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Virginia Ginni Thomas the far right political activist who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is once again in the news due to reports that the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack has unearthed a string of email correspondence between her and conservative attorney John Eastman, who pushed Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election results that booted Donald Trump out of the White House.

Reporters have not yet accessed details about the email threads contents, but its existence alone has raised even more red flags about Ginni Thomass alleged involvement in Trumps plot to overturn the election.

According to CNBC, the January 6 committee announced today that it now plans to invite Ginni Thomas to testify about her involvement in efforts to reverse Donald Trumps presidential election loss.

This is not the first time that evidence has emerged about Ginni Thomass role in strategizing ways to find legal rationales to pressure Mike Pence to essentially declare various state elections null and void, and simply reinstall Trump as president.

Back in March the House committee investigating January 6 obtained details about text messages that Ginni Thomas sent to former President Donald Trumps chief of staff, Mark Meadows, urging him to continue the fight to overturn the election results. As stories like these have done the rounds, calls have grown for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from any and all Supreme Court cases relating to elections and their legitimacy. To date, he has refused to recuse himself.

This is a story that gets more awful the more we know. Last weeks devastating revelation was that in the weeks after the election, Ginni Thomas contacted 29 Arizona legislators, urging each and every one of them to decertify Arizonas vote and instead choose alternative electors who would cast their lot with Trump. Had they done so, they would have taken a very deliberate step to overturn the will of the people, and a significant step to destroy democracy in the United States.

Thomas isnt some lone eccentric simply trying to project her personal opinion. She is a leading operative on the board of a shadowy right-wing coordinating group called the Council for National Policy (CNP).

In the mid-1990s, when I was fresh out of journalism school and accepting pretty much any freelance assignment that I could lay my hands on, I worked for several months as a researcher on a book called The Armchair Activist. It documented the various organizations that made up the spine of the U.S.s fast-growing far right and ultraconservative movements, and was intended as a how-to handbook providing organizing tools for progressives to counter these groups.

One memory of the project that stands out is the tentacle-like behind-the-scenes power of the CNP. Out of the public eye, the organization, which had been set up 15 years earlier, in 1981, quietly but extraordinarily effectively developed policy goals and organizing methods to reach those goals that covered pretty much everything from restricting the franchise, to demolishing the social safety net, to ending access to abortion and expanding access to guns.

The New York Times has, quite correctly, labeled the CNP a little known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the county. Think of it as a sort of exclusive country club, where conservative icons, such as the Koch brothers, the DeVoses, the Scaifes, and other wealthy luminaries of the right go to brainstorm and break bread with less wealthy but politically well-connected men and women such as Ginni Thomas.

In recent years, it has gotten increasingly influential. During Brett Kavanaughs confirmation hearings, the CNP met, in secret, for a three-day strategy meeting, to plot a way toward implementing a hyper-conservative social, cultural and religious agenda given the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Attendees included a slew of top Republican political figures including Rep. Jim Jordan conservative donors, and Christian-right leaders.

In March 2020, Vice President Mike Pence thanked the organization for consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump. That same year, Trump himself spoke for a full hour at the organizations annual meeting.

When I was researching The Armchair Activist, I remember drawing a series of diagrams, putting the CNP in a big circle in the center, and, with great theatricality, explaining to my fellow researchers how all of these different individuals and organizations connected via this coordinating hub.

In the decades since, every so often Ive encountered a policy or organizing effort in which the CNP was involved and been startled, all over again, at just how powerful this secretive organization is.

A hundred years from now, when historians want to understand how this country lurched so far rightward in such a relatively brief period of time, the critical role of the CNP in helping to shape and implement the right-wing agenda will, I am sure, be pored over.

That the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice is a board member of this group and an activist pushing its radical right causes, ought to give anyone who cares both about the state of U.S. democracy and about the legitimacy and independence of the countrys top judicial institution serious pause. In a stunning expos earlier this year, The New York Times Magazine argued that no spouse of a sitting Supreme Court Justice has ever, in U.S. history, been more of an overt political activist than Ginni Thomas.

The Thomases claim that there is somehow an iron wall separating their two careers that Clarence Thomas has nothing to do with Ginni Thomass political organizing efforts. Thats clearly not the case. In 2002, Justice Thomas was a headline speaker at a CNP gathering outside Washington, D.C. In 2020, as Trump sought desperately to cling to power, the CNP was central to the messaging effort to try to frame the election as having been stolen; and while the Supreme Court repeatedly threw out Trump campaign efforts to overturn state results, Clarence Thomas came closer than other justices to entertaining sympathies for at least some of the Trump arguments, in particular vis--vis the nebulous notion that there had been widespread election fraud in November 2020.

