No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.

– US Constitution, Article I, Section 9

QUESTION: So you don’t need congressional approval to build the wall?

TRUMP: No, we can use — absolutely. We can call a national emergency because of the security of our country, absolutely. No, we can do it. I haven’t done it. I may do it. I may do it, but we could call a national emergency and build it very quickly.

– press conference January 4

This week’s featured posts are “Another Week in the Post-Truth Administration” and “Ralph Northam and the Limits of Forgiveness“.

This week everybody was talking about the budget negotiations

But nobody was saying anything terribly insightful about them. The government is funded through February 15, so the conference committee has until then to make a deal. Maybe they’ll succeed and maybe they won’t. But whatever deal does or doesn’t happen, it won’t be negotiated in public. The way these things usually go is that there appears to be no deal until suddenly there is one. Speculation is always titillating, but we’re in a phase where we just have to wait and see.

and the weather

How cold was it? In Chicago, transit crews were setting the train tracks on fire to keep them from freezing over.

Of course, people who don’t understand the science raised the usual question: How can there be global warming if it’s so cold out?

The answer (from Science Alert) is that there’s been a weird airflow pattern, not that the planet as a whole is actually colder than usual. The North Pole was having a heat wave, relatively speaking, after sending much of its cold air south. (It’s like when you stand in front of an open refrigerator door. You’re not eliminating warmth, you’re just reshuffling it.)

A condensed version of Science Alert’s explanation: Melting ice in the Arctic is causing it to reflect less sunlight and absorb more heat. This lowers the temperature differential between the Pole and lower latitudes. Ordinarily, the polar vortex is a high-altitude “river of wind” that is more-or-less circular around the Pole. But the lower temperature differential slows that river down and makes its course more erratic. So occasionally it dips south, carrying polar cold into lower latitudes.

So yes, strange as it sounds, this week’s record cold across the northern and eastern US was in fact evidence of global warming. (This kind of weather will probably happen more often as climate change continues.) And even as the weather was far colder than usual where I live, it was still warmer than usual when you look at the whole Earth.

and Governor Northam

One of this week’s featured posts compares Northam to past Democratic figures like Robert Byrd and George Wallace, both of whom were allowed a measure of redemption.

But a second issue concerns double standards for Democrats and Republicans. Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel had to resign last week because of blackface photos: He wore blackface to make fun of victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That case didn’t arouse my sympathy. So am I applying different standards to Republicans?

The answer is: Yes I am, and I don’t apologize for it.

Here’s why: Questions of racism get raised by standard Republican positions on issues that come up every day. When you denounce “amnesty” for the undocumented, are you concerned about the rule of law, or are you really thinking that there are already too many brown people in the US? (I mean, why can’t we have more immigration from Norway?) Is it an unfortunate coincidence that your anti-voter-fraud measures suppress the black and Hispanic vote, or is that the point? Are you really supporting your local police, or do you just not care when officers kill young black men? Do you think the government spends too much, or just that it spends too much on people who don’t look like you?

When a politician’s positions on current issues already raise questions about racism, then evidence of racism in his or her past ought to have increased significance.

and national emergencies

The concept of a national emergency is simple: Congress moves more slowly than the Executive Branch. Recognizing that, Congress pre-authorizes the President to take timely actions in situations that are moving too fast for a congressional response.

A national emergency formalizes what President Lincoln did at the beginning of the Civil War: take immediate necessary actions and ask Congress for its approval some other time. (From Lincoln’s message to a special session of Congress assembled on July 4, 1861: “It was with the deepest regret that the Executive found the duty of employing the war power in defense of the Government forced upon him. He could but perform this duty or surrender the existence of the Government.”)

I haven’t read the national emergency laws, so I can’t say for sure what they do or don’t allow. But I do know this: What Trump is proposing (to declare a national emergency so that he can build his Wall without the approval of Congress) invalidates the whole justification of national emergencies.

The situation at the border is largely unchanged since Trump took office, except for humanitarian problems he has caused himself by mistreating refugees. (He could solve those problems without declaring an emergency, just by reversing his own policies.) Events are not moving too fast for Congress to react. In fact, Congress has acted; it just hasn’t done what Trump wanted.

To declare an emergency under these circumstances would be an authoritarian act, an abuse of power that could well be impeachable. The President would not be getting out in front of Congress, he would be circumventing Congress.

He would also be defying the will of the American people. Trump is a minority president, elected with 46% of the vote, nearly 3 million fewer votes than his main opponent. He has remained unpopular throughout his administration; his approval rating has never hit 50%. More recently, Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives with 53% of the vote. It is Pelosi, not Trump, who has a popular mandate.

and Venezuela

I confess to not paying a lot of attention to South America over the years, so I’ve been looking for background articles that can help me make sense of the current crisis. The BBC has a fairly good one, which I’ll summarize:

Venezuela has a lot of oil, and the potential to be a fairly prosperous country. But in the 1990s it had massive inequality. It sounds like the usual Latin American thing, but moreso: A few families controlled everything and a lot of people were desperate. The new oil wealth just made that worse.

Democracy and inequality on this scale can only coexist for so long, and so Hugo Chávez got elected president as a socialist in 1999. A lot of his reforms were poorly thought out and backfired on the general economy. (The BBC article mentions his price controls, which pushed a lot of the controlled items onto the black market.) But he also spent oil money on programs that improved health care, literacy, and quality of life among the poor. He remained popular for most of his era in power — he died as president in 2013 — but at the same time had very powerful enemies among the upper classes. He consolidated power and became a virtual dictator.

Things started to get really bad late in his administration, when the global price of oil collapsed. The oil revenues had put a blanket over a lot of unsustainable policies, which started to unravel. By now, the country is a mess. About 3 million of the country’s 32 million people have left. US intelligence services estimate that another 2 million refugees will leave soon.

Chávez was succeeded by the current president, Nicolás Maduro, who has not managed to turn things around. He was re-elected last May to a 6-year term that started a few weeks ago. His re-election, though, was rigged, so the opposition says the presidency is vacant now. The Venezuelan Constitution says that when the presidency is vacant, it falls to the head of the Assembly, who is Juan Guaidó. Guaidó has declared himself acting president, which Maduro disputes.

The United States, the EU, and most of Latin America recognizes Guaidó as president. Maduro has the support of Russia, China, and a few other countries. So far the Venezuelan military is sticking with Maduro.

The immediate problem is that legitimacy has broken down. Nobody has a clear claim to be in charge. The Maduro government is clearly not good for the country, but would a Guaidó government be better? A Venezuelan might wish for things to go back to normal, but when was that exactly? In Latin America, “normal” is often a desperate condition for the lower classes.

That’s why the suggestion that American troops might get involved is so worrisome. It’s not that the Maduro government deserves to survive, but that we could easily wind up fighting to help plutocrats keep the common people down. In Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, Senator Marco Rubio listed the misdeeds of the Venezuelan government and raised the question:

Is it not in the national interest of the United States of America that the Maduro regime fall?

Senator Angus King of Maine responded with caution:

[Senator Rubio] listed refugee flows, human rights abuses, and corruption. There are lots of countries in the world that meet that description, and our right or responsibility to generate regime change in a situation like that, I think, is a slippery slope. I have some real caution about what our vital interests are, and whether it’s our right or responsibility to take action to try to change the government of another sovereign country. That same description would have led us into a much more active involvement in Syria, for example, five or six years ago.

An additional problem from the US perspective is that Venezuela has taken on symbolic meaning for American conservatives: It’s a cautionary tale illustrating why you should never elect socialists. Whenever an American progressive proposes Medicare for All, a conservative will start talking about Venezuela, as if no other country in the world had universal health care, and as if American progressives look to Venezuela as a model rather than Denmark or Sweden or Canada, which were the top three countries in US News’ 2018 best-quality-of-life ratings.

Venezuela’s symbolic significance makes it harder to see what is actually happening there.

but maybe we shouldn’t have been talking about Howard Schultz

OK, he’s rich and he wants to be president. But so far, as best I can tell, he doesn’t have a base or a signature issue or a poll showing that any measurable number of people would vote for him. So I can’t figure out why his potential candidacy is worth all this attention. Why is he getting so much free media?

The Schultz media rollout has been eye-popping, with the billionaire sitting down for interviews with not only 60 Minutes, but CBS This Morning, CNBC, Goop, the New York Times, ABC’s The View, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

and you also might be interested in …

Cory Booker has joined the 2020 race.

Last Monday, a Trump tweet endorsed the “Biblical Literacy” legislation that has been proposed in a number of states, including Missouri, North Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia. Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas already have such laws. The point is to require public schools to offer elective courses that teach about the Bible.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State comments on its blog:

To be clear, the classes are not per se unconstitutional. But Bible classes must be taught in accordance with constitutional requirements set out by courts. These courses must be taught in a nondevotional manner with no attempt made to indoctrinate students as to either the truth or falsity of biblical accounts. The courses should not be taught from the perspective that the Bible is a literal historical record, and such courses must expose students to critical perspectives on the Bible and a diversity of scholarly interpretations.

In other words, you can teach that the Gospel of John says Jesus rose from the dead. But you can’t teach “Jesus rose from the dead” as a historical fact, citing John as your authority. The same thing applies to any other religion. Students should learn what Muslims believe about the origin of the Quran: The Archangel Gabriel recited it to Muhammad. But that’s different from teaching them that this recitation actually happened.

Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with a high school class reading the Book of Job or the Song of Solomon and discussing them the same way they would discuss The Odyssey or any other ancient text. (Though probably most high schools would consider Song of Solomon too racy.)

It’s not that hard a distinction to understand, if you want to understand it. Unfortunately, a lot of Christian fundamentalists would rather not understand it or observe it.

Texas passed one of these bills in 2009, and the resulting classes offered in many districts have been very problematic. Six years ago, Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, surveyed courses in 60 districts around the state. Only 11 districts, Chancey found, were “especially successful in displaying academic rigor and a constitutionally sound” approach. The other 49, he found, “were a mixed bag, some were terrible.” Chancey singled out 21 districts as offering “especially egregious” instruction. According to Chancey’s research, public school students in these courses were taught that “the Bible is written under God’s direction and inspiration,” Christians will at some point be “raptured,” and that the Founding Fathers formed our country on the principles of the Holy Bible. (Kentucky passed one of these laws as well and has had similar problems.)

In fact, a properly taught Biblical Literacy course would probably horrify the very people who are pushing to create such courses, because it would teach students that over the centuries the Bible has been read and interpreted many different ways. Whatever your pastor told you is not the only way to think about it.

What Project Blitz and other backers of Biblical Literacy courses want instead is to have the government endorse their particular theology, and to force non-believers to pay taxes that promote fundamentalist Christian views. That has been illegal at least since my friend Ellery Schempp (he’s still alive and belongs to my church) won his Supreme Court case in 1963.

The first priority of House Democrats, H.R. 1, is a bill to curb corruption and make it easier to vote. Among other things, it would make Election Day a national holiday, so that workers would have an easier time making it to the polls. It would also expand early voting, require the president and vice president to publish the last 10 years of their tax returns, force SuperPACs to reveal where their money comes from, make government contractors report their political contributions, provide federal matching funds to encourage small donations to political campaigns, make voter registration an opt-out system rather than an opt-in system, reduce gerrymandering, and do many other things to make elections a truer gauge of the will of the People.

Mitch McConnell, of course, is against it and will not bring it to the floor of the Senate after it passes the House. The bill, he says, is a “power grab“. And he’s right, it is. It is an attempt to grab power for the American people. McConnell’s GOP, which represents a minority of the American people but a majority of the super-rich, would have some of its power taken away. GQ’s Luke Darby has it right:

What McConnell calls a “power grab” is common practice in most functioning democracies. But building and maintaining a functioning democracy has never been his priority.

Meanwhile, Texas is steaming ahead on suppressing the votes of non-whites.

Trevor Noah: The black community has been saying for years that the police have too much power to wreck people’s lives, and Trump has paid no attention. But now the President is outraged when that power is used against his henchmen, as when Roger Stone was hauled to jail in a predawn raid on his home.

