DL Open Thread: Monday, April 1, 2024

An Attorney Who Is Holding MAGAt Rethugs Accountable.  Hey, he can pocket that corporate lucre as long as he’s paying it forward like this:

Michael J. Gottlieb can never remember the exact amount — it’s $148,169,000— that a jury ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. But Ms. Freeman’s words after the December 2023 victory are indelible to him.

“Don’t waste your time being angry at those who did this to me and my daughter,” said Ms. Freeman, 65, who with her daughter Ms. Moss, 39, was falsely accused by Mr. Giuliani of aiding an imagined plot to steal the 2020 presidential election.

“We are more than conquerors.”

Less than a decade ago, the two women would have struggled to find a lawyer. But Mr. Gottlieb, a partner at the firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and a former associate counsel in the Obama White House, represented them for free. Convinced that viral lies threaten public discourse and democracy, he is at the forefront of a small but growing cadre of lawyers deploying defamation, one of the oldest areas of the law, as a weapon against a tide of political disinformation.

Mr. Gottlieb has also represented the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists as well as the brother of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staff member whose 2016 murder ignited bogus theories implicating his family. In the Giuliani case, Mr. Gottlieb, his law partner Meryl Governski and other members of his team worked with Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that pushes for laws and policies to counter what it sees as authoritarian threats.

‘Things Tumbling In Israel’?  I never bet against Josh Marshall’s Spidey Sense:

Keep an eye on the events out of Israel. It seems possible they’re reaching some kind of turning point, though one hesitates to use that phrase about a country which has been in such an extended political paralysis for so long. The key to understand is that whatever crisis or shift may be in the works isn’t driven by the issues animating coverage in the U.S. To the extent it is tied to the Israel-Hamas war it is about the hostages and the widespread belief that the Netanyahu government isn’t that focused on striking a deal to get them home. Hovering around this is the fact that the government has at best tended to ignore and shun the hostages families. The communities along the border with Gaza tend to be made up of left-leaning Kibbutznik types. So they’re not Netanyahu’s people by any stretch of the imagination. That’s been a subtext to much that has happened over the last six months.

You also have the anti-judicial coup coalition which was holding massive weekly protests for almost a year before October 7th going back to the streets. All of that had stopped cold on October 7th. It’s been slowing reassembling since. But the protests this weekend are bigger than any since just before the massacres in southern Israel. They are now a coupled message for the government to resign and to bring the hostages home.

Then there’s the issue of the continuation of the draft exception and public subsidies for the ultra-orthodox community. This is too complex a topic for anything but a thumbnail description. But here goes. Men from the ultra-orthodox community are exempted from the draft and a great proportion of their families live on public assistance, notionally because they spend their days in religious study. This has been a simmering issue for years. But for a complicated set of reasons it came to a head last week when there was a deadline to formalize a new system which would either continue these privileges and benefits, scrap them or do something in between.

The critical context is that over the last three decades the ultra-orthodox parties have become a central pillar of any right-wing government. They supply about a quarter of the seats. The issue is basically irresolvable if you rely on those votes and seats. No them, no majority. That all hit the fan last week. There was no decision Netanyahu could make and hold his government together. So basically he just didn’t. And we’re now seeing how long that lasts. This seems to have both thrown new light on the precariousness of Netanyahu’s government and shown again that the whole country is hostage to the Prime Minister’s need to give them basically anything they demand. In the context of a national emergency the existence of a whole community that refuses to serve in the army and lives off everyone’s taxes is simply too much for many people.

I recommend that you join Talking Points Memo.  Some of the best reporting and analysis out there.

Why Do Rethugs Hate Students?  And why haven’t D’s made this a bigger campaign issue?:

Last summer, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student loans for about 40 million Americans. The plan would have canceled up to $10,000 in debt for low- and middle-income borrowers, and double that amount for borrowers from the poorest backgrounds. The decision responded to two cases brought by conservative groups, and came down months before loan payments were set to restart after a historic halt during the pandemic—dealing a double blow to millions of borrowers.

Now, 11 Republican-led states are at it again, with a new lawsuit aimed at killing the administration’s latest effort to lower the burden of student debt on households. On Thursday, they sued the Biden administration to undo a new income-driven repayment plan, launched in August to lower required loan payments for many borrowers.

In other words, this is an income-driven plan that requires decades of payment from most borrowers—a far cry from simple debt cancellation. But it is a financial lifeline for households drowning under large monthly loan payments after years of high inflation. Yet these 11 states argue that just like the old effort to cancel student debt, Biden’s SAVE plan reaches beyond his presidential authority, recreating the argument against debt relief that won at the Supreme Court last year.

One City’s Disaster Is Another City’s Boon?  We’ll see if this trend continues:

The Port of Wilmington is already seeing “close to double” the expected number of ships in the early days of the Baltimore port closure, said Bayard Hogans, Mid-Atlantic president of Port of Wilmington operator Enstructure.

“This horrible tragedy has really affected the maritime community,” Hogans said. “And being really the closest gateway to Baltimore, we have a customer base … that immediately reached out to us, and we’ve been working with them to support their supply chain needs here in Wilmington.”

What do you want to talk about?