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This is Fighting Words, a weekly newsletter about what got me steamed this week. Let’s dive in.

Item one: Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows hate America

 

That stunning Washington Post piece by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Mark Meadows needs to be read at least twice to take in the full measure of corruption and venality it conveys. Here were people trying to overturn American democracy, saying that this was not politics but war—oh, and while saying all this, invoking the name of Jesus Christ.

 

The story reveals much about three people. 

 

About Ginni Thomas, who wrote 21 of the 28 text messages that Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff in 2020, turned over to the January 6 select committee before he stopped cooperating (and which were then apparently leaked to the two Bobs—Woodward and Costa), we learn that she is an out-and-out fascist. Consider these quotes:

 

•	“… the most important thing you [Meadows] can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.”
•	“This war is psychological. PSYOP.”
•	“Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his [Trump’s] back.”
•	“If you all cave to the elites … I think I am done with politics.… Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”

 

The first three are (a) just cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs but (b) terrifying. The fourth is fascinating—and even more terrifying. When she writes she would be done with politics, I doubt she means she’s going off to the country to retire. She means, more likely, that she’s done with politics in the normal, peaceable sense that the “GOP charade” is guilty of participating in. She means it’s time for a fascist party to take over and start arresting liberals.

 

About Mark Meadows, we learn that he, a former presidential chief of staff, largely endorses this worldview. He repeatedly agrees with Thomas and eggs her on (although he does deliver to her the bad news that loony Sidney Powell won’t be leading the Trump legal effort). His most telling text: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.” The King of Kings, according to Revelations, is Jesus. Think about that. Perhaps you’re not religious and this just doesn’t mean much to you. But for a devout Christian who presumably has devoted some hours of his life to the study of Jesus Christ’s teachings to say this is just gobsmacking. Joe Scarborough nailed it Friday morning when he said that Meadows was right, it was a fight between good and evil, he just got the jerseys mixed up.

 

Finally, it tells us that Clarence Thomas is corrupt up to his eyeballs. Thomas was the only Supreme Court justice to rule in January that the National Archives did not have to turn presidential records over to the select committee. Those records included these text messages. Gee, do you think Thomas knew? After Jane Mayer’s killer piece on Ginni Thomas came out in January, Ginni did a c.y.a. interview with The Washington Free Beacon saying she and her husband didn’t discuss their work. But there’s a text in here where she tells Meadows, right after he invokes Jesus, that she had a conversation with her “best friend.” She doesn’t say who that is, but … well, here’s something a friend of the couple told the Post way back in 1991, when Thomas was nominated:

“The one person [he] really listens to is Virginia. He depends on her for advice.” Maybe they made new ground rules when he became a justice. Or maybe they went in precisely the opposite direction, confiding everything in each other. There’s certainly no reason to believe Ginni’s denials.

 

These texts, combined with Thomas’s failure to recuse himself on that January vote, should be grounds for an impeachment inquiry. Whether that ever happens or not, they’re certainly grounds for concluding that he is the most corrupt Supreme Court justice of modern times.

 

Item two: Ted talk

 

Look, a Supreme Court nominee’s sentencing record is a legitimate topic for inquiry, and a certain amount of grandstanding during confirmation hearings is inevitable. But the hectoring of Ketanji Brown Jackson—particularly by Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham—wasn’t aimed at getting to the truth, and the grandstanding was off the charts.

 

The reason is obvious: Some of these Republican senators want to be president, and they are using the hearings to gain notoriety. Blackburn will now start making presidential wannabee lists solely on the basis of asking Jackson to define the word “woman.” Also, well, Jackson’s a Black woman, and the Republicans know she’s about 98.7 percent likely to end up on the Supreme Court for 30-plus years. If they can plant in 40 percent of America’s collective brain that she’s soft on child pornography, they’ve successfully tooted a dog whistle that will be heard for years to come—perhaps even until, say, 2031, when Jackson is the decisive fifth vote in overturning Shelby County or the Seattle/Louisville school resegregation decision or a host of other reactionary rulings.

