Two Americans, Judith A. Voorhees and Charles K. Voorhees, filed a lawsuit today in federal court in Washington D.C. seeking a temporary restraining order “enjoining Defendants and any third parties from further destroying any portion of the White House.” That may sound like slamming the door after the horse has escaped from the barn, but the lawsuit recognizes that if Trump wanted to, he could tear down the entire White House and build some sort of garish South Florida monstrosity in its place, and there would be no way to stop him.

The lawsuit says that Trump broke the law. He violated the National Capital Planning Act of 1952 by failing to submit plans for his “renovation” of the White House to the National Capital Planning Commission. He violated the National Historic Preservation Act (“NHPA”) of 1966 by failing to notify or consult with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (“ACHP”) and the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office (“SHPO”) before beginning work on the property and by failing to evaluate the effects of any proposed work on the historical property of the White House. Last, but not least, Trump bypassed “legally required oversight by the Commission of Fine Arts (“CFA”), which reviews and advises on the design and aesthetics of the exterior modifications to the White House and its grounds.”

Trump clearly broke several laws by leveling the East Wing of the White House, but he doesn’t care. The Supreme Court – six of the justices anyway -- allowed him to break the law and not face any consequences, because they ruled that Trump cannot be charged with a crime for any official act he carries out as president.

Tearing down a portion of the White House is an official act. So, it doesn’t matter that Donald Trump ordered that the East Wing be torn down in favor of a privately funded monument to himself that the White House is already calling “The Donald J. Trump Ballroom.”

It wouldn’t matter if Trump decided to tear down the entire structure of the White House, which has stood, in one form or another, since the year 1800. He could do it. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, looking rather pleased with herself, in answering a question from a reporter, said today that Trump can tear down anything he wants, including the White House or the Jefferson Memorial, because permission is required from the National Capital Planning Commission “only for vertical construction,” but not for demolition.

But of course, she is wrong about that. Trump can tear down any federal structure he wants in Washington D.C. or anywhere else in the country because the Supreme Court said his official actions as president are not to be challenged under law.

It is probably the case that the dimwits on the Supreme Court, in granting to Trump or any future president ultimate power under the unitary executive theory that they are so fond of, did not foresee that Donald Trump would use that power to destroy part of the national monument that he lives in. That is the problem with right-wing beliefs like the unitary executive theory held by the so-called “conservatives” on the Court. They presuppose that the American people will elect at least a sane person fully in possession of his mental faculties and maybe even a person with a conscience.

That did not happen last November. The American people elected a person so consumed by self-adoration and a grossly inflated sense of his worth as a human being that he is utterly and completely out of control. Upon announcing his plans to add a gigantic “ballroom” to the White House, Trump promised that the structure of the building as it stands would not be touched, because he is its “biggest fan.”

He lied. He knew at that moment that he would do anything he wanted to the White House, because that is the way he has lived his life. Trump infamously told Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape that he could “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything you want.” He was not only describing his proclivity for sexual assault, he was telling the world that in his life so far, he could do anything he wanted to do and get away with it, because he was Donald Trump.

He is still Donald Trump, and thanks to the Supreme Court of the United States, we are stuck with him. He can tear down the East Wing of the White House. He can slap gold leaf on stair treads in the White House if he wants to. He can hold fund raisers in the White House and line his own pockets with millions of dollars. He can sit in the Oval Office and plan crypto scams and rake in the bucks from MAGA suckers if he wants.

He can order the U.S. military to shoot boats out of the water based on his suspicion that the people on the boats are smuggling drugs, which would be murder under any sane system of laws.

He wakes up in the morning and he breathes air filled with magic dust scattered by a Supreme Court with six justices who think that the power that they have aggregated to themselves and passed on to him allows him to, in his own words, do anything he wants.