His dissent in one of the Pennsylvania lawsuits around mail-in ballots borrowed heavily from the sorts of arguments developed by the CNP and related groupings.

Had Arizonas legislators responded to pressure from the CNP and other right-wing groups by overturning their states election result, all hell would have broken loose. It would have triggered a constitutional crisis, would have likely precipitated mass protests, and would, almost certainly, have resulted in the Supreme Court eventually having to get involved in arbitrating the process.

Moreover, Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter to the Supreme Courts January order rejecting Trumps bid to withhold documents from the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack. Maybe he did so out of genuine legal concern for precedents that would be set in the perennial power struggle between the executive and legislative branches. Its at least possible, however, that he was concerned that his spouses intemperate emails and other exchanges would, if the documents were released, become part of the public record. Perhaps Ginni Thomas had mentioned to him just how involved she was in the efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

It is surreal to think that, in a moment of national peril, the future of the country continues to hang, not on weighty legal arguments, but on at-home conversations between one U.S. Supreme Court justice and his far right activist spouse.

Read more here:
Does the Future of US Democracy Hang on Talks Between Clarence and Ginni Thomas? - Truthout

Have you ever heard the expression: "children are better seen, not heard"? What a load of bologna! It is so important that we tell our children at a young age that their voices matter and if they speak up, they can make a difference. It will help them mature into confident, articulate grownups! An elementary school student from Springfield, Massachusetts (Western MA), just exercised his freedom of democracy all for the sake of "taco day" at school.

According towwlp.com,State Representative Orlando Ramos attended a career day a few months ago. After talking to the students about what it's like to be a State Rep, Carlos opened up the room for questions. Xavier, a fifth grader, expressed his displeasure that there was no lettuce on the tacos served at school. This is all kinds of awesome for a few reasons:

1. I love that Xavier felt passionately enough about the lack of lettuce on the tacos to bring it up in a public setting.

2. I love that he realized that this man who came to his school could make the change happen! Half of the battle is talking to the right people, and Xavier knew how to navigate this at the ripe age of 10.

3: His wish was granted!

Rep Ramos started making moves on this right after he heard from Xavier, and signed anew legislation that from now on lettuce will be included on the menu for taco day, not just at Xavier's school but for the whole district.

The article quotes Rep Ramos:

I hope this serves as a message to all young people in the city that their voices are important, and they are heard when they speak up, and were here to listen.

Way to go, Xavier! I think this little dude might be cut out for a career in politics!

This New Hampshire Food Truck Tour is a Feast You're Sure to Love

12 Unwritten New Hampshire Rules That All Granite Staters Know

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A 5th Grader from Massachusetts Exercised Democracy in the Name of Tacos - wokq.com

By By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

More than 330,000 people in the United States died during the pandemic because they were uninsured or underinsured. That grim statistic was reported this week by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health. In addition to that staggering, preventable death toll, in 2020 alone, our fragmented and inefficient healthcare system, cost the U.S. $459 billion more than if we had genuine, universal healthcare. The Yale team prescription to prepare for the next pandemic: Medicare for All.

Our current healthcare system is dysfunctional. It is extraordinarily wasteful and expensive, and it is cruel, Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders said as he opened a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Medicare for All last month.

The American people understand as I do, that healthcare is a human right and not a privilege, and that we must end the international embarrassment of our great country being the only major nation on earth that does not guarantee health care as a human right to all of its people, Sanders continued. Over 70 million Americans today are either uninsured or underinsured there are millions of people in our country who would like to go to a doctor, who have to go to the doctor, but cannot afford to do so. This is unacceptable, this is un-American, and this cannot be allowed to happen in the wealthiest country on earth.

Sanders has introduced S.4204, the Medicare for All Act of 2022, with fourteen Democratic Senators as co-sponsors. Similar legislation is also before the House of Representatives. Medicare for All would lower the eligibility age for the federal Medicare health insurance program from 65 to the time of birth.

Opponents of Medicare for All disparage it as government-run healthcare. This criticism is wrong. In the United Kingdom, for example, the NHS, the National Health Service, is government-run. The government owns all the hospitals and clinics, and the doctors, nurses and other staff are government employees. In the U.S., the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Service are government-run, just like the NHS.