These guys are genuinely shocked when the police use the same force on them that they’ve been using on so many other people in the country, unchecked.

I put off writing this article for so long that now David Brin has written it. Adam Smith and F. A. Hayek don’t have anything to do with present-day conservatism. The current free-market-worship really has no philosophy behind it. It’s pure superstition.

Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill is cutting the big internet companies out of her life and chronicling what changes. This week it’s Google, and it affects a lot more things than you’d think.

Texas Secretary of State David Whitley has been circulating “a list of 95,000 registered voters who were matched with people flagged by the Texas Department of Public Safety as being noncitizens … 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections”. The Atlantic explains why you shouldn’t take this claim seriously, even if Trump does.

Several years ago I looked at a similar claim about dead people voting in South Carolina. The state attorney general was claiming that his computer search showed that 900 dead people had voted. His claim fit the right-wing narrative, so he made the talk-radio circuit and got interviewed on Fox News.

As soon as the election boards started investigating his list, though, the whole thing unraveled. It turned out there were a bunch of legitimate ways a name might end up on that list, from mistaken identity to clerical error to having a heart attack two seconds after you dropped your absentee ballot into the mailbox. Eventually the state police got pulled into the investigation, and when they were done the number of unexplained cases was down to three, with no clear evidence of election fraud even for those three.

Something similar will happen here.

Here’s a dam good metaphor.

Last Monday, Sarah Sanders held the first White House briefing in more than a month, and CNN decided not to cover it live. MSNBC stopped routinely airing live White House briefings in November. Both networks send reporters and camera, but then let their editors decide what was newsworthy.

This is part of the media’s evolving strategy for dealing with a White House whose communications include more disinformation than information. Finally, news networks are realizing that they are not obligated to give the White House a open channel to lie to the American people. That doesn’t serve the country and doesn’t serve their viewers.

That gradual evolution started early on, when a lot of news hosts stopped inviting Kellyanne Conway for interviews, since it is virtually impossible to get any useful information out of her. A few weeks ago, CNN’s Chris Cuomo had Conway on, and Don Lemon shook his head sadly as he and Cuomo had their nightly handoff conversation. I agreed with Lemon: The Cuomo/Conway fencing match was entertaining for people who are into that kind of thing, but no one learned anything from it.

The people who parrot Trump’s fake-news denunciations of CNN saw hypocrisy here: CNN criticized the White House for not have briefings, and then didn’t cover the one they had. But I don’t buy it. What journalists are asking for is the kind of news briefings they got during every other administration of the television era: A chance to ask the press secretary questions and get answers that may be slanted, but were mostly reliable. Previous press secretaries often didn’t know answers to questions, but made a good-faith effort to get them. Sanders offers fake briefings that are full of outright lies, and if she doesn’t know the answer to a question, that’s the end of it; she’s not going to put any effort into finding out.

Meanwhile, I’m trying not to get too excited about Sarah Sanders saying that God wanted Trump to be president. Her interview with CBN is one of those shiny objects that is supposed to distract us from Trump’s disastrous shutdown and the increasing likelihood that he’s a Russian asset. But I do have to point out that God denied Sanders’ claim on Facebook.

What? You don’t think that’s the real God? Maybe not, but I think whoever owns that Facebook page has as much right to speak for God as Sarah Sanders does.

and let’s close with something for the birds

About 10,000 people in a mountainous part of Turkey speak “bird language“, a whistle-based system of communication.

This week had a number of stories that need a few paragraphs of explanation, but which didn’t inspire me to write a longer piece. So my current plan is not to have a featured post this week. Instead, the weekly summary will be extra long. It’s possible some note from the summary will grow in the telling, so that I’ll pull it out into its own article, but so far that’s not happening.

Anyway, I project the summary coming out about 11 EST.

The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security and financial well-being of all Americans.

– Donald Trump, 2019 State of the Union

The politics of eternity requires and produces problems that are insoluble because they are fictional.

– Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom

Every day he designs a false threat, steps in to the nonexistent battlefield, and declares himself victorious to a group of now emotionally dependent human beings, whose internal story and well-being depends on him winning. That’s the only way their world makes sense anymore, it is the only outcome they can conceive of.

– John Pavlovitz, “The Cult of Trump“

There was no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about Virginia

Last week’s featured post “Ralph Northam and the Limits of Forgiveness” looks better now than it did at the time. When I wrote

I don’t think we’re ever going to find enough pure people to form a majority.

I didn’t know that the entire Democratic leadership of Virginia state government would soon find itself embroiled in scandal and facing calls to resign. (Also some Republicans. And then the virus spread to Mississippi.) Forget about forming a majority. In Virginia, it may not be possible to find enough pure people to staff a government.

My point (that Democrats need to define a forgiveness process for past incidents of racism, sexism, and homophobia) was improved on by Rev. William Barber (famous for leading the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina): Forgiveness has to begin with repentance. Repentance, for Barber, means more than just a verbal apology; it means taking action to restore the balance.

Whether we are talking about Northam or President Trump — Democrats or Republicans — restitution that addresses systemic harm must be the fruit of true repentance.

If Northam, or any politician who has worn blackface, used the n-word or voted for the agenda of white supremacy, wants to repent, the first question they must ask is “How are the people who have been harmed by my actions asking to change the policies and practices of our society?” In political life, this means committing to expand voting rights, stand with immigrant neighbors, and provide health care and living wages for all people. In Virginia, it means stopping the environmental racism of the pipeline and natural gas compressor station Dominion Energy intends to build in Union Hill, a neighborhood founded by emancipated slaves and other free African Americans.

Barber made one important point very clearly: It does no good to force out people who did racist things years ago, if their power will then pass to people who are sponsoring racist policies today.

we cannot allow political enemies of Virginia’s governor to call for his resignation over a photo when they continue themselves to vote for the policies of white supremacy. If anyone wants to call for the governor’s resignation, they should also call for the resignation of anyone who has supported racist voter suppression or policies that have a disparate impact on communities of color.

Barber’s article doesn’t revisit the 2017 gubernatorial election, but it’s worth thinking about. Northam was a candidate with a decades-old racist secret. But the Republican candidate in the race (Ed Gillespie) ran a race-baiting campaign, focused on raising fears about “sanctuary cities” (of which Virginia has none) and defending Confederate monuments (of which it has many).

While we’re talking about Confederate monuments, Smithsonian Magazine has an excellent long article “The Costs of the Confederacy“.

A century and a half after the Civil War, American taxpayers are still helping to sustain the defeated Rebels’ racist doctrine, the Lost Cause. First advanced in 1866 by a Confederate partisan named Edward Pollard, it maintains that the Confederacy was based on a noble ideal, the Civil War was not about slavery, and slavery was benign.

The authors traveled all over the South, and found lots of tax-supported Lost Cause propaganda.

We went on many tours of the homes of the Confederacy’s staunchest ideologues, and without exception we were told that the owners were good and the slaves were happy.

At the home of Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, a question about his slaves (otherwise barely mentioned) elicited a quote (from a Depression-era oral history of slavery) from a slave about how proud he was to work for “Marse Robert Toombs”.

A more revealing, well-documented story is that of Garland H. White, an enslaved man who escaped Toombs’ ownership just before the Civil War and fled to Ontario. After the war erupted he heroically risked his freedom to join the United States Colored Troops. He served as an Army chaplain and traveled to recruit African-American soldiers. We found no mention at the Toombs memorial of White’s experience. In fact, we know of no monument to White in all of Georgia.

And that’s a point I wish got more attention: In addition to well-celebrated figures like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the South had real Civil War heroes like White, people who risked their lives for freedom rather than for slavery. Their monuments are nowhere.

and the possibility of another government shutdown

The deadline is Friday. This weekend the negotiators started sounding pessimistic. But a lot can happen in a week.

and Jeff Bezos vs. the National Enquirer

I’m wondering who at the National Enquirer said: “Let’s threaten the richest man in the world. That always works out well.”

At the moment, the Bezos/AMI story is great gossip, with nude selfies and claims of extortion and so on. It could turn into much more if some of Bezos’ accusations and implications turn out to be true.

Because deep down, we’re all still in middle school.

Let’s recap: The Enquirer ran a story on January 9 about Bezos’ extramarital affair, the day after Bezos and his wife MacKezie announced that they were getting a divorce. I haven’t heard whether the prospect of the story played any role in the timing or the fact of the divorce. The Enquirer story included “intimate texts” between Bezos and his mistress.

Bezos decided he wanted to know how the Enquirer got those texts, and what motivated them to go after him to begin with, so he hired investigators. You can hire a lot of investigators if you’re worth $100 billion.

In particular, Bezos wanted know if the motive was political. He owns The Washington Post, which makes him an enemy of AMI CEO David Pecker’s friend Donald Trump, and of the Saudi government, with whom AMI is seeking a lucrative alliance. The Post has been relentless about exposing Trump’s lying and corruption, and it refuses to let the Saudi government get away with murdering one of its journalists, Jamaal Khashoggi.

That implication of a political motive apparently unhinged Pecker. According to Bezos’ blog post on the subject, Pecker’s people made Bezos “an offer I couldn’t refuse”. (This is a Godfather reference.) Bezos should stop investigating and instead release a statement that his people “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” And in exchange, AMI wouldn’t release the texts and photos they had of him, including a naked selfie and revealing photos of his mistress.

Bezos instead decided to make the whole email exchange public and dare AMI to do its worst. (As Bobby Axelrod says on the TV show Billions: “What’s the use of having fuck-you money if you never say ‘Fuck you.’?”) Since going public, Bezos has picked up support from other people who claim to have been threatened by AMI.

And there’s another problem:

Federal prosecutors on Friday began looking into the accusation to see if American Media’s alleged conduct might violate the company’s agreement to cooperate with a government investigation of Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. If so, it could expose American Media and Enquirer Publisher David J. Pecker to prosecution for campaign-finance violations related to the McDougal payoff.

So it’s Amazon’s founder vs. the National Enquirer, with the possibility that the story might spill over and implicate Trump or the Saudi government. Pass the popcorn.

and the State of the Union

Usually, I treat the State of the Union as major news. For presidents of both parties, I’ve been known to do a featured article attempting to read between the lines. But this is another way in which this administration is different: Trump’s speeches are just not that serious, not even the SOTU. (Stacey Abrams’ Democratic response is here.) He says things that he thinks will sound good, but there is unlikely to be any follow-through.

Like all Trump speeches, this one was full of lies and misleading statements. It slandered undocumented immigrants, using the same propaganda techniques Hitler pioneered on the Jews. (Specifically: Highlighting crimes by the targeted group as if they were somehow different than other crimes. I’m sure someone could compile an list of crimes by German-Americans — people like Trump and me — that is just as horrifying as Trump’s litany of crimes by undocumented immigrants.) He segued directly from Iranian threats against Israel to the 11 Jews murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, as if the murderer had been a Muslim motivated by Iranian propaganda rather than a white supremacist who blamed Jews for the migrant caravans that Trump had been rabble-rousing about.

To the extent that the speech laid out an agenda, it’s hard to take that agenda seriously. Once again, for example, he called for an infrastructure plan.

I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting edge industries of the future.

He said something similar last year (“Tonight, I am calling on the Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment we need.”), and delivered a poorly-thought-out proposal that his own party shelved.

The next major priority for me, and for all of us, should be to lower the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs — and to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

But of course, the main threat to people with pre-existing conditions has been Trump himself, and his eagerness to undo ObamaCare without caring what replaces it.

I am asking the Congress to pass legislation that finally takes on the problem of global freeloading and delivers fairness and price transparency for American patients. We should also require drug companies, insurance companies, and hospitals to disclose real prices to foster competition and bring costs down.

In any previous administration, that would mean that he had a piece of legislation drafted and ready to go. I sincerely doubt that Trump does. He has stated his good intentions, so now it’s up to somebody else to craft a plan that manifests them, which he will feel no obligation to support.

I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.

So far, his policy has been the exact opposite: Not only has he demanded substantial reductions in legal immigration, but he has also tried to expel people who came here legally under the Temporary Protected Status program, and has been violating American laws and treaties by refusing to let refugees legally request asylum at the border. So is this new love of legal immigration an about-face, or did he just say something that sounded good in the moment, which we’ll never hear about again? I’ll bet on the latter.

