Monday, November 25, 2024

YES, ROBERT KENNEDY JR. IS AN AUTHORITARIAN (AS IS TRUMP, OBVIOUSLY)

The opinion section of The New York Times has just published a roundtable discussion of the incoming Trump administration, featuring left-leaners Jamelle Bouie, M. Gessen, and Lydia Polgreen, along with token right-winger Ross Douthat. Patrick Healy is the moderator. The teaser headline on the front page of the Times is "What If It Gets Really Bad? Four Columnists Debate Trump’s Approach to Power."

It's a frustrating discussion, because while Bouie, Gessen, and Polgreen expect the Trump presidency to be authoritarian, they're also upset about likely consequences of Trump's election that aren't technically authoritarian but will be Reaganism on steroids. Polgreen, for instance, predicts that
what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are cooking up at their Department of Government Efficiency could cause a tremendous amount of suffering very quickly. Sharp, thoughtless cuts to Medicaid, for example, will have an immediate effect on the health and well-being of millions of poor Americans, especially children. Not to mention the economic impact of throwing potentially millions of federal workers out of work. The government would save money on salaries, but individual communities across the country would lose earners who contribute to the overall economy in many ways. It is all just so heedless.
All this gives Douthat an opening to be the contrarian who argues that the Trump presidency might not be authoritarian. At one point, Healy asks Douthat:
... I wonder, when you look at the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Kennedy or the now withdrawn Matt Gaetz — people who seem to see the state as the enemy and give off authoritarian vibes in different respects — do you see any signs of darkness ahead?
Douthat replies:
In what sense do you think that Kennedy, whose potpourri of positions combine old-school lefty critiques of everything from nuclear power to big pharma with libertarian-inflected support for alternative medicine, psychedelics and fad diets, gives off “authoritarian vibes”? His most deplorable position is his anti-vaccine advocacy, which has nothing authoritarian about it; it’s a form of crunchy libertarianism taken to a regrettable extreme. Not everything unwise or reckless can be collapsed into the category of creeping authoritarianism; there are plenty of errors that run in the opposite direction!
Later, Gessen defines Robert Kennedy as an authoritarian because ... he rejects mainstream science. I don't like Douthat, but saying this makes his job very easy:
Gessen: ... let’s agree that one aspect of authoritarian government is decision-making by one person or a small group of people, outside of any transparent deliberative process. This is what makes Kennedy’s wacky positions on things such as vaccines “authoritarian” — it’s not what he thinks, necessarily; it’s his rejection of expertise and the deliberation that has produced existing policies.

Douthat: I’ll just say again that I don’t think the rejection of expertise is authoritarian — if so, then Americans have always been authoritarian — unless it is enforced by actual dictatorial means.
None of the panelists seem to realize that Kennedy has made expressly authoritarian threats. I told you about this in April 2023, just after Kennedy, who at the time was a presidential candidate, made clear that he was prepared to bring criminal charges against government health officials and editors of medical journals whose positions differ from his.

In a Twitter thread, Kennedy reassured us that he didn't intend to be vindictive against Anthony Fauci and other government health officials if he was elected president.
It is dawning on mainstream figures like Anthony Fauci that their Covid policies were a public health disaster. Lots of us are angry about the mandates, the lockdowns, the censorship, the insanity. But we need to avoid the toxic quagmire of retribution and blame and focus on ensuring this never happens again. Clean up the regulatory agencies, get corporate money out of public health, and guarantee free, open, uncensored public and scientific discourse.
But then he immediately withdrew the olive branch:
Of course, officials who betrayed the public trust must not be allowed to hold power. I will remove them from their positions and, if laws were broken, my attorney general will prosecute.

Just to be clear, I will prosecute any official who engaged in criminal wrongdoing during the pandemic.....

As President, I will direct my attorney general to investigate and prosecute every person who knowingly defrauded or deceived the American public about the safety and efficacy of medical products and I will obtain justice and compensation for every American who was injured or suffered the death of family members from those actions.
Kennedy has called the COVID vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made." He said in this thread that he was eager to "prosecute every person who knowingly defrauded or deceived the American public about the safety and efficacy of medical products." You do the math.

And he seemed eager to prosecute the editors of medical journals:



Kennedy's words:
I'll bring all the medical journals -- The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA -- into the Justice Department, as soon as I appoint an AG, and I'll say to them, "You guys are part of a racketeering syndicate. You're collaborating with this pharmaceutical industry, lie to the American public about the efficacy and safety of these products, and you're causing enormous harm, and we are going to sue you both civilly, for damages, and we're going to sue you criminally, unless you come up with a plan right now for how you're going to stop doing that.
Apparently, no one in the Times discussion remembers any of this.

*****

In this discussion, it's remarkable how long it takes panelists who work for a newspaper to mentions Trumpworld's threats to the press. It's only near the end of the discussion that Gessen warns of "media capture (e.g., bringing media outlets to heel by exerting pressure on owners, often using their other business interests)." Polgreen invokes an aspect of Narendra Modi's authoritarianism in India: "Intimidate the press through legal harassment and by threatening owners’ other business interests." You'd think the panelists would be very focused on this, given the fact that Trump recently sued CBS for $10 billion because, he claims, CBS edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and Trump's attorneys also sent a letter to the Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages because, according to the letter "false and defamatory statements" appeared in Times articles by Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, as well as in a Penguin Random House book written by Buettner and Craig.

And now there's this:
... Elon Musk shared a bawdy meme on his X platform that joked about tapping into his deep pockets to purchase MSNBC....

MSNBC’s parent company Comcast ... has been eyeing plans to spin off nearly all of its cable channels into a company dubbed SpinCo. Other channels in the group include CNBC, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and the Golf Channel....

The tech mogul also joked about purchasing Twitter (now X) for years before he actually pulled the trigger.

“How much is it?” he asked in 2017 on the platform.


