Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift. Whenever there’s another mass- or school-shooting, Republican politicians hustle out fundraising emails about how “Democrats are coming to take your guns!” The result is a measurable and profitable spike in gun sales after every new slaughter of our families and children, followed by a fresh burst of campaign cash to GOP lawmakers. But the GOP’s ability to exploit any opportunity that comes along — regardless of its impact on America or American citizens — goes way beyond just fundraising hustles. When Jared Kushner was underwater and nearly bankrupt because he overpaid for 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a billion-dollar bailout to cover his mortgage, his buddies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) blockaded American ally (and host to the Fifth Fleet) Qatar until that country relented and laundered the money to Jared through a Canadian investment company. Just this year, after Trump deregulated toxic trains leading to a horrible crash and the contamination of East Palestine, Ohio, Steve Bannon — already charged with multiple fraud-related crimes and then pardoned by Trump — showed up to hustle $300+ water filters to the people of that town. The grift is at the core of the GOP’s existence, and has been since Nixon blew up LBJ’s peace talks with the Vietnamese in 1968 and then took cash bribes from the Milk Lobby and Jimmy Hoffa in the White House while having his mafia-connected “plumbers” wiretap the DNC’s offices at the Watergate. — Republicans successfully fought the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices for decades; in turn, Big Pharma pours millions into their campaign coffers and personal pockets (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court ). — Republicans beat back Democratic efforts to stop insurance giants from ripping off seniors and our government with George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage privatization scam; in turn, the insurance companies rain cash on them like an Indian monsoon. — Republicans oppose any effort to replace fossil fuels with green energy sources that don’t destroy our environment; in turn, the fossil fuel industry jacked up the price of gasoline into the stratosphere just in time for the 2022 election (and you can expect them to try it again in 2024). — Republicans stopped enforcement of a century’s worth of anti-trust laws in 1983, wiping out America’s small businesses and turning rural city centers into ghost towns while pushing profits and prices through the ceiling; in turn massive corporate PACs fund ads supporting Republican candidates every election cycle. — Republicans authored legislation letting billionaires own thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets; in turn the vast majority of those papers (now half of all local papers are owned by a handful of rightwing New York hedge funds) and stations all run daily news and editorials attacking Democrats and supporting the GOP. — Republicans Trump and Pai killed net neutrality so giant tech companies can legally spy on you and me, recording every website we visit and selling that information for billions; in turn, major social media sites amplify rightwing voices while giant search engines stopped spidering progressive news sites . Newspeak — George Orwell’s term for the grift where politicians use fancy phrases that mean the opposite of what people think they mean — has been the GOP’s go-to strategy for a half-century. Richard Nixon, for example, promised to crack down on drugs, but instead used that as an excuse to crack down on anti-war liberals and Black people. Instead of an economic grift, it was a political grift. As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum : “You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“ And it worked. The grift is a recurrent theme through Republican presidencies in the modern era. Ronald Reagan told us if we just destroyed America’s unions and moved our manufacturing to China and Mexico, great job opportunities would fill the nation. He followed that up by promising if we just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would trickle-down to the rest of us. Reagan even assured us that raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and taxing Social Security benefits would mean seniors could retire with greater ease. All, of course, were grifter’s lies. Republican presidents since Reagan have continued the tradition. George W. Bush called his program to make it easier to clear-cut America’s forests and rip roads through wilderness areas the “Healthy Forests Initiative.” His program to legalize more pollution from coal-fired power plants and immunize them from community lawsuits (leading to tens of thousands of additional lung- and heart-disease deaths in the years since) was named the “Clean Air Act.” Bush’s scam to “strengthen” Medicare — “Medicare Advantage” — was a thinly disguised plan to privatize that program that is today draining Medicare’s coffers while making insurance executives richer than Midas. Donald Trump told Americans he had the coronavirus pandemic under control while he was actually making the situation far worse: America had more deaths per capita from the disease than any other developed country in the world, with The Lancet estimating a half-million Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s grift. Jared and Ivanka cashed in on their time in the White House to the tune of billions, while Trump squeezed hundreds of millions out of foreign governments, encouraging them to illegally pay him through rentals in his properties around the world. Other Trump grifts — most leading to grateful industries or billionaires helping him and the GOP out — included : — Making workplaces less safe — Boosting religious schools at the expense of public schools — Cutting relief for students defrauded by student loan sharks — Shrinking the safety net by cutting $60 billion out of food stamps — Forcing workers to put in overtime without getting paid extra for it — Pouring more pollution from fossil fuels into our fragile atmosphere — Gutting the EPA’s science operation — Rescinding rules that protected workers at federal contract sites — Dialing back car air pollution emissions standards — Reducing legal