Losing My Perspicacity February 21, 2025

If Congress is too frightened of their base to uphold their oath, they should all step down

Author

Julie DiCaro
February 21, 2025

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Good morning and Happy Free Friday at LMP! Thanks for reading.

I’m sitting down to write this edition of LMP much later than I usually do — the result of what’s known in our household as “birthday” week, as three people in my immediate family have birthdays (and Valentine’s Day) within a 7-day span. I won’t lie — it’s a long week, there’s a lot of sugar, and it’s completely draining. So, if my copy-editing is worse than usual, please forgive me.

Another part of the reason I’m writing this so late is that news has been breaking fast and furiously over the last few hours, throwing my entire plan for this edition of LMP into chaos. And every bit of it is infuriating. I’ll get to that a bit.

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I’ll get to what I had planned for today in a moment, but here’s what happened last night.

Oh, and also this:

Here's video of Steve Bannon doing a Sieg Heil today at CPAC. It is what it is and it's what Bannon intended. Don't let yourself be gaslit.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)2025-02-21T03:54:24.669Z

Don’t worry, though. I’m sure it’s not a Nazi salute. That would be crazy.

Today: Vanity Fair confirms that Congress is full of cowards; Luis Rubiales found guilty of sexual harassment; Trump sure spends a lot of time golfing; Weekend Action Items; and The High Note.

Here we go.

If you’re too afraid to uphold your congressional oath, step down

I spent some time yesterday with this piece in Vanity Fair, which attributes the congressional GOP’s refusal to do their damn job of acting like a check on the executive branch to a fear of physical violence if they constrain Trump in any way.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)

This makes me so angry I can barely see straight. As of 2020, over half the members of Congress were worth over $1 million. Many of them, like Rick Scott and Mark Warner, are worth tens of millions. Most congressional reps have plenty of dough to hire their own private security if they’re that terrified of their base.

Secondly, while I’m extremely disappointed in the Dems’ impotent and milk-toast response to Trump, why don’t we see those on the left, like AOC, Jamie Raskin, Elizabeth Warren, and Jasmine Crockett, letting these fears affect their votes? They’re out there bashing Trump and voting against him every chance they get. Do we think AOC isn’t getting these kinds of threats? I know she is — I’ve seen the unhinged garbage men send her way on X. Tough guys like Thom Tillis (worth $11 million) and Kevin Hern (worth $110 million) have a lesser ability to protect themselves than a 5’4 Latina woman with a net worth of $200k?

And finally, as a woman who once got death threats daily for having opinions on sports on the internet (I have an entire running folder that holds hundreds of screenshots), this is sheer cowardice.

January 6 further catalyzed GOP fear of Trump-inspired violence. Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins, that an undercurrent of anxiety thwarted Republican efforts to formally punish Trump for his role in inciting the riot. “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins wrote in his book. “When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”

When our Congress members are sworn in, they take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. If the consequences of doing that are too frightening to GOP reps and Senators, they are obligated to step down and let someone else take their place — someone with the courage to stand up to an authoritarian regime and preserve the Republic.

I once got a death threat so specific that my boss and I agreed I needed to stay home from work for a few days. At that point, I knew I had a decision to make: a) I could either get out of sports media, b) I could stop talking about topics like violence against women by athletes, or c) I could suck it up and not let @JulieRapist88 (or whatever his name was) silence me. It was far from the last time a man threatened to physically harm me via the internet. If I felt I couldn’t do my job properly because of these threats, I would have quit.

It’s been 10 years since that first “credible” threat, and I still have men who harass me daily. And while it’s not “violent” in the physical sense, it still causes harm.

Here’s a banger from last week:

And here’s one FB just alerted me to:

I have no idea who this person is or why they sent me this. But I get messages like this nearly every day, and I don’t work in a building with security at the front gate or a staff to protect me.

My point is this: When you choose to work in a field that puts you in the public eye, and requires you to take stands on divisive issues, you either decide you’re going to put up with this garbage or that you can’t. Those are the only two choices you have. You can not abdicate your responsibility to something bigger than yourself because you are afraid of the people you represent. The GOP created this monster by enabling Trump every step of the way to where we are now, and they aggravated the situation by excusing the violence he encouraged. They can live with the consequences or get out of the way.

Great Americans have always put their personal safety on the line. John Adams defended the British soldiers accused in the Boston massacre in court, so strong was his belief in the right to a legal defense. Harriet Tubman led a military raid on Combahee Ferry and freed 700 enslaved people. John Lewis was arrested more than 40 times during a 6-year period and beaten so severely during the Selma march that his skull was fractured. Mildred Harnack left Wisconsin to fight the Nazis in Berlin and was executed for it.