With Medicare for All, the government simply pays the bills as the single payer, saving enormous amounts of money by removing the health insurance corporations from the equation.

The hospitals, medical offices and laboratories all remain unchanged, primarily as private or non-profit institutions, exactly as they are today. This is how our current Medicare system works for those over 65 years old. Medicare for All wouldnt change that; it merely expands the population covered to everyone.

Medicare for All would dismantle the bloated, private insurance bureaucracy, saving hundreds of billions of dollars annually. At the Budget hearing, Committee Chair Sanders summarized, The six largest health insurance companies in America last year made over $60 billion in profit, led by United Health Group which made $24 billion in the midst of the pandemic in 2021. But its not just the profits of the insurance companiesThe CEOs of 178 major healthcare companies collectively made $3.2 billion in total compensation in 2020, up 31% from 2019. According to Axios, in 2020, the CEO of Cigna, David Cordani, took home $79 million in compensation while people died.

An analysis produced by the Political Economy Research Institute, PERI, at UMass Amherst, includes a just transition for the close to 900,000 people employed by the health insurance industry. Savings provided by a single-payer system could pay for a combination of early retirement and retraining, lessening the impact on those workers.

Single-payer, or Medicare for All, makes sense in normal times, but we are not in normal times. The global COVID-19 pandemic has ripped the scabs off of so many sectors of our society, exposing and exacerbating inequities and a lethal lack of preparation.

The Yale study puts real numbers to it, noting the disproportionate impact on poor and low-income communities and on people of color.

Universal healthcare would lead to a healthier population, more capable of withstanding the impacts of the next pandemic. Regular, preventive doctor visits, the comfort and security of knowing that a needed procedure or hospital visit wont lead to bankruptcy or add to personal debt, all contribute to a broader resilience. Citing a Gallup poll, the Yale researchers write, due to apprehension about their ability to pay, 14% of US adults reported that even if they experienced the two most common symptoms of COVID-19, fever and dry cough, they would still avoid seeking care.

Another lesson of the pandemic is that when any of us is exposed, all of us are. Universal, effective and affordable healthcare makes us all stronger and safer. The simplest way to achieve that is Medicare for All.

More here:
A Prescription Against the Next Pandemic: Medicare for All - Democracy Now!

Good morning.

The US government system nearly failed on January 6, the House select committees chairman has warned while a conservative judge underlined that Donald Trump and his allies remain a a clear and present danger to American democracy.

Judge J Michael Luttig, who was an adviser to the former vice-president Mike Pence, told the hearing that Trump and his Republican backers were openly preparing an attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but [to] succeed.

The committee hearing also detailed how the former president imperilled Pences life by falsely claiming he had the power to refuse to count votes for Joe Biden. Just 40ft divided the former vice-president from the mob Trump whipped up on January 6: some chanted Hang Mike Pence and a gallows was erected outside.

When Trump heard about the chant, the panels deputy committee chair said, the president responded Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.

How widespread is Trumps lie among Republicans? More than 100 Republicans who have won primaries for midterm elections this year back Trumps lie about electoral fraud in 2020, according to the Washington Post.

The lead Republican negotiator in US Senate talks for a bipartisan gun safety bill walked out of negotiations on Thursday, telling reporters that he was through talking.

Senator John Cornyn said he had not abandoned the negotiations but was returning to Texas amid an impasse, reducing the chances of a vote on the legislation before the Senate breaks up for a two-week July 4 recess.

The group has been developing legislation to deal with gun violence after the Uvalde school shooting in Texas, which happened just 10 days after another gunman killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York.

A shooting at a church in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama killed two people and wounded two others on Thursday, police have said. The suspect was taken into custody.

Russia has already strategically lost the war in Ukraine and will never be able to take control of the entire country, the head of the UKs armed forces has said.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said Russia was suffering heavy losses for marginal gains and would emerge from the conflict a more diminished power while bolstering Nato. Putin has used about 25% of his armys power to gain a tiny amount of territory and 50,000 people either dead or injured, he said.

Meanwhile the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, gave an interview with the BBC on Thursday, saying: Russia is not squeaky clean. Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed of showing who we are. When asked about alleged war crimes against civilians, he accused the UN of spreading fake news.

What does western intelligence say? British intelligence reports appear to echo claims about casualties. Some Russian battalion tactical groups usually made up of about 600 to 800 personnel have included as few as 30 soldiers.