Donald Trump can turn the White House into Mar a Lago. His Supreme Court is poised to allow him to go to war against his own people using the United States military. His Supreme Court will allow him to declare an emergency and station soldiers outside polling places in November of next year, because under their theory of executive power, he can do anything he wants.

If you visit Washington D.C. today, or next week, or the week after that, you will see soldiers in the streets carrying rifles, and you will see a national monument, the White House, that has been vandalized by a madman.

We live in a country that we do not recognize because last year, our fellow citizens voted for a dictator as president.

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In this Reality Check video, DCReport’s co-founder, and Pulitzer Prize winner, David Cay Johnston, takes a closer look at the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey—and why dismissing the case too quickly could conceal the truth. Johnston argues that instead of granting Comey’s request to throw out what appears to be a politically motivated prosecution, the judge should allow full subpoena power to uncover whether Donald Trump’s Justice Department engaged in vindictive prosecution. It’s a moment that could test the very integrity of America’s justice system.

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The post James Comey: Vindictive Prosecution? David Cay Johnston Weighs In appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Three weeks ago, and I put out our weekly podcast, and I gave it the following title: Trump Just Lost The Military Forever. The premise was simple. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth had summoned all of America’s generals and admirals together for a historically dangerous meeting. And then proceeded to give speeches that convinced even the most die-hard MAGA in uniform that these are not men fit to lead a Kindergarten field trip.

Now, here we are three weeks later, and that initial assessment appears to have been 100% accurate:

Numerous high-ranking officers painted Mr. Hegseth’s Sept. 30 speech to hundreds of generals and admirals gathered at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia as a turning point in how his leadership style, attitude and overall competency are viewed in the upper echelons of the U.S. armed forces.

“It was a massive waste of time. … If he ever had us, he lost us,” one current Army general told The Washington Times.

Most days, I wake up and my first thought is, “God, I hate being right.” Because most days, the terrible things I was worried about coming to pass, do. Some days, though, the regime lives down to my low expectations and that is exactly what I was hoping for. Oh boy! Did they ever!

Back in April, I pointed out that Trump was in a Catch-22. Pete Hegseth is a loser, but Trump can’t put anyone EXCEPT a loser in charge of the military.

TL;DR - Trump needs someone who is broken and weak to run the military. Someone who will obey his every illegal order because they have no future without Trump. Hegseth is that man.

Trump needs a man like Hegseth because he only has two years to seize power before Democrats take control of Congress and expose everything the regime has been doing through investigations. Trump will need the military to seize control of the 2026 midterm elections.

BUT! Such a weak and broken man like Hegseth can never command the respect of the military, which has 250 years of tradition and service and sacrifice and honor, something Hegseth knows very little about.

Accordingly, Hegseth is a laughably bad fit for the job:

“Hegseth’s focus on fitness, weight and appearance reflects his experiences as a junior officer. These are perennial challenges at the small unit level; anyone who has commanded a small unit in the military understands where he’s coming from,” Mr. Cancian wrote. “However, if his military experience had been at higher levels, he would have discussed strategy, threats and warfighting at the operational level. As it was, these topics were nearly absent from his remarks.”

Hegseth is unqualified for the job he has, and he’s definitely incapable of the job Trump hired him to do: Remake the military into a fascist weapon willing to overthrow the constitutional rule of law to preserve Donald Trump’s power.

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Where does this leave us?

Hegseth will grow increasingly erratic and hostile as he orders the military to respect him. Small men always lash out when their betters look down on them and there’s not a single general or admiral who considers Hegseth to be their superior officer, just a higher-ranking one.1 Expect more temper tantrums, firings, and obsessive attention to trivial bullshit. Anything to give Hegseth the illusion of control and authority. He doesn’t really know how to be a real leader so this is all he’ll have.

Trump will continue to try to manufacture a “national crisis” to justify using the military to seize control of the elections, but that will prove impossible to sell to the public as legitimate with video of inflatable costumes flooding social media. The Supreme Court will still almost certainly allow the deployment of troops despite knowing for a fact the narrative being used to justify the deployment is a lie, but the court of public opinion will not be swayed so easily.