Being a great American has nearly always required risking injury to your person. That members of Congress are too afraid of the same MAGA crowd they refused to condemn after January 6 is an affront to the memory of better Americans than they.

Stop cowering in your offices, woman up, and do your damned jobs.

Down goes Luis Rubiales

Disgraced former Spanish football head Luis Rubiales was found guilty of sexually harassing star player Jenni Hermoso after the 2023 World Cup yesterday.

Spain's High Court set a fine of over €10,000 ($10,434.00) for the crime, but acquitted Rubiales of a count of coercion. The former executive told Reuters he would appeal, saying: "I am going to keep fighting."

Prosecutors had sought a prison sentence for Rubiales in a case that marred the celebrations of Spain's first Women's World Cup title and sparked a debate about sexism in women's football and wider Spanish society.

Rubiales said Hermoso consented to the kiss, but she denied it.

Judge Jose Manuel Fernandez-Prieto said he believed Hermoso's testimony that she had not given any consent, thus finding Rubiales guilty of sexual assault. However, he said that while this was "always reproachable," this instance was of minor intensity as there was no violence or intimidation.

I don’t know about you, but every time I see a judge or a jury say they believe a woman’s testimony over a man’s, I breathe a sigh of relief. Too often, when women come forward in cases involving sexual harassment or assault, we hear one of two things from the masses: 1) She consented to it/wanted it, or 2) It’s he said/she said, so we have no way of knowing what happened.

Well, finders of fact do have a way of knowing what happened. It’s listening to testimony from both parties and deciding who they believe is telling the truth. We do this all the time in plenty of other criminal cases.

Rubiales was also banned from communicating with Hermoso for a year, as well as coming within a 200-meter radius of her. Hooray for accountability.

Trump has golfed nearly a third of the time he’s been in office

While Elon Musk and DOGE lay waste to our federal agencies in the name of rooting out “fraud and waste,” Donald Trump has spent nine out of 30 days in office on the golf course.

According to a HuffPo investigation, those days of golf have already cost taxpayers more than $10 million, and that’s before we get to him attending the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500.

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has already spent $10.7 million of taxpayer money to play golf since retaking the White House last month, an expense that appears to have escaped the attention of his “Department of Government Efficiency” waste, fraud and abuse hunters.

The golf-related expenses — which are likely to recur most weekends while Trump is in office — have somehow flown below the radar of Elon Musk and his “high-IQ” team, as Trump calls them, of programmers who are ransacking their way through the federal budget and labeling items they do not like or appear not to understand as “fraud.”

Worse, Trump has whined about federal employees “working from home” while he “works” from Mar-A-Lago.

“There’s a whole big, oh, you can work from home,” Trump said. “Nobody’s going to work from a home. They’re going to be going out. They’re going to play tennis. They’re going to play golf. They’re going to do a lot of things. They’re not working.”

This is a rare subject in which Trump actually knows what he’s talking about.

Kudos to the Sarasota Tribune for telling it like it is, including sneaking this line in:

In his first month “in office”, Trump spent a solid chunk of  it “out of office” in Florida, where he sauntered in his relaxed-waist pants, searching for approval and playing golf nine times.

I now have one goal in life: To never be referred to as wearing “relaxed-waist pants.”

Weekend action items

One of the worst parts of life right now is feeling helpless as we all watch what’s happening in Washington and beyond. To help us not feel so helpless, I’m going to (from time to time) suggest some quick, little actions we can all take that make a big difference.

  • Public comment is open on passport gender marker changes. This is where you can let the government know how you feel about their erasure of trans people. I commented on all three actions, which took me less than 10 minutes. Some advice on how to comment here;

  • Buy hard copies of banned books. I’ve seen quite a few people picking up two or three books each month, just in case they, for some reason, aren’t available in the future. Worst case, you can donate them down the road, either to your local library or the underground resistance, depending on which way this thing goes;

  • Read this piece by Heather Burns, and the paper she recommends when you have time;

  • Sign this petition demanding that the US reinstate legal services for unaccompanied immigrant minors.

The High Note

Given the current state of America, I endeavor, each day, to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, or the will to keep fighting.

Here’s today’s first offering: America’s dumbest senator strikes again:

The guy who can’t name the three branches of government also couldn’t come up with the word for “triangle.”

And finally, believe it or not, this battle cry comes from none other than Chumbawamba (remember them?). Tubthumping will always be inextricably linked with the ‘98 World Cup for me, and this song is even better.

Finally, Canada beat the US 3-2 in OT to take the Four Nations Cup, and Justin Trudeau had this one in the holster:

Survive and advance, don’t let the bastards get you down, and have a great weekend.

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