The US state department is aware of a photograph appearing to show two missing Americans believed to have been captured by Russian forces while volunteering to defend Ukraine, a relative of one of the men has said.

The last remaining UN humanitarian aid route into Syria is likely to be closed amid the collapse in relations between Russia and the west. The security council will vote on 10 July on whether to keep the Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey open; this year, more Syrians are at risk of hunger than at any other point during the conflict.

Japanese schoolchildren have once again been allowed to talk to their friends during lunch break, after the Covid rule of mokushoku silent eating was scrapped. It comes as cases fall nationally and amid concern about childrens development.

An investigation has been launched into the death of a disabled passenger who reportedly fell after disembarking from a plane at London Gatwick airport without a helper. An airport spokesperson said staff shortages were not a factor in the passenger falling down an escalator.

Once an abundant source of food and medicine, Maui now imports between 85% and 90% of its food. But a growing food and land sovereignty movement in Hawaii is working to bring back the lost thriving landscape, with Indigenous farmers pushing back against the dominance of agrochemical transnationals in the state.

While hip-hops first confirmed billionaire raps about staying close to his roots, residents of the Marcy Houses where Jay-Z grew up have met his plan offer them a free financial literacy cryptocurrency course with skepticism. Many reacted to the idea of joining the Bitcoin Academy with frustration: People dont want to be investing money knowing that they might have a chance of losing it, one 58-year-old retiree said.

Climate campaigners have accused western countries of seeking to exploit the fossil fuel reserves of the developing world while failing to help them deal with the climate emergency. Countries including Germany are planning to ramp up their imports of fossil fuels to replace gas from Russia amid the Ukraine war.

Kevin Beresford, a proud member of the Dull Mens Club, has been crowned the most boring man in Britain. The international collective (which welcomes women to its ranks) finds joy in the mundane; Beresford, who once created a bestselling calendar celebrating the traffic circles in his town, has this quality in spades.

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First Thing: Trump a clear and present danger to US democracy - The Guardian US

But for journalists, not every story is as black and white as a mob storming the United States Capitol to try to overturn a free election. Often, there are areas of gray.

Gerrymandering is a classic example. Its not always easy to identify heroes and villains when writing about the redrawing of district boundaries. Republicans have had more success with redistricting lately, and theyve often run afoul of voting rights laws, but both parties manipulate political maps for their own ends. In New York, for instance, Democratic legislators sought to maximize their number of House seats, only to run into a court order throwing out their maps.

So is gerrymandering a fundamental threat to democracy, as some would argue? Is it a tool politicians use to protect their jobs or gain an edge over rivals? Something in between? The details matter.

Journalists run into difficult questions like these every day:

How to calibrate a headline on a big story like the assault of Jan. 6, 2021.

How to correct misinformation when repeating it could amplify lies.

How seriously to take fringe groups that might seem inconsequential now, but could prove dangerous in the future.

Whether and how to quote politicians who make outlandish comments for the very purpose of generating a backlash.

How to cover campaigns that exclude reporters from their events or refuse to respond to basic questions.

Theres no handbook for any of this, but a group of activists and academics is trying to help.

A new 28-page report by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group, proposes guidelines for news outlets to help them distinguish between normal political jockeying and truly dangerous conduct. Its primary author was Jennifer Dresden, a former scholar at Georgetown University who has studied democracy around the world.

In an interview, Dresden said she was driven by the conviction, backed by decades of research, that authoritarianism doesnt happen overnight. Like a stalagmite, it develops from the slow drip of infringements on freedoms and breaches of longstanding democratic rules and traditions. That process is now well underway in the United States, she worries.

The idea motivating the report, Dresden said, was to develop rules for thinking about how to evaluate whether something is a systemic risk to democracy and expose it as such or just one loose cannon doing things that are problematic.

Protect Democracy assembled a panel of academic luminaries for the project, including Sheri Berman, Larry Diamond, Timothy Snyder, Kim Lane Scheppele, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The group also consulted editors at various news outlets, including The New York Times, to help gain insights into how newsrooms are approaching this task.

The panel reached a consensus on seven basic tactics authoritarian leaders and movements use to pursue and maintain power, which are listed verbatim below:

They attempt to politicize independent institutions.

They spread disinformation.

They aggrandize executive power at the expense of checks and balances.

They quash criticism and dissent.

They specifically target vulnerable or marginalized communities.

They work to corrupt elections.

They stoke violence.

Each bullet point comes with its own section, along with suggestions for journalists meant to influence their coverage. But the advice is all guided by the overarching question that animated the report: Whats politics as usual, and whats not?

