My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about three things giving Heather a headache and making Bob’s blood boil — the Supreme Court become so radically rightwing that even John Roberts has lost control over it, a Republican Party become so nuts that it’s impervious to the January 6 committee hearings, and economists and policymakers at the Fed become such apologists for corporations that they’re blaming inflation on wage increases rather than on corporate profits. Heather also gives old Bob the nicest compliment he’s ever received.

Please pull up a chair.

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If there’s any doubt about the extremism of the Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees, it was on full display today with their opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overrules Roe v. Wade, establishing the right to an abortion. Roe had been the law of the land for almost fifty years.

Even more ominous is Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he argues that the same rationale the court used to overrule Roe should be used to overturn cases establishing rights to contraception, same-sex consensual relations and same-sex marriage. Thomas is pointing the way for the radicals on the court to take in the future.

If the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution doesn’t protect abortion, says Thomas, the court “should reconsider” other cases that rely on the same clause: Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples have a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.

Thomas says the court has a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents. That’s not all. After “overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions” protected the rights they established, says Thomas.

I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. Also in my class at the time was Clarence Thomas, along with Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

As I’ve noted before, our law professors used the “Socratic method” – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights or gay marriage), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. The Supreme Court can change its mind and rule differently than before, but it needs good reasons to do so, and it helps if the justice’s opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, the rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — political.

In those classroom discussions almost fifty years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. He and five of his colleagues — all appointed by Republican presidents, five by presidents who lost the popular vote, three by a president who instigated a coup against the United States — are now violating stare decisis. They have not given a clear and convincing argument for why. Thomas wants the court to reverse more than a half century of rights.

The Supreme Court is now firmly in the hands of radicals, eager to throw stare decisis out the window. They are part of the anti-democracy movement now threatening America.

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Yesterday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, said outright that the Fed’s higher interest rates won’t lower the prices of gas or groceries. Hello? Gas and food prices are the two items hitting families the hardest, and the Fed is openly admitting that raising interest rates will do nothing to ease the burden?

What rate hikes will do is force millions of Americans into joblessness and make families poorer. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said during her questioning of Powell, “You know what’s worse than high inflation and low unemployment? It’s high inflation with a recession and millions of people out of work.”

Earlier this week, Larry Summers argued that containing inflation will require five years of 6 percent unemployment, or two years of unemployment at 7.5 percent or one year at 10 percent.

If that’s the case, the cure is worse than the disease.

Let’s be clear: Workers aren’t to blame for inflation. Wages aren’t pushing up prices. Real wages have dropped 3.5 percent over the last 12 months. Corporate profits are pushing up prices. The goal of policymakers should not be to restrain wages, but to restrain monopoly profits.

Powell’s and Summers’s remarks remind me of a debate I had with Summers’s predecessor at the Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, more than two decades ago. (From my memoir “Locked in the Cabinet”):

May 11, 1994, Washington

[Fed Chair Alan] Greenspan has been raising interest rates. He started three months ago and is about to do so again. My colleagues seem intent on egging him on. 

Lloyd Bentsen argues that the administration should publicly state that the economy is approaching its “natural” rate of unemployment—the lowest rate achievable without igniting inflation. This, he reasons, will reassure Wall Street that we won’t object if the Fed tightens the reins. And that reassurance should maintain Wall Street’s confidence that we’re committed to the inflation fight, which, in turn, will keep long-term rates well under control. 

I’m flabbergasted. “How can we be near the natural rate of unemployment when eight and a half million people can’t find jobs?” I ask. 

Bentsen stares at me like I’m a Texas toad. Others around the table explain to me that the last time unemployment was about to dip below six percent—at the end of the 1980s—wages started to rise, pushing up prices. “We can’t let Wall Street lose confidence.” The familiar chorus. 

But the economy is different than it was then. Workers aren’t about to demand wage increases this time around. The 1991–92 recession was a watershed. Most people who lost their jobs weren’t rehired by their former employers. In fact, job insecurity is now endemic. Big companies are downsizing. Medium-sized ones are outsourcing and subcontracting.

