All posts by Rick Hasen

“How Charlie Kirk’s social media machine rewired a generation’s politics”

cheap speech, social media and social protests

WaPo:

Last month, as social media buzzed with news that Taylor Swift was engaged to Travis Kelce, Charlie Kirk advised one of the world’s most successful female musicians to leave “the island of the wokeys” and start having children with the star football player.

“Reject feminism,” Kirk urged the billionaire singer, in a video that has garnered 7.5 million viewson TikTok. “Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

The video drew accusations of sexism from liberals and Swifties, but it found an enthusiastic audience among Kirk’s Gen Z fans. The clip’s viral spread illustrated how the 31-year-oldactivist and provocateur harnessed the attention economy to build a political empire credited with shattering the left’s grip on young voters….

Kirk’s tactics came under scrutiny ahead of the 2020 election, when The Washington Post revealed that Turning Point Action paid teenagers to produce messages that reflected Trump’s talking points on social media — an operation experts compared to a troll farm. Facebook permanently banned a marketing firm that worked on the campaign on behalf of Turning Point, and Twitter suspended 262 accounts associated with the campaign for what it said was “platform manipulation and spam.” The companies did not suspend accounts affiliated with Turning Point or Kirk, citing insufficient evidence.

Before Jan. 6, 2021,Kirk tweeted that his group was “sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” He later was named the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to a consortium of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington and other organizations called the Election Integrity Partnership, which analyzed false claims about the election on social media. Kirk latercondemned the day’s violence but invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions about Turning Point’s role in the rally when he was deposed in 2022 before the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riots.

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“On the Supreme Court’s Emergency Docket, Sharp Partisan Divides”

Supreme Court

Adam Liptak for the NYT:

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh says good judges are like good referees.

“Am I calling it the same way for labor and management, for the business and the environmental interests, for the Republican and the Democrat?” he asked at a judicial conference over the summer. “If you can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘I would do the exact same thing if the parties were flipped,’ then you’re not being a good judge, just like you wouldn’t be a good referee if you were favoring one team over the other.”

A look at the court’s record in emergency rulings does not appear to reflect Justice Kavanaugh’s goal.

Drilling down to individual justices’ votes rounds out the group portrait.

In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48 percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump…..

On the far right side of the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted with the Trump administration 95 percent of the time and the Biden administration just 18, for a gap of 77 percentage points.

On the far left, the size of the gap was identical, but in the other direction. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson favored the Biden administration by 77 percentage points….

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“How Nancy Pelosi Quietly Shaped California’s Redistricting Fight”

redistricting

NYT:

One Friday in early August, Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom sat together in the historic governor’s mansion in Sacramento and began dialing some of the nation’s wealthiest Democrats for dollars.

Ms. Pelosi, the 85-year-old former House speaker, and Mr. Newsom, the 57-year-old governor of California, have known each other for decades. She has been his mentor, and their circles are so entwined as scions of San Francisco that their families were even blended by marriage at one point.

But this was something entirely new for them both as they raced to raise cash for a fall ballot campaign on redistricting that could shape the 2026 midterms.

Ms. Pelosi would begin with pleasantries, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss private fund-raising calls made that day. Then she would hand the phone to Mr. Newsom to close the deal. The choreography was partly borne of a mindfulness of tangled federal rules about soliciting outsized checks, and partly out of deference to Mr. Newsom.

Well, at least most of the time.

“That’s certainly not enough,” Ms. Pelosi blurted out to one potential contributor who had floated a sizable, but apparently not sizable enough, donation. Everyone burst out laughing, according to two people with knowledge of the tandem fund-raising. “I think we can do better,” she ribbed at another point.

The moment at the mansion provided a glimpse of Ms. Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role in a redistricting push with national consequences. At President Trump’s behest, Republican-led states, starting with Texas, are moving rapidly to rip up their congressional boundaries and boost G.O.P. chances of keeping control of the House next fall. California represents Democrats’ biggest and best hope for a meaningful counteroffensive…..

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“Louisiana’s Chief Election Official Confirms Lack of Widespread Noncitizen Voting”

election administration

Brennan Center:

After reviewing state voter rolls going back to the 1980s, Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state announced this month that “non-citizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana.” That finding aligns with years of research showing that, with vanishingly rare exceptions, only American citizens vote in American elections.