Dresden says there ought to be clearer standards than the Potter Stewart test referring to the former Supreme Court justice, who famously said in a 1964 case that his method for identifying obscenity was I know it when I see it. Theres some wisdom in that trust-your-gut approach, but democracy is a lot more complicated than a pornographic film.

So the report contains advice like explain and contextualize the reasons why institutions were designed as independent and rely on experts familiar with each particular institutions history.

The Trump era prompted many mainstream news organizations to do exactly that. At one point, Slate, a left-leaning website that pioneered many aspects of early web journalism, ran a semiregular feature called Is This Normal? that aimed to answer readers questions about moves like Donald Trumps firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director whose role in the Russia investigation agitated the former president. (Spoiler alert: That was not normal.)

But all of us in the journalism business, admittedly, are still figuring out how best to cover what the weight of evidence suggests is an authoritarian moment with few parallels in our lifetimes.

In one measure of the challenge, researchers with the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin studied the views of 56 people who believed Trump won the 2020 election. The results are sobering: Participants trusted unedited video content, personal experience, and their own research and judgment more than social media and news organizations, they found.

The Trump era has prompted The Times and other news outlets to take steps to better organize and invest in coverage of democracy and efforts to undermine it.

Its first editor is Griff Witte, a longtime foreign correspondent who said in an interview that his years abroad gave him fresh eyes in approaching the job.

From perches in London and Berlin, he covered the far rights reaction to an influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and witnessed up close how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, managed to use the mechanisms of democracy against democracy to entrench his power.

We have Jan. 6, which is highly visual and very dramatic, Witte said, but you also have a lot that is going on in a subterranean way that no one sees.

The Timess new executive editor, Joe Kahn, has been clear about his view of the papers responsibility to the public: that Times journalists cannot be impartial about whether the United States slides into autocracy. As he told David Folkenflik of NPR in a recent interview, You cant be committed to independent journalism and be agnostic about the state of democracy.

The Times approaches this mandate broadly, reflecting the papers size and the sprawling, global nature of the topic.

Coverage of democracy is woven across multiple parts of the newsroom, including the politics desk, which covers campaigns and elections; the enterprise and investigative teams, which dig deep into stories that require more than the usual elbow grease; national correspondents across the United States, who cover everything from hurricanes to school shootings to big societal trends; international correspondents, based in many instances in countries that dont have a free press; and the Washington bureau, which covers the White House, Congress and federal agencies.

We need your input, too.

The Times has asked readers to tell us their concerns about the state and future of American democracy, and On Politics will regularly round up stories on this topic from colleagues across the newsroom. Expect to see new guest authors contributing to the newsletter in the weeks to come. And please drop us a line with your thoughts.

In case you missed it, Peter Baker wrote about the House panels laserlike focus on Trumps culpability for the Jan. 6 riot. In the entire 246-year history of the United States, Baker writes, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.

States are spending millions to combat a deluge of unfounded rumors and lies around this years midterm elections, Cecilia Kang reports.

Matt Apuzzo and Benjamin Novak examine how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, has not hesitated to use the levers of government power to erode democratic norms and cement one-party rule during a decade in power. Orban, as Elisabeth Zerofsky wrote for The New York Times magazine last year, has become a source of inspiration for some on the American right.

Danny Hakim and Alexandra Berzon take apart 2000 Mules, a new movie about the 2020 election that makes a host of misleading and outright false claims.

In The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reflect on how, after covering Richard Nixons downfall, we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest. But then, they write, along came Trump.

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On Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Heres what Shuran Huang told us about capturing the image above:

It was a hot day at Union Square near Capitol Hill. Gun violence survivors and families of victims were waiting to hear from members of Congress at a gun control rally. Many wore red shirts bearing the words Moms Demand Action.

People were wiping sweat off their foreheads. Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally showed up. As she spoke, I noticed a woman in the crowd raising her hands and clapping to every line Pelosi said.

The speaker promised that Congress would pursue action on guns. Why would someone be against raising the age so that teenagers do not have AK-47s? she asked. Why would someone not want protection in their home so that children cannot have access dangerously to guns?

As Pelosi spoke, the womans hands appeared to hold both the speaker and the Capitol building in the center of the frame.

Thanks for reading. Well see you on Monday.

Blake

Is there anything you think were missing? Anything you want to see more of? Wed love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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How Journalists Wrestle With Covering Threats to Democracy - The New York Times