Remember, it is critical for stolen elections to appear legitimate; otherwise, the entire scam falls apart. As I keep mentioning, this is a very large country with 400 million guns. Even if the United States military were completely behind Trump, and they very much are not, they could not possibly seize power here and hold it. The only way to do this is to maintain the fiction of democracy and legitimacy, possibly deploying the military to crush a blue city or two to make a point.

None of that is going to happen now because Hegseth has ensured no one will follow him down the road to fascism, even if they were so inclined in the first place.

Thank god Trump is so weak and stupid that he has to surround himself with men who are even weaker and stupider. Our greatest ally in this fight continues to be the regime itself.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 11 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Trump and Hegseth sure do like the word, “lethal.” But it’s a meaningless word in the context of the modern world. How did U.S. lethality work out in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did all our warships and our stealthy fighters and bombers and our highly trained soldiers win us anything even marginally resembling a victory in those two countries? The four-year anniversary of Russia’s war against its much, much smaller neighbor, Ukraine, is fast approaching. How’s that working out for you, Vlad? Scheduled your victory parade for Red Square yet?

What the hell is happening over there in Ukraine? What the hell happened to us in Iraq and Afghanistan? With all our wealth, all our technological superiority, all the weapons systems we have spent decades building and equipping our army and air force and navy and marines with, why weren’t we able to roll into Afghanistan in 2001 after 9-11 and kick ass and take names and get our revenge and declare victory and get out of there? Why was “shock and awe” in Iraq such a dud?

I read something the other day that said a main battle tank like the U.S. Abrams facing enemy drones is estimated to have a 75-minute lifespan on the modern battlefield. Those Abrams we sent to Ukraine? They’re either dead or useless. Same for Russia’s main modern battle tank, the T-90. According to an authoritative Dutch open-source intelligence site called Oryx, it has been visually confirmed that Russia has lost 187 T-90 tanks since the war began in 2022. The Ukrainian army has destroyed them with American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles and another missile made by Sweden, the fire-and-forget NLAW. Ukraine has also used drones to destroy Russian tanks, dropping small explosive warheads down the commander’s cupola, or using drones to put anti-tank mines in their way.

I spent a few hours this afternoon reading the latest update on the Russia-Ukraine war from the Institute for the Study of War, which follows the war using open-source methods and reports from the battlefield gleaned from sources in Ukraine and Russian military bloggers. Scrolling through the ISW report, dated October 21, what you see is a depressing tableau of a pitiful helpless giant nibbling at Ukrainian front-line defenses all the way from the border with Russia to Kherson in the South.

One paragraph of the ISW report of the Russian fight for Pokrovsk – one paragraph – reads like this: “Russian forces attacked near Pokrovsk itself; north of Pokrovsk near Rodynske; northeast of Pokrovsk near Sukhetske, Krasnyi Lyman, Novoekonomichne, and Mykolaivka; east of Pokrovsk near Myrnohrad; southeast of Pokrovsk near Promin and Lysivka; south of Pokrovsk near Zelene; and southwest of Pokrovsk near Zvirove, Kotlyne, Udachne, and Molodetske on October 20 and 21.”

Expanding on that paragraph, ISW reports that a Ukrainian drone battalion commander described street to street fighting with small groups of Russian soldiers attacking Ukrainian drone operators and mortar crews one by one with “small arms.” ISW reports like that one go all the way from Kupyansk in northern Luhansk through Donetsk and outside of Bakhmut – remember Bakhmut? They’re still fighting a few miles outside of that piece of flattened Ukraine. And down the front lines the fighting goes, through Zaporizhia all the way to just outside Kherson.