Here are some of the relevant tweets:



This might have happened after the roundtable took place -- but the Trump lawsuit and the threatening letter were already old news, as was the apparent intimidation that led The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to withdraw their Kamala Harris endorsements. Now the intimidation is happening live on Elon Musk's platform. I'm sorry no one asked Douthat why all this isn't already fascism, or at least fascist in intent.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:32 AM 0 comments

Sunday, November 24, 2024

IT'S GOOD TO KNOW WHAT RIGHT-WINGERS ARE THINKING, BUT WE DON'T NEED TO TALK TO THEM

A few days ago, a centrist Democratic congressman who mounted a failed challenge to President Biden in the 2024 primaries posted a tweet that's getting a lot of attention, much of it negative:



Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, I followed quite a few right-wingers there. I liked knowing what they were thinking and how they framed their ideas. As longtime readers of this blog know, I often lurk at right-wing sites -- I still sometimes go to Free Republic, and I like knowing what's being said at the Fox News site, at Breitbart, and even at Gateway Pundit.

But I don't see what value there is in engaging social media right-wingers. As The Atlantic's Ali Breland notes, polite debate isn't want social media right-wingers want:
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience....

The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.
Libs of TikTok seeks to troll liberals and also target liberals, directing right-wing followers' attention to supposed enemies who don't have the means to defend themselves against the right's doxxing, harassment, death threats, and so on. (Elon Musk is now targeting government employees in this way.) Rufo wants to shape the way the entire culture talks about right-wing wedge issues:



This isn't debate. This is warfare. There's no reason for liberals to engage it.

However, it's useful to know what these people are saying. Forewarned is forearmed. What we want to know is how they talk to one another when they think the rest of us aren't listening. That's why I lurk at exclusively right-wing sites. That's why I think people who capture and reproduce right-wingers' words to one another -- Media Matters, Right Wing Watch, NewsHounds, Kat Abu -- are performing a vital service.

It's also good to know what appears in the books that right-wing personalities churn out in bulk, because rightists really don't expect us to notice what they say in those books. Jonathan Chait has been reading three recent books by Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump's pick for secretary of defense, and I hope what he found shocks people who think contemporary conservatism is merely an inch or two to the right of Gerald Ford, accompanied by some empty Trumpian bluster. I wish every Democratic politician and mainstream pundit could understand that what Chait found is what all those Trump guys in diners really believe, or at least it's rhetoric that would make them enthusiastically nod in agreement (sadly, Chait doesn't seem to understand this):
Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the U.S. public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot....

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run....

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.”

... American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

... The War on Warriors repeatedly urges readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, Hegseth writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists ... You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The Left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.
You know who else shares an inabilty to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition? Everyone in America who binge-watches Fox. They all believe it's illegitimate to vote for Democrats -- doing so, they believe, marks the voter as a traitor to the cause of true Americanism.

Our political culture needs to know what these people think. Every mainstream journalist should at least scan the ragebait headlines at FoxNews.com and other right-wing sites every day, and should watch Fox, or at least Fox clips, on a regular basis to understand how far to the right the GOP electorate has drifted.

But there's no point arguing with right-wingers on social media. They don't want civic debate. They won't total political and cultural domination.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:24 AM 0 comments

Saturday, November 23, 2024

KIM JONG UN + DEUTSCHE BANK + TRUMP'S MIT UNCLE + LINDSEY GRAHAM + BARRON = ELON MUSK

I keep trying to understand why Donald Trump hasn't parted ways with Elon Musk yet, even though nearly everyone believes he will. The formula above is the closest I can come to an explanation.

The Lindsey Graham part isn't obvious to most people, but it seems clear to me. We're told that Trump and Musk is a clash of egos, but Musk shows Graham-like deference to Trump when he needs to. This is from a recent New York Times story:
... it is notable that Mr. Musk has appeared concerned about the perception of his influence. On Wednesday, in response to a headline describing him as Mr. Trump’s “closest confidant,” the tech billionaire went out of his way to praise “the large number of loyal, good people at Mar-a-Lago who have worked for him for many years.”

“To be clear, while I have offered my opinion on some cabinet candidates, many selections occur without my knowledge and decisions are 100% that of the President,” he wrote on X.
But Trump also likes and admires the people he calls "killers." Sometimes he likes them because they're literally killers. Here was Trump in 2018:
Mr. Trump had ... praised Kim [Jong Un] as very "talented." [Bret] Baier [of Fox News] pressed Mr. Trump on his praise for Kim, pointing to the North Korean leader's murderous regime record....

"You know you call people sometimes killers, he is a killer. He's clearly executing people," Baier said.

"He's a tough guy," Mr. Trump responded.

"Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don't care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have," the president continued. "If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that's one in 10,000 that could do that. So he's a very smart guy, he's a great negotiator. But I think we understand each other."
Musk may not literally be a killer, but it appears that he's trying to get people killed:
... this week, Musk has escalated from targeting government agencies to singling out individuals....

One recent post by the billionaire zeroed in on Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., after another user on Musk’s social-media platform X questioned her role.

Musk’s repost—“So many fake jobs”—garnered 32 million views, triggering an avalanche of memes and ridicule from his followers against the employee....
He also targeted a relative of Nancy Pelosi, an adviser to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who's criticized the safety of Tesla vehicles, and "two obscure federal officials with climate-related jobs—including one who had actually left her job at the Energy Department in August."

What does Ashley Thomas do?
An agency official said the climate diversification portfolio is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.
Merely acknowledging the existence of climate change is heresy in the Trump administration -- or maybe the tweeter whose post Musk amplified saw "Climate Diversification" in Thomas's job title and thought it had something to do with diversity.



This stochastic terrorism has had the intended effect:
LinkedIn and Facebook pages for Thomas, who lives in the Seattle area, were no longer live as of Wednesday.
To Trump, Musk is also, obviously, a potential source of money -- both his own and that of his tech billionaire friends.

And I think Trump sees Musk as some sort of science genius (which makes him no different from millions of people all over the world, including many credulous journalists). To Trump, Musk is the master of social media, where Trump has taken up residence for a decade or so. But it's not just that. Notice how Trump can only gaze in awe at Musk waving a model rocket in the air:



We know that Trump thinks there are genius genes in his bloodline, but when he says this, who is his go-to example? Uncle John Trump, a "super genius" MIT professor. Trump has said of his uncle that he "used to discuss nuclear with him all the time."

