Saturday Report 2/3/24 - Warming-Up Alert! Did Punxsutawney Phil just come through for all of us & predict an early spring?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Mona El Falaky from Pixabay

— Nikki Haley Claims States Have the Right to Secede: Do they? Because the only policies the GOP will work on are tax cuts for the morbidly rich and deregulation of polluting or predatory businesses, Republican politicians have to pander to the bizarre fantasies of their base to stay elected. That was on full display this past week when Nikki Haley, who’s hanging on in the primary in the hopes that Trump goes down in flames, decided to essentially endorse Texas seceding from the union:

“If that whole state says we don’t want to be part of America anymore, I mean that’s their decision to make, but I don’t think government needs to tell people how to live, how to do anything. I mean, I think that we need to let freedom live.”

Setting aside the sad reality that Republicans do want to tell people how to live — particularly if they’re female or trans — in fact, Texas can’t secede. This was already decided long ago (1869) by the Supreme Court in the case of Texas v White and amplified by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who said:

“If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede. Hence, in the Pledge of Allegiance, ‘One nation, indivisible.’”

But by all means, Nikki and all the folks at Fox “News” and on rightwing hate radio, keep up the fantasy. At least overthrowing the government of Texas will probably do less damage than trying again to overthrow the government of the United States.

— Are Presidential debates dead? In 1988, George HW Bush, tired of tough questions from real journalists, pulled the GOP out of the debate system that the League of Women Voters had devised generations ago. Instead of letting journalists and the League run the debates, the two political parties got together and created an