win the White House back in 2024.”

She added that Mr. Trump “does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward.”

The remarks made plain that Ms. Cheney, a leading Republican voice trying to push the party back toward its traditional policy roots, had no intention of backing off her criticism of the former president after two attempts last week to punish her for her impeachment vote. In Washington, her critics forced a vote to try to oust her as the chairwoman of the House Republican conference, but it failed overwhelmingly on a secret ballot. And on Saturday, the Wyoming Republican Party censured her and called for her resignation.

Answering that call, Ms. Cheney said on Sunday that she would not resign and suggested that Republicans in her home state continued to be fed misinformation about what had taken place. It came a few days after she privately rebuffed a request by the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, to apologize to her conference for how she handled herself around the impeachment vote, according to two people familiar with the exchange, which was first reported on Sunday by Axios.

“People in the party are mistaken,” she said on Fox News of the Jan. 6 attack, which, together with nearby protests, killed five people, including a Capitol Police officer. Referring to the Black Lives Matter movement, she added: “They believe that B.L.M. and antifa were behind what happened here at the Capitol. That’s just simply not the case, it’s not true…”

Stick by your convictions Ms. Cheney.  You are doing the country and your party a great service.

Tony 

  Click to enlarge 

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting this morning that American higher education lost a “brutal” 650,000 jobs last year, a 13 percent drop since February 2020 (see graph above).  As reported.

“Colleges and universities closed out 2020 with continued job losses…It was a dispiriting coda to a truly brutal year for higher ed’s labor force.

Since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the U.S. Labor Department estimates that American academic institutions have shed a net total of at least 650,000 workers, according to preliminary, seasonally adjusted figures released last Friday. Put another way, for every eight workers employed in academe in February 2020, at least one had lost or left that job 10 months later.

Across the broader economy, 9.9 million fewer people held jobs in January 2021 than in February 2020. The national unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent on Friday.

At no point since the Labor Department began keeping industry tallies, in the late 1950s, have colleges and universities ever shed so many employees at such an incredible rate.

All of the job losses between the department’s November and December reports occurred in academe’s private nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Estimates from last summer had suggested that the public and private sectors might see diverging recoveries, with private colleges seemingly faring better than public ones at that point. But since then, neither has been able to produce consistently positive job numbers.

Though estimates of the number of workers employed (see graph below) by colleges and universities are available from the Labor Department, information on other classes of workers remain unavailable, such as how many employees lost their jobs because of scaled-back business at companies that contract with academic institutions to prepare food and clean facilities.

A Washington Post report and analysis last fall found that “the lowest-paid workers in higher education are bearing the brunt of the layoffs, mirroring broader trends of the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history.”

This is dispiriting news to say the least and we are not finished with the coronavirus pandemic yet!

Tony

Click to enlarge

Dear Commons Community,

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who has said he may vote this month to convict former President Trump on an article of impeachment, is pushing back against possible retaliation from the Nebraska Republican State Central Committee by warning that his party must choose between “conservatism and madness.”

Sasse on Thursday released the five-minute video (above) responding to Republican officials back home who want to censure him at a Republican State Central Committee meeting on Feb. 13 because of his criticism of Trump. He warned that purging Trump skeptics from the GOP is “not only civic cancer for the nation [but] just terrible for our party.”

Sasse, who didn’t support Trump’s candidacy in 2016 or 2020, dismissed his critics in the state party as “angry about life” and out of step with regular Nebraskans. “I listen to Nebraskans every day and very few of them are as angry about life as some of the people on this committee. Not all of you, but a lot,” Sasse said in the video. “Political addicts don’t represent most Nebraska conservatives.”

Sasse is one of several Republican officeholders under attack for criticizing Trump.

The GOP and the country need more political leaders like Sasse to tell it like it is.

Tony

Timothy Egan

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times contributing opinion writer, Timothy Egan, has a piece today explaining how some states are able to keep extremists out of politics.  This is an issue with lots of interest given the events this past week involving Marjorie Taylor Greene and the reluctance of Republicans in Congress to denounce her and her fraudulent conspiracy views.  Their reluctance rested on a fear the Donald Trump would fund right-wing zealots against them in primary elections and jeopardize their political careers.  Entitled, A Plan to Keep Extremists Out of the G.O.P., Egan looks at the primary systems in several states and suggests that other states should adopt the same.

Interesting read! 

Egan’s entire piece is below.

Tony

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A Plan to Keep Extremists Out of the G.O.P.

Putting country before party would be easier if we changed electoral systems.

By Timothy Egan

Contributing Opinion Writer

Feb. 5, 2021

I try not to bet on politics; it’s better to gamble on March Madness, the best sporting event in America. But here’s a wager I would make: The two Republican House members from Washington State who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump will not only survive their next election but do even better in 2022 than they did last year.