Trump didn't invite classical musicians to his White House, like JFK. He doesn't read serious fiction or nonfiction, like Barack Obama. Musk is a tech genius, so he's a genius as Trump defines genius (which probably means that he manages to make Trump feel as if he's a genius).

And as I said a couple of weeks ago, there seems to be a weird father-son dyamic here:
... I think it's noteworthy that Trump is the same age as Musk's father. If Musk is an alpha male, he's a weirdly wounded one -- before he went full Nazi on X, he seemed to be using it to get love, in a quest to become the world's most famous shitposter. Now Trump seems to be giving him the love he needs.
And Trump might be looking for a son. He seems disappointed in his three biological sons, although he appears to be grateful to Barron for steering him in the direction of the bro podcasters who helped him win this election. Maybe Trump sees Musk as Barron if Barron found a way to be a "killer" as a result of being extremely online.

I could be wrong about all this, but I think this relationship could last.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:39 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 22, 2024

GAETZ'S DOWNFALL IS A WIN, BUT IT'S NOT OUR WIN

Amanda Marcotte gives credit for Matt Gaetz's downfall to "the resistance."
It's a reminder that resistance is not futile.

Gaetz throwing in the towel is a necessary reminder that it can pay to fight back.
But what did we do, exactly, that led Gaetz to withdraw, according to Marcotte?
Republicans were sullenly falling into formation behind this pick, as evidenced by the suppression of the ethics report. But because ordinary people showed some spine — and some interest in consuming news about the scandal — the embarrassing details about Gaetz kept coming out.
So we "resisted" by watching and reading news about Gaetz's sex scandals?

If that were sufficient to bring down a Republican, Pete Hegseth would have withdrawn is name by now as well. Attention to scandals might also have brought down Robert Kennedy Jr., although the sexual assault allegations against him haven't received nearly enough attention. And, of course, we wouldn't be talking about any of these nominations if consuming news about sexual assault were a successful resistance tactic, because Donald Trump wouldn't have won the election.

The truth is that Gaetz is gone because Republicans opposed him.
Mr. Gaetz told people close to him that after conversations with senators and members of their staffs, he had concluded that there were at least four Republican senators in the next Congress who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and the newly elected John Curtis of Utah. With a 53-member majority, four defections would be enough to defeat the nomination.
It would be nice to think that fear of Democratic and swing voters led to this outcome, but that's unlikely. Collins is up for reelection two years from now in a blue state, but Murkowski won't need to run again until 2028. Curtis just won his seat and won't need to defend it until 2030. McConnell has stepped down as Republican leader and probably won't run in 2026, when he'll be 84, but he's in a red state where the one popular Democrat, Governor Andy Beshear, says he won't run for the Senate seat (probably because he's gearing up for a presidential run).

Yes, there was probably an element of resistance in the leaking of details about the Gaetz investigations (although the leaks could also have been the work of people who support Trump but despise Gaetz). Nevertheless, no one in the Democratic leadership stood up and openly defied Trump on this nomination. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called for the release of the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz but didn't demand it, and no Democrat leaked it. As a result, the public won't associate this win with our side. If you're a voter to whom it now appears that sexual predators are operating with impunity, you're seeing no evidence that Democrats have your back.

And we're being told that this is by design:
Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader for a few more weeks, is not known for keeping his thoughts to himself. But he has been uncharacteristically restrained about offering up his views on even the most eyebrow-raising potential Trump administration nominees emanating from Mar-a-Lago.

“We’re going to wait and see what happens in each of these instances before commenting,” Mr. Schumer told reporters this week, passing up a television camera-ready opportunity he would normally grab to slip a knife into any of the president-elect’s cabinet picks.

He is keeping quiet for a reason, and it is not because he does not have opinions on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s administration in the making. With some Republicans raising their own profound concerns about Mr. Trump’s ethically and legally challenged choices, such as the former Representative Matt Gaetz to be attorney general and the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, why get in the way of their intraparty hand-wringing?
Why get in the way of Republicans' intraparty handwringing? Because there may not be any more of it. It's quite possible that every other Trump appointee will sail through, including alleged rapist Pete Hegseth, Russian agent Tulsi Gabbard, and polio vaccine opponent Robert Kennedy Jr.

What does Schumer think would be the downside of being forthright about these nominees now?
Mr. Schumer does not want Republicans to be able to paint him as the face of the opposition, a prospect that could help rally the G.O.P. around Mr. Trump’s choices.
Heaven forbid! We certainly wouldn't want the American people to think that Democrats have different opinions from Republicans!

Donald Trump barely won this election. He didn't win a majority of the popular vote. Even Peter Baker of The New York Times is reporting this. Why are Democrats still so afraid to speak up in opposition to him? After a presidential campaign whose main message often seemed to be "See, I'm a good person -- Republicans like me!," Democrats apparently want Republicans to get all the credit for sinking Trump nominees. They don't want to be seen as part of that process. And now we may have seen the last nominee to sink.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:54 PM 0 comments

Thursday, November 21, 2024

WHY DOESN'T TRUMP HAVE A PLAN B AFTER GAETZ? (updated)

Matt Gaetz is out:
Matt Gaetz withdrew Thursday as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general following continued scrutiny over a federal sex trafficking investigation that cast doubt on his ability to be confirmed as the nation’s chief federal law enforcement officer.
Bizarrely, Trump doesn't seem to have a backup plan. CNN's Kaitlan Collins reports:
Trump does not have a new name in mind for attorney general and now returns to the search. He had struggled to find a candidate he liked initially, which is what led him to Gaetz. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Sullivan & Cromwell attorney Robert Giuffra had been two names he was looking at last week. Trump wasn't sold on either. He has been mainly focused on Treasury and the FBI this week.
How is this possible? There are countless lawyers all over the country who'd happily carry out the Republican agenda of politicizing the Justice Department. There are radical right-wing activists like Texas attorney general Ken Paxton who are eager to turn the DoJ into a tool of GOP vengeance. In fact, when the Gaetz pick was announced, many people speculated that he was offered up as an appointee the Senate could vote down, after which there'd be less pressure to reject other controversial Trump picks, and then Trump could appoint Paxton instead.