As part of what Secretary Nancy Landry called an ongoing investigation of potential noncitizen voting, officials ran the state’s voter files through the SAVE program, a federal tool that checks individuals’ citizenship status. In voting records dating back to the 1980s, Landry’s office identified up to 390 registered voters who could be noncitizens. Of those, 79 voted at least once during that more than 40-year period. However, list-matching alone — whether with SAVE or any other database, all of which contain flaws — isn’t enough to identify ineligible voters, let alone voter fraud. That’s why Landry has rightly acknowledged that the actual number could be even lower, as some of the potential noncitizen voter registrations flagged by the SAVE program could be the result of outdated or inaccurate data.

To put that number in perspective, we estimate that at least 74 million votes have been cast in Louisiana since the 1980s — and that estimate is a significant undercount due to data limitations. In other words, out of tens of millions of ballots cast in Louisiana over more than 40 years, only a tiny fraction of them were possibly cast by noncitizens, and even those cases are unconfirmed….

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“Brazil’s Former President Was Convicted of Plotting a Coup. What Comes Next?; Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for conspiring to cling to power after losing the 2022 elections.”

election subversion risk

NYT:

Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison on Thursday for overseeing a failed coup plot after losing the 2022 elections, a landmark ruling for Latin America’s largest nation.

Mr. Bolsonaro was convicted of orchestrating a vast conspiracy that included overturning the vote, dismantling courts, handing special powers to the military and assassinating the president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the election.

Mr. Bolsonaro denied plotting a coup or planning to kill his political rival. He accused the Supreme Court justice who oversaw his trial, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, of unfairly targeting him and his right-wing movement.

The ruling marks the first time that Brazil, a nation with a long history of coups, has held accountable a leader who tried to subvert its democracy. But it is far from clear whether Mr. Bolsonaro will actually end up behind bars.

His conviction could also worsen the diplomatic tension between Brazil and the United States, which escalated after President Trump’s tried to help Mr. Bolsonaro, an ally, by applying tariffs and sanctions on Brazil….

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“Missouri lawmakers give final approval to map targeting a Democratic House seat”

direct democracy, redistricting

CNN:

Missouri’s Republican-controlled Senate on Friday passed a new congressional map, taking final legislative action to target one of the state’s Democratic seats in the US House and boost the GOP’s chances of retaining its fragile majority in the chamber.

The 21-11 vote came just two weeks after the state’s GOP Gov. Mike Kehoe first unveiled the map and ordered a special legislative session to approve it. It targets longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver by carving up his Kansas City-area district and stretching its boundaries into rural, Republican-friendly areas of central Missouri.

Cleaver has pledged to fight the map in court and has said he plans to seek reelection. Opponents also intend to attempt to put the map before voters in the form of a referendum. They have 90 days after the map is signed into law to collect the signatures needed to force a statewide vote….

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“As Political Violence Rises, Trump Condemns One Side”

political violence

NYT:

After the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump released a four-minute video from the Oval Office in which he condemned the killing as the “tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day.”

Then, instead of calling for Americans of all political stripes to lower the temperature, Mr. Trump rattled off a list of political violence only targeting Republicans or perpetrated by those he views as on the left: the assassination attempts against him; attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; the assassination of a health care executive in New York; and the mass shooting of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice that nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

Even though the authorities had not identified a suspect or motive, Mr. Trump placed the blame squarely on his political opponents.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Mr. Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

Missing from Mr. Trump’s list was any reference to political violence targeting Democrats or perpetuated by those on the right.

The president made no mention of the recent killings in Minnesota of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband, who were on a hit list of dozens of left-wing figures; the arson attack on the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, while he and his family slept; a shooter’s attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a hammer assault on the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the shootings at an Arizona campaign office of Kamala Harris; or the Jan. 6 pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol that injured roughly 150 police officers.

In doing so, experts said, Mr. Trump captured the raw sentiment of his conservative base — the feeling of being under constant threat from the left in a country that is abandoning them. But the remarks addressed only part of the seemingly endless cycle of political violence America is experiencing.