Here is a description of a Russian assault on a town called Orikhiv in the Zaporizhia region: “Artillerymen and drone operators of the 4th Military Base (58th CAA); drone operators of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, including its 417th Reconnaissance Battalion and Unmanned Systems Company; and Molniya-2 loitering munition operators of the Russian Chechen Vostok-Akhmat Battalion are reportedly striking Ukrainian positions and forces near Mala Tokmachka.”

Got that? “For loitering munitions” read: drones. For “Unmanned Systems Company” read: drones. There are similar descriptions of actions by Ukraine’s forces. The war, along a front that is more than 600 miles long, is being fought with drones, mortars, artillery, and occasionally rifles. It’s modern, but it’s not. War today is still bullets and artillery shells and rockets and explosions and death.

So, we have one of the world’s big powers, a country with as many if not more nuclear weapons than the U.S. has, a country with a zillion barrels of oil under its ground, one of the countries that defeated the Nazi war machine, and what are they doing? They’re flying armed drones over Ukraine. They’re shooting mortars at positions held by Ukrainian soldiers that are so deeply dug-in that there are few, if any, casualties. Russia now has somewhere in the vicinity of 600,000 soldiers in Ukraine, many with training of only a few weeks.

Russian losses have been staggering. Politico reported last week in a story titled, “Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains,” that Russia has lost “281,550 soldiers in Ukraine in the first eight months of this year, according to a document that Ukrainian intelligence says contained leaked Russian data.” Based on Western intelligence estimates, The Economist estimates that there have between 1 million and 1.5 million Russians killed or wounded since February of 2022. The British Ministry of Defense estimates that about 250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed.

Those Russian soldiers were killed in the kinds of attacks that I just described happening all along the front lines. Ukraine can be said to be winning its war against Russia, even as they lose a kilometer here, a village there, because they have turned a 600-mile front line into one gigantic Battle of Bakhmut. Russia attacks and attacks and attacks again, all along the front and after two or three months, ISW reports that they now occupy this village in the north or that village in the south that less than a thousand Ukrainians once called home.

Meanwhile, Russia is sending rockets and drones into Ukraine by the hundreds on a nightly basis. They hit a kindergarten in Kyiv last night. ISW reports that Russia is carrying out “acts of sabotage and hybrid operations” in Poland and Romania and elsewhere in Western Europe. Russian operatives are attempting to booby-trap supply shipments into Ukraine with explosives. They’re flying jets over Estonian airspace. They’ve flown armed drones across the Polish border.

This is the war being waged by one of the world’s alleged “superpowers.” Their rockets destroyed a kindergarten. Armed Russian drones are flying into apartment buildings in Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson. They are killing Ukrainian civilians every single night. Russian soldiers are being sent to the frontlines with incomplete uniforms having spent less than a week shooting their AK-47’s in training. It’s no wonder that they are dying and being seriously wounded by the hundreds of thousands. Politico reports that Ukraine has recently captured 2,300 Russian soldiers. Almost 34,000 Russian soldiers are described by Russia itself as “missing.”

What happened to Putin’s big attack on Ukraine? His generals told him he would take Kyiv in five days. Today, restaurants and movie theaters are open in Kyiv. The government is functioning. The same Ukrainian president whom Putin thought he would force from office is still the country’s leader.

After nearly four years.

Warfare for big countries has become one huge Vietnam. Spend hundreds of billions. Commit millions of troops. Blow shit up. Invent and put new kinds of weapons into the war. Play the game of catch-up with remote controlled drones and computers that hack the enemy’s defenses. Shoot more artillery shells. Fire more missiles. Blow more shit up.

Where is the victory? Where are the Russian flags over Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson? What is Putin doing on the phone with Trump? He’s demanding that Ukraine give up territory that he cannot take having spent the lives of nearly 300,000 Russian soldiers this year alone. Trump, to his everlasting shame, actually listened to him in Anchorage, and then turned around and told President Zelenskyy what Putin said. Then he lectured Zelenskyy at the White House last week, telling him once again that he would have to give up Ukrainian land that his army has fought over for four years.