But Trump clearly doesn't want a tool of Republican vengeance. Trump wants a tool of Trump vengeance. He doesn't want someone who'll simply do what's in the Project 2025 playbook. He wants someone who'll focus on hurting his enemies and satisfying his whims.

Republican radicals want the government to be remade in a manner that will lead to a durable one-party plutocratic theocracy. Trump just wants his needs catered to at all times. He wants Justice to be a private law firm devoted solely to his wishes and run by a modern Roy Cohn.

This may not be the last time we see a conflict between Trump's agenda and the agenda of Republican radicals. It may be what saves us from the radicals' most frightening plans.

*****

UPDATE: Well, now Trump has chosen former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. You remember her, right?
In March 2016, CREW discovered that the Trump Foundation had broken the law by giving an illegal $25,000 contribution to a political group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Charitable foundations like the Trump Foundation are not allowed to engage in politics. Even more problematic was the fact that the contribution was given as Bondi’s office was deciding whether to take legal action related to Trump University.
Needless to say, Bondi never investigated Trump University. And then....
Not long after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to investigate Trump University, Donald Trump hosted a fundraiser for for her, reported The Huffington Post.

The report showed the invitation to the fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, with its minimum donation request of $3,000 per person, and a Bondi staffer told The Huffington Post that about 50 people attended, meaning Bondi picked up at least $150,000 from the March 2014 event.

still surprised he's not going for Paxton or Davis which seems to show me that he really wants a loyalist more than he wants an ideologue who is *also* loyal

[image or embed]

— Sharon Kuruvilla (@sharonk.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 6:45 PM

Yup.

Posted by Steve M. at 1:59 PM 0 comments

HOW REPUBLICANS WOULD RESPOND TO NANCY MACE'S BIGOTED GRANDSTANDING, IF THE PARTIES WERE REVERSED

As I'm sure you know, Nancy Mace got her scalp:
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced Wednesday that transgender women are not permitted to use bathrooms in the Capitol that match their gender identity....

Johnson’s statement — which was made on Transgender Day of Remembrance, recognized annually to memorialize trans people who died due to anti-trans violence — comes days after Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced a bill to bar transgender women from facilities on Capitol Hill that match their gender identity, a response to the election earlier this month of Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.).

McBride will be the first openly transgender person in Congress.

In a statement following the policy announcement Wednesday, McBride said she disagreed with the new rule but would abide by it.
It has been pointed out that Mace wasn't always an anti-trans bigot -- in fact, she once co-sponsored a (moderately) pro-trans bill:
In 2021, she co-sponsored the Fairness for All Act, a bill seeking to protect LGBTQ+ Americans from discrimination while balancing religious liberty.

At the time, Mace tweeted....

So what happened to Mace? The answer is easy: Redistricting happened. Her district in and around Charleston, South Carolina, had been swingy enough for a Democrat to win it in 2018. A redistricting plan signed into law in 2022 made the district much more Republican, but it was challenged in court. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court approved the plan, making the district solidly Republican.

Democrats should still call out her hypocrisy. They should do what I think Republicans would do if the parties' positions on LGBTQ rights were reversed and a hypocritical Democrat named Nancy Mace had done what the real Nancy Mace has done.

Democrats should take the bill she co-sponsored and introduce it themselves. They shouldn't change a word. The only change they should make is to the title.

Instead of calling it the Fairness for All Act, they should call it the Make America Compassionate for Everyone Act.

Short version: the MACE Act.

Yes, this would be a stunt, and I know: Democrats don't do stunts. Democrats think stunts are beneath them.

But if I were a House Democrat, I'd do the stunt. Stunts can make a point in a vivid way. (I know: Most Democrats don't do vivid, either.)

There are problems with the bill. It was filed as a Republican alternative to the Equality Act, which House Democrats passed in 2021 on a mostly party-line vote. (In the Senate, the Equality Act died in committee.) The Republican bill explicitly permits discrimination by religious groups and in school sports. But even if the bill is flawed, it would have created a better world for trans people than the hellscape Republicans want to create for them now.

It doesn't matter. The bill wouldn't pass now, or even get out of committee. The point of filing it is to inform voters that the great crusader against the transgender menace knew three years ago that trans people aren't a menace. And so did the other co-sponsors, including Donald Trump's pick for UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik. But Democrats won't do it.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:39 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

NANCY MACE IS HAVING FUN

I know I'm supposed to take House Republicans' expressions of contempt for incoming congresswoman Sarah McBride very, very seriously....
House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled support Tuesday for a Republican effort to ban Democrat Sarah McBride — the first transgender person to be elected to Congress — from using women’s restrooms in the Capitol once she’s sworn into office next year....

A resolution proposed Monday by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina would prohibit any lawmakers and House employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” Mace said the bill is aimed specifically at McBride, who was elected to the House this month from Delaware.
But it's hard to believe they're actually worried about sexual assault or the downfall of civilization when the leader of this witch hunt is so obviously having the time of her life:



This is fun for her! She's the center of attention now. She'll probably be on every Sunday talk show next weekend. It's fun for Mike Johnson, too -- almost as much fun as turning America into an unrecognizable theocratic authoritarian kleptocracy.



They know there's no urgent civilizational crisis here. As Charlotte Clymer noted on Threads,
... trans women have been using women's restrooms in the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings and the White House and the Pentagon for many years now, including during all four years of the Trump Administration.

Under Donald Trump's leadership, trans women were permitted to use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and there was never any issue.

In the four years that Rep. Nancy Mace has been in Congress, she's known that trans women use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and it's never been an issue for her. Not once. In all this time.

Until the first openly-trans person was elected to Congress. Then it suddenly became an issue.
They like winning. They like punching down. They like rallying their voters with manufactured rage, and they really like the votes and money they get as a result.

And most of their voters aren't really angry either. You can see that at Trump rallies. It was very obvious at the 2020 boat parades, which, by definition, were attended by Trump supporters who were quite well off.

In March of last year, I wrote this about supposedly angry GOP voters:
Deep down, they know that life is pretty sweet for people like them. No one's really coming for their guns -- they have plenty, and it's easy to buy more. No one's really coming for their red meat or their big-ass SUVs. No one's forcing them to be gay or bi or trans. Politically, they run half the states. They run the Supreme Court and will control it for decades. They run the House, and they have an excellent chance of taking the Senate and the White House next year.

