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Kansas Landslide Showed Most Americans Still Value Liberty -- And Privacy

Kansas Landslide Showed Most Americans Still Value Liberty -- And Privacy

That Kansas voted to protect abortion rights guaranteed in its state constitution didn’t surprise me, although I certainly never expected a landslide. The original “Jayhawks,” after all, waged a guerilla war to prevent Missourians from bringing slavery into the Kansas territory, a violent dress rehearsal for the Civil War. A good deal of the state’s well-known conservatism is grounded in stiff-necked independence.

In the popular imagination, Kansas has always signified heartland values and rustic virtue. Superman grew up on a farm there, disguised as mild-mannered Clark Kent. So did Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz, a spunky young woman with an adventurous spirit. But cartoonish fantasies have little to do with the real world. My favorite Kansas politician was always Sen. Bob Dole, war hero, Senate majority leader, 1996 GOP presidential nominee, and unmistakably his own man.

Pondering a photo of the then-three living ex-presidents, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, Dole quipped “There they are: see no evil, speak no evil…and evil.”

Regardless of party, how can you not appreciate a politician like that? After the 2020 presidential election, Dole accepted Joe Biden’s victory and allowed as how he was “all Trumped-out.”

So naturally, Trump skipped his 2021 funeral. All class, that guy.

Although nominally anti-abortion during most of his career, Dole was also a realist who was leery of single-issue zealots and political purity tests. Suffice it to say they aren’t making Republicans like him anymore.

All of that is a roundabout way of saying the Kansas result shouldn’t have astonished anybody. After all, the state currently has a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly. Another Democrat, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, was elected there in 2002 and reelected in 2006. Indeed, as Stuart Rothenberg points out in Roll Call, Democrats have won four of the last eight gubernatorial contests in the state and six of the last 11.”

It follows that this blue state/red state business based strictly on presidential elections tells you relatively little about a place and its retail politics. More broadly, Justice Samuel Alito and a handful of religious zealots on the Supreme Court can argue that there’s no right to privacy in the Constitution, but they will never persuade a majority of Americans to believe it.

Specifically, how is it even the government’s affair to know who’s pregnant and who’s not? How is it yours? How is it anybody’s except the woman herself? Truly, it’s hard to imagine a more fundamental freedom than the decision whether or not to give birth.

Almost needless to say, women voters in Kansas appear to have felt this more keenly than men. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal some 33,000 new voters registered in Kansas in the weeks immediately following the court’s decision overturning Roe vs. Wade, some 70 percent of them women. That’s a lot in a state with just under two million registered voters, enough to push the state’s abortion referendum into landslide territory: 59 to 41 percent.

What the Kansas vote mainly signified to me was bedrock Americanism: essentially, “You’re not the boss of me, and it’s none of your damn business.”

“For decades,” writes the New Yorker’s John Cassidy, “the Republican Party has largely owned and exploited the language of individual liberty and freedom, even as many of its policies have favored the rich and powerful— from gunmakers to Big Pharma and Wall Street—over individual middle-class Americans.”

It's time to call their bluff. Everywhere you look these days, politicians calling themselves “conservative” are banning books, pushing teachers around, threatening school boards and businesses, suppressing voting rights, attacking the freedom to love and marry, elevating gun rights over basic human rights, and doing their best to turn American women and girls into brood mares, knocked up and locked up.

What they are is authoritarian. In a word, bullies.

Writing on Twitter, Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut has some advice for fellow Democrats up for election this fall. (He’s not on the 2022 ballot.) “Run on personal freedom,” he urges. “Run on keeping the government out of your private life. Run on getting your rights back. This is where the energy is. This is where the 2022 election will be won.”

Polls show that the majority of likely voters are preoccupied with economic issues, inflation in particular. But the Kansas referendum resulted from right-wing activists seeking to impose a total ban on legal abortion: an intrusive effort to extend government control into citizens’ most intimate life decisions.

And voters there rejected it about as decisively as it’s possible to do. It appears that Americans—and for what it’s worth, Kansans are overwhelmingly white and Christian—have no wish to live in a judicially-imposed theocracy and will turn out in droves to prevent it. Overall voting totals were extremely high for a primary contest, reflecting strong motivation.