The one statement in the speech I take seriously is this one:

If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!

In other words, if Congress starts getting serious about oversight on this historically corrupt administration, Trump is going to take it personally. Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, who continued to work with Newt Gingrich’s House Republicans while they investigated him constantly — because that was his job — Trump intends to hold the country hostage. If Congress passes legislation that would benefit America, Trump reserves the right not to sign it out of personal pique.

Democrats immediately called his bluff on that. A variety of House committees are gearing up for investigations of Trump’s foreign business activities, possible violations of the Constitution’s emolument clause, family separations at the Mexican border, and other issues. But Democrats are planning to proceed methodically.

“We’re going to do our homework first,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), whose panel is scheduled to receive testimony from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross next month. “What [Republicans] would do is, they would go out and make headlines a week or two before the hearing and then look for some facts to prove the headlines. We’re not doing that.”

The difference, IMO, is that Republicans investigating the Obama administration suspected there was nothing to find, so their biggest bang would be in the insinuations they could make as hearings were looming. But Democrats investigating Trump believe the corruption and illegal activity is really there. The payoff will come when they find it.

That said, I watched a small amount of Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker’s six hours of testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, and saw clips of the “highlights” of the rest it. I don’t think the hearing reflected well on anybody. Whitaker was needlessly rude and argumentative, and the members of the committee were needlessly aggressive and accusatory.

The main thing was to ask Whitaker a small list of questions and get his answers on the record. So here’s the content of the whole six hours: He denies telling Trump or other “senior White House officials” anything he learned about the Mueller investigation. He says he hasn’t interfered in Mueller’s investigation. He refused to say whether or not he thinks the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt”.

I think it’s important that investigating House Democrats project an image of calm determination: They won’t be stopped, but they’re in this for the good of the nation rather than to get on TV. Trump needs to tell his base a story of Us Against Them, while Democrats need the story to be Truth Will Out. The Whitaker hearing turned into Us Against Them, so in that sense I don’t think it was a good start.

and abortion

So Louisiana has passed an anti-abortion law that requires doctors in clinics that provide abortions to get admitting privileges in a local hospital. That may look reasonable at first glance, but I explained why it’s not when Alabama had a similar law challenged in 2014.

The history of violence against abortionists in Alabama, and the continuing harassment and intimidation of doctors and their patients, makes it unsafe for an abortion-clinic doctor to live in large parts of Alabama. In the three clinics likely to close, most doctors have their primary practice and residence elsewhere. (One doctor drives to the clinic from another state, using a diverse series of rentals cars rather than his own car, in hopes that he won’t be spotted by potential assassins.) That lack of local presence makes them ineligible for admitting privileges at local hospitals. The clinics could stay open if they could recruit new doctors who live and practice nearby, but that is impossible because they would not be safe.

So in passing this provision, the Alabama legislature was, in essence, conspiring with violent terrorists. Clinics would be shut down by the confluence between the law and predictable outside-the-law violence. That wasn’t some unfortunate but unforeseen side effect; that was the point.

Eventually, a Texas version of the law reached the Supreme Court, where it was struck down. (Justice Breyer wrote the 5-4 majority opinion. The provision did not confer “medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access”.) Courts are supposed to respect precedent rather than continuing to re-examine the same arguments, so that should have been the end of such laws.

It wasn’t. Louisiana passed its own admitting-privileges law, which is expected to make two of the three abortion clinics in Louisiana close. Anti-abortion activist judges refused to cite the binding precedent and illegitimately pushed the case up the line, figuring that with Kavanaugh replacing Kennedy, maybe the balance of power on the Court had changed. They were right about Kavanaugh, but Chief Justice Roberts cast the deciding vote to block enforcement of the Louisiana law until the Court can rule on its constitutionality.

When Susan Collins blessed Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court, she took at face value his pledge to respect precedents like Roe v Wade. Charles Pierce explains how that is playing out.

[Kavanaugh’s] dissent relies on, along other things, the transparently phony notion that Louisiana officials will be judicious in using the law they’ve already passed. He writes:

…the State’s regulation provides that there will be a 45-day regulatory transition period before the new law is applied. The State represents, moreover, that Louisiana “will not move aggressively to enforce the challenged law” during the transition period.

You’d have to be as big a sap as Susan Collins is to believe that one. It’s impossible that even Kavanaugh believes it. What the defenders of the right to choose feared—and of which they still remain wary—is that upholding the Louisiana law will send a clear message to state judges that the federal system will not defend its own rulings. Thus would Roe v. Wade essentially die from a thousand cuts.

I’ll pull out another piece of Kavanaugh’s dissent.

during the 45-day transition period, both the doctors and the relevant hospitals could act expeditiously and in good faith to reach a definitive conclusion about whether those three doctors can obtain admitting privileges.

Kavanaugh trusts the good faith of anti-abortion forces, when bad faith is the whole point of this law. That’s what we can expect from Kavanaugh. Maybe he won’t seek to reverse Roe immediately, but in every case that comes before him, he will concoct some reason not to enforce it quite yet.

but ultimately, the Green New Deal might turn out to be the most important thing that happened this week

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey released a proposed nonbinding congressional resolution calling for a Green New Deal.

It’s hard to know how to think about this. On the one hand, no one expects this plan for a “ten-year national mobilization” to be carried out as written. It may not even be possible, even if the country and its government had the political will to do so. (For example: “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” in ten years.)

In addition to the call for massive infrastructure spending to create an environmentally sustainable economy (that anything calling itself a “Green New Deal” would have to have), it also includes (in the words of New York magazine’s Eric Levitz) “damn near every item on progressives’ policy wish list”: national health care, union rights, racial justice, and so on.

So if your definition of a “serious proposal” includes an expectation that it might become law sometime soon and succeed in achieving its stated goals, this is not a serious proposal. There’s no negotiation with Mitch McConnell that starts here and winds up anywhere. (Mitch wouldn’t even agree to massive infrastructure spending on roads and bridges when the leader of his own party called for it.) And even if Democrats win all the open Senate seats on 2020, it’s still not going to happen, because there’s the whole question of possibility.

Maybe that bothers you, or maybe see the Green New Deal serving another purpose. Slate’s Mike Pesca is bothered.

Well, call me a tired old watchdog, or fuddy-duddy fact finder—I do not assess policies through the lens of the charismatic and compelling Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the perfect distillation of the Trumpian, big swing, mega-MAGA hashtag, nonconstrained by literalism, post–reality-to-accuracy politics age. I tend to judge ideas by considering the opinions of experts who know more than I do. And when it comes to the Green New Deal, almost none of these people think that the United States can achieve its goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.

… Perhaps I am naïve when it comes to the way the world works, and I should realize that knowingly unrealistic, which is to say dishonest, goals and proposals that will not work are the best ways to steer us to a better future. Instead, I worry that having impossible goals might dissuade the public and discredit those proposing them.

Levitz, though, sees something else, “so long as you take the Green New Deal seriously, but not literally.”

AOC’s decision to append a wide variety of progressive goals — each with its own influential constituency — to her climate plan is tactically sound: If the entire Democratic agenda is rebranded as the “Green New Deal,” a future Democratic government will be less likely to ignore the central importance of climate sustainability to all of its other policy goals; which is to say, a future Democratic government will be less likely to de-prioritize preventing ecological catastrophe.

… As a mechanism for raising expectations for what qualifies as a progressive climate policy — and increasing the probability that Congress passes such a policy within the next decade — the Green New Deal is politically realistic. As a blueprint for a climate bill that is both legislatively viable, and commensurate with the scale of the ecological threat humanity faces, it is not.

But neither is anything else. … There is simply no way to mount a realistic response to climate change without changing political reality. And for now, the Green New Deal is the most realistic plan we’ve got for doing the latter.

Whether you’re a fan of AOC or think she gets too much attention already, her lightning-round exploration of government ethics limits is brilliant and deserves wider distribution.

and you also might be interested in …

If you ever doubted that the conservative version of “religious freedom” only applies to Christians, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court just made it clear. Thursday, the Court voted 5-4 (on party lines, a phrase we didn’t used to use for Supreme Court votes) to allow Alabama to execute a Muslim prisoner without honoring his request to have an imam present. The prison employs a Christian chaplain.

The chaplain kneels and prays with inmates who seek pastoral care, the officials said. After considering Mr. Ray’s request, prison officials agreed to exclude the chaplain. But they said allowing the imam to be present raised unacceptable safety concerns.

Justice Kagan’s dissent summarizes the problem:

Under that policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an inmate practices a different religion—whether Islam,Judaism, or any other—he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality.

While we’re talking about religion and the law, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case (where the Supreme Court sided with the baker against the gay couple that wanted a wedding cake) was decided on such narrow grounds that it didn’t really settle the underlying issues: How do anti-discrimination laws interface with a business-owner’s freedoms of speech and religion? So now new cases are rising through the system.

Two completely different views of what’s going on in Venezuela: It’s about restoring democracy. It’s about preserving white supremacy.

As people start completing their tax returns, many of them are realizing that the Trump Tax Cut didn’t do much for them. Some are actually paying more tax, due to changes in deductions. And even people who are paying less tax in total are being surprised that they owe money rather than have a refund coming. That’s because withholding guidelines were changed, possibly with the intent to make the tax cut temporarily look bigger than it actually was.

Finland ran an experiment in giving people a guaranteed basic income. The government picked 2,000 unemployed Finns at random and promised them $635 a month for two years, no strings attached. Find a job, don’t find a job, you get to keep the money.

How you view the results depends on whether you’re a glass-half-full person or not. The GBI turned out to have no effect on whether or not people got jobs. So it didn’t turn their lives around, but it also didn’t encourage idleness. The recipients became slightly more entrepreneurial, and they reported feeling much less stressed.

OK, I admit that “Trump supporter says something stupid” isn’t news any more. I think we see way too much coverage of stuff like that already. But this …

Candace Owens … is one of the president’s best-known black supporters. The 29-year-old activist and social media aficionado regularly appears on Fox News imploring black Americans to leave the Democratic Party. … At a December event in London, Owens said:

“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism.’ I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. … He was a national socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize.”

So basically, as long as Hitler just wanted to annihilate the Jews in Germany, that was “okay, fine”. He didn’t get out of line until he started to go after the Jews in Poland and Holland. National death camps good; international death camps bad.

Back in May, Trump tweeted:

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,” and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on…so good for our Country!

And “Trump is a hypocrite” isn’t exactly news either, but this story similarly takes things to a new level. The Washington Post describes “a long-running pipeline of illegal workers” between Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey and the village of Santa Teresa de Cajon in Costa Rica.

Over the years, the network from Costa Rica to Bedminster expanded as workers recruited friends and relatives, some flying to the United States on tourist visas and others paying smugglers thousands of dollars to help them cross the U.S.-Mexico border, former employees said. New hires needed little more than a crudely printed phony green card and a fake Social Security number to land a job, they said.

Why did the Trump Organization do this? In a word, money.

There was also seeding, watering, mowing, building the sand traps and driving bulldozers, mini-excavators and loaders — all while they earned about $10 an hour or less, they said. Around that time, a licensed heavy equipment operator in central New Jersey would have received an average of $51 to $55 per hour in wages and benefits, according to union officials at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 825 in the nearby town of Springfield.

In The Atlantic, Richard Parker explains why Trump’s wall will never be built: The people who own that land now have enough clout to protect it from being taken by the federal government.

There will be no “concrete structure from sea to sea,” as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.

Elizabeth Warren officially announced her candidacy, during a week when the Native American issue refused to die. I’m sad about that. To me, Warren is the most authentic candidate in the race. She went into politics because she felt that the big banks and corporations were rigging the system against ordinary people, so that the path she had taken from the working class to the professional class was now much, much harder to travel. That’s what her career has been about ever since.

I have to agree with Matt Yglesias’ take:

Warren would like to have a debate about economic policy with Trump. Trump would like everyone to fall back on racial identity instead. You, as a citizen or a journalist or whatever else you are, are allowed to choose whether or not to take the bait on his provocations.