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“America enters a new age of political violence”

political violence

WaPo:

A Minnesota state legislator killed in her home in June. The Pennsylvania governor’s house set afire in April. Candidate Donald Trump facing two apparent assassination attempts during last year’s campaign. And now conservative activist Charlie Kirk gunned down and killed Wednesday during a talk at Utah Valley University, horrifying a live audience and those who saw the shooting online.

America is facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s, which saw the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are going through what I call an era of violent populism,” said Robert Pape, who heads the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “It is a historically high era of assassination, assassination attempts, violent protests, and it is occurring on both the right and the left.”

He added: “This is way beyond the usual minor ebb and flow of militia group violence we have seen for 20 years. This is a different level, a different historical period of political violence, and that is what you see. This is a demonstrable fact.”…

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“Republicans invoke ‘nuclear option’ in push to change Senate rules”

legislation and legislatures

WaPo:

Republicans moved Thursday to speed up Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees by changing the chamber’s rules over the objections of Democrats.

Senators voted 53-45 to allow themselves to change the rules with a simple majorityinstead of 60 votes — a move known as the “nuclear option.”

The rules change will allow the Senate to confirm multiple people at once, helping to clear a backlog of nearly 150nominees awaiting floor votes. Republicans argue it is necessary because Democrats have held up the confirmation process by forcing time-consuming votes on each nominee rather than allowing some of them to be confirmed by voice votes, which is faster.

The change excludes Cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices and federal judges, who must be confirmed one by one.

“Democrats and their political base cannot deal with the fact that the American people elected President Trump,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Thursday on the Senate floor. “And so they’re dragging out every confirmation in retaliation.”

The rules change is the latest instance of the majority party using the nuclear option to make it easier to confirm nominees without the consent of the minority. Senate Democrats changed the rules in 2013 to allow most nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority rather than 60 votes. Senate Republicans did the same for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 when they held the majority. The also reduced debate time for most nominees in 2019.

Some Democrats said they agreed that the nominations process was broken. But they said they had stalled Trump’s nominees becausethey believe they are “historically bad.”

Democrats argued that they tried to negotiate with Republicans last month to confirm more nominees in exchange for the Trump administration releasing some funding that it had held up. But Trump torpedoed the deal, encouraging Republicans to go home for their summer break and telling Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) on social media to “GO TO HELL!”…

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““Modernizing Voter List Maintenance: An Evidence-Based Framework for Access and Integrity”

voter registration

Michael Morse, Rachel Orey, and Joann Bautista have published a Bipartisan Policy Center report on list maintenance, based on Morse’s earlier article. Here’s an excerpt of the executive summary:

Voter registration lists are widely regarded as the backbone of election administration. To keep these lists up to date, election officials are responsible for identifying when voters move, die, or otherwise become ineligible to vote. The bureaucratic process known as “list maintenance” has long been a quiet feature of election administration, but has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Some advocacy groups equate the removal of voter registrations with disenfranchisement, labeling it voter purging; others maintain that voter lists are plagued by errors, characterizing them as “dirty,” and argue that registrations aren’t being canceled often enough.

In reality, list maintenance doesn’t need to be a trade-off between access and integrity. Rather, well-crafted, evidence-based policies can advance both goals simultaneously. This report discusses two of the most salient topics in list maintenance policy discussions today:mobility and citizenship.

Mobility and citizenship present fundamentally different types of problems for election officials. Although voters move frequently, audits have found that very few registered voters are not citizens. Nonetheless, identifying when voters move and verifying citizenship present similar types of administrative challenges for election officials, who must coordinate with other officials in their state, between states, and in the federal government to gather the most up-to-date information.

Drawing on Michael Morse’s 2023 law review article, this report first addresses the recurring problem of voter mobility for list maintenance and suggests targeted reforms. It then turns to nascent efforts to verify the citizenship of voters, highlighting emerging challenges and urging caution to avoid premature policymaking.

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The Despicable Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Uncategorized

Once again I condemn the use of political violence. It is equally repugnant when directed at liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, governors, presidents, or activists like Kirk.

I have had to post sentiments like this far too often in the last few years, and I fear this will not be the last.

A democracy cannot fairly function with political violence and fears of violence becoming routine.

My condolences to Kirk’s family, friends, and supporters.

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