What kind of war is this? For Russia, it’s a losing war. For Trump, it’s a war that he cannot “end” in the way he thinks he has “ended” all the other wars he has hallucinated on his way to his hallucinated Nobel Peace Prize.

This is what happens to countries that have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out whole populations and turn tens of millions of square miles into inhabitable wasteland. They sit on those stockpiles of unusable bombs and missiles, they waste hundreds of billions on “defense” or on “war” in the way we wasted money and material and the blood of our human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Putin has wasted his soldiers and his rubles in Ukraine.

Then, Putin attacks his neighboring country, and with itchy fingers and visions of camouflaged sugarplums in his head and nothing else to do, Donald Trump goes to war against his own citizens. He commits tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars and his uniformed and armed soldiers to the streets of his own country.

That is what our military is doing today. Its soldiers are bopping down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in a cartoon version of a parade. Its generals are flying to a theater somewhere in Virginia so they can be lectured to by two cartoon characters in ill-fitting suits babbling about beards and haircuts and pushups and winning elections that were not won. Its soldiers are picking up garbage and raking leaves in its nation’s capital.

This is why big countries should not go to war. They will lose because the leaders of their armies are delusional ignorant fuckwits with too many gold bathroom fixtures and too much desperately unearned self-importance. It’s a recipe for disaster, a gigantic display of powerlessness by the powerful, and it’s happening right now in Ukraine and in the streets of the United States of America.

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They started by banning the teaching of critical race theory. Then they didn’t want to hear the word “slavery” anymore. Then it was DEI, anything that touched on the diverse history of our country. No more Black History month, no more talk about Tuskegee Airmen or the women who were crucial to the Manhattan Project. Whole shelves of books were removed from libraries.

Now the assault on our history by Donald Trump is being done with excavators that are ripping, crushing, and destroying by board and nail and wire and window, the East Wing of the White House.

Here is a list of recent presidents who somehow got through their terms in office without ordering the wholesale destruction of the building where they lived and worked: Harry Truman; Dwight D. Eisenhower; John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson; Richard Nixon; Gerald Ford; Jimmy Carter; George H. W. Bush; Bill Clinton; George W. Bush; Barack Obama; Joe Biden. There were some minor changes – FDR put in an indoor swimming pool that later became the press room; Truman added a bowling alley; Gerald Ford had an outdoor pool installed; Jimmy Carter built an outdoor tennis court; Obama transformed the tennis court into a basketball court.

None of them drove two excavators onto the grounds of the White House and started ripping down its walls and windows, as Donald Trump began doing to the East Wing yesterday.

When Trump announced that he would construct a 90,000 square foot ballroom on White House grounds, he promised that the White House itself would not be touched. “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it but not touching it — and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” Trump told reporters in July. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

He was breathing unassisted at the time of that statement, so of course he lied.

The changes Trump has made to the White House could be charitably termed for recreational purposes. Trump ripped out the grass and flowers from the Rose Garden, paved the place, added outdoor tables with yellow-striped umbrellas and renamed it the “Rose Garden Club” where he has held dinners and lunches for members of the House and Senate from the Republican Party, and a dinner for billionaires who have promised donations to his ballroom.

That last event, by the way, is what is typically called a fund raiser. There has never been a fund raiser held at the White House previous to Trump’s September 15 “Legacy Dinner” for 130 business leaders and wealthy donors.

It’s always been something of an anachronism that the White House serves as both the Executive Branch headquarters of the government and the home of whichever president is in office. Great Britain is the only other country where the leader of its government lives and works in the same building, 10 Downing Street in the nation’s capital, London. You look at photographs of the interior of either the White House or 10 Downing Street and they show a rabbit warren of small offices, some of which are windowless, that house the people who work for the most powerful person in either country.