Amy Klobuchar is in the race. My impression is that Klobuchar is the Democrats’ most likeable candidate other than maybe Biden. She’s also the candidate I would feel most confident of in a race against Trump. She radiates a Midwestern decency that I think Trump would have a hard time countering.

But I recall another Minnesota candidate, Republican Tim Pawlenty. It’s hard to remember now, but at the beginning of the 2012 cycle, a lot of pundits were projecting Pawlenty as the candidate the party would ultimately settle on, because he was the one who would be most acceptable to all the major Republican factions.

The problem with that strategy was that Pawlenty turned out to be nobody’s first choice, so he was out of the race before a single vote was cast. That’s going to be Klobuchar’s challenge: How is she going to become people’s first choice, rather than just somebody they like?

If you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it any more, other candidates will express that anger better for you. But if you’re tired of being angry all the time and you long for a politics that’s more than the Outrage of the Day, you might want to look at Amy. (Or Cory Booker.)

and let’s close with something topical

The Dunning-Kruger song from The Incompetence Opera.

The long-awaited constitutional crisis looks like it might finally be here. Trump’s specious declaration of a national emergency threatens to reverse Congress’ decision not to fund his wall. If this stands, the Republic will be fundamentally changed.

Power has been gradually shifting from the legislative to the executive branch of government since the New Deal, but the one power Congress has retained is the power of the purse. If presidents can now declare a national emergency on any pretext, and redirect money Congress has appropriated for other purposes, then the power of the purse is now a shared power, and Congress has been greatly diminished.

I’ll discuss this in more detail in “One Fishy Emergency”, which should be out soon. That will be followed by a less timely piece, “I See Color”, which is my response to Howard Schultz’ claim that “I didn’t see color as a young boy and I honestly don’t see color now.” That should be out around 10 EST.

The weekly summary will collect some further odds and ends around Trump’s bizarre national-emergency speech, then discuss Rep. Omar’s apology for raising an old anti-Semitic trope (and the bad-faith denunciations of her from people who routinely do far worse), a first-person account of a late-term abortion, Mark Kelly’s amazing campaign-rollout video, Amazon backing out of New York, and a few other things, before closing with a story about one of the most poorly conceived crimes ever. Probably that’s out before noon.

Friday morning, Trump declared a national emergency that he said would allow him to start building his wall by redirecting funds Congress has appropriated for other purposes. The speculation-to-action ratio has been particularly high since then, with political and legal experts giving conflicting views of what will happen next. Let me see if I can boil it down without adding to the confusion.

1. The declaration was made in bad faith. There is no national emergency on the southern border. Trump admitted as much: “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this.”

As I explained two weeks ago (under the sub-head “and national emergencies”), the point of the national emergency process is to allow the President to respond to events that unfold too fast for Congress to take action. Whatever you think about the issues of immigration and smuggling on the Mexican border, they have been playing out over decades, and are less serious now than they have been at other times.

Congress has had plenty of time to consider appropriating money to build a wall, and has decided not to do it.

With no honest case to be made for either a national emergency or for circumventing Congress to build a wall, Trump once again gave a speech full of lies.

2. This is unlike any previous emergency declaration. As Trump rightly pointed out, presidents have declared national emergencies before (59 times since the National Emergencies Act was passed in 1976, according to Fox News’ Chris Wallace). But a national emergency declaration has never been used as a partisan weapon before. Wallace challenged Trump advisor Stephen Miller to “point to a single instance when the president asked Congress for money, Congress refused to give him that money and the president then invoked national emergency powers to get the money”. Miller could not answer.

A national emergency declaration has never been challenged in Congress or the courts before, but that’s because previous presidents have used them in uncontroversial ways, not because Trump is being specially persecuted by his opponents.

3. The money will be taken from more worthy projects. USA Today lists the sources.

$3.6 billion will come from a military construction fund, and White House officials admitted that “they did not yet know which military constructions might be cancelled or delayed by the move.” Military Times lists some possibilities:

a new vehicle maintenance shop at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, drydock repairs at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, F-35 hangar improvements at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, ongoing hospital construction at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and new family housing builds in South Korea, Italy and Wisconsin.

Also: a middle school on an Army base in Kentucky. Lindsey Graham explained that “It’s better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border.”

Another $2.5 billion will come from a Defense Department drug-interdiction program. So presumably it will be easier now to get drugs into the country by boat or plane. Trump’s bogus wall, which will do little to affect drug traffic, will squeeze out programs that actually catch drug smugglers.

4. Congress still has a chance to weigh in, but there’s a catch. As originally passed in 1976, the National Emergencies Act allowed what is known as a legislative veto: Congress could override the President’s declaration if both houses agreed to do so. This is, in fact, likely to happen. The Democratic House will pass a resolution against the emergency fairly easily, and the Republican Senate will probably follow suit. (In order to do so, all 47 Democrats and 4 Republicans will have to agree. Mitch McConnell can’t prevent the resolution from coming to the floor, and it can’t be filibustered.)

However, in 1983 the Supreme Court (in regard to a different law entirely) found legislative vetoes to be unconstitutional. As laid out in the Constitution, Congress passes laws and the President has an option to veto them. Congress can delegate its power to the President (as it did in the National Emergencies Act), but it can’t switch places with the President and give itself veto power over his decisions.

As a result, Congress can still undo the President’s declaration, but it requires a joint resolution, which is then subject to a presidential veto. A two-thirds majority of each house would then be necessary to override the President’s veto. This is currently considered unlikely, because not enough Republicans are willing to go against Trump.

So the most likely scenario goes like this: Congress passes a joint resolution against the emergency, the President vetoes it, and Congress fails to override the veto.

5. Then it’s up to the courts. Congress will sue on the grounds that its power of the purse has been usurped. States along the border will sue. Property owners whose land will be seized will sue. Some of those suits have already been filed. (Congress’ suit will probably wait until after its attempt to override the emergency declaration fails.) Then the courts will have to decide whether Trump’s emergency is legitimate.

Whatever conclusion you want to hear, I can point you to an expert who predicts it. Vox assembled 11 experts, and their responses amounted to: Judges shouldn’t OK this, but there’s just enough justification that they can if they want to.

The point of view most generous to Trump is that Congress screwed up when it passed the National Emergencies Act, so its power-of-the-purse is delegated, even if it shouldn’t be. The law doesn’t define “emergency”, but trusts the president not to abuse his power to declare one. Who knew we’d eventually have an untrustworthy president?

Some judges will feel that it’s not their job to second-guess Trump on this. That’s more-or-less how the Muslim Ban case came out. After the administration revised its first two obviously-unconstitutional Muslim bans, the third one passed muster — not because the 5-4 Supreme Court majority agreed with the bigoted pile of bullshit Trump used to justify it, but because five justices deferred to the president’s judgment and declined to examine the details.

As with the Muslim ban, this case hangs on the question of bad faith: How transparently faithless does the President have to be before a judge is obligated to notice?

The problem I have with the Congress-screwed-up view is that the original version of the law didn’t delegate this much power, because Congress retained the ability to override illegitimate emergencies. Now the President only needs one-third of one house to support him. So the Supreme Court changed something significant in the law when it rejected legislative vetoes.

So I would be tempted to make the same kind of argument that conservatives have made against the Affordable Care Act: The National Emergencies Act is a coherent whole, and you can’t invalidate the legislative veto while leaving the delegation-of-power intact. I haven’t heard anyone make that argument, so there must be some reason not to (aside from the fact that all of the currently active national emergencies become invalid, which might not be a bad thing).

6. And the people. This is something worth getting into the streets about. MoveOn has protests planned today, and no doubt there will be others soon.

If you live in a state or district represented by a Republican, you need to challenge your representative to defend the Republic. The expectation that Congress can’t override a veto is based on the idea that most Republicans will stand by Trump’s seizure of power. But if they hear from enough voters, they won’t.

7. Once again, conservatives in Congress and in the courts  will face a challenge: Will they support Trump, even at the expense of what was once considered a core conservative principle? Over the last several decades, much hot air has been blown about defending “the Constitution” and “the vision of the Founding Fathers”. It goes virtually without saying that neither the Constitution nor the Founders ever envisioned or endorsed a process like this: Congress refuses to fund a presidential project, the president seizes the money, both houses vote to condemn that seizure, but it goes through anyway.

Any congressional Republican who refuses to override Trump’s emergency declaration or his subsequent veto can never again claim to be a defender of the Constitution, and should never again be allowed to invoke the Founding Fathers without hearing about this betrayal of their vision. Any judge who allows this travesty to play out can likewise never in good conscience claim to be an “originalist” or “strict constructionist” rather than a partisan judicial activist.

8. There are hardly any core conservative principles left. Republican respect for the Constitution has been suspect at least since Mitch McConnell ignored President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. The GOP’s claim on the Constitution further eroded when the Party decided to ignore the Emoluments Clause and let Trump profit from what are essentially bribes by foreign governments and the governments of the states. But it’s also worth considering the other conservative principles that have already fallen since Trump became the Republican Party’s nominee.

Republicans once claimed to care about the federal deficit, but they have allowed Trump to blow up the federal balance sheet in a completely unprecedented fashion. The record Bush/Obama deficit of FY2009 was a response to an economic catastrophe, but Trump’s deficits are approaching those levels in the late stages of an economic expansion, when the federal budget should be in its best shape. (President Clinton had a surplus during a comparable period.) The next recession, which is due to hit soon, will send deficits into territory never before seen.

Republicans once championed a global system of free trade, but now they stand for tariffs, presidential bullying of American corporations, and one-on-one negotiations with each country.

Republicans once were the advocates for rural America, but now Republican trade policies hit farmers harder than anyone.

Republicans claim their opposition to undocumented immigration stems from a belief in the rule of law, but they support Trump in violating our laws by refusing to let refugees turn themselves in at the border and ask for asylum.

Republicans once claimed to be the party of patriotism and freedom, and promoted Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city on a hill”. Now they stand behind a president who is totally subservient to a Russian dictator, who shows no respect to the world’s other democracies, and instead expresses admiration and envy for brutal autocrats like China’s Xi, North Korea’s Kim, and the Philippines’ Duterte.

Republicans once styled themselves as the party of traditional family values, and (particularly during the Clinton administration) talked endlessly about the importance of a president’s character. Now they make excuses for Trump’s infidelity, corruption, sexual assaults, and shameless lying.

What ground is left for Republicans to stand on, other than bigotry against Hispanics, making the rich richer, and a naked desire to wield power?

Five reasons whites shouldn’t colorblind themselves.

Tuesday night, CNN (for reasons I still don’t understand) decided to devote an hour of evening air time to billionaire Howard Schultz (a.k.a. Daddy Starbucks) answering questions in a town hall format. While answering a question about a racial incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, Schultz said this:

As somebody who grew up in a very diverse background as a young boy in the projects, I didn’t see color as a young boy and I honestly don’t see color now.

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of a statement like that, or how to respond to it. It’s far from the first time I’ve heard another white person (it’s always a white person) say that he or she “doesn’t see color”. Typically, people who make this statement think they’re saying something virtuous — that they’re not prejudiced against non-whites, that they try to see each person as an individual rather than through the lens of a racial stereotype, or that they treat people of all races the same. If you question them, you’re likely to hear the famous Martin Luther King quote:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

By “not seeing color”, then, a white person is trying to live Dr. King’s dream: I’m not judging your children by the color of their skin; in fact, I’m not even noticing it.

So what’s wrong with that? Many of the people who say they don’t see color really do mean well — though some don’t; we’ll get to that — so I think they deserve a clear and honest answer.

1. It’s probably not literally true. I’ve occasionally been surprised to find out that someone I’ve known for a while has Jewish ancestry, or was born in another country and speaks English as a second language, or was brought up in a family very much richer or poorer than mine. Apparently, I really don’t “see” those things, at least not all the time. But I’ve never, ever been surprised to discover that somebody is black. I’ve never, ever had anyone say to me, “Did you realize Marcus is black? I never noticed before.”