 

My mention of the court’s future should serve to remind that conservatives, their dominance of the federal courts notwithstanding, have many unfulfilled long-term jurisprudential goals:

 

1. Overturning Roe, which may happen this year, and ...

 

2. A decimation of stare decisis in other areas. For example, if the court can overturn Roe, a 50-year-old holding that’s been reaffirmed around a dozen times, then surely it can overturn Obergefell, the decision that legalized same-sex marriage just seven years ago. As another example: Loving v. Virginia, which outlawed state miscegenation statutes, is a mere six years older than Roe. If the court can overturn Roe, why could it not overturn Loving? Surely it could. That’s a little harder to imagine, given that interracial marriage is now quite widely socially accepted; on the other hand, earlier this week Indiana Republican Senator Mike Braun unambiguously said the question of interracial marriage should be returned to the states. (He later walked it back, unconvincingly.) If the principle is that these matters belong to the states, then they belong to the states, period. States can pass laws making interracial marriage legal. And most presumably would. Maybe all would, eventually. But imagine how rancorous and ugly that process could potentially be.

 

3. The court could eviscerate the power of federal government to write and enforce regulations. This is known as the delegation issue, or sometimes as the nondelegation issue, and it is terrifying. Read Ian Millhiser on it here.

 

4. My great personal fear is that a right-wing court someday strikes down one person, one vote. The decisions that upheld this principle are about a decade older than Roe. They, too, would presumably be fair game. If you think what Republicans are doing today on voter suppression is bad, you have no idea what this country could be made to look like if the cases (Baker and Reynolds, mainly) were overturned.

 

There’s a lot more, but I’ll stop there. Don’t think all this isn’t on Republicans’ minds, especially with corrupt Clarence Thomas experiencing whatever brush with mortality he just experienced.

Item three: Biden fails to embarrass America

 

Well, the doddering old Joe Biden who, according to Fox News, can’t put two sentient sentences together, looked pretty capable to me Thursday as he spoke from Brussels. Yes, the press conference was quick, but he was perfectly cogent, and from the press reports about what NATO agreed to at the meetings, it seems like the group remains on the same page in all key respects and has ratcheted up the sanctions regime pretty significantly.

 

There are sanctions on some 400 Russian individuals and entities now. Biden announced more humanitarian aid and an impressive increase in the number of Ukrainian refugees the United States would accept. Biden was headed to Poland on Friday, probably to a place near the Ukraine border, to meet with refugees. I’d love to see him sneak into Ukraine itself. He’d be remembered forever for doing that. But the Secret Service would never allow it. Among other things, they always need to know where the nearest restroom is (this is true: I know it from experience, from the one time I interviewed someone with Secret Service protection in my place of business rather than theirs).

 

Anyway, Biden is obviously proving up to managing the global Putin opposition thus far. It may get worse. He said that if Russia uses chemical weapons, we’ll respond “in kind.” One wonders what exactly that means. It doesn’t mean NATO will gas Russian babies. But it does imply an act of war that could lead to some dark places. We shall see. But for now, Biden is being that thing this country sorely lacked for four years: a democratic leader who knows that legitimacy comes from acting in concert with democratic allies. What a long trip from the guy who bungled Afghanistan—a problem Donald Trump made for him, by the way—and what a long trip from Trump’s attitude toward democratic allies.

Item four: More on that Trump prosecution

 

Remember a few weeks ago, when two prosecutors working for new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg quit, and reports suggested that it was because Bragg wasn’t interested in prosecuting Donald Trump? Now The New York Times has obtained the resignation letter of one of the prosecutors.

 

Mark Pomerantz wrote: “The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes—he did.” He did also write that he allows that Bragg made a good-faith decision but added that “a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong.”

 

One thing I’d love to know here is: How do prosecutors not have enough leverage on longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg to flip him? In addition, what does Trump himself have on Weisselberg? What is the state of Weisselberg’s conscience (I use the term loosely)?

 

And so a man who has been suspected of cooking his books and cheating on his taxes for decades may skate away. (New York Attorney General Letitia James also still has a say in this matter.) He’s the same man whom the KGB, according to New Republic contributor Craig Unger, identified as an asset four decades ago, and the same man who might yet again be elected, or “elected,” president of the United States.

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