Perhaps Chris Murphy’s optimism is mistaken. But it’s definitely the right fight to have.

Key US Lawmakers Offer Guarded Hope For Gun Safety Reforms

Key US Lawmakers Offer Guarded Hope For Gun Safety Reforms

Washington (AFP) - Key US lawmakers expressed guarded optimism Sunday that the shocking school shooting in Texas might lead to at least small steps against gun violence.

"There are more Republicans interested in talking about finding a path forward this time than I have seen since Sandy Hook," Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on ABC, referring to the 2012 school shooting in his home state of Connecticut that claimed 26 lives.

Since the shooting Tuesday in the town of Uvalde, Texas left 19 children and two teachers dead, Murphy has been a leader in talks with Republicans -- who have long resisted gun-control measures -- about potential steps.

Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, said Sunday that compromise would not come easily, but that after Uvalde, he sensed "a different feeling among my colleagues."

"The real challenge is whether the Republicans will step forward and show courage, political courage, in a very tough situation," he told CNN.

But, he added, "There will be some."

One moderate House Republican, Adam Kinzinger, told CNN that Uvalde might have opened him up to greater gun control measures.

Kinzinger, a military veteran, said he had opposed the idea of a ban on assault-style weapons until "fairly recently."

But, he added, "I think I'm open to a ban now," or at least to imposing training or certification requirements on potential buyers.

"We have to be coming to the table with ways to mitigate 18-year-olds buying these guns and walking into schools," he said. "My side's not doing that."

Opposition to gun control runs deep among Republicans and some Democrats representing rural states.

In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, several Republican lawmakers have advocated improved school security or additional mental health support.

Durbin acknowledged the difficulty of achieving real reform in a country where guns outnumber people.

"The AR-15 that was used by this individual in Uvalde, there are now 20 million of those owned by Americans across the nation, just to put it in perspective," he said.

"So we have got to be realistic about what we can achieve."

The Lone Star State Is Now The Pro-Death State

The Lone Star State Is Now The Pro-Death State

On May 24, Fox News blasted a headline, "New York City subway crime up 58 percent so far compared to 2021; Hunt for gunman in unprovoked shooting intensifies."

That day, a gunman shot 19 elementary school children and two adults to death in Uvalde, Texas. For the record, the number of homicides on New York City subways this year totals four.

Last year, Houston had at least 473 homicides. New York City, with four times the population, saw only 15 more.

If you want to limit the discussion to the dangers of commuting, consider the spike in road rage homicides in the Lone Star State. Last year, 33 people were shot and killed by angry, unhinged drivers — presumably strangers.

This week in Houston's Harris County, a Nissan SUV reportedly cut off a Chevy Malibu. The driver of the Malibu followed the Nissan, fired several shots, came around again and fired more, killing a passenger.

Just another day on the roads of Texas.

Crime is rising everywhere. Gang violence and demographics certainly influence the statistics. There are mentally ill people across the country, and some can get their hands on weapons of war regardless of local gun control laws.

But there's a sick, cultural thing going on in places like Texas that equate ownership of assault-type weapons with manliness. In truth, give a killing machine to a 90-year-old woman in a wheelchair, and she could mow down a line of weightlifters.

The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place 10 years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. But the state of Connecticut responded with a raft of new gun control laws. And the state's representatives in Washington have since pushed, in some cases hollered, for more stringent limitations.

"It's f-ing awful," Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, said on the day of the Uvalde outrage. "And it's just our choice whether we want this to continue."

That's apparently the choice in Texas, where mass shootings in schools, churches and shopping centers fly past the elected leaders' consciences like clouds across the West Texas skies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded to the Uvalde massacre with the words "Horrifically, incomprehensibly." Yes, "horrific," the Houston Post countered, "but the second word Abbott used — 'incomprehensibly' — is just as much cowardice as it is a bald-faced lie."

The governor, with the connivance of the legislature, the editorial said, passed gun "laws so permissive that they've even defied the objections of police chiefs and gun safety instructors." It went on to note that Abbott bragged on Twitter about the 2021 permitless carry bill that lets any eligible Texan carry a gun in public with no license or training — "as though that were progress."