I know that mixed-race people are sometimes hard to classify. So “Do you think of yourself as black?” can be a meaningful question. But even then I have usually spotted the uncertainty. Because I see color. I believe just about everybody does.

So “I don’t see color” has an element of willfulness to it. At best, it’s not about perception, it’s about habits of thought. Probably the more literal statement would be, “I don’t think about race.” Or maybe: “I try not to think about race.”

But even when we try not to take race into account, we often do. I try not to be prejudiced or to act in any way that promotes bigotry. But I also score badly on the implicit racism test. Like most people, I see color even when I think I don’t.

2. That’s not how dreams work. But what about the dream of a colorblind society? I mean, the one where people might notice each other’s skin color in the literal sense I just talked about, but it just doesn’t matter, because all people are judged “by the content of their character”. Race might still be part of your heritage, but in the here and now, it would only matter to the extent you want it to.

A lot of white identities are like that now. I come from German stock, while somebody else might have Polish ancestors. Germans and Poles have been at each other’s throats for centuries, but in America today none of that matters any more. Maybe we’ll trade mock-hostile barbs when Germany plays Poland in the World Cup. Maybe your grandmother taught you how to prepare kielbasa while mine taught me schnitzel. (Actually she didn’t, unfortunately.) But in all the ways that count, the ones that might re-ignite the conflicts of our ancestors, neither of us cares.

We can imagine a society where race is like that. “Your people came over from Africa? That’s interesting. Have you traced what part?” But when employers are deciding whether to hire you, police are deciding whether to arrest you (or just shoot you), or Starbucks managers are deciding whether to call 911, your race wouldn’t play any role. The percentage of the population that is in poverty or in prison or in management or prematurely in the grave wouldn’t depend on race in anything but a round-off-error sort of way.

Is that a worthy dream? I believe it is.

But I’m not trying to pretend it’s true now, because dreams don’t work that way.

If you dream about being a billionaire like Howard Schultz, the way to get there isn’t to start living like a billionaire in all the ways you can. Quite the opposite: Every time you go to the kind of restaurant a billionaire might frequent — or as close to one as your credit cards will allow — you get a little farther away from actual wealth.

I dream of a society where all people have access to health care, but I don’t bring that day closer by pretending that they already do. I dream of a world where refugees aren’t desperate to get into the United States, because their home countries are doing fine and they have lots of other good places to live. But having that dream doesn’t make me any less callous when I ignore those refugees.

I dream of a world where everyone is honest, and I can leave my laptop sitting unattended on my table at Starbucks when I go off to the bathroom. But I never do that, because dreams don’t work that way.

A colorblind teacher in a white neighborhood school would see the new black kid being picked on and think, “I wonder what that’s about.” A colorblind warden would be oblivious to the racially segregated gangs in his prison.

In American society today, race matters. You can’t deal with that reality unless you see it.

3. Having a choice about whether or not you’ll notice race today is an element of white privilege. As I write this sentence, I’m sitting in the breakfast area of a La Quinta somewhere in Maryland. A couple of hotel employees are responsible for keeping the coffee urns full and the steam tables stocked with scrambled eggs and sausages. None of them are in my line of sight right now, and I realize I don’t know what race they are. To that extent, at least, I’ve been colorblind this morning.

I can do that, because whether they’re white or black or something else, they’re here to serve me.

Similarly, when Howard Schultz sits down with a stack of resumes, thinking about who Starbucks’ next CFO should be, he can decide to ignore race if he wants to. (But given that Philadelphia incident and the bad publicity that came with it, he probably shouldn’t. Some highly visible black face would do Starbucks some good right now.)

But think about what happened to John Crawford III. He was shopping in a Wal-Mart near Dayton, Ohio, when he picked a pellet gun off a shelf and began carrying it with him while he shopped (and talked on the phone). A white customer saw him and called 911, telling police that a black man was waving a gun around at Wal-Mart. (He wasn’t.) A few minutes later, a white policeman barked orders at a very confused Crawford, and then shot him dead when he didn’t respond fast enough, because the cop believed Crawford “was about to” raise the gun. (The officer wasn’t charged with any crime, kept his job, and went back to full field duty after the investigation was complete.)

Now imagine that you’re a black parent trying to raise a son. What will you tell him that Crawford did wrong there? What do you want your boy to do differently if he’s in a similar situation? I think you warn him that Crawford didn’t see color that day. He didn’t think: “There are white people in this store who expect black men to be dangerous.” He didn’t notice when white police walked into the store, and immediately assume they might be looking for him.

The white people in the Wal-Mart could choose to be colorblind if they wanted (though the guy who called 911 clearly wasn’t). John Crawford III couldn’t get away with making that choice.

Of course, you also tell your black son about Martin’s Dream. But you’re very careful to teach him not to lose sight of the difference between the Dream and the Reality. Confusing the two could get him killed.

4. Colorblind whites make bad allies. Think about the teacher and the warden I mentioned above. Racism is real in America, and you’re not going to be much use in mitigating it if you refuse to see it.

Most racism in America today tries not to draw attention to itself. It often pretends to be something else, and has a semi-plausible explanation of its actions. If you’re not paying close attention, you might not see through that explanation.

For example, during the Obama administration, the First Family was often faulted for doing things that white First Families had done without drawing criticism. Barack was photographed putting his feet up on a historic desk. Family vacations cost the taxpayers a lot of money because of the entourage that had to come along. The White House Christmas card didn’t display any religious themes. The White House is equipped and staffed to provide a posh lifestyle, as it has for decades.

Lots of people objected to this stuff without consciously thinking about race. It wasn’t that the Obamas were black, it’s that they were living wastefully or disrespecting some important American value. But somehow that disrespect didn’t register in the same way when the president was white.

In order to notice that kind of thing and address it appropriately, you need to see color. You need to be sensitive to the idea that racism constantly lurks in the background of American society, even when the foreground looks fine.

A lot of today’s racism is baked into the system, and doesn’t depend on any individual’s prejudice. The pipeline that sends black children to mostly segregated schools, funds those schools inadequately, criminalizes discipline, and channels students in the direction of prison — it operates with or without the racism of any particular teacher or principal or policeman or judge. If they all suddenly became colorblind, the system would continue to function.

5. Idealizing colorblindness gives cover to people who invoke it in bad faith. Trump has often claimed to be “the least racist person” — the least racist person you’ve met, ever interviewed, and so on. He has made that claim while trying to ban Muslims from entering the country, building a wall to keep out Hispanics, saying that neo-Nazis are “very fine people”, and pushing the baseless theory that the first black president wasn’t really an American.

He gets away with that, at least among certain segments of the electorate, because he doesn’t explicitly invoke color. This is a constant theme in conservative circles: If I don’t explicitly mention color, I’m not racist. On paper, the law has explicitly been colorblind since the 1960s. So racism effectively ended then — except for the affirmative action programs that disadvantage whites. Non-whites are still much poorer than whites, and are under-represented in elite schools, corporate boardrooms, and high-paying professions, while over-represented in prisons and poverty programs. But any attempt to remedy those problems can’t be colorblind, so they get tarred as “reverse racism”.

I’ll give the last word to Khalil Gibran Muhammad author of The Condemnation of Blackness,

If we’re going to do something differently in the 21st century than what was done in the 20th century, it’s going to take a whole lot more white people in everyday experiences to be anti-racist and to stand up for racial justice.

Not non-racist, anti-racist. And you can’t fight what you can’t see.

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on March 4.

We call upon our Republican colleagues to join us to defend the Constitution.

– Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
joint statement on President Trump declaring a national emergency

This week’s featured posts are “A Fishy Emergency Threatens the Republic” and “I See Color“.

This week everybody was talking about the “national emergency”

I covered this in one of the featured posts. I left out a link to the proclamation itself, so here it is.

Before getting around to declaring the emergency, (There is no emergency, so what’s the hurry?) Trump talked about trade with China, demonstrating that he has no idea how international trade works.

We have been losing, on average, $375 billion a year with China. A lot of people think it is $506 billion. Some people think it is much more than that.

He doesn’t seem to know that this is not a guessing game; his own government actually keeps track of foreign trade. The US trade deficit with China in goods in 2018 was $382 billion. In services, we run a trade surplus with China — $38.5 billion in 2017 (I haven’t found a 2018 figure)  — so the total trade deficit in 2018 was probably less than $350 billion.

The only person who says $500 billion or more is Trump himself. He has been saying it since 2015 and it has repeatedly been pointed out to him that this is wrong.

The more subtle but more important error in his statement is that we aren’t “losing” that $350 billion. We’re spending money and getting stuff for it.

“A bilateral balance doesn’t really tell you anything about what the economy is doing,” said Scott Lincicome, an adjunct fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, “just like my bilateral deficit with my grocery store doesn’t tell you anything about whether I’m in debt.”

Trump continued:

We’re gonna be leveling the playing field. The tariffs are hurting China very badly. They don’t want them and frankly if we can make the deal, it would be my honor to remove them. But otherwise, we are having very many billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury; we have never had that before with China.

He also doesn’t understand how tariffs work. China doesn’t pay the tariffs; American importers do, and they pass the cost on to their customers. So if you bought anything made in China this year, you paid a tariff. The Chinese paid nothing.

Military Times asked 900 active-duty troops to rate a variety of threats. Each bar in this graph represents the percentage of troops who described the threat as either “significant” or “very significant”. Both “immigration” and “Mexico” ranked way down the threat list.

The conservative National Review has taken a very strong stand on the abuse of executive power:

Because executive power is awesome, and intended to be that way, certain abuses of it can be discouraged only by the credible threat that Congress will remove the president from power — or, if discouragement fails, can be remediated only by the president’s actual removal. That is why Madison believed that the inclusion of impeachment in Congress’s arsenal was “indispensible” to preserving the Constitution’s framework of liberty vouchsafed by divided power.

Of course, it took that stand in 2014, when the “executive overreach” in question was Obama’s decision to tell 5 million undocumented immigrants that he was not going to get around to deporting them. To it’s credit, NR isn’t happy about Trump’s seizure of power, but I haven’t noticed them talking about impeachment.

and anti-Semitism

Ilhan Omar, one of two Muslim women in Congress, got herself in trouble by tweeting six words. Glenn Greenwald had just tweeted:

GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their criticisms of Israel. It’s stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.

Omar responded:

It’s all about the Benjamins baby

If you’re not tuned in to the history of anti-Semitism, you might not get why this is anti-Semitic. If the issue under discussion were, say, guns or drugs, there would be nothing particularly out-of-bounds about tweeting “It’s all about the Benjamins” as a way of saying that McCarthy had been bought by the NRA or Big Pharma. But what makes it different when the subject is Israel is the long history (going back to the Rothschilds and even further) of conspiracy theories about Jewish money controlling events from behind the scenes.

Most recently, the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh was motivated by the belief (widely held on the right-wing fringe) that Jews are plotting to dilute the US’s white majority by encouraging caravans of illegal Hispanic immigrants to come up from Central America. George Soros is supposedly financing the caravans. Soros himself was a target of the MAGA Bomber in October, who shared a social-media meme showing Soros at the top of the “Controlled False Opposition”.

So it’s playing with fire to imply without evidence that Jewish money has bought Kevin McCarthy, because irresponsible accusations like that have resulted in people getting killed, not just in Eastern Europe during the pogroms, but recently here in America. (If terrorists were attacking NRA conventions, I’d be more careful about how I talked about them, too. I wouldn’t stop disagreeing with them, but I’d be careful not to seem to endorse the violence.)

Omar apologized. Some Jewish writers, like David Perry, want to accept that apology and move on:

too often, my would-be allies against injustice on the left can easily stumble into anti-Semitic tropes and only sometimes realize quickly enough to reverse course. The most recent example happened on Twitter when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose district in Minneapolis surrounds me as I write in my office, made a flippant tweet about Israeli money buying off Congress. She clearly meant it as a comment on the power of lobbyists, but it inadvertently invoked long-standing tropes of wealthy Jewish cabals exerting influence. The ensuing political firestorm revealed just how hard it is to maintain solidarity in the face of the oppressive forces that want to divide and conquer. The solution is this: Listen. Believe people when they reach out to you in good faith. Ignore bad-faith hypocrites. Apologize if necessary. Then we can move forward together.

