Republicans are even more stupid and short-sighted than I thought. In Tennessee, the Republicans totally dominate the legislature, they have all the power, and they couldn’t resist the temptation to use that power to brutally squash even the vestiges of influence the Democrats have.

The Republican-led Tennessee House voted Thursday to expel two Democratic lawmakers who halted proceedings last week to join protesters demanding gun-control legislation after a mass killing.

In a historic act of partisan retaliation, the chamber voted 72-25 to oust Rep. Justin Jones (D), a 27-year-old community organizer elected in November to represent part of Nashville, and 69-26 to expel Rep. Justin Pearson (D) of Memphis. Republicans did not have enough votes to remove Rep. Gloria Johnson (D), a former teacher from Knoxville who lost a student to gun violence.

They were protesting the inaction of the legislature in response to the Covenant School murders, in which three nine-year old children and three adults were killed. The Republicans are so determined to do nothing that they finally did something, by throwing out the few activists they had.

Just to make their injustice even more cartoonishly garish, of course they evicted the two black troublemakers and left the white woman alone. Tennessee, can you be any more blatant?

At least the charges were revealing.

Republicans in the House filed the resolutions Monday to oust Jones, Johnson and Pearson, saying the three lawmakers “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House.

The only dishonor here is the action of cowardly Republicans who not only expelled the people who criticized them, but then proceeded to ignore the problem of gun violence in their state. Apparently, the most honorable people in the legislature were Jones, Pearson, and Johnson, and the Republicans moved decisively to silence them.

I do wonder what happens next. The Tennessee Three will be a focus of a growing activism in the state, but let’s get real: the racists who elected a swarm of fascists to the legislature are going to be happy with their actions, and we’re also going to see a growing conservative resistance.

They’re probably building a Death Star already.

Yesterday, I wrote about how a liberal judge, Janet Protasiewicz, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her opponent was spittin’ mad, because she had been “political,” campaigning on her support for pro-choice positions, as if he wasn’t, because campaigning on a rabid anti-choice position isn’t political, somehow. Some Wisconsin Republicans are already scheming to impeach her, because she is somehow bad for holding the opinions she has.

Now consider the corruption of US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman [Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

He’s rotten all the way through. It’s not just that he accepted absurdly expensive gifts from a right-wing billionaire, but that he knew it was unethical — he kept them secret.

I, too, am a public servant, although one that gets a salary less than a quarter of Thomas’s, and lacking all those additional perks. Every year I get sent an annoying form that I have to fill out, asking for all the details about any income above my salary, and wanting to know about any profitable associations that might bias my teaching or research. It’s mainly aimed at professors who, for instance, might have lucrative ties to pharmaceutical companies. At least I can say it’s easy for me to fill out, lacking additional revenues of that sort, but I do fill it out honestly and accurately.

If any of you readers feel like dropping by to whisk me off in your private plane for a vacation in Indonesia, thank you very much, but I will be listing it on my disclosure form.

Clarence Thomas wouldn’t.

“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. When she was on the bench, Gertner said, she was so cautious about appearances that she wouldn’t mention her title when making dinner reservations: “It was a question of not wanting to use the office for anything other than what it was intended.”

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations.”

“When a justice’s lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust,” said Canter, now at the watchdog group CREW. “Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink.”

Even those vermin in Congress have tighter restrictions on gifts than Supreme Court judges.

There are few restrictions on what gifts justices can accept. That’s in contrast to the other branches of government. Members of Congress are generally prohibited from taking gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics committee to take many of the trips Thomas has accepted from Crow.

When your ethical considerations are looser than those of a Matt Gaetz, and you can’t even abide by them, then we can safely say that you’re corrupt to the core. Don’t impeach Janet Protasiewicz, not when you’ve got the thievery and corruption of Clarence Thomas stinking up the joint.

Several things that make me happy occurred.

• Trump was arrested. That’s nice.
• A liberal won the Chicago mayoral race.
  

  Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former public school teacher, was projected to win Tuesday’s mayoral runoff after promising to increase investment in social programs to address public safety fears in the nation’s third-largest city.

• The Wisconsin supreme court was flipped to a majority liberal

  Liberals claimed control of Wisconsin’s high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election.
  Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the state’s election maps “rigged.”

  This is the one I cared about most, because it’s the state next door, and I’ve got a grandchild living there. Wisconsin has been on a long slow ugly slide to the dark side, and this is a welcome and meaningful reversal. Also — a Democrat campaigning on abortion rights won? Please, Democratic party, realize that this is a winning issue for you.

I think that one thing that has been dragging Democrats down for decades is the timidity of conservative Democrats who want to be Republican Lite and refuse to embrace what the party stands for — progressive values, equality, and labor (they still suck on that last one).

It’s grown a bit today. Finland has joined the alliance.

I’m a bit bothered by that hole in the North — where’s Sweden? It seems they have applied to join NATO, but Turkey is being a pain in the butt, kind of a Minchin of Asia Minor.

But membership applications must be approved by all existing NATO countries. And Turkey positioned itself as a spoiler, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using the process to extract concessions and score domestic political points. Although he ultimately came around on Finland, he has continued to hold out on Sweden, citing Stockholm’s refusal to extradite those he calls “terrorists” affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Charles XII would not have been happy. There he was, in exile in Turkey, when he rushed back to Sweden specifically to make sure they wouldn’t make peace with Russians.

Eventually, in the autumn of 1714, their warning letter reached him. In it, those executive and legislative bodies told the absentee King that unless he quickly returned to Sweden, they would independently conclude an achievable peace treaty with Russia, Poland and Denmark. This stark admonition prompted Charles to rush back to Sweden.

He would have wanted Sweden to be part of NATO, I’m sure.

We won’t mention that when he got back to Sweden he decided to declare war and invade…Norway? Where he was killed? History is complicated. I think we can safely say we’re living in one of the more complicated times in history.