Out of concern that Lloyd’s proposal will carry, I inject a political note. “Has anybody forgotten?” I ask, far too condescendingly. “We’re Democrats. Even if we are approaching the danger zone where low unemployment might trigger inflation, we should err on the side of more jobs, not higher bond prices. That’s why we’re sitting here, and not the economic advisers to a Republican president.” One or two heads nod in agreement, encouraging me on. “So here’s my proposal: The President should warn the Fed against any further increases in interest rates.” 

My idea is rejected out of hand. But, happily, so is Lloyd’s. A standoff is better than the likely alternative.

Lloyd does have a point, and it’s a conversation I wish we had. There’s some level of unemployment that will trigger inflation, and whatever that magic level might be, it will still leave millions of people out of work. A seeming paradox: Millions of people unemployed or underemployed, and yet wages begin to creep upward because employers can’t fill jobs. Paradox explained: They can’t fill the jobs with these people. These people are walled off from the economy because they lack the education, or have the wrong skills, or don’t know what’s required, or are assumed to be too old to make the change. 

So whatever the “natural” rate of unemployment, we don’t have to assume it’s fixed there. It can be reduced by helping these people scale the wall. 

We keep having these goddamn arid debates about deficits and interest rates, as if they were the only variables, as if we were dealing with immutable laws of physics. But economics isn’t a physical science. Its “laws” are subject to change. And the softer variables—ignorance, isolation, prejudice—make all the difference. I wish I could show them Father Cunningham’s project in Detroit, or the East Los Angeles Skills Center, or the community colleges brimming with adults trying to make something more of themselves, or exceptional companies—like L-S Electro-Galvanizing in Cleveland—that are building loyalty and teamwork while they upgrade employee skills. 

We should be puzzling over how we can help more Americans become productive citizens rather than how we can help more bond traders stay confident.

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court knocked down part of the wall between church and state with a ruling that’s likely to force taxpayers to fund religious indoctrination at Christian schools.

So, today’s questions:

(1) How much do you think the same conservatives championing this decision would freak out if they thought their tax dollars were being used to fund Islamic madrasas? And (2) if religious institutions can receive tax dollars and make partisan political endorsements, while receiving billions in income, shouldn’t they be stripped of their tax exempt status?

What do you think? Please comment below. (I’ll chime in as well.)

Excellent discussion. I’ve responded to many of your comments but let me add one of my own here: The First Amendment to the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." That should be enough for a Supreme Court justice claiming to read only the plain words of the text. A Justice claiming to be an "originalist," seeking to know what was in the minds of the Framers, can view their writings, which repeatedly warned against an official religion or any dependence of a religion on government or dependence of government on any religion. The Framers knew English history and the damage wrought by wars and social upheavals over religion there; they were also aware of the religious intolerance of the Puritan era. They wanted to encourage a multiplicity of denominations, which meant erecting a wall between Church and State.

Yet the conservative majority on the current Supreme Court seems intent on taking a wrecking ball to the Establishment Clause by using the phrase that comes right after it --"… or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" against it. The Maine law in question in no way prohibits the free exercise of religion. It simply denies public money to religious schools, a far cry from a prohibition on the exercise of religion. Besides, if there's any tension between the two phrases — “make no law respecting the establishment” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — shouldn't the justices defer to lawmakers on how to resolve the tension rather than substituting their own judgment? And if the law and the constitutional provision in question originate in a state, shouldn’t there be even more reason to defer?

I need a new word to describe the conservative majority rather than simply calling them "conservative." They're not conservative. They're the most activist court since the Warren court -- but instead of being activist to protect rights, they're activist to destroy rights.

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Today’s fourth hearing focused on how Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change election results — leaning on state officials to alter the vote and to create slates of fake electors pledged to Trump — and their unwillingness to go along with Trump. But under the surface of today’s hearing and its revelations lurks the civil war that Trump has created within the Republican Party — between the dwindling number of Republican officials who maintain their oaths to the Constitution, and Republican officials who were (and still are ) willing to bend — and the committee’s attempt to fortify the former.

1. The committee highlighted Republicans who maintained their oaths of office and did not just refuse Trump’s demands but also stood up to mobs unleashed by Trump.

Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, testified that in phone calls with both Trump and Giuliani after the election, Giuliani asserted that hundreds of thousands of undocumented people had voted, and that many ballots were from people who had died. Bowers asked for evidence to back this claim but never received it. Trump asked Bowers to hold a hearing at the Arizona State Capitol to investigate allegations of election fraud, but Bowers did not believe that the evidence “merited a hearing” and “did not want to be used as a pawn.” Bowers later told Trump, “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.” Bowers’s emotional testimony described the threats he endured as a result.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, testified that President Biden carried the state of Georgia by approximately 12,000 votes. All ballots were twice recounted by hand, with no difference in the result. The committee played the recording of Trump trying to push Raffensperger to “find” just as many votes as he needed to beat Biden. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said. “Give me a break.” But Raffensperger testified that “there were no votes to find. It was an accurate count that had been certified.” When Raffensperger refused Trump, Trump threatened him with a “criminal offense.” Raffensperger subsequently received threats to himself and his family, as did his wife and widowed daughter-in-law.

Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, also testified today. He had publicly disputed Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election. Weeks after the election, Sterling warned the public that unless Trump stopped making false claims, “someone is going to get killed.” Trump dismissed Sterling’s warning in a tweet, reiterating — again, without evidence — that “thousands of votes” in Georgia were fraudulent.

Shaye Moss, an election worker in Georgia was the last to testify. After Giuliani likened Moss, a Black woman, to a low-level drug dealer, she and her mother were subject to a wave of online threats and harassment — including death threats, some racist in nature. Shaye’s mother's house was invaded by election deniers. She and her mother continue to live in fear. Moss’s testimony was a powerful illustration of what Trump has wrought: Regular Americans doing public service jobs being subject to threats and intimidation from Trump followers.

Today’s hearings also added to the list of traitors in the Republican Party, willing to break their oaths of office. They include Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. It was revealed today that an aide to Johnson wrote to a Pence aide that Johnson wanted to hand-deliver to Pence a slate of fake electors from Wisconsin. Pence’s aide responded: “Do not give that to him. Today’s testimony also added evidence of the traitorous behavior of Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona. Bowers testified that Biggs called him on the morning of Jan. 6 and asked him to support the effort to overturn the election. Bowers says he told Biggs he would not.

2. The committee made much of the fact that its witnesses are Republicans who wanted Trump to win. Raffensperger, for example, described himself today as a conservative Republican who wanted Trump to win in 2020. He said he had to “follow the law and follow the Constitution.”

Clearly, one of the purposes of the committee hearings is to fortify those remaining Republican officials and lawmakers around the country who continue to honor their oaths of office. The committee’s strategy underscores the stark reality that, no matter how much Democrats revile Trump, it is Republicans who will ultimately decide his fate — and whether Trump remains a force in American politics.

3. A third revelation today is that the attempted coup continues — to this day. I was struck by the fact that even this morning, before the committee hearing began, Trump issued a statement claiming that Bowers had told him after the the 2020 election that the election in Arizona was rigged. Bowers denied under oath that he had said this to Trump. Clearly, Trump wants the entire committee hearings to be seen as his word versus the committee’s. If he decides to run for office (which seems increasingly likely), this will be his strategy.

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Friends,

As Congress prepares for summer recess, average working Americans are facing increasingly hard economic times — including a likely recession (see here). Yet Congress has so far failed to provide most Americans with what they need to weather the storm — subsidies for childcare and eldercare, paid sick leave, an increase in the federal minimum wage, lower pharmaceutical costs, additional help with the next strain of COVID, and so on.

At the very same time, American corporations are lining up with their hands outstretched, seeking all sorts of special benefits. And there’s bipartisan support for giving them what they want.

Today I want to explain why corporations so often get what they want while average Americans don’t. It’s not simply that corporations bribe legislators with campaign donations, although that’s a big part of it. There’s another phenomenon at work that you need to know about.

Consider semiconductor chips. They’re the brains of modern electronics — embedded in everything from smartphones, radios, TVs, computers, video games, and advanced medical diagnostic equipment, to automobiles. As the world supply of almost everything tries to catch up with roaring post-lockdown demand, chips inevitably are in short supply.

This week, Congress is putting final touches on the CHIPS Act, which will provide more than $52 billion to companies that design and make semiconductor chips. The subsidy is demanded by the biggest chip makers as a condition for making more chips here.

It’s pure extortion.