But then there are the “bad-faith hypocrites” like Trump, who said Omar should resign. Or Mike Pence and Kevin McCarthy, who want Democrats to take away Ilhan’s committee assignments, as Republicans did to Steve King after a lifetime of racist comments.

CNN’s Jake Tapper did a great job of demonstrating that hypocrisy.

There is nothing that this White House finds more offensive than a politician feeding into stereotypes about Jews, Jewish money, and controlling politicians, which is what Congresswoman Omar is accused of having done.

But instead of a clip of Omar doing this — there isn’t one, she just tweeted those six words — what rolled instead was Trump talking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015:

You’re not going to support me, even though you know I’m the best thing that could ever happen to Israel. … You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. … You want to control your own politicians.

Tapper then apologized for showing the wrong clip, and began a mock struggle with his “rogue” control room. As Tapper kept asking for the Omar tape, what he got instead was

• A Trump tweet showing Hillary Clinton on a backdrop of money, with “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” printed on a large red Star of David.
• Trump lecturing the press that “very fine people” were “on both sides” of the marches in Charlottesville, where right-wing extremists chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
• A Kevin McCarthy tweet: “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg” [three Jewish billionaires] “to BUY this election!”

He could have kept going by showing the 2016 Trump campaign’s final ad, which The Guardian characterized like this:

The film features lurid shots of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve interspersed with images of three prominent Jewish people: Janet Yellen, who chairs the Federal Reserve, the progressive financier George Soros and the Goldman Sachs chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein.

“The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election,” Trump is heard saying in the advert. “For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind.”

Instead, Tapper apologized and went to commercial, saying “We seem to be having some issues here sorting out which anti-Semitic tropes are offensive and which ones are not.”

I understand the arguments for and against boycotting Israel (or perhaps just products made in the occupied territories) over the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. For: The situation is frequently compared to apartheid in South Africa, where a boycott played a significant role in putting pressure on the white government. Against: Of all the countries that violate human rights in one way or another, Israel is being picked out because of anti-Semitism.

But I don’t understand why one side or the other of that debate should be illegal.

and Amazon

After that long public process about siting a second headquarters, Amazon has now changed its mind about building it in New York. Progressive politicians had begun to challenge the $3 billion in tax incentives that drew Amazon to New York.

There’s a broader conversation to be had about corporations playing communities off against each other. I’m sure Amazon will get the deal it’s looking for somewhere else. But should it?

Usually this issue comes up in the context of sports, when a city feels like it has to invest hundreds of millions in a sweetheart stadium deal in order to attract or keep a team. This is a situation where some federal rules might benefit everyone: Even the cities that “win” these competitions often wind up as losers.

and you also might be interested in …

It looks like Bernie is running again.

Let’s review: Kamala Harris isn’t black enough, Kirsten Gillibrand is so out of touch that she doesn’t know how to eat fried chicken, Elizabeth Warren should never have told anybody about her Native American ancestor, and Amy Klobuchar is a bad boss.

Isn’t that weird? For every woman who runs for president, there’s some story that blocks out consideration of what she wants to do.

I think the video rolling out Mark Kelly’s campaign for the Arizona Senate seat that’s up in 2020 is one of the best political pieces I’ve ever seen. Kelly has been a Navy pilot in Desert Storm, an astronaut, and the husband of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head by a mass shooter. The video is a fabulous mix of themes: service, heritage, heroism, risk, family. He may be a man running against a woman (Martha McSally, who lost her race to Kyrsten Sinema, but got appointed to fill out John McCain’s term), but he’s a man who has supported his wife through a difficult recovery. I think that’s going to count for something.

To me, the most heart-breaking exchange is when Mark is sitting on a couch with Gabby, who apparently is still challenged to put together long sentences. “Do you remember when you entered Congress for the first time?” “Yes, so exciting.” “It was exciting. You know, I thought then that I had the risky job.”

Former FBI Director Andy McCabe isn’t an unbiased source, but his account of the days after James Comey was fired is worth a look. I’ll probably read his book when it comes out in a few weeks.

Cartoonist Jen Sorensen responds to Tom Brokaw’s suggestion (since apologized for) that “Hispanics should work harder at assimilation”.

Politicians put religion to the strangest uses. Wyoming recently came close to repealing the death penalty. The repeal bill passed the House and was unanimously approved by the appropriate Senate committee, only to lose 12-18 on the floor of the Senate. One senator explained her No vote like this:

Sen. Lynn Hutchings, R-Cheyenne, argued that without the death penalty, Jesus Christ would not have been able to die to absolve the sins of mankind, and therefore capital punishment should be maintained.

“The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me,” she said. “I’m grateful to him for our future hope because of this. Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”

That’s what she learned from the story of Jesus.

What kind of woman has a late-term abortion, which the far right calls a “partial-birth” abortion? This kind.

In December 2014, I had an abortion at 29 weeks, after my first baby was diagnosed with a brain abnormality called lissencephaly. The early diagnosis—lissencephaly is sometimes not diagnosed until after birth—meant her case was severe and her prognosis was grim: We could expect her to live for two to six years while suffering from frequent respiratory infections and intermittently choking on her own saliva. Her cognitive development would be arrested or even reversed by painful seizures. She might have been able to smile socially and/or track motion with her eyes, but maybe not. Eventually, one of the bouts of pneumonia or choking episodes or complications from one of the surgeries needed to sustain basic life functions would have killed her.

The author, Margot Finn, eventually got involved with a support group for women who have gone through late-term abortions. None of them fit the anti-abortion stereotype of an irresponsible woman who just whimsically decided to kill her baby after procrastinating for six months.

I’m not sure I’ll ever understand how incurious some pro-life people seem to be about the reasons people seek abortions. In response to the version of my story I posted recently on Facebook, I’ve had people confidently claim that no one’s talking about people like me, that what I did was between me and my doctor. They say they’re talking about people who “just change their minds” at 24-plus weeks of pregnancy about whether they want the presumably healthy fetus cresting today’s fulcrum of “viability” inside them.

Oh, those people. Has anyone ever met one?

and let’s close with some stupidity

Some would-be hi-tech thieves in Silicon Valley stole a shipment of GPS tracking devices. Within hours, police had tracked the devices, some of which were in the thieves’ storage locker and the rest in their car. The storage locker also contained other stolen property, as well as some drugs.

And that’s not all they did wrong.

Before making off with about $18,000 worth of the devices, the thieves grabbed a beer out of the fridge and cut themselves in the process, leaving fingerprints and blood evidence.

Clearly these guys need to spend time in prison, where they can meet more accomplished thieves and begin to educate themselves in their chosen profession.

It has been an eventful two weeks: Michael Cohen’s testimony, Congress moving towards denouncing Trump’s national emergency declaration, the Trump/Kim summit blowing up, more Democratic 2020 candidates, and a bunch of other stuff.

I’ve been resisting making detailed comments about the Democratic presidential candidates until the campaign gets more seriously underway. (The first debate is in June.) When there are 20 or so candidates, who differ more in emphasis than in goals, I think it’s a mistake to identify yourself with one too soon. (Unless, of course, you’re a professional who needs to sign on with a campaign.)

The main goal, in my mind, is to get Trump out. If we do that, I’ll be happy, whether the 46th president comes billed as a socialist or a moderate. I would encourage everybody to avoid painting themselves into an “If the nominee isn’t my candidate, I don’t care whether Trump wins” corner. If Democrats picked their candidate by tossing the names of all their elected officials into a hat and drawing one at random, I would care deeply about that candidate winning.

With that in mind, this week’s featured post, “Before We Even Think about Candidates for 2020”, looks at how Trump plans to win, and how that should influence Democrats’ counter-strategy. That should be out by, say, 10 EST. I’m targeting the weekly summary for around noon.

We already know how Trump is planning to beat us. Let’s go into that battle with open eyes.

President 46%. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president with 46% of the vote, beating a Democrat who got 48%. As he was being inaugurated, he briefly benefited from the wave of hope and goodwill that greets all presidents, and for about two weeks his approval/disproval rating was positive.

He quickly dissipated all that goodwill: He gave his scary “American carnage” inaugural address. We saw the flock of shady billionaires, fossil-fuel industry puppets, and alt-right provocateurs he had appointed to high office. Sean Spicer angrily told us that we didn’t really see all that empty space on the National Mall during Trump’s inauguration, and Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts“. Then Mike Flynn resigned under a cloud that had something to do with lies about Russia, the Trump family kept openly profiting from his presidency, and by April his approval was below 40%. It has fluctuated in a 37%-43% range ever since.

Whatever he says or does, or how well or badly things are going, that’s how much support he has. The unemployment rate hits record lows and the stock market record highs, but he can’t get over 43%. He all but kneels to Vladimir Putin, refers to Nazis as “very fine people”, puts kids in cages, and is identified in as a conspirator in a crime Michael Cohen has already been sentenced to prison for, but he doesn’t go under 37%.

There’s a good reason for that narrow range: Unlike all previous presidents (at least since World War II; I’m kind of hazy on the presidents before FDR), Trump continues to serve up the rhetoric his base wants to hear, and doesn’t even try to speak to the nation as a whole. Most of the things he says are easily recognized as false or nonsensical as soon as you leave the Fox News bubble. (The Washington Post fact-checker estimates that during 2018 Trump averaged 15 false or misleading statements per day.) But inside that bubble, he is a prophet; he says the (untrue) things that no other president has ever had the courage to say. Every bad claim people amke about him originates from a conspiracy between the Deep State and the Fake News Media, who are “enemies of the American people“.

Unlike, say, Bill Clinton reforming welfare, George W. Bush working with Ted Kennedy on education policy, or Barack Obama offering a “grand bargain” on the federal deficit to John Boehner, Trump has never given Democratic leaders the slightest reason to hope that they might achieve their goals by working with him. Every gesture towards compromise — like the DACA-for-Wall deal Trump said he wanted or the job-creating infrastructure bill he promised — turns out to be a mirage that evaporates in the light of day. Fundamentally, Trump doesn’t accept the premise of a win/win outcome; in order for him to believe he has won, his opponents have to lose.

Even worse, he seems to take joy in trolling groups that oppose him. He never misses an opportunity to smear Latino immigrants. He makes up derogatory nicknames (like “Pocahontas” or “Cryin’ Chuck”) for U.S. senators. Whenever he needs to rile up the racists in his base, he picks a fight with some black celebrity like LeBron James or Spike Lee. (Try to remember any previous president of either party trading insults with a celebrity outside of politics, no matter what opinions they expressed.) He refers to black-majority nations as “shithole countries“, and contrasts them with countries he’d like more immigrants from, like Norway. He encourages police to be more violent with suspects.

So how does Trump plan to win? That kind of behavior raises an obvious question: How does Trump think he’s going to get re-elected? Something like a third of the country may worship him. (Literally. It’s not uncommon to run across people saying that Trump was chosen by God to be president.) They may indeed be so devoted that they don’t care if he stands “in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoots someone”, much less if he violates campaign finance laws or commits bank fraud or is a ventriloquist’s dummy for Putin.

But how do you win an election if you don’t do anything to grow a base that’s barely more than a third of the country?

Answer — the same way he did in 2016. Eezy-peezy: Rile up your third of the country so that they’re sure to vote (and depress the rest of it so that they’re not), making them maybe 40% of the electorate. Get another 6% to hold their nose and vote for you because they’re scared of your opponent. Encourage (maybe with some social-media help from Russia) 5% or so to vote for third-party candidates who have no chance to take any of your states. (Howard Schultz has already volunteered for that role.) Then count on the Electoral College to install you in office even though your opponent has more votes.

That would sound like one of the Brain’s plans to take over the world, if we hadn’t just seen it work.