That’s right: The gutsy stand to remove a mad president will actually help Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse win re-election, which is how it should be for the rare politician who chooses country over party.

They will win because Washington is one of the few states where voters have designed a method to keep extremists from both parties on the fringe of politics. It’s something the rest of the country could learn from.

In other words, how can we save the Republican Party, now in the midst of a fight over its confused and darkened soul? Take it away from Republican Party activists and give it to the people. We already have a way to make it work.

Hear me out. In Washington, along with California, the top two vote-getters in a congressional primary, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election. Sometimes two Democrats make the final. Sometimes two Republicans. Often, it’s one of each, with partisan zealots left out.

In my home state of Washington, the Trump fanatics, conspiracy theorists and misinformation merchants who dominate the G.O.P. are in a lather over the votes by Herrera Beutler and Newhouse to impeach Trump.

“Turning a blind eye to this brutal assault on our Republic is not an option,” Newhouse said last month in announcing his decision.

“I’m not afraid of losing my job,” said Herrera Beutler. “But I am afraid that my country will fail.”

Republicans in her district, a moderate to conservative swath of southwestern Washington, called her vote shameful, and they vowed to primary her. Good luck with that.

In a top-two primary system, Herrera Beutler will almost certainly make the runoff, even if another Republican gets more Republican-leaning votes in the primary. But in the general, she’ll pick up independents and many Democrats, as she did in the past. She won by 13 percentage points last November, in a district that Trump carried by four points.

Removing the leverage to knock out Herrera Beutler in the primary allows her to be more accountable to her constituents than to her party. Little wonder that she’s also a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

Newhouse has already survived an attack from the far right, in 2014, when he got only 26 percent of the primary vote, versus 32 percent for the right-winger. Still, that was enough to make it to the November election, where he beat the extremist with the help of Democrats and independents. He has won by wide margins since then.

Kim Wyman, Washington’s Republican secretary of state, said the top-two (or four) open primary system encourages higher turnout and promotes candidates with a broader reach. “You have to appeal to a wider group of voters than your base,” she told me. “For a lot of states, this is a radical concept — giving voters the choice and the power.”

With top-two primaries, the incentive is actually to take more risk; the more voters you appeal to of all political stripes, the better your chance of winning office.

The downside of the top-two system is that it might leave, say, a majority-Democratic district without a Democratic candidate in the general election. If something like a half-dozen Democratic candidates were to split the primary vote equally, it could allow two Republicans to get just enough to make the general.

In that instance, one-party choice can mean no choice for the party left off the general election ballot. This system also makes it very hard for minor-party candidates to advance.

The parties hate this system. Which is why all three states that have these types of races had to do it by vote of the people. (In November, Alaskans voted in favor of top-four primaries. Nebraska has top-two primaries for state legislative races.)

In a heavily one-party state, this system probably wouldn’t save a profile in courage. Representative Liz Cheney, now under ferocious attack by Trumpers in Wyoming for her vote to impeach, might be doomed in a state that Trump took by 43 points.

But such primaries could protect Representative Dan Valadao of California, another one of the 10 Republicans on the side of impeachment. President Biden carried his district, but Valadao attracted enough votes from both sides to win.

In the big picture, Republicans are likely to continue gerrymandering districts in key states that are crucial to the makeup of the next Congress. They’ll resist voter-driven reforms to open the system, because those changes take power from the zealots.

Lonely are the brave. Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, another of the 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment, is urging his party to confront “how much we peddle darkness and division.” Several states have found a way toward the light.

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times are reporting this morning that the Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” whose host has trumpeted unfounded assertions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, has been cancelled. 

In a statement yesterday, Fox News Media said the move was part of routine programming alterations that it had foreshadowed in an announcement last fall.  

Fox News Media “regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business — this is part of those planned changes,” the company said.

Whether the cancellation ends Dobbs’ career with Fox Business wasn’t addressed, and the company had no further comment. The former CNN host started his show at the channel in March 2011, and it became among the most-watched business news channel programs.

The statement appeared to distance the cancellation from a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit filed Thursday against Fox and three of its hosts, including Dobbs, by the election technology company Smartmatic. In a previous statement, Fox News said it would “vigorously defend against this meritless lawsuit in court.”

The replacement for “Lou Dobbs Tonight” will be announced soon, Fox News said. The show last aired on Friday, with a guest host sitting in for Dobbs, who had no immediate statement.

An interim show, “Fox Business Tonight,” will air starting 5 p.m. Eastern Monday with rotating hosts Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman and repeat at 7 p.m. EST.

In December, Smartmatic sent a letter threatening legal action to Fox and two other networks, Newsmax and One America News Network, also popular with supporters of former President Donald Trump.