And in the meantime, they make liberals squeal in agony any time they please. Hey, let's propose a bill to make being a Democrat illegal! A legislator in Florida actually did that. Let's hand out AR-15 pins on the House floor! Let's find creative new ways to make guns more available and abortions less available! Let's ban books and drag shows, and put up more and more barriers to being trans, until eventually it's illegal at every age! Past a certain point, it's all just sport. It's quite possible that most right-wingers don't even care about the actual policy outcomes -- as the man said, the cruelty is the point....

We want to solve big problems -- bigotry, economic inequality, a rapidly warming planet -- and all those fights are hard. But right-wingers, for all their complaining, mostly like our society just fine. All they want to do is fuck with us -- and they don't have very much trouble getting what they want.
What's the point of the Trump presidency? They're happy. We're miserable. That's the whole point.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:43 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

NOBODY COULD HAVE FORESEEN!

The New York Times just posted the transcript of Ezra Klein's most recent podcast, under the headline "Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails." Klein begins his opening monologue by asserting that Donald Trump is acting in a way resonable people never believed he'd act:
Think back two months. Imagine it’s September. You’re reading the Substack of some resistance-era liberal. They’re ranting about the dangers of the Orange Man coming back. “Imagine what a second term is going to be like,” they write. “You’re going to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary. Tulsi Gabbard is going to lead the intelligence services. Matt Gaetz is going to be the attorney general. Maybe Donald Trump is going to make a ‘Fox & Friends’ host secretary of defense.”

I think most people reading that would have said: Oh, come on! Donald Trump might be a menace. He is a menace. But that’s a parody of what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. Let’s be real about this.

But here we are in the real, and that is not what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. This is what Donald Trump imagines a Trump administration is going to be. It is what he is trying to make it be.
Seriously?

How could any political observer fail to anticipate that Trump might pick Kennedy for HHS? As I've been telling you, this pick was discussed in August, and Trump told CNN he "probably would" give Kennedy a job in the administration.

How could Klein fail to notice the popularity of Gabbard within the MAGA/Fox News bubble, and the widespread pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine sentiment within that bubble? Haven't we spent eight years debating whether Trump is a Russian agent or merely a pro-Putin useful idiot? Didn't Trump pick J.D. "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine" Vance as his running mate? And remember that Vance was recommended by Donald Trump Jr. -- y'know, this guy:


Why was anyone surprised at the pro-Russia choice of Gabbard?

I admit that the Gaetz pick was a surprise to me -- though we all should have realized that Trump would choose someone who intended to go the the Justice Department and "start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads," which is what a unnamed Trump adviser told Marc Caputo of The Bulwark that Gaetz vowed to do.

And we know Trump likes Hegseth because he considered making him head of the Department of Veterans Affairs in his first term.

I love the way Klein expresses contempt for the "ranting" of "resistance" Trump-bashers even as he admits that we were right. (We were right, but I guess we were right in a gauche way, so Klein and his entire crowd are still smarter and cooler than we are.)

Klein is horrified to discover that Trump doesn't feel constrained by "guardrails." Wow, who could have predicted that? Oh, right -- lots of people.

Washington Post, November 1, 2023:
Trump and his allies have plans to remove the guardrails in a second term

... He wants lawyers like John Eastman, willing to wrench and blowtorch legal language until the will of the electorate becomes secondary to the will of Donald Trump.
The New York Times, December 4, 2023:
Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First

... He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.

... Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.

As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.
CNN, September 26, 2023:

@jaketapper

Hutchinson: In A Second Term, Trump would Not Have Guardrails

♬ original sound - Jake Tapper

We were talking about Trump and "guardrails" a year ago. We knew. But Klein is the kind of person who never experiences any disruption to his very comfortable life and therefore can't imagine this level of disruption happening at all in his world. He knew people were forewarning us about this, but it couldn't really occur, could it? Because if it did, it would be really bad! Nothing really bad ever happens in Ezra Klein's world!

Well, it's happening. The leopards still won't eat Ezra Klein's face, in all likelihood, but he should be prepared to see a lot of faceless people, and a lot of leopards.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:39 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 18, 2024

WHAT I WANT A SENATOR TO ASK PETE HEGSETH

I don't think Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump's other controversial appointees will ever go through confirmation hearings. I assume that even if the Senate resists allowing Trump to seat them as recess appointments, simpering toady Mike Johnson in the House will put forth a resolution to recess both houses of Congress, as outlined in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, and get the votes he needs to pass the resolution because most House Republicans will be too afraid of primary challenges and death threats to resist.

But on the off chance that there are Senate hearings on Hegseth's nomination, I hope some Democrat asks him about a passage New York magazine's Sarah Jones found in one of his books:
In American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he outlined his case for Trump’s reelection in 2020 and drew parallels between contemporary America and the medieval era. “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he writes. “Arm yourself — metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”
This is probably a naive fantasy, but here's what I want a Democratic senator to ask Hegseth about this passage:
As you know, Mr. Hegseth, I'm a Democrat. Many of the people who voted for me are Democrats.

In the shooting war that you say will be necessary at some point in America's future, who exactly do you think you're going to be pointing guns at? Is it me? Is it my voters? Is it everyone in my state? When this conflict starts -- and the conflict sounds a lot to me like a second civil war -- are we the enemy? I'd like a yes or no answer, please.
This passage was just meant to be pro-wrestling-style trash talk dressed up in fancy language so it sounds like a modern version of an eighteenth-century pamphlet. Fox News and the Republican Party have loved this sort of verbal aggression for a long time. But at a certain point, as Kurt Vonnegut said, we are what we pretend to be. This empty bombast has millions of Americans actually looking forward to a shooting war against Democrats. And we have a president-elect who relishes the notion of using the military against domestic enemies. Secretary of Defense-Designate Hegseth clearly likes the idea, too.

