Matthew Chapman is a video game designer who attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lives in San Marcos, Texas. Before joining Raw Story, he wrote for Shareblue and AlterNet, specializing in election and policy coverage.
This week, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature have faced national fury after their successful lawsuits blocking Democratic Gov. Tony Evers from delaying the election and extending absentee voting.
But just one day after tens of thousands of voters were forced to stand in public lines and risk COVID-19 exposure just to exercise their constitutional right to vote, the Wisconsin GOP found yet another way to weaponize the pandemic for partisan gain.
According to Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Republicans in the legislature have slipped a provision into the state's relief bill authorizing unemployment disbursement under the federal CARES Act, that would allow the state's Finance Committee to make budget cuts without input from Evers — stripping him of power at exactly the moment when the public would be looking to the governor for help.
The move hearkens back to the GOP's passage of a series of measures stripping Evers and other statewide Democratic officials of power to make certain appointments and manage state litigation, just before they took office.
Evers has told reporters he intends to veto the legislation — but that he also supports the portions of the bill providing coronavirus relief, and that he intends to work with the legislature to reach a compromise.
As former President Donald Trump has sat through more days of his criminal hush money trial in Manhattan, including the testimony of his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, a wave of Republican officials, including senators and representatives from around the country, have descended on the courthouse to speak in his defense, and attack people that Trump is prohibited from mentioning under his gag order.
But the irony, said former Trump White House communications official Anthony Scaramucci on CNN Friday afternoon, is that the former president would stab all of these people showing up for him in the back the second it became advantageous for him.
"What do you make of all the support we're seeing Donald Trump get in the courtroom from these high-ranking Republican officials?" asked anchor Jake Tapper.
"Well, it's a section of high-ranking Republican officials, but it's an obligatory loyalty test by all of them," said Scaramucci, who famously only lasted less than two weeks in the Trump administration and has been a harsh critic of the former president ever since. "They're using the same hand signals as Donald Trump. They're wearing the same outfits as Donald Trump. But it'll never be enough for Donald Trump."
"Unfortunately for all of those guys — Michael Cohen has learned it, other people, myself included, that have worked for Mr. Trump — there's no pleasing him and he's incredibly transactional," said Scaramucci.
In fact, he continued on, the reality of the situation is that "if he has to run you over with a bus or hit you with a car five minutes after he shook your hand and smiled at you charmingly, he'll do that."
The U.S. Flag Code outlines: "The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."
Alito blamed his wife for the move, saying she was upset at lawn signs with swear words. Several signs popped up around the election, reading, "f--- Trump." She complained that children waiting for the bus saw the vulgar word.
"If you want to connect the image that you saw, you don’t have to look far," said former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann. "If you look at what Alito said in the immunity argument — the argument was should a president be subject to the criminal laws. And it was unbelievable. Somebody who is a U.S. attorney, now sitting in the Supreme Court of the United States, took the position, we cannot trust DOJ, we cannot trust a grand jury of citizens, we cannot trust the criminal justice system, which by the way, he oversees the constitutional limits on what the government can do, we can’t trust that and that’s why a president should be immune."
She later noted that Chief Justice John Roberts has the power to hold the justices to the same standards as other judges, but he has been unwilling to do so.
She counted off rules such as "employees of the Supreme Court may not engage in partisan political activity, partisan political activity related to elections contested by political parties. For example, employees may not publicly support or oppose a partisan political organization or candidate."
Another is that "employees may not engage in nonpartisan activity if it could reflect adversely on the dignity or impartiality of the court or interferes with the duties."
Wallace said that the "upside-down flag is associated with one of the two parties, Trump supporters, at the Capitol that day and absolutely makes it impossible for that body to be dignified."
"Can we consider for a moment what Justice Alito's defense is here?" he said. "Understanding that because of the photo, he can't just say it didn't happen. Let's even assume his wife put it up, and take that as a given. Even though we just have the statement, there's lots of reasons to think — it's his lawn. But he didn't see it?"
Wallace noted that Alito never said in the statement that he didn't see it, only that his wife did it.
"It's up for days. He never saw that? I mean, he didn't talk to his wife? He didn't see the flag? He didn't think, maybe I should take this down? Remember the environment we were in. Let's go back to Jan. 6th. What was going on in Washington? I mean, I keep saying this about the judges who have these cases; everyone who was in Washington lived it. It was happening there around them."
He explained that he doesn't think people who weren't there can fully understand how central Jan. 6 was to those who live in America's capitol and "how shocking" it was "even for us just watching it on TV."
"And he didn't think, maybe I should take this down?" asked Weissmann. "I mean, and then the response, I'm doing this in response to what? How is putting a 'Stop the Steal' flag that you know about, you are not taking down, how is that somehow justified by a neighbor?"
Weissmann wondered what would happen if the neighbor promoted Joe Biden.
"That means you put up this flag as a sitting Supreme Court Justice? It is so much, 'Might makes right.' It is such a denigration of what should be a court that people revere."
LOS ANGELES — A lawyer who was the architect of a plan to subvert the 2020 election and return Donald Trump to the White House denied all charges against him when he appeared in an Arizona court Friday.
John Eastman is the first of 18 people charged in the battleground state to appear in court over the scheme to empanel fake electors to support their favored candidate.
Others include Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, one-time Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney Jenna Ellis and campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn.