That month, Fox aired pre-taped segments in which a voting technology expert said he hadn’t seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to alter vote counts. The segments aired on Dobbs’ program and on Fox News Channel shows with Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.

Over and over again we have seen that people put their careers at risk when they get too close to Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Smartmatic USA, a voting technology company, is suing Fox News, three of its hosts and two former lawyers for former President Donald Trump — Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — for $2.7 billion, charging that the defendants conspired to spread false claims that the company helped “steal” the U.S. presidential election.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The 285-page complaint filed yesterday in New York state court is one of the largest libel suits ever undertaken. On Jan. 25, a rival election-technology company — Dominion Voting Systems, which was also ensnared in Trump’s baseless effort to overturn the election — sued Guiliani and Powell for $1.3 billion.

Unlike Dominion, whose technology was used in 24 states, Smartmatic’s participation in the 2020 election was restricted to Los Angeles County, which votes heavily Democratic.

Smartmatic’s limited role notwithstanding, Fox aired at least 13 reports falsely stating or implying the company had stolen the 2020 vote in cahoots with Venezuela’s socialist government, according to the complaint. This alleged “disinformation campaign” continued even after then-Attorney General William Barr said the Department of Justice could find no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

For instance, a Dec. 10 segment by Lou Dobbs accused Smartmatic and its CEO, Antonio Mugica, of working to flip votes through a non-existent backdoor in its voting software to carry out a “massive cyber Pearl Harbor,” the complaint alleged.

“Defendants’ story was a lie,” the complaint stated. “But, it was a story that sold.”

The complaint also alleges that Fox hosts Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro also directly benefitted from their involvement in the conspiracy. The lawsuit alleges that Fox went along with the “well-orchestrated dance” due to pressure from newcomer outlets such as Newsmax and One America News, which were stealing away conservative, pro-Trump viewers.

Roy Gutterman, a media law professor at Syracuse University, said the lawsuit is compelling and based on specific examples and facts, not frivolous claims.

“This is a perfect example of why we have the law of defamation in first place,” said Gutterman, a former reporter.

Fox News Media, in a statement on behalf of the network and its hosts, rejected the accusations. It said it is proud of its election coverage and would defend itself against the “meritless” lawsuit in court.

Fox “is committed to providing the full context of every story with in-depth reporting and clear opinion,” the company said in a written statement.

Giuliani and Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

For Smartmatic, the effects of the negative publicity were swift and devastating, the complaint alleges. Death threats, including against an executive’s 14-year-old son, poured in as Internet searches for the company surged, Smartmatic claims.

With several client contracts in jeopardy, the company estimates that it will lose as much as $690 million in profits over the next five years. It also expects it will have to boost spending by $4.7 million to fend off what it called a “meteoric rise” in cyberattacks.

“For us, this is an existential crisis,” Mugica said in an interview. He said the false statements against Smartmatic have already led one foreign bank to close its accounts and deterred Taiwan, a prospective client, from adopting e-voting technology.

Like many conspiracy theories, the alleged campaign against Smartmatic was built on a grain of truth. Mugica is Venezuelan and Smartmatic’s initial success is partly attributable to major contracts from Hugo Chávez’s government, an early devotee of electronic voting.

No evidence has emerged that the company rigged votes in favor of the anti-American firebrand, and for a while the Carter Center and other observers held out Venezuela as a model of electronic voting. Meanwhile, the company has expanded globally.

Smartmatic is represented by J. Erik Connolly, who previously won what’s believed to be the largest settlement in American media defamation, at least $177 million, for a report on ABC News describing a company’s beef product as “pink slime.”

“Very rarely do you see a news organization go day after day after day against the same targets,” Connolly said in an interview. “We couldn’t possibly have rigged this election because we just weren’t even in the contested states to do the rigging.”

Fox, after receiving a demand for retraction from Smartmatic’s lawyers in December, aired what it called a “fact-checking segment” with an election technology expert. In the segment, the expert said there was no evidence of tampering — something the defendants knew from the start and reported elsewhere on the network, the complaint alleges.

Far from making the company whole, Mugica said he saw the segment — in which an unidentified voice asks questions referenced in the retraction letter — as an admission of guilt.

Gutterman said that any after-the-fact correction can be a mitigating factor but doesn’t get of the defendants entirely off the hook if they are found to have previously been propagating false claims. With the line between fact and opinion increasingly blurred in the current media landscape, he said he expects the lawsuit to force news outlets trying to capitalize on support for Trump to reconsider how far to stretch the limits.

“This is certainly a wake-up call that, just because you’re dealing in opinion and not straight news, you can’t openly put anything on the air,” he said. “Facts are still facts.”

I hope a New York State judge throws the book at Trump’s  associates and friends at Fox News.

Tony