Let’s not get fooled again. If you know the trap your enemy is setting, the obvious counter-strategy is to refuse to walk into it. Since the trap is two-pronged (motivate his voters, depress and split ours) we should look for two things in a potential Democratic challenger:

• Someone who raises progressive enthusiasm, so that marginal Democratic voters (especially non-whites and young people) are drawn to the polls.
• Someone who doesn’t scare Republican voters outside Trump’s base (especially educated suburbanites and moderates) into supporting him.

The problem: While those two are not directly contradictory, they do generally point in opposite directions. A candidate with sweeping progressive proposals (like Bernie Sanders) tends to scare the Right, while a “safer” candidate (like Joe Biden) may leave low-motivation voters wondering why they should bother.

Moving either way increases the third-party threat. In 2016, Jill Stein got votes from people who would have voted Democratic if Bernie had been the nominee. But Schultz has openly said that his motivation to run as a “centrist” arises from fear of Democrats nominating a progressive like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Trumpists are preparing for either possibility. You can bet that any moderate candidate will face the same kinds of attacks “Crooked Hillary” did: He or she is a tool of the powerful special interests that are threatened by Trump’s attack on the Deep State. But CPAC (over the weekend) was a testing ground for attacks on progressives: They want to turn the US into Venezuela and even take away your hamburgers. The Green New Deal, Trump summed up, means “No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric.”

Any Trump challenger will face personal attacks that make him or her seem uniquely horrible. (“I mean, I don’t like him either, but couldn’t the Democrats have picked somebody else?”) It doesn’t really matter that the charges be true, only that they take time to refute. We’ve already seen this with Warren and the Native American issue. (Lots of people are convinced she made up her native ancestor in order to take advantage of affirmative action. There is zero evidence for this, but the issue never goes away.)

I think progressives underestimate the effectiveness of this kind of stuff, largely because Bernie never had to face it in 2016. (Republicans were counting on him to wound Hillary, so they mostly laid off of him, portraying him as a good guy with some wacky notions. Trump would occasionally cry some crocodile tears about the raw deal Bernie was getting.) It’s a mistake to draw the conclusion that Bernie was shielded by his fine moral character. Anyone can be lied about, and it’s usually not that hard to find some factual foundation to build a lie on. In a sufficiently large cloud of lies, the many absurd charges (think Pizzagate) can seem to support each other. (“I don’t know. It just seems like there’s something wrong there.”)

Don’t help him. The most important thing Democrats can do is to avoid slandering their front-runners. We need to make sure that candidates have answers for any serious questions that are bound to come up eventually, but attacks on a candidate’s fundamental honesty and decency shouldn’t be tossed around lightly.

So it’s fine to ask why Amy Klobuchar doesn’t support Medicare-for-All, but not to jump to the conclusion that she’s a tool of the insurance companies (unless you really know something). It’s fine to wonder how Bernie will pay for his proposals, but not to accuse him of trying to turn the US into Cuba.

And I don’t want to hear about how Kamala Harris isn’t black enough, or that Kirsten Gillibrand doesn’t know how to eat chicken. We’ll get enough of that kind of BS in the general-election campaign. We don’t need to start it now.

Can anybody thread the needle? The most successful Democratic campaigns of the Trump era have somehow managed to split the difference. Doug Jones won an unlikely senate seat in Alabama by avoiding progressive positions like Medicare-for-All, but the very thought of a Democrat beating Roy Moore inspired high turnout in Alabama’s black neighborhoods. Beto O’Rourke ran a surprisingly close race in Texas by creating an exciting progressive image without taking many progressive stands on the issues. That is also the path Obama took in his 2008 landslide. Obama himself was the excitement, not a revolutionary platform.

Texas and Alabama are both in the South, where a Democratic presidential nominee will only win as part of a national landslide. So I don’t think those races should define the limits of acceptable positions. But I think each issue needs to be weighed on the inspiration/fright scale. Reparations for slavery, for example, is a trap issue for Democrats. No one really believes the next president can get a reparations bill passed — and I don’t even know of a plausible reparations proposal — so I doubt the issue will inspire new support. But it will scare a lot of white people and lend itself to exaggerated charges.

At the moment, things look relatively good. The latest poll has Trump trailing a generic Democrat by 48%-41%. But of course, many polls showed even larger leads for Clinton at some point or another. That 7-point lead comes before the actual nominee either raises enthusiasm or gets torn down. It also comes before the Mueller report appears, and before investigations in the House nail down charges that Trump supporters have been able to wave away so far. There’s a strong chance of a recession beginning before the election, and who can guess what foreign crises will erupt between then and now?

The idea that 41% of the public might be able to look at the last two years and say, “I want more of that” is both scary and mind-boggling. But that’s the world we live in. Trump has about that much support and always has. He’s going to try to win again without building that base, and we know exactly how he’s going to try to do it. No matter what happens in the internal dynamics of our own process, we can’t ever lose sight of that.

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again

– Pete Townsend, “Won’t Get Fooled Again“

This week’s featured post is “Before We Even Think about Candidates for 2020“. During my week off, I preached this sermon.

This week everybody was talking about Michael Cohen

Two things were striking about Michael Cohen’s public testimony to the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

1. He accused the president of multiple crimes, offered documents to back up his claims, and gave names of people who were also involved.
2. Republicans on the committee did not rebut any of these claims. With only a few clumsy exceptions (see below) they did not even defend Trump’s character.

Republicans were right, of course, in the observation that Cohen’s word by itself shouldn’t count for much. But that’s not what Democrats are asking the country to believe. They’re going to use Cohen’s account as a road map to assemble supporting evidence. I want to know what Trump’s accountant, Alan Weisselberg, is going to say, and what’s in the tax returns of Trump himself and the Trump Organization.

To anyone outside the Fox New bubble, Republican Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows embarrassed themselves in the hearings. They made crystal clear what House Democrats have been saying for two years: If Trump has done anything wrong, House Republicans don’t want to know about it. [Another thing that’s apparently OK if you’re a Republican: witness intimidation.]

The SNL parody (with Ben Stiller as Cohen and Bill Hader as Jordan) wasn’t far from the truth.

Cohen’s actual comment was dead-on:

I did the same thing you are doing now for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years … And I can only warn [that] people that follow Mr. Trump as I did, blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.

Cohen cleared up the question of whether Trump “directed” him to lie to Congress, as BuzzFeed reported and Mueller’s office rebutted: Before his testimony, he had a conversation with Trump in which the President spoke to him “in code“.  [at 2:26 in the transcript]

He doesn’t tell you what he wants. Again: “Michael, there is no Russia. There’s no collusion. There’s no involvement, no interference.” I know what he wants, because I’ve been around him for so long.

Also, Cohen says Trump’s lawyers read and edited his prepared remarks for that hearing, which included the lie.

Many people (including James Comey and Andrew McCabe) have made this observation: In private, Trump talks like a mob boss. This kind of non-specific direction resembles dialog from The Sopranos.

Cohen started his prepared remarks by saying that Trump is a racist. That started a long and silly dispute, in which Rep. Mark Meadows attempted to “prove” that Trump is not racist by producing a black woman who works in his administration. (The woman in question had no background in public housing, but qualified for her position at HUD by working for the Trump family. She is reported to be angling for a role in reality TV.)

Sure, Trump is a racist, but that’s the wrong point to get hung up on, especially given the many definitions of racism and the fact that many people (like me, for instance) admit that we’re pretty much all racists in one way or another.

The more significant fact, the one we can observe directly without trying to see into the man’s heart, is that Trump exploits racism. He supports efforts to suppress the black vote. He makes racist appeals. He is very slow to criticize white supremacists, because they’re a key part of his base. Whenever he needs to get his minions stoked up, he picks a fight with some black athlete like LeBron James or Steph Curry or Marshawn Lynch. (Actually, his biggest critics in the sports world are white coaches: Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr. But hitting back at them wouldn’t make the racial contrast, so what would be the point?)

While we’re talking about racism, don’t miss this article by Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility. She points to the “racial illiteracy” that is promoted by the notion that racism is an individual attitude (that nice people don’t have), rather than a problem in the very shape of our society.

If I don’t understand racism as a deeply embedded system that I have been shaped by and participate in, my inaction will uphold it.

Given his article, you can read the Mark Meadows episode as an example of her point: Meadows interprets racism as an individual hostility towards blacks, and is offended that anyone would accuse either Trump or Meadows himself of racism. After all, he has nieces and nephews who are people of color, and is friends with the black chair of the committee, Elijah Cummings.

But none of that really matters. Good for him as an individual for consciously accepting his nieces and nephews, but that doesn’t mean racism doesn’t affect his actions, or that his votes as a congressman don’t uphold a racist system.

and the Trump/Kim summit

I wasn’t surprised that nothing came of the summit, but it did surprise me that everyone admitted nothing came of it. Trump is now trying to paint the summit’s failure as an expression of his strength, but it really just reflected the fact that the whole Trump/Kim relationship has been a reality TV show.

In the early part of the week, Republicans and Democrats contrasted Cohen’s testimony with the approaching summit: Which was the news and which was the distraction? Don Jr. laid it out like this:

You got a President trying to deal with a major world issue, and to try to distract – or whatever it is – by bringing in a convicted felon and known liar. I mean, it’s pretty pathetic, but it really shows you how much the Democrats hate Trump.

I interpreted the summit as the distraction, because Trump’s whole approach to North Korea has been more theater than substance. He theatrically exaggerated the threat of war with his “fire and fury” remarks, and then he resolved the self-induced tension with his ridiculous claim that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” His statement that “we fell in love” should have made the whole US foreign policy team cringe, and probably did.

In reality, Kim did enough testing to establish North Korea’s nuclear threat, and then paused to play Trump for propaganda points, which Trump gave him. Kim’s people have now seen him meet the American president as an equal, and to refuse to be bullied into giving up his country’s nuclear status. Trump has scaled back military cooperation with South Korea and vouched for Kim’s innocence in the death of American Otto Warmbier (which his family disputes).

In return, Kim hasn’t given up anything. There never was a serious prospect that he would.

and the national emergency

The House passed a resolution voiding Trump’s declaration of national emergency on the southern border. The Senate has to vote on it, and four Republican votes are needed to pass it. This weekend, Rand Paul became the fourth to come out against the emergency, saying:

I can’t vote to give the president the power to spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress. We may want more money for border security, but Congress didn’t authorize it. If we take away those checks and balances, it’s a dangerous thing

He joins Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Tom Tillis. The vote is expected next week. Trump is expected to veto the resolution after it passes, setting up a legal battle that undoubtedly will be decided by the Supreme Court.

I generally try to rein in my urge to speculate, but I don’t think John Roberts really wants this responsibility. I expect him to look for some way to drag the process out until the point becomes moot.

and the US government taking children from their parents

The House Oversight Committee is looking into the Trump administration policy of separating families at the border. The first hearing was Tuesday. Channel 3000 lists its takeaways:

• There was no cross-agency mechanism to track children as they moved from the jurisdiction of Homeland Security into HHS.
• No officials along the way objected.
• There are thousands of complaints of sexual abuse against minors in custody.
• Scott Lloyd from ICE (and now a senior advisor at HHS) kept track of pregnant minors in order to block them getting abortions.

The committee is now subpoenaing documents from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and HHS.

and an unusual amount of hypocrisy and projection

Hypocrisy is constant in this administration, so I generally let it go. But this week stood out.

Ivanka Trump went straight from her inherited role in the family business to a job in her father’s White House (that she has no qualifications for). Here’s her comment on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ idea for a federal job guarantee:

I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last 4 years. People want to work for what they get.

She is, I deduce, deeply envious of all those people who were born with nothing and have only the things they’ve earned.

Paul Krugman went on to look at the further claim Ivanka made: that people “want the ability to live in a country where there is the potential for upward mobility.”

Ms. Trump is surely right in asserting that most of us want a country in which there is the potential for upward mobility. But the things we need to do to ensure that we are that kind of country — the policies that are associated with high levels of upward mobility around the world — are exactly the things Republicans denounce as socialism.

Allies of President Trump are incredulous that anyone still listens to a person who has lied in the past. White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders:

It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.

It’s worth noting that during Michael Cohen’s first opportunity to “spread his lies” to Congress, he was actually spreading Trump’s lies. Fact-checkers estimate that in 2018 Trump averaged 15 false claims per day.