Hegseth would talk around the question, which should lead to a follow-up:
Yes or no, Mr. Hegseth: When you and your allies go to war against fellow Americans, perhaps because the president has invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed the military against citizens, will the mark of the enemy be that we voted for the wrong party? Can you say to me right now, sir, "No, we won't target you just because you vote for Democrats"?
Wouldn't Hegseth offend the president, the president's base, and every binge watcher of Fox News if he said, "No, we won't target you just because you vote for Democrats"? I don't think he'd offer that reassurance.

I'd love for that to be the story of his hearings, assuming they ever happen. I'd love for it to slowly dawn on the mainstream media and normie politics-avoiders that Republicans would be happy to hang half the country for treason just because they vote Democratic. I think there are many centrist voters who don't really get that yet, and who would think it's a bit much. Or maybe that's the naive part of this fantasy.

I also wish someone would school Hegseth on this:
Later, in 2024’s The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth complains that the U.S. military has become too woke, too effeminate, and too vaccinated to be fit for purpose. “At a basic level, do we really want only the woke ‘diverse’ recruits that the Biden administration is curating to be the ones with the guns and the guidons?” he writes in the introduction to The War on Warriors. “But more than that, we want those diverse recruits — pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies — to be sharing a basic training bunk with sane Americans.”
I expect all Republicans in good standing to believe the military is woke -- but "pumped full of vaccines"?

Does Hegseth know about this?
George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, ordered mandatory inoculation against smallpox for any soldier who had not gained prior immunity against the disease through infection....

As a result of Washington’s orders, the Continental Army was the first in the world with an organized program to prevent smallpox. Some historians have suggested that if smallpox inoculation had been performed earlier, the smallpox outbreak among Continental soldiers in Quebec could have been avoided—speeding up the conclusion of the Revolutionary War....
Does Hegseth know that servicemembers in World War II were "vaccinated for cholera, diphtheria, plague, smallpox, tetanus, typhoid, paratyphoid A and paratyphoid B, epidemic typhus, and yellow fever"? We won that war, dude.

But this is the sociopathy of the right. These people didn't start by opposing vaccines. They saw during 2020 and 2021 that they could use vaccination as a wedge issue, and because all they care about is beating us, they were willing to undermine the health of America (and America's troops) just to own the libs.

And now some of them actually believe what they've been saying. Is Hegseth one of them? Will he change military policy so we no longer vaccinate the troops against diseases like malaria and cholera? Maybe someone should ask him whether precisely which vaccines he no longer wants the troops "pumped full of."
Posted by Steve M. at 11:02 AM 0 comments

Sunday, November 17, 2024

HOW TO GET AN OP-ED PUBLISHED: CHASTISE DEMOCRATS FOR NOT DOING THINGS THEY'RE ACTUALLY DOING

Adam Jentleson, a former top staffer to Senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, has some theories about the 2024 presidential election, which he's published in a New York Times op-ed:
When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”

Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.

Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.
Kamala Harris tried to win this race by doing a great deal of outreach to moderate Republican voters, in an effort to expand her coalition. Harris also held a huge rally in Texas, a state everyone knew she was unlikely to win. So why was Trump's strategy so special?

But go on, Adam.
Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.
Okay -- Jentleson has used the word "supermajority" three times in the first four paragraphs of this op-ed. He's clearly angling for a deal to publish a book with the word Supermajority in the title (or maybe Supermajority will be the entire title). As you'll see when I discuss the rest of the op-ed, the subtitle of Jentleson's book will be something like How Democrats Can Build a New Winning Coalition by Embracing the Middle -- and Abandoning the Left.)

And now let's talk about how well Trump's "supermajority" strategy worked, because, well, he didn't win a supermajority. It's not clear that he even won a majority. According to AP and the Times, Trump has 50.1% of the national vote, with nearly 2% of the vote still to be counted, much of it in California, a state Harris won by more than 20 points. The Cook Political Report says he's at 49.96%. His popular-vote victory over Harris was less than 2%. Biden won the popular vote by more than twice that in 2020. Both of Barack Obama's popular-vote wins were by greater margins. Even Hillary Clinon's popular-vote win in 2016 was by a greater margin. So if this was a supermajority strategy, it didn't work.

Continue, Adam.
That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.

Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.
Democrats didn't make a clean break with interest groups? Really? Harris embraced fracking. She and President Biden expressed support for a right-wing immigration bill. She portrayed herself as tough on crime, and announced that she owns a gun and would use it to defend herself if necessary. She rebuffed opponents of Israeli brutality in Gaza. That's just a partial list of ways she broke with progressive interest groups.

And it's clear that Jentleson has fallen for the myth that Trump is a fearless maverick who follows his inner dictates and doesn't give a damn about party dogma. Really? Does he think the famously libertine Trump gave speech after speech to Christian Right groups out of a deep and abiding personal faith in the Almighty? Does he think Trump announced that he'd vote to uphold Florida's six-week abortion ban a day after criticizing it because he has a profound inner belief that abortion is wrong? Trump got Roe overturned for one reason: coalition management. He signed on with anti-vaxx obsessive Robert Kennedy Jr. for the same reason -- remember when Trump said positive things about COVID vaccines and was booed by his own supporters?

Jentleson goes on to say that Democrats should
stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun. This is where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.
But Donald Trump once said he wanted "some form of punishment" for women who had abortions, and he said it on video. Why was he able to get out from under this past statement and a hundred others, while Harris was held accountable for her past statements?

Or should we just say that if it was a 50%-48% race, as appears to be the case, then both candidates lost votes because they'd previously said and done things the voters didn't like, and it's unreasonable to expect a candidate not to have a record to defend?

Jentleson's point is that previous progressive policy positions (decriminalizing border crossings, offering gender surgery to prisoners) buried Harris. But she wasn't buried. It was a close race. And she tacked to the right on many, many issues, but Trump was more successful at shedding his baggage. I believe that was because people without the means to pay off their credit bills in full every month are still understandably angry about a burst of inflation that wasn't actually Harris's fault, or President Biden's, but they took it out on her. She did a great deal of what Jentleson accuses her of not doing. But in a dissatisfied country, that wasn't enough.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:18 AM 0 comments

Saturday, November 16, 2024

THE LEADER WE NEED NOW: ANYONE BUT HAKEEM JEFFRIES

A couple of days ago, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on Jake Tapper's CNN show to talk about Donald Trump's appointments. It did not go well.