You see, the world’s biggest chip maker (in terms of sales) is already an American corporation — Intel, based in Santa Clara, California. Intel hardly needs the money. Its revenue rose to $79 billion last year. Its CEO, Pat Gelsinger, got a total compensation package of $179 million (which was 1,711-times larger than the average Intel employee).

From the perspective of the United States, the problem is that Intel is not dealing with the current American shortage of chips by giving preference to producers in the United States, and it’s not keeping America on the cutting edge of new chip technologies. In addition to its facilities in the United States, Intel designs, assembles, and tests its chips in China, Israel, Ireland, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam. And it sells them just about everywhere. (To add another layer of complication, many of Intel’s “American” customers don’t actually make their products in the United States. They’re headquartered in the United States but, like Intel, they design and make stuff all over the world.)

Obviously, Intel would like some of the $52 billion Congress is about to throw at the semiconductor chip industry — but why exactly should Intel get the money?

Among the other likely beneficiaries of the CHIPS Act will be GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries currently makes chips in New York and Vermont, but in many other places around the world as well. GlobalFoundries isn’t even an American corporation. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co. — the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates.

The point is, the nation where a chipmaker (or any other global corporation) is headquartered has less and less to do with where it designs and makes things or where its customers are located.

Every industry that can possibly be considered “critical” is now lobbying the U.S. government for subsidies, tax cuts, and regulatory exemptions, in return for designing and making stuff in America. But they’re lobbying in other nations, too.

It’s a giant global shakedown. India, Japan and South Korea have all recently passed tax credits, subsidies and other incentives amounting to tens of billions of dollars for the semiconductor industry, and the European Union is finalizing its own chips act with $30 billion to $50 billion in subsidies. Even China has extended tax and tariff exemptions and other measures aimed at upgrading chip design and production there. “Other countries around the globe … are making major investment in innovation and chip production,” says Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “If we don’t act quickly, we could lose tens of thousands of good-paying jobs to Europe [emphasis added].”

Who is “we,” Senator?

John Neuffer, the chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association (the Washington D.C. lobbying arm of the semiconductor industry) says the industry has been under “withering pressure” to build new manufacturing facilities to respond to the explosion of demand for chips, but he warns that chipmaking facilities are often 25 to 50 percent cheaper to build in foreign countries than in the United States. Why are they so much cheaper to build abroad? As he admits, it’s largely because of the incentives foreign countries have offered.

As capital becomes ever more global and footloose, it can play nation against nation to get the best deals in return for where it agrees to do what. Most people, by contrast, are rooted within particular nations, which gives them far less bargaining power.

This asymmetry helps explain why Congress is ready to hand over $52 billion to a highly-profitable global industry but can’t come up with even the $22.5 billion that the Biden administration says is necessary to cope with upcoming variants of COVID in the United States — for testing, therapeutics, vaccines, and essential treatments for the next generation of vaccines.

The reality is that global corporations have no loyalty to any nation. As the then-CEO of U.S.-based ExxonMobil unabashedly stated, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”

If they are publicly owned, corporations have to be loyal to their shareholders by maximizing the value of their shares. But not even this guarantees that they’ll act in the best interest of the United States. Over 40 percent of the shareholder value of American-based companies is owned by non-Americans. There’s no reason to suppose a company’s American owners will be happy to sacrifice investment returns for the good of the nation, either.

Global corporations also have to obey the laws of the countries where they make or sell their stuff — which can cause problems when those laws or policies conflict with those of other nations. Last December, Intel was slammed by China for writing a letter to its suppliers, published on its website, stating that the corporation had been "required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region” — as required by the United States (which has accused China of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang, home to the country's predominantly Muslim Uyghurs). Intel then deleted the reference to Xinjiang and apologized for the "trouble" it had caused, explaining that its commitment to avoid supply chains from Xinjiang was an expression of compliance with U.S. law rather than a statement of its position on the issue. (The apology caused Senator Marco Rubio to threaten to make Intel ineligible for CHIP Act subsidies. “Intel’s cowardice is yet another predictable consequence of economic reliance on China,” Rubio said. “Instead of humiliating apologies and self-censorship, companies should move their supply chains to countries that do not use slave labor or commit genocide.”)