After years of ranting about imaginary voter fraud by Democrats, Trump has nothing to say when an actual absentee-ballot scam by Republicans causes an election to be thrown out.

The same people who object strongly when Rep. Ilhan Omar’s tweets hint at anti-Semitism don’t care at all when she faces blatant Islamophobia.

and books you might want to read

Andy McCabe turns out to be a really good writer. His new book The Threat is worth reading for its content, of course. But McCabe also has a deft hand for including just enough scene-setting details to make his account come alive.

In addition to all the Trump-and-Comey stuff, he also tells the story of the FBI’s role in tracking down the Boston Marathon bombers.

Timothy Carney’s Alienated America is a frustrating book. The first half is really good: He seems to be the kind of conservative who was opposed to Trump (but voted for him over Hillary), and he’s pursuing the mystery of why Trump was attractive to so many other conservatives. He popularizes a lot of good sociology, cuts through some simplistic stuff about the white working class, and comes to a very interesting conclusion: The Trump base, the first supporters who picked him over Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, were people who were doing well in places that were doing badly. Not the guys dying of opioid overdoses, but the neighbors of guys dying of opioid overdoses.

He then does some more good work to identify what’s wrong with those communities: Their civic institutions have been hollowed out. So when people hit misfortune, they feel like they’re on their own: no churches, no extended family, no union, nothing that anchors a supportive network. People lack social capital, so they respond to the Trump message that the American Dream is dead. (In places that still have social capital, it turns out, the chances for social and economic mobility are much higher, so the American Dream is alive.)

That was all fascinating. And then, very abruptly at Chapter 8, all the data goes away and we’re in Conservative Just-So-Story Land: Local civic institutions were killed off by centralization, and especially by government. Liberal government is hostile to churches, and to anybody but government doing anything for the community. There’s no need for data; just tell a couple of uncheckable anecdotes and rely on the fact that there’s no other way things could be.

A second culprit is hyper-individualism, which is embodied in the sexual revolution, but has nothing to do with the conservative push to replace public schools with voucher-supported private schools, or to turn public-policy decisions over to the market. (Upscale liberal communities, he believes, teach our kids the sexual abstinence we think is judgmental in school programs. He doesn’t know the same teens I know, and hasn’t talked to the people who teach UU sex education.) Mom-and-pop shops are being killed off by zoning rather than the market. The local diner is the kind of “third place” a community needs, but he never mentions the public library.

It’s like a very interesting and intelligent guy wrote the first seven chapters, and then turned the manuscript over to a yahoo to finish.

and you also might be interested in …

Washington Governor Jay Inslee has joined the 2020 presidential race. He is likely to make climate change his central issue.

Great article: “Mitch McConnell, Republican Nihilist“.

there is only the will to power. He is a remorselessly political creature, devoid of principle, who, more than any figure in modern political history has damaged the fabric of American democracy. That will be his epitaph.

The mainstream media loves Democrats-in-chaos stories like this one from the Washington Post. But nothing in this story sounds alarming to me: Moderate Democrats from swing districts sometimes vote with Republicans to amend bills that more liberal Democrats want. The progressive wing of the Party may challenge the notion that those districts really are that conservative, by running primary candidates who are more liberal than the current Democratic representative.

That’s all as it should be. Neither the moderate votes nor the threat of progressive primary challenges sound like betrayals to me. A healthy party has these kinds of debates.

Now it’s the Methodists’ turn to fracture over LGBTQ issues.

No charges will be filed in the Stephon Clark case. Clark was an unarmed 22-year-old black man who was shot by Sacramento police in his grandmother’s back yard.

The officers fired their weapons 20 times in Mr. Clark’s direction within seconds of turning a blind corner. “Both officers believed that he was pointing a gun at them,” Ms. Schubert said. She added that police video showed Mr. Clark was “advancing” on the officers.

Mr. Clark was later found to be unarmed; his cellphone was found under his body. An autopsy released by the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office in May found at least seven bullets had hit Mr. Clark.

A comprehensive analysis of police video footage by The New York Times found that gunfire continued after Mr. Clark had fallen to his hands and knees. Six of the seven shots most likely hit Mr. Clark as he was falling or was already on the ground, according to The Times’s analysis. Three minutes passed after the shooting before police officers identified themselves to Mr. Clark, and he did not receive medical attention for six minutes.

So Clark was someplace he had every right to be, holding his phone and “advancing” towards a corner police had not turned yet. Whenever I hear about such cases, I imagine myself trying to raise a black teen-ager. What do you tell him to do or not do, so that he can avoid getting killed like this?

and let’s close with something we’ve seen far too often already

Namely: a trailer for a movie where a white person plays a key role in black progress.

It didn’t get a lot of attention on my social-media feeds, but this week Republican Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Joe Manchin co-wrote an op-ed about climate change that appeared in the Washington Post. It’s frustratingly timid and vague, but this appears to be where the center of the Senate is on the issue. So I decided it’s worth looking at in detail. That’ll be today’s featured post, “Where is Congress’ Center on Climate Change?”. It should be out before 9 EST.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: Democrats launching investigations, Manafort’s light sentence, a string of economic reports that point to a slowing economy, and a variety of other stuff. That should appear around noon.

A bipartisan duo of centrist senators combine to promote a vague and inadequate agenda. But at least it’s something.

The Green New Deal proposal that AOC and Ed Markey put forward last month almost certainly won’t become law anytime soon. But presumably it also had a second purpose: to move the national debate off the nothing-can-be-done pessimism of the last two years and push other people to offer plans of their own. That effort is already seeing some success. For example, here’s economist Noah Smith’s GND, which largely overlaps with the progressive Democrats’ GND, but shaves off a few of its more controversial economic features — like a federally guaranteed job — and puts more emphasis on research and trade policy, plus a carbon tax.

Fertilizing the collective imagination and keeping pressure on fossil-fuel lackeys to explain why they’re blocking legitimate efforts to preserve a livable planet for future generations — those are two worthy accomplishments. But at some point actual legislation needs to pass, which (at least for the next two years, and probably well beyond) will require just about all Democratic votes plus a few Republicans. What kind of proposal could achieve that anytime soon?

We got an indication this week in the bipartisan op-ed on climate change that Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) published in the Washington Post. Murkowski and Manchin are both considered centrists in their respective parties, so if there is going to be bipartisan cooperation, this is where you would expect it to start.

Whether you find this piece encouraging or discouraging depends on where you expected the Senate’s center to be. On the optimistic side, the two senators accept the basic science of the problem.

There is no question that climate change is real or that human activities are driving much of it.

They point out that the effects of climate change not just looming in some distant computer-modeled future, but are already affecting their states: floods in West Virginia and shifting fisheries in Alaska.

This is a huge improvement on science-deniers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) or President Trump, who have described climate change as a hoax, or those like Marco Rubio who employ the “I’m not a scientist, but” dodge, or like Joni Ernst who dodge with “our climate always changes”. At least Murkowski and Manchin start by recognizing reality.

From there, though, things get iffy. They position themselves in the center by framing the climate debate as a clash between two equally wrong extremes.

those who support drastic, unattainable measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and those who want to do nothing.

Three things are wrong with this framing:

• It fails to point out that more vigorous measures to reduce emissions are “unattainable” largely because people like Murkowski and Manchin won’t get behind them.
• It ignores the likelihood that “attainable” measures won’t be enough to avoid a climate catastrophe. (If they think attainable measures will suffice, they should state that position openly and defend it.) Think about Winston Churchill in the 1930s foreseeing Great Britain’s coming clash with Nazi Germany: What if he had limited himself to calling for preparations that were “attainable” under the Chamberlain government?
• The Trump administration isn’t trying to “do nothing”. If only it were. Instead, it’s actively rolling back what the Obama administration accomplished, trying to cut funding for renewable energy, filling the government with fossil-fuel industry activists, and in general doing everything it can to make the problem worse. Doing nothing would be a considerable improvement.

But OK then, what are Murkowski and Manchin proposing? They are the chair and ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where

we are working together to find pragmatic policies that can draw strong and enduring support.

So they support measures that can draw support, whatever those might be. From there, you have to read between the lines to see what they might mean.

The United States leads the world in research and development. Our national labs and universities are working toward the next scientific breakthrough, and private investors are pursuing the next game-changing technology. The United States is at the forefront of clean-energy efforts, including energy storage, advanced nuclear energy, and carbon capture, utilization and sequestration. We are committed to adopting reasonable policies that maintain that edge, build on and accelerate current efforts, and ensure a robust innovation ecosystem.

The impact of developing these new technologies will be felt by Americans from all walks of life, including residents of rural communities and other areas served by older technologies. Transitioning these communities to more efficient forms of energy will provide them with cleaner energy that is also more stable and has lower costs, which will bring about additional benefits.

I read it like this: They’ll appropriate more money for research, in hope of finding win/win solutions that lower carbon emissions without asking for any sacrifice from either industry or consumers. So: no green taxes, no mandates that might force higher efficiency standards, no forced retirement of coal-fired power plants, no firm commitment to a national carbon-emission goal.

Undoubtedly there are at least a few such win/win solutions to be found, and if so, we should definitely try to find them. But I suspect they won’t move us far enough fast enough to avoid the kinds of disasters that will create new deserts, raise oceans, and send tens or hundreds of millions of people looking for new homes. If you have been alarmed by the flood of refugees from Syria or Sudan or Guatemala, wait for Bangladesh.

If you think in terms of what the crisis requires, this isn’t even half a loaf; it’s more like part of a slice. If there is a slice to be gotten, though, we should be sure to get it. Funding new research, after all, is better than stifling research. The trick will be to get the slice without letting the public lose sight of what is really needed.

The data that came in this week wasn’t terrible, but it was far from Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

It’s hard to know how to respond when Trump sets up a stupid benchmark and then fails to meet it. On the one hand, the failure points out that his policies haven’t done what he expected them to do, because the world doesn’t work the way he thinks it does. But on the other hand, I don’t want to validate the benchmark, because then I’ll start feeling obligated to judge future presidents by it.

Case in point: the mercantile trade deficit, which set an $891 billion record in 2018, despite Trump’s promise to shrink it.

Trump takes a pre-Adam-Smith mercantilist view of trade; if a country sells us more stuff than we sell to them, then they’re “beating” us and we need to do something to stop “losing” to them. The economic reality is a lot more complicated. (The libertarian Cato Institute explained this back in 1998, when a trade deficit of $250 billion seemed scandalous.) True, they might be selling us more because they make better products more efficiently. But it also might be because the strength of the dollar makes our exports look artificially expensive. And the dollar might be strong because people around the world want dollars; they view it as a more secure store of value than their home currency; or they want to invest their savings in the US because the American system has more respect for the rule of law; or for some other reason. Maybe what we’re trading for those refrigerators and TVs is paper, like shares in start-up corporations that pop up in the US because our economy does a better job nurturing such things. And so on.

Also, focusing on the deficit in goods ignores services. So if some country makes our bicycles while we handle their banking and insurance, the mercantile trade deficit may say that we’re “losing”, when in reality we might be trading bad jobs for good jobs.

So anyway, Trump has identified the mercantile trade deficit as a major problem, which it isn’t. When he was campaigning in 2016, he said:

Today, our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is nearly $800 billion. And going up, going up fast. Unless I become president. You will see a drop like you’ve never seen before.

In July, Trump falsely told a crowd:

Thanks to our powerful trade policies, the trade deficit is falling and falling and falling.

The point of all his tariffs and trade wars has been to bring the mercantile trade deficit down, so that we stop “losing” to other countries. But it’s not working, as any economist could have told him ahead of time. In 2018, we also ran a somewhat smaller surplus in services, so the overall trade deficit was $621 billion, the highest since 2008.

That graph should tell you something about our mercantile trade deficit: It went way down in 2009. (It also wasn’t “going up fast” in 2016. That was a lie.) What was happening in 2009? A lot of stuff we wouldn’t want to repeat, like massive unemployment that caused people to stop buying stuff. Also, the price of oil crashed in the Great Recession, so that our energy imports cost less. A