immigration of skilled workers into the US from “shithole countries” — Blocking regulation of toxic chemicals — Rolling back rules on banks, setting up the crisis of 2023 — Defenestrating rules against racially segregated housing While Nixon was simply corrupt — a crook, to use his own term — in 1978 when five Republicans on the Supreme Court signed off on the Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell himself, giving corporations the legal right to bribe American politicians, the GOP went all in. Ever since then, the GOP has purely been the party of billionaires and giant corporations, although their most successful political grift has been to throw an occasional bone to racists, gun-nuts, fascists, homophobes, and woman-haters to get votes. Democrats at that time were largely funded by the unions, so it wasn’t until the 1990s, after Reagan had destroyed about half of America’s union jobs and gutted the unions’ ability to fund campaigns, that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton was forced to make a big turn toward taking corporate cash. Since Barack Obama showed how online fundraising could replace corporate cash, however, about half of the nation’s Democratic politicians have aligned with the Progressive Caucus and eschewed corporate money, returning much of the Party to its FDR and Great Society base. The GOP, in contrast, has never wavered from lapping up corporate money in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate socialism. Their most dangerous grift today, though, has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It’s leading us straight into the jaws of fascism. Bannon’s grift in East Palestine is the smallest of the small, after his being busted for a multi-million-dollar fraud in the “Build the Wall” scheme and others, but is still emblematic of the Republican strategy at governance. When all you have to offer the people is a hustle, then at the very least, Republicans figure, you should be able to make a buck or gain/keep political power while doing it. On Monday, the Essex County clerk held a drawing to see which political party would get the preferential first line on the ballot for the Nov. 7 general election. Such drawings happen all over the state around this time and usually generate little hubbub. But this time, the Republicans won the coveted Line A in Essex County — for the first time in 17 years and on the same day a Republican state Senate candidate sued County Clerk Chris J. Durkin for “nefarious conduct” the candidate said ensured Democrats’ statistically improbable 17-year winning streak. Such a win might delight other Republicans. But Michael D. Byrne, the GOP candidate vying for retiring Democratic Sen. Dick Codey’s seat, remained just as suspicious after Monday’s drawing as he was when he filed his lawsuit in Superior Court earlier in the day. Friday, he filed a statement with the court to renew his concerns, saying he believes the ballot drawing was manipulated and that the drawing “lacked transparency, fairness, and honesty just as the previous 18 drawings did.” Byrne and his attorney Giancarlo Ghione told the New Jersey Monitor Friday afternoon that their civil rights lawsuit will proceed because Byrne remains concerned that Durkin, a Democrat who has been county clerk since 2006, hasn’t taken steps to ensure the equal treatment of all parties and public confidence in the election process. “The odds are ludicrous,” Ghione said. “Instead of being 0 out of the last 18 drawings, we’re now at 1 out of 19, when it’s supposed to be a 50-50 chance of drawing Line A.” Byrne called the Democrats’ dominance in the drawings “an ongoing issue in Essex County,” where Republicans hadn’t won Line A since 1999. Republicans for years consequently speculated that clerks have dented, refrigerated, or otherwise manipulated capsules in the bingo-style drawing so they’d know by feel which contained their preferred party, Byrne said. If he’s elected as senator, Byrne said, he’ll introduce legislation to ban the capsules and require clerks to adopt practices to ensure a truly random drawing. “We need a permanent solution for transparency in this process,” Byrne said. Byrne, who’s the longtime chairman of the Montclair Republican County Committee, on Monday had asked a judge to stop the drawing scheduled for that afternoon and order changes to ensure transparency. “In his tenure, Durkin has never drawn Line A for the Republican Party or for Republican candidates — a statistical impossibility and absurdity,” Byrne said in the lawsuit. “There is a statutory right to have a fair and honest chance at drawing the preferential position on the ballot, and it should be protected by the courts.” Judge Robert H. Gardner denied Byrne’s request for an injunction, clearing the way for Monday’s drawing to take place. Before the drawing, Byrne wrote in his Friday filing, Durkin told Byrne and another political candidate in attendance: “I think you’ll be happy with the process.” Ten seconds after he began rummaging for the winning capsule, Byrne wrote, Durkin presented “the capsule that would make us ‘happy with the process.'” Byrne insisted his fight is not a partisan one, writing in his Friday filing that Democrats were “disadvantaged by the lack of transparency and fairness” in Monday’s drawing. In response to the New Jersey Monitor’s request for comment Friday, Durkin sent a written statement through his office. “Each ballot drawing is conducted in a fair and open process where the public is invited to attend,” the statement said. “Each ballot drawing for the general election is conducted once a year and is conducted completely separate from the previous year. There was a lawsuit filed to delay the ballot drawing, but the judge found no basis to delay the ballot drawing. The Republican Party has been awarded Line A for the Nov. 7, 2023, general election.” Decades-long suspicions The controversy comes almost 40 years after a near-identical complaint in Essex County. In that case, Mary Mochary, then the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, sued Nicholas Caputo, then the Essex County clerk, and Raymond Durkin, who was then chairman of the county Democratic party. Chris Durkin, the current county clerk, is the late Raymond Durkin’s son. Mochary raised similar concerns about