Trump appears to be in the process of transforming the White House into Mar a Lago North, adding gilded gimcrackery to the Oval Office and other rooms in the building. He bragged recently of replacing the floor of the interior passage leading to the Rose Garden with marble tiles, claiming that the previous floor was made of “Home Depot tiles that were cracking and 30 years old.” The artist’s rendering of the proposed ballroom shows a high-ceilinged space the exterior of which some architects have predicted will “dwarf” the rest of the White House.

The White House, it goes without saying, is not owned by Donald Trump. It belongs to the federal government and has traditionally been referred to as “The People’s House.” Numerous stories about the destruction of the East Wing have pointed out that Trump completely ignored the usual process, involving the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission on Fine Arts, for approving changes to the White House. Believing he can do anything he wants, anytime he wants, to anything or anyone he wants, Trump didn’t ask anyone for permission to alter the building which was built by the second president of the United States, John Adams, and was first occupied by Thomas Jefferson in 1801.

But that’s history, someone else’s history. Donald Trump doesn’t care about history. What he cares about is money. Here is what Trump said today at a luncheon for Republican Senators at the so-called Rose Garden Club: “You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back. You hear that sound? Oh, that’s music to my ears. I love that sound. Other people don’t like it. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.”

Then he told another lie, because he is Donald Trump and he was still breathing without assistance: “In this case, it reminds me of lack of money because I’m paying for it,” he said.

What he’s going to use his Big Beautiful Ballroom for is fund raisers and state dinners. For Donald Trump, who has been selling access to himself at private dinners for one million dollars a head, even the state dinners will be fund raisers. He’ll charge countries who want their leaders to be honored at the White House, and he’ll sell tickets to people who want to attend the dinners and kiss his ass. He’s going to tack a gaudy, disgusting display of bad taste onto the history of our country and make billions of it. He’s Donald Trump. It’s what he does.

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Today is Tuesday, October 21, 2025 and the Republican Party continues to be completely fucked. Smiles, everyone! Smiles!

Because they had no plan other than, “Fuck you, Democrats!”, Republicans walked into a funding fight with no real exit strategy. For some insane reason, they believed they had the stronger message. They really did not. “We love firing government employees, fucking over blue states, and refusing to give tens of millions of people back their healthcare!” is the Cybertruck of political messaging minus the exploding battery.

Oh wait, we’ve reached the exploding battery part:

Three weeks into shutdown gridlock, some Senate Republicans are expressing openness to a controversial solution: nuking the filibuster.

“I know that’s being discussed,” Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS. “I am a strong supporter of the filibuster, but obviously I’ll look at any plan that anyone puts out in order to reopen the government.”

Senate Republican leadership is not into this idea, but an increasingly vocal and growing number of Republicans are pushing for it.

What’s happening here? A few things. The massive No Kings rally on Saturday has the GOP rattled. They were assured it was going to flop or be violent or no one would notice. Instead, over 7 million people showed up and the entire world saw a peaceful protest…against Trump and his entire party.

That’s 2 million more than showed up in June and getting awfully close to that critical 3.5%. That would be the historic threshold where 3.5% of the population engages in protest/civil disobedience and governments fall.

At the same time, Republicans are running out of track for the Trump Train. This week and next, millions of Americans are going to get letters from their insurance companies. These letters will explain how much more expensive their premiums are going to be without the ACA subsidies that are expiring. Social media will be flooded with enraged Americans who will demand those subsidies back, and even more Americans pointing the finger at the party refusing to renew them.

Hint: It’s Republicans. Republicans are refusing to renew them.

The easy way out would be just to restore the ACA subsidies and Medicaid funding. Republicans will still get 90% of their cruel budget passed and take the big W for fucking the country. But they can’t DO that because compromise is weakness and fascism will never compromise blablabla.

Remember, the regime’s illusion of total power has to be maintained at all times because without it, everything falls apart.