Jeffries appeared shortly after it was announced that Trump had chosen Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Tapper asked Jeffries for his "reaction to this breaking news." Facing a fat pitch right over the plate, Jeffries ... talked about bipartisanship:
REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): Well, great to be with you, Jake. Since the election we've made clear that we will work to find bipartisan common ground with the incoming administration on any issue whenever and wherever possible in order to make life better for the American people, but, of course, we will push back against far-right extremism whenever necessary.
And what did Jeffries have to say about Kennedy? A lot of empty, meaningless words that told viewers nothing about why Kennedy is a dangerous pick:
Throughout the campaign, the former president promised America the very best, promised the best economy, promised the best border security, promised the best administration possible. The question that we all have to ask with respect to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, is this America's very best? Is this the best that America has to offer to safeguard the health and well-being of the American people?

Of course, it's not, and that's problematic and it's an unfortunate sign perhaps of what's to come.
Tapper offered Jeffries the opportunity to go into more detail. Jeffries responded with more vague mush.
TAPPER: What are your issues specifically with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary?

JEFFRIES: We understand he's completely and totally unqualified as it relates to protecting the health, the safety, and the well-being of the American people. We have a lot of challenges emerging from the pandemic. We need serious folks with a serious background and serious expertise. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, of course, none of the above.
In this segment, Jeffries does the two terrible things Democrats invariably do when they get TV time: He embraces a bipartisan approach to governing that Republicans have rejected since the Newt Gingrich era thirty years ago, and he talks to the public as if all of his listeners read three print newspapers a day cover to cover and already know all the relevant facts. It's a terrible approach to public communication.

To be fair, Jeffries came on just after Tapper and other CNN talking heads had gone over some of the appalling things Kennedy has said. Tapper had played a tape of Kennedy uttering crackpottery about the COVID virus:
COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. And -- but we don't know whether it's deliberately targeted that or not.
Kaitlan Collins had said,
All of the clips that you'll see where he's linking autism to vaccines even though that's been completely debunked, where he's linking, you know, mass shootings to prescription drugs, all of these things that are just his conspiracy theories that he has pushed.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta and former congressman Charlie Dent had rejected the idea that vaccines are linked to autism. So you could argue that Jeffries didn't need to go over this ground once again.

But not everyone who was watching CNN on Thursday saw the entire 23-minute segment, which you can watch here. And Jeffries knows that these on-air segments are clipped and excerpted on social media, which is how many people see them. The Instagram clip above consists only of the Jeffries interview. If he'd made news in that interview, or said something memorable, even shorter clips would be appearing on social media.

No chance of that, though. Jeffries had nothing specific to say.

Jeffries might have mentioned the fact that Kennedy has said no vaccines are safe and effective. He made this pronouncement on the Lex Fridman podcast in July 2023:
Fridman, July 6: You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

Kennedy: I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.
And he specifically cast doubt on the polio vaccine:
So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, Yes. And if you say to me, “Did it kill more people ... did it caused more death than averted?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”
Jeffries might have brought up Kennedy's visit to American Samoa in 2019 during a measles outbrak. Kennedy encouraged vaccine resistance. The outbreak killed 83 people, most of them children.

Jeffries might have mentioned some of Kennedy's other beliefs: Wifi causes cancer. Drinking water is turning kids gay.

You might say that Kennedy was a shocking pick and Jeffries was unprepared to talk about him in detail. But we've known since August that Trump was considering Kennedy for an important position in his administration. And Jeffries is the House Democratic leader. He has Nancy Pelosi's job. He would have been Speaker of the House next year if Democrats had won a few more House seats. He should have first-rate staffers who could have done a better job of preparing him to talk about Kennedy.

Jeffries continued to fail in that Jake Tapper interview after Tapper changed the subject to Trump's attorney general pick, pedophile Matt Gaetz. When Tapper asked about Gaetz, Jeffries once again talked about a fantasy world of bipartisanship:
TAPPER: Do you think the House Ethics Committee should report -- should release the report on Gaetz even though he's no longer a member of Congress, so it's no longer his -- their jurisdiction I suppose?

JEFFRIES: Well, the House Ethics Committee has traditionally operated in a bipartisan fashion. You know, I have great amount of trust and respect in the top Democrat on that committee, Representative Susan Wild. I haven't had an opportunity to have a conversation with her about what's possible.

Certainly, full transparency is always the preferred approach, but the House Ethics Committee has always operated in a straightforward fashion, not as part of a command and control structure connected to leadership from either the House Republican side or the House Democratic side, and I'm just hopeful that consistent with that background, with that history with the integrity of what the House Ethics Committee should represent, that it chooses to do the right thing, consistent with House rules and with the law.
And in response to the next question, Jeffries envisioned a nonexistent universe in which congressional Republicans agree to join with Democrats so both parties in Congress can act as a check on Trump's excesses:
TAPPER: So what are you expecting the Senate to do when it comes to some of these more -- some of the more controversial appointees, whether your former colleague Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS, Fox News co-host and decorated veteran Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon.

Do you expect that they're all going to be confirmed?

JEFFRIES: Well, certainly would be surprised if that in fact was the case based on some of the reaction from some of the moderate Republican senators to several of these elections.

But at the end of the day, what's going to be most important is that both the House and the Senate commit to functioning as a separate and coequal branch of government and that we elevate the principle of being a check and balance on a potentially out of control executive branch.
Wait, this gets worse.
That is the vision of James Madison and the framers of the Constitution as to what we should be doing in the House and in the Senate and House Democrats are committed to just solving the problems that the American people want us to solve, which first and foremost relates to lowering costs and making sure that we can help everyday Americans who are struggling to live paycheck to paycheck get ahead and not simply get by. And all of this that we're seeing over the last few days seems to me to be a distraction from the mission that all of us should be focused on in the context of delivering real results for everyday Americans and solving real problems for hardworking American taxpayers.
Trump is very seriously planning to put Democrats in prison and Jeffries is giving us reheated mush that sounds as if it's been kept in cold storage since the days of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. Yeah, there might be tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue soon, but my fellow Democrats and I will be over here quietly problem-solving, and gee whiz, we sure hope congressional Republicans will join us.

