heathercoxrichardson.substack.…

#HeatherCoxRichardson #uspolitics
Sep 14, 2024

..."After bomb threats today, officials had to evacuate two elementary schools in #Springfield, Ohio, and move the students to a different location. They had to close a middle school altogether. This is the second day #bombthreats have closed schools and public buildings after MAGA #Republicans have spread the lie that #Haitian #immigrants there have been eating white people's pets. Haitian immigrants, who were welcomed to Springfield by officials eager to revitalize the city and who are there legally, say they are afraid.

Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo today explained where the lie had come from and how it had spread. More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city.
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The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate.

Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration.

Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.
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Controlling the country through the courts was the plan behind stacking the courts with Republican nominees and weaponizing the filibuster to stop Democrats from passing legislation. In March 2024, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that McConnell “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”...