This is not to dismiss the critical importance of semiconductor chips to the United States, but only to suggest that paying $52 billion in subsidies to global chipmakers to make them here is a peculiarly inefficient way of responding to that importance. The real question is what conditions the United States (or any other nation that subsidizes chip makers) should place on receipt of such subsidies.

It can’t be enough that a company merely agrees to make or design chips in America, because chip makers are already doing that. It can’t be that they’ll create more American jobs in chip making, because jobs in low-end fabrication that require little skill won’t build the technological capabilities of the U.S. workforce. And it can’t just be that the chipmakers agree to produce more chips in the United States, because additional production in the United States is no guarantee against future shortages in the United States. Remember, these corporations are global. They sell their chips around the world to the highest bidders, wherever the chips are produced.

If we want to tie the public subsidy to the public interest, we should demand that any chips produced in America, over and above those already produced here, focus on the highest value-added parts of chip making — design, design engineering, and high precision manufacturing — so Americans gain that technological expertise. And we should demand that in the event of chip shortages, the subsidized chipmakers give highest priority to their American-based customers — customers using the chips in products made in the United States, by American workers.

But what happens if every nation subsidizing chipmakers demands the same? Obviously, the chipmakers can’t grant most-favored-nation status to every nation. They’ll have to choose.

Also: How do we ensure that a big chunk of the $52 billion isn’t frittered away on shareholders and executive pay — as has been the case every time the U.S. government has subsidized Wall Street banks? Perhaps make chip makers agree not to buy back their shares of stock or pay their executives more than 50 times the pay of their median workers, and also give the government partial ownership in the form of equity interest. As Senator Bernie Sanders (who is pushing these conditions in an amendment to the CHIP Act) has said, there’s no reason to socialize the chipmaker’s risks and privatize their profits. If American taxpayers are going to give the semiconductor industry $52 billion, we should get a return on our investment.

What do you think?

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We fool ourselves if we believe that the televised hearings of the January 6 committee are changing the direction of the Republican Party, or that the hearings will end the attempted coup that Trump launched immediately after the 2020 election. The G.O.P. is becoming ever more divorced from reality. Trump’s attempted coup continues unabated.

The first three hearings of the House January 6 committee demolished the myths of voter fraud repeated incessantly by Trump and his supporters and amplified by Republicans in Congress. A parade of Republican witnesses — including his attorney general William Barr, Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers — testified that they knew Trump lost the election, and told him so. Trump was also informed that the demands he was making of his Vice President Mike Pence to block his defeat were illegal.

Yet the Republican response to those hearings has ranged from indifference to hostility. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, wrote on Twitter that the members of the committee “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” and he calls the committee “despicable.”

On Friday, speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville, Trump repeated his Big Lie — as if the hearings never happened — and once again berated Pence, charging that his former Vice President “did not have the courage to act” in trying to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes that were being cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Why aren’t the hearings slowing the Big Lie or Trump’s continuing attempted coup?

First, the Lie is now fully entrenched in the Republican Party, a central tenet of G.O.P. dogma. It has become the vehicle by which Republican candidates signal their fealty both to Trump and to a broad range of grievances — some imaginary, some derived from the so-called “culture wars” — that now constitute the Republican brand.

So far, at least 108 Republican candidates who embrace the Big Lie have won their nominations or advanced to runoffs, and there is no sign that the hearings have reduced the intensity of their demagoguery. Voters have chosen eight Big Lie candidates for the U.S. Senate, 86 Big Lie candidates for the House, five Big Lie candidates for governor, four for state attorney general and one for secretary of state.

In Michigan, the Republican race to challenge Governor Gretchen Whitmer is led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general Matthew DePerno led a November 2020 lawsuit over an election night tabulation error in Antrim County that Trump supporters have seized on in their efforts to perpetuate unfounded claims of fraud. (DePerno has promised to lead criminal investigations of alleged fraud in 2020 despite the conclusion by Republican state senators that his allegations are “demonstrably false.”) Secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo served as an observer in Detroit during the 2020 absentee ballot count and claimed, without evidence, that she had witnessed fraud.