Never mind that polls show 80 percent of Texans wanting universal background checks, which are designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally deranged. But the legislature won't go there. Nothing — not the previous and recent mass shootings in El Paso, Odessa, and Midland — would move them.

The latest paroxysm of gun violence in Texas comes right in time for the planned annual convention in Houston of the National Rifle Association. Abbott will be there, undoubtedly singing their praises, as will the two U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. And the NRA will likely praise them back.

"Heidi and I," Cruz just tweeted, "are fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting in Uvalde."

You can bet that these politicians will continue going on and on about protecting "unborn babies" while giving free rein to those who kill born babies. Texans have much to be proud of, but their growing reputation as the pro-death state is tragic.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

October Surprise Part III: 'Nonpartisan' Johnson Crashes Impeachment As Trump Surrogate

October Surprise Part III: 'Nonpartisan' Johnson Crashes Impeachment As Trump Surrogate


With this third and final installment we complete a series by Sidney Blumenthal on the origins of the "Obamagate" conspiracy theory promoted by the Trump White House and its allies -- with particular attention to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. In the first installment Blumenthal explained how Johnson came to serve as Trump's instrument in the creation of "multiple untruths" to distract from the criminal realities exposed by the Mueller Report and the prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. In the second, Blumenthal examined Johnson's ill-fated intervention in Trump's attempt to coerce the new government of Ukraine to corruptly intervene in the 2020 election. The following article recounts Johnson's role as a Trump surrogate during impeachment -- and how the false narrative he advanced then has served as the template for White House "Obamagate" mythology.

This series was first published by Just Security, an electronic journal based at the Reiss Center for Law and Security at New York University Law School, and is reprinted with permission.

Johnson Serves His Purpose: The House's Impeachment Investigation

Trump's main strategy in dealing with the House impeachment inquiry was to engage in character assassination of the witnesses. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council, had listened in on Trump's July 25 call with Zelensky and afterward reported it immediately to the White House Legal Counsel. "It is improper for the President of the United States to demand a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen and political opponent," he would testify on Nov. 19. What Vindman would say was well known.

In anticipation of his appearance, Ron Johnson trotted out as Trump's surrogate to trash him. In an 11-page letter dated Nov. 18 addressed to the ranking Republican members of the committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Johnson attacked the inquiry "as a continuation of a concerted, and possibly coordinated, effort to sabotage the Trump administration that probably began in earnest the day after the 2016 presidential election," but which he also traced even farther back, omnisciently stating that "my first-hand knowledge and involvement in this saga began with the revelation that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept a private email server."

Throwing in his kitchen sink—the Steele Dossier, the Strzok-Page text messages, and "the false narrative of Trump campaign collusion with Russia"—the discerning Johnson could see that these elements "all fit a pattern and indicate a game plan that I suspect has been implemented once again." Vindman's testimony, according to Johnson, could be understood as part of that very "pattern" and "game plan." His background—coming to America as an immigrant from the Soviet Union at the age of three, his rise within the army from combat officer in Iraq to Russian expert for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the NSC—was dismissed. Johnson suggested that Vindman's true motive was subversion by acting as an agent of the "Deep State."

"I believe," he accused, "that a significant number of bureaucrats and staff members within the executive branch have never accepted President Trump as legitimate and resent his unorthodox style and his intrusion onto their 'turf.' They react by leaking to the press and participating in the ongoing effort to sabotage his policies and, if possible, remove him from office. It is entirely possible that Vindman fits this profile."

After arranging Vindman into his conspiracy theory, Johnson wandered into further recollections of his August 31 meeting with Trump. He added a new anecdote about Trump that pointed to yet another underlying reason for his withholding aid from Ukraine: his anti-NATO bias and pro-Russian tilt. Trump, in Johnson's telling, "reminded me how thoroughly corrupt Ukraine was and again conveyed his frustration that Europe doesn't do its fair share of providing military aid. He specifically cited the sort of conversation he would have with Angela Merkel, chancellor Germany. To paraphrase Trump: 'Ron, I talk to Angela and ask her, 'Why don't you fund these things,' and she tells me, 'because we know you will.' We're schmucks, Ron. We're schmucks.'"