fairness and statistical improbabilities after Caputo in August 1984 drew the Democrats for the preferential first line on the ballot — the 40th time Democrats won the draw in the previous 41 draws, according to that lawsuit. The case made it to the state Supreme Court, where justices declared the controversy moot because the general election had already occurred by the time they issued their decision in July 1985. Mochary lost to incumbent Bill Bradley, a Democrat. But the court still found the facts disturbing, with one justice noting that circumstances documented in the case “must shock even the most cynical observer of the public scene.” The court recommended changes the clerk could take to improve voter trust, including allowing witnesses unimpeded, close views of the drawing; using a nonpartisan monitor; issuing a detailed, written explanation of the process; and implementing further unspecified “procedures likely to assure the integrity of an impartial draw subject only to the laws of chance.” It’s unclear how much the process changed after that ruling. By Byrne’s account, it didn’t. “It would appear that Durkin is on his way to following in the ignominious footsteps of his Democratic predecessor,” he said in his lawsuit. Byrne wants a judge to order many of the changes the Supreme Court recommended almost four decades ago by requiring Durkin to use a nonpartisan monitor; give witnesses “reasonable time” to inspect drawing materials visually and physically; give witnesses a close, unimpeded view of the drawing; conduct the drawing at full face, without his back turned to witnesses; and use tools that ensure the drawing materials have “no distinguishing features or temperatures.” Byrne proposed the League of Women Voters as a nonpartisan monitor, according to his complaint. Without such safeguards, Durkin will fail in his duty to ensure transparent, fair, and honest elections, Byrne’s lawsuit states. “The public rightfully cannot have confidence in the way the Essex County clerk conducts its drawing for ballot position,” the lawsuit states. Ballot placement has long been a sore subject for good-government advocates in New Jersey, who say political parties rig the ballot to control who has access to political power. But the overwhelmingly Democratic 27th Legislative District, where Byrne is running for a Senate seat, shows political rigging goes beyond the ballot. The district has been beset with controversy in recent months, with Democrats bypassing voters to jockey for control. Redistricting forced longtime Sen. Nia Gill into a primary race with Codey, with Codey winning in June. Earlier this week, Codey announced he would not seek reelection, leaving Gill supporters grousing and accusing Democratic leaders of orchestrating a scenario where they could hand-pick Codey’s successor. They did that this week, picking Assemblyman John McKeon to replace Codey and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill to replace his wife Alixon Collazos-Gill, who won her primary bid for an Assembly seat but is dropping out so her husband can have it, the New Jersey Globe reported . GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUBSCRIBE New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com . Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and Twitter . CONTINUE READING Show less Mark Meadows is reportedly seeking to completely do away with any of the criminal counts against him in Georgia stemming from alleged attempts to overturn the state's 2020 election, according to news reports on Saturday. Meadows, who previously moved to get the Georgia case moved to federal court, didn't wait for the conclusion of his first motion before asking for the court to throw away the case entirely. That move is "unusual," according to Anna Bower, a legal fellow and courts correspondent for Lawfare. However, according to Bower, Meadows is intent on speeding up the process, regardless of whether the venue change request has been decided. POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office? "That has not been decided yet, and in the usual process of things, you would first file a motion to remove, have that decided, and then filed this motion to dismiss," she said on MSNBC's Ayman on Saturday. "However, Meadows seems intent on speeding up the process, he makes the claim that as a part of removal analysis, the judge also has to decide whether or not he could potentially have these charges dismissed under the immunity claims" he has asserted. Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega also noted the filing, saying it's unlikely to succeed based on the rules. "Meadows' motion to dismiss will fail. Rule 12(b)(1) applies only to issues that can be decided w/out a trial on the merits," she said Saturday. "Here, whether the Supremacy Clause applies depends on what Trump and Meadows et al were doing, which can only be determined thru facts adduced at trial." Watch the MSNBC video below or click here. CONTINUE READING Show less Donald Trump on Saturday mentioned that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was meeting with other Republican presidential contenders, sarcastically calling such a meeting a "beautiful reunion." Trump, who it was recently reported was "unhinged" during the waning days of his presidency, said in a Saturday night Truth Social Post that he "indisputably" got elected Kemp, Mike Pence, and Ron DeSantis. Earlier in the day, Trump was complaining about the time and expense the criminal indictments were costing him. In his most recent posts, the former president appears to be responding to news reports that DeSantis had secretly met with Kemp. POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office? "How nice, a really beautiful reunion! Three people that I indisputably got Elected, two Governors and a V.P., Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike Pence of Indiana, & Ron DeSanctimonious of Florida, just met, most likely to talk about the 'weather,' or perhaps to discuss how they can stop the Weaponization of Georgia Law, working with the DOJ and others, against their absolutely, all time favorite President, ME," Trump wrote on his own social media network. "All three have been just wonderful, so loyal and nice. It’s great to have friends like this!" CONTINUE READING Show less