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But why won’t Republicans flex their muscle and do away with the filibuster? They’re all about power and abusing it, right? Well, as I keep pointing out, Republicans are not convinced that Donald Trump can seal the deal on his authoritarian takeover:

Removing the filibuster has long made Republican senators queasy. While all senators acknowledge it would be easier to pass bills with a 51-vote threshold versus needing 60 votes to move legislation, Republicans are well aware Democrats would use a simple-majority for bills if they retake the majority.

“Bad idea,” Thune told reporters of getting rid of the filibuster as he walked into his office Monday evening.

…

Speaker Mike Johnson has been more careful, arguing in a press conference earlier this month that he would be “deeply concerned” if Democrats used a diminished 51-vote threshold to turn the U.S. “into a communist country.”

I cannot stress this enough: This is not what a fascist regime convinced it is winning acts like. Vladimir Putin does not give a flying fuck about what the opposition party will do “if they win” the next election. Viktor Orban doesn’t give a shit if the rules would give the opposition party the chance to remake the country. Xi Jinping doesn’t lose a moment of sleep wondering if he’s making a mistake by setting up a system that will allow his successor to move China in a way he wouldn’t like.

But Republicans are extremely concerned about this.

Again, the filibuster is the only thing keeping their party from extinction. A new Voting Rights Act alone would be a death sentence. The day the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court announce they’re taking the new law under review, Democrats would announce that they’re expanding the Court by 5 seats and, gee, are you SURE you want to review that law, Chief Justice John Roberts?

So, yes, Republicans are acutely aware the filibuster is all that stands between them and oblivion in a single election cycle. If they really thought they would never have to face another real election, they wouldn’t give a shit. They would just nuke it and pass whatever budget they want. They would outlaw abortion nationwide. They would make contraception illegal. They would criminalize homosexuality and transgender people. They would make it illegal to speak any language except English. It wouldn’t matter that the public would despise them because who cares? Elections don’t matter anymore!

But they clearly do matter and Republicans are very much convinced they will not be in power much longer. As badly as they want to load that gun and pull the trigger, they know THEY KNOW, deep in their shriveled little hearts, that soon it will not be THEIR finger on the trigger. And while they’re a long way from being able to pass laws to fully cement their power, Democrats can easily pass just two or three to cement theirs.

That’s what happens when you turn your party into a minority party cesspit of white nationalism and fascism that can only win by rigging elections and gerrymandering. If elections become free and fair, really free and fair, you lose everything. That is what Mike Johnson and John Thune fear above all else and why they’ll resist nuking the filibuster. The end of the filibuster is the end of the Republican Party.

The problem, of course, is that Donald Trump doesn’t give the tiniest of shits about the GOP. He wants what HE wants and who cares what the consequences are later? That means eventually, Trump will almost certainly order Senate Republicans to end the filibuster and end the shutdown. Then Thune and his party of craven cowards will either have to obey their god emperor and destroy their party, or save themselves and risk his wrath.

Or, Senate Republicans could finally negotiate and end the shutdown like adults, which would preserve their party and let them take the brunt of the blame instead of their beloved master in the White House. They may even come out with a bump in popularity for working to preserve healthcare for millions of their own voters. Weird to think Republicans actually doing something to help their base…

But all of this is in the future. Hopefully, the not-too-distant future as the shutdown is set to begin its fourth week on Wednesday. A lot of people are hurting, the fallout from the shutdown is spreading and impacting the economy in increasingly damaging ways, and with the economy already collapsing, this can easily push it into a freefall.

Republicans keep talking about how this is going to go on until Thanksgiving or after, but that’s a bluff and/or a desperate bid to keep the House from reopening so they can’t vote to release the Epstein Files. But in reality, time is almost up for the GOP. The question now is what will they do to avoid the doom of their own design speeding towards them at high speed? Watch this space.

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Fascism hates organized protests. Over 7 million of us showed up, and the fascists are afraid. They fear US. Keep the fascists afraid by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun. There are 13 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.