If we survive the second Trump presidency, it will be in spite of Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries. We're really on our own here.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:44 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 15, 2024

IT'S FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SCHOOLYARD BULLYING

The Trump era, in two tweets:



Trump doesn't use elaborate, sophisticated schemes to get his way. He knows one simple thing: When he's in a position of power, he's willing to bully people to get his way, and if the people he's dealing with don't want to fight back, or fight at all, they let him have his way. If he were a genuinely shrewd multi-dimensional chess player, he'd combine this with a sophisticated approach to attaining his long-term goals, but sophistication is beyond him. For instance, a shrewder man would have done the minimum necessary to avoid being indicted, but once he was up on charges and tried in New York, he bullied the court until he and his surrogates were allowed to engage in what amounted to jury tampering, and he intimidated officers of the court. This didn't prevent him from being convicted, but his entire presidential campaign was intended to intimidate the judge who'll preside over his sentencing, and it worked -- the judge delayed his sentencing until after Election Day, and now we know he won't go to prison.

Right now, Trump is appointing people who shouldn't be confirmed, and he's threatening to use a forced adjournment of Congress and recess appointments in lieu of Senate confirmation. The scheme requires the House of Representatives to call for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate, and it appears that House Speaker Mike Johnson is willing to do this for Trump. So now the Senate, which is a very self-regarding institution, wants to avoid being humiliated by a president who says he doesn't need the Senate's consent for his appointees, so senators are likely to rubber-stamp even Trump's worst appointees, holding pro forma hearings with a pre-determined outcome rather than no hearings at all, in order to preserve the tradition of holding hearings. Bullying works.

But what's the point? Maybe Trump was struggling to find easily confirmable appointees who'd be as willing to carry out his agenda as Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, but what does Trump get out of appointing Robert Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services? Trump doesn't care about seed oils or food additives. Trump bragged about the COVID vaccines until long after his base turned against them. Kennedy's agenda is not Trump's agenda.

I think what Trump wants is the sheer joy of bullying. He likes forcing people to bend to his will for its own sake. At times he seems to pursue quick hits of dominance instead of real, enduring power or profit.

During Trump's first term, I was struck by how often his corrupt acts seemed small. In 2019, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Ireland and stayed at a Trump resort, along with his Secret Service entourage -- but the resort is on the far west coast of Ireland, and Pence needed to be in Dublin, which is in the east. What did Trump get out of this? It's been reported that the hotel costs for the Secret Service were $15,000. But Trump wanted that relatively tiny amount of money. He wanted the cash, but I think he also wanted the travelers to do what he wanted them to do. He wants to dominate people, even Republican senators who'd happily work with him on ways he can amass power. He wants dominance for its own sake.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:15 AM 0 comments

Thursday, November 14, 2024

GAETZ WILL GET THE JOB ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

Many people believe that Donald Trump picked Matt Gaetz to be attorney general as a ploy:

I worry that Gaetz is the sacrificial lamb and who Trump really wants through is Tulsi and the Fox host.

— Allie A (@alliea.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 6:52 PM

Hypothesis: Gaetz is the sacrificial lamb Trump is giving to the Senate to make it more likely Hegseth - who Trump actually wants - gets through.

— Jeff Lazarus wants to live in a democracy (@jlazarus.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 8:40 PM

He probably nominated Gaetz as a sacrificial lamb so he can push through Paxton on the second try.

— jeanjeanie.bsky.social (@jeanjeanie.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 5:51 PM


But that seems a lot less plausible coming from Trump than this scenario, from a very connected figure in the right-wing legal world:



Article II, section 3 says that the president
may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses [of Congress], or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper....
The "extraordinary Occasion" in this case would be adult toddler Trump saying, "WAAAAHHHH! I'm not getting my own way!"

And will the Senate really put up resistance? The Bulwark's Marc Caputo reports that even a senator who had unpleasant interactions with Gaetz is open to voting for him:
... an old clip of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) quickly resurfaced in which he noted that, in the House, Gaetz would show colleagues videos “of the girls that he had slept with” and “brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”

But ... even the once tough-talking Mullins signaled on Wednesday afternoon that he’d be at least open to voting for Gaetz.

“I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one,” Mullins told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He has to answer those questions. And hopefully, he‘s able to answer the questions right. If he can, then we’ll go through the confirmation process.”
If there's sufficient resistance, I think the Senate will get Gaetz the job via a recess appointment, with the Senate calling the recess or Trump using the Constitution to call it. The Supreme Court didn't ban recess appointments -- it said that if the Senate is effectively in recess but is holding pro forma sessions so it's technically in session, the president can't treat that as a recess and slip in an appointee. Previous presidents had done that, but when Barack Obama did it, the Court ruled against him. Trump will get his way.

I agree with Marc Caputo that this is extremely important to Trump:
In Trump’s mind, there is no more important post than attorney general, both because of the sheer number of federal investigations and indictments he’s weathered since leaving office and his conviction that he was let down by feckless or non-loyal AGs when he served as president.
And I can easily imagine that Trump sees Gaetz, the subject of Justice Department probes himself, as his new Roy Cohn:
[Gaetz's] attitude has won him many enemies on the Hill. But it was also fundamental to Trump’s decision to choose him for the AG slot, according to a Trump adviser familiar with the transition process.

“None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz,” the adviser said. “Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’”

... those familiar with Trump’s thinking say he’s deadly serious about getting Gaetz in at DOJ.
But if Gaetz doesn't get the job one way or another, I'm not sure it will matter much. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern writes:
It is a shocking choice, surely by design, that reflects an obvious desire to corrupt the agency from the top down. If Gaetz is confirmed, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Justice Department will be permanently damaged, as civil servants flee (or face termination), partisan loyalists take their place, and the entire agency reorients around settling old scores against Trump’s perceived enemies. If Senate Republicans do not draw the line here, then a line does not exist.
But if Gaetz doesn't get the job, anyone Trump appoints in his place will be there to do exactly the same thing. Trump ran for office to do precisely this. It was the main goal of the campaign. Trump just thinks Gaetz will do it harder than anyone else will do it.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:35 AM 0 comments
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