In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made the stolen election claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on January 6. And Blake Masters, who aims to challenge incumbent Democrat Senator Mark Kelly, says without evidence that “one-third of the people outside the Capitol complex on January 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”

In Pennsylvania, Republican senate candidate Mehmet Oz has embraced the Big Lie. Gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano also asserts it, and has said that the Republican-controlled legislature should have the right to take control of the all-important choice over which presidential electors to send to Washington.

Big Lie nominees for statewide office in swing states also include Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia and Burt Jones for Georgia lieutenant governor.

Secondly, the hearings have not affected the Republican Party (and are unlikely to) because Big Lie candidates are under no pressure to respond to the findings of the committee. Their districts or states already lean Republican, and most of voters in them have dismissed or aren’t paying attention to the committee hearings.

Recall that the 2020 election was mainly about Trump. You were either for him or against him. Voters in districts and states that voted largely for him in 2020 will not easily change their minds. The cognitive dissonance required to shift from believing Trump’s alleged conspiracy to accepting the reality of what occurred is simply too formidable. In addition, few of their sources of news — Fox News, rightwing radio, and rightwing social media — have questioned the Big Lie.

Because these districts or states lean Republican, these Big Lie candidates are likely to win the offices they are seeking, notwithstanding. In an open primary in a safely Republican Georgia district, for example, all nine candidates questioned the 2020 result. Of the two candidates who advanced to June’s runoff, lawyer Jake Evans touted his past efforts to “overturn” elections, while physician Rich McCormick emphasized that he refused to concede in a 2018 race. Many of these Republican Big Lie candidates will hold positions with the power to interfere in the outcomes of future contests — to block the certification of election results, to change the rules around the awarding of their states’ electoral votes or to acquiesce to litigation attempting to set aside the popular vote.

The third reason the hearings aren’t affecting the Republican Party is that the G.O.P.’s biggest backers — such as billionaire Peter Thiel, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of Big Lie candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters — show no signs of reducing their backing in light of the committee’s findings.

It’s shameful enough that Republican lawmakers and candidates have embraced the Big Lie for the utterly cynical purpose of gaining or remaining in power. For the G.O.P.’s billionaire funders to embrace it as well, presumably for no purpose other than to destabilize American democracy, can only be described as traitorous.

In his closing statement before the January 6 committee, former U.S. appellate court judge J. Michael Luttig — one of the most conservative judges in the federal system, whom George W. Bush passed over for the Supreme Court because Bush thought him too conservative — called Trump and his allies and supporters “a clear and present danger to American Democracy.” This was not only due to what happened on January 6, said the Judge, but because they still “pledge that in the presidential election of 2024 if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election.”

By not divesting itself of the Big Lie and not embracing the truth of what the January 6 committee is revealing, the Republican Party is losing its last shred of moral authority to function as one of America’s two governing parties.

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My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we cover the third hearing of the January 6 select committee, why the committee isn’t turning over its transcripts to the Justice Department, what’s the connection between Ginni Thomas (wife of Justice Clarence Thomas) and John Eastman, the Fed’s dangerous decision to raise interests rates by another 0.75 percent, and celebrating the summer solstice.

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Today marks the end of the school year for many public schools. Every year about this time I think of Alice Camp.

I arrived in her third-grade classroom in Lewisboro Elementary School, in South Salem, New York, as an extremely short, shy, insecure 8-year-old who was often bullied and mocked on the bus and made to feel like a loser on the playground, and had no particular interest in school.

But she saw in me something I didn’t see. She fed me books, projects, ideas. She challenged me and praised me. She made me feel special. Her slightly whacky sense of humor connected with mine. Her curiosity fueled mine (she didn’t mind if I stayed in at recess and barraged her with questions). Her enjoyment of literature made it okay for me to love books. She made me understand that I wasn’t a freak, that I might even be talented, that the drawings and writings I did (up until then alone at my small desk in my bedroom) were okay — perhaps even good. And there was no reason for me to be so sad and ashamed, so fearful, so alone in the world.

I think of Mrs. Camp when I see America’s teachers blamed these days for almost everything imaginable — yelled at by parents over masks, reprimanded by school boards about books they assign or let their students read, vilified by politicians for teaching about America’s history of racism, even told to arm themselves against the possibility that their classrooms will be invaded by murderous young men with semi-automatics.

Instead of berating them, we should honor them. Rather than impose ludicrous demands on them we should free them to teach and inspire. Instead of demeaning them, we should express our gratitude to them — every day.

And we should pay them twice a much as they’re earning, or three times. Why in hell should investment bankers get paid fortunes for moving money from one set of pockets to another, when our teachers can barely afford to live on what they make? Bankers watch over our financial capital. Teachers watch over our human capital — and therefore our future.

I never saw Alice Camp again after third grade ended for me that June of 1954. I never had a chance to thank her (although I do remember sitting cross-legged on the floor at the end-of-year school assembly, quietly crying about leaving her and trying desperately not to show it). She passed away long ago.

I had the great fortune to have other wonderful teachers over the rest of my years of public elementary and high school, and then in college and graduate school. I don’t recall thanking any of them, either. Most are gone by now. But I think of them often. And I am forever in their debt.

I suppose one way I’ve managed to pay back a small portion of that debt is to teach — which I’ve done for most of the last forty years. I love teaching. I love my students. I can’t imagine a more rewarding or noble profession.

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The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held its third public hearing today — focused on Trump's efforts to pressure Vice President Pence to refuse to count lawful electoral votes on January 6: the gonzo plan that lawyer John Eastman came up with.

But where did John Eastman come from? And how did he ever reach Trump in the first place? The committee didn’t touch on this today. (When Eastman appeared before the committee he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 146 times.)

Spoiler alert: The connection seems to be through Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas.

Eastman was a law clerk for Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s. (As a former law clerk to a federal judge myself, I can attest that it’s an intimate working relationship. At the time Eastman clerked for Thomas, he was one of only four such law clerks.)

In the days and weeks after the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas actively sought to overturn the election. She pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors (according to emails obtained by The Washington Post) — urging lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, she emailed 22 House members and one senator, saying “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead.” She also sent messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly pressing him to overturn the outcome of the election, according to text messages obtained by The Post and CBS News. (After Jan. 6, she told Meadows in a text that she was “disgusted” with Pence, who had refused to help block the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.)

Ginni Thomas also corresponded by email with John Eastman (per The Post). Eastman must have presented his bonkers plan to her, which she related to Meadows (and therefore Trump).

Soon thereafter, Eastman was working closely with Trump. He met the Oval Office with Trump and Pence. In a late-night court filing on May 19, 2022, Eastman disclosed he routinely communicated with Trump directly or via "six conduits" regarding legal strategy leading up to January 6, detailing "two hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation." (Eastman made the disclosure to claim attorney-client privilege to prevent the January 6 committee from obtaining 600 of his emails. On June 7, Judge David O. Carter ruled that Eastman had to disclose 159 sensitive documents to the committee, ten of which related to December 2020 meetings by a secretive group strategizing about how to overturn the election, which included what Judge Carter characterized as a "high-profile" leader. Carter noted one email in particular contained what he found was likely evidence of a crime and ordered it disclosed under the crime-fraud exception of attorney-client privilege. The email in question contained a comment by an unidentified attorney that litigating a case regarding the January 6 session in Congress might "tank the January 6 strategy" and so the Trump legal team should avoid the courts.)

Did Eastman communicate with Justice Thomas, too? Eastman knew things about the Supreme Court at the time that no one else outside the Court knew. According to the New York Times, Eastman told an ally on Dec. 24, 2020, that there was a “heated fight” among Supreme Court justices about whether to take up election-related lawsuits. Recall that the Supreme Court rejected an 11th-hour effort by Trump allies to have it step in during the legal fight over the election results, during which dozens of lower court cases were almost all decided against Trump. Justice Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito disagreed with that decision. Then in January 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a request by Trump to block the release of his White House records to the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.

According to committee testimony from Pence’s then-chief counsel Greg Jacob, Eastman told Jacob he was confident Justice Thomas would have backed his strategy to have Pence reject some Biden electors on Jan. 6.

The leaders of the House Jan. 6 committee say they plan to invite Ginni Thomas to speak to the committee (it’s unclear if the committee will first ask for a voluntary appearance or a closed door deposition, or send a subpoena). Ginni Thomas told the right-wing news site The Daily Caller in an interview today that she would "look forward" to speaking with the committee. Thomas has worked with the Daily Caller in the past, including producing an interview with her husband.

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