In his fervent defense of Trump, Johnson seemed blithely unaware that his story of Trump calling the U.S. "schmucks" for playing the leadership role within NATO, in order to explain withholding military aid to Ukraine, only undercut his argument. Johnson didn't appear to grasp how he was further establishing the pattern of Trump's bad faith.

Johnson insisted on adding another story in his letter that he believed would exonerate Trump, this one from his September 5 meeting in Kyiv with Zelensky. "At no time during this meeting—or any other meeting on this trip," he wrote, "was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid, not even after [Senator Chris] Murphy warned them about getting involved in the 2020 election—which would have been the perfect time to discuss any pressure."

Johnson made a mistake in bringing up Murphy. The Connecticut Democrat was not a mannequin. He knew what he had said and what Zelensky replied, and that it was not what Johnson portrayed. The same day that Johnson issued his letter, on November 19, Murphy responded with a letter of his own, addressed to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the intelligence committee, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chair of the oversight committee, conducting the impeachment inquiry.

Murphy wrote that "the most disturbing element of Senator Johnson's letter was his assertion that certain Administration staffers, most notably Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, may be actively working to 'sabotage' the President's foreign policy agenda, despite having no actual evidence of such sabotage." Murphy rejected the "deep state" conspiracy theory, instead describing how "ethical public officials saw corruption occurring" and decided to "tell the truth" about "a shadow foreign policy."

Murphy then recounted some of the recent sordid history of US-Ukraine relations. He criticized the composition of the delegation to Zelensky's inauguration that included Johnson as unfortunately "mid-level" and "partisan." While Murphy wrote that Johnson "did not support the president's decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine," he noted that Johnson was not in the dark but cognizant of the game being played and "was not alarmed like I was about Giuliani's efforts."

In their meeting with Zelensky, it was Murphy who took the initiative in raising "the pressure on Zelensky from Rudy Giuliani and the president's other emissaries to launch investigations into Trump's political rivals—namely the Bidens." Murphy urged Zelensky "to ignore requests from Trump's personal political representatives" and only deal with the United States "through official channels." Murphy described the scene as anxious and fraught. Zelensky was "gravely serious" about the withheld military aid, and Murphy wrote, "I felt the enormous burden this suspension of aid was putting on the new leader of an already fragile democracy."

Johnson, for his part, did not join his colleague in supporting Zelensky against the Giuliani juggernaut, but sat close-lipped. In Johnson's version of this meeting, he denied that Zelensky expressed any concern. Murphy, however, directly contradicted Johnson. With customary senatorial courtesy, Murphy wrote that while he did "not dispute any of Senator Johnson's factual representations…I came to a very different conclusion regarding the way that Zelensky reacted to my comments…. I interpreted Zelensky's answer to my question as a concession of the premise of my question—that he was receiving improper overtures form Giuliani to interfere in the 2020 election."

Murphy then deconstructed Trump's use of the charge of "corruption" as a lever to advance his scheme. He observed that Johnson conveyed to Zelensky "that 'corruption' was a clear concern of President Trump…simply relaying what the president had told him." "But," Murphy explained, "it's clear that in other conversations through the Giuliani back channel, 'corruption' had become synonymous with two specific investigations that would personally benefit the president, and indeed, as we learned later, these were the only two 'corruption' matters that Trump raised directly with Zelensky on the July 25 phone call."

Murphy concluded: "President Trump preyed on a vulnerable foreign nation, dependent on the U.S. for its very survival, and used taxpayer money as leverage to get that nation to work for the personal political benefit of the president." Johnson had no response to Murphy whatsoever.

The Witness and the Juror

At noon on January 16, 2020, the House Managers walked from their side of the Capitol to the Senate to deliver their counts of impeachment and a 111-page memorandum of new evidence that had emerged since the House vote on impeachment on December 18, including the Government Accountability Office's report that Trump's withholding of aid to Ukraine without notifying Congress was illegal. Chief Justice John Roberts swore in the senators in "the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States."

Trump attorneys opened their defense on January 25, insisting that there was "no evidence," according to Pat Cipollone, the White House legal counsel, while Jay Sekulow, Trump's chief lawyer, suggested that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election.

The next day, on January 26, the New York Timesreported of an "explosive account" by John Bolton in an unpublished manuscript that Trump had told him "that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens."

The Times also reported that Bolton gave a more detailed version of the May 23 Oval Office meeting where Johnson had been present. Trump "railed about Ukraine trying to damage him and mentioned a conspiracy theory about a hacked Democratic server, according to Mr. Bolton." Trump thundered his denial on twitter: "I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens." Queries to Johnson were directed to a statement he had made in October when the meeting first was revealed: "Senator Johnson does not recall in any meeting or discussion with the president, or any member of the administration, that the term 'quid pro quo' was ever used. Nor does he recall any discussion of any specific case of corruption in the 2016 election, such as Crowdstrike, the hack of the DNC servers, Hillary Clinton campaign involvement, or Hunter and Joe Biden, during general discussions of corruption, which is endemic throughout Ukraine."

"A show-trial spectacle," Johnson called the impeachment trial. "This has been blown so far out of proportion." He yawned that he would "be bored if both sides took 24 hours." He waved away the GAO finding that Trump's impoundment of the funds approved by the Congress for Ukraine was illegal. "I don't think it's particularly relevant." And he showed contempt for the emergence of Bolton as a prospective witness. "The House had an opportunity to call John Bolton," Johnson said. "They decided not to. The House was in such a rush to do this impeachment. They did, from my standpoint, a pretty sloppy job. Now, they want the Senate to do their job for them."

Those glib statements elided the fact that Bolton had threatened to fight any House subpoena in a drawn-out court battle, but had since promised to comply with a subpoena from the Senate. There was, Johnson claimed, "no impeachable offense." He denied that Trump's actions were an attempt to eliminate Joe Biden as a candidate. "I never viewed his desire to find what happened in Ukraine as having anything to do with the 2020 election. It was all a look back, trying to explain in some way, shape or form how he ended up with the special counsel."

Johnson voted against allowing the House Managers to call any witnesses, including John Bolton. At the time, three-quarters of Americans believed that witnesses should be allowed to testify in the Senate trial, according to Quinnipiac polling. Before the closing arguments, Johnson announced there was no case: "That's why I will not vote to convict. I'll vote to acquit." On February 5, Trump was acquitted with only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, of Utah, voting guilty on one count of impeachment.

Headlong into "Obamagate"

As soon as the trial without any witnesses ended in his favor, Trump launched a retaliatory purge, firing Lt. Col. Vindman; firing the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Michael Atkinson; firing the Inspector General of the State Department, Steve Linick, who was investigating alleged misconduct by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; firing the chairman of the oversight panel of the federal government's economic stimulus fund, Glenn Fine; firing the deputy Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, Christi Grimm, who was probing Trump's failed response to the coronavirus crisis; firing the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, Mitch Behm, who was investigating irregular contracts awarded by Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, the wife of Republican Senator Majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Johnson dashed to the Green Room to defend Trump's vengeance, appearing on May 17 on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper. "I'm not crying big crocodile tears over this termination," he said about the dismissal of Inspector General Linick at the State Department. Johnson explained that the independence of inspector generals was strictly a fiction. "And so," he said, "they serve at the president's will." Yet under Obama, Johnson had been a champion of inspector generals, declaring it essential that they be "completely independent," warning against "retaliating against people that were issuing reports," and proposing a bill to strengthen the system. Now, he encouraged the wrecking of what he had previously tried to shield.

Johnson was already floating the "Obamagate" scheme, Trump's through-the-looking-glass conspiracy theory to explain the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel and the impeachment as all one connected plot against him, and to weaponize it for the campaign.

Johnson's work started with a letter on May 18 to Barr demanding that a supposedly incriminating email — from Susan Rice summarizing a meeting with President Obama and other officials presumably about unmasking Michael Flynn on January 5, 2017 — be declassified in the interest of "transparency." The next day the mysterious email was released. It showed that Obama had stated that any investigation into Flynn's discussions with Russian officials must be done "by the book." "The only encouraging bit," commented Tim Miller, the former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, "is the realization that if By-The-Book Gate is the best these goobers have got, then it turns out that they're as incompetent as they are corrupt."

The fizzle of the Rice email did not dampen Johnson's zealotry. He shifted into a high gear, publicly releasing his lengthy list of targets of the imaginary perpetrators of "Obamagate." But as Johnson readied his subpoenas, John Bolton finally published his book.

Bolton's memoir, The Room Where It Happened, filled in the gap in Johnson's airbrushed version of his May 23, 2019 Oval Office meeting with Trump. Bolton added additional episodes of Trump bargaining U.S. national security for his reelection effort, for example, with China. And he corroborated the other evidence gathered for Trump's impeachment as an eyewitness to the Ukraine "drug deal," all too late for the impeachment but not for the 2020 election. Bolton's direct account refuted Johnson's cynical credulity about what Trump knew and when he knew it. On August 20, 2019, Bolton wrote, "I took Trump's temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn't in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over." Case closed.

In anticipation of the "Obamagate" and Durham investigations, Trump appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network on June 22 to accuse President Obama. "Treason. It's treason," Trump said. "Look, when I came out a long time ago, I said they've been spying on my campaign, I said they've been taping…Turns out I was right. Let's see what happens to them now…100 years ago, or 50 years ago, they would have been executed."

* * *

Charles Sykes was a Republican talk show host in Wisconsin who was responsible for helping to launch Ron Johnson on his political career. After his election to the Senate, Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal and President Reagan's former speechwriter, brightly described how a star was born. "A conservative radio host named Charlie Sykes got hold of a speech Mr. Johnson gave at a Lincoln Day dinner in Oshkosh. He liked it and read it aloud on his show for 20 minutes. A speech! The audience listened and loved it. A man called in and said, 'Yes, yes, yes!' Another said, 'I have to agree with everything that guy said.' Mr. Johnson decided to run because of that reaction, and in November he won. This week he said, 'The reason I'm a U.S. senator is because Charlie Sykes did that.'"

"We were a thing," Sykes recalled. He imagined Ron Johnson was an independent free of the Republican "establishment," "very much his own man." Since Trump's election the talk show host and the sorcerer's apprentice have taken different paths. Sykes has been thoroughly disillusioned with the Republican Party, become a leading Never Trumper, written a book titled How the Right Lost Its Mind, and helped found the Never Trumper journal, The Bulwark. "What happened to Ron Johnson?" Sykes asked. "On one level, his story is not all that much different from the rest of the GOP, which has transformed itself into Trumpist camp followers." It turned out that Ron Johnson was not who Sykes thought he was. "He was poised to be very much his own man. Instead, he became Trump's."

Yet, in an interview with Politico on the "Obamagate" investigation, Johnson presented himself as the same old Ron Johnson. "I'm a very nonpartisan guy. I just am," Johnson said in an interview. "I like using the word nonpartisan. I'm not doing anybody's bidding." The record is otherwise.

(Author's note and full disclosure: When Ron Johnson disclosed his list of people he intends to subpoena in his "Obamagate" probe my name appeared on it. Apparently, this involves the most obscure conspiracy theory within the larger conspiracy theory, a "second dossier" to Christopher Steele's Dossier originating with the Clinton campaign. There is, in fact, no such "second dossier," which is not a "dossier" at all but two emails consisting of raw notes of an inquiring journalist that he collected from conversations about Trump's Russian relationships, sent to some friends, including me, which I shared with another longtime friend, who unbeknownst to me happened to share it with his longtime friend, Christopher Steele, who unbeknownst to that friend sent a paragraph he found interesting in one of the emails to the FBI. None of this had anything to do with the Clinton campaign; no one in this chain knew who the next person would share it with; and none of it had any relevance to anything significant that subsequently occurred. I debunked this conspiracy theory in testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on June 16, 2019. It seems that Ron Johnson and his crack staff have failed to properly acquaint themselves with the work of that Republican-led but bipartisan committee.)

Sidney Blumenthal is the author ofAll the Powers of Earth, the third volume in his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, published in September 2019 by Simon and Schuster. the first two volumes are A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. He has been a senior fellow of the NYU Center on Law and Security and is a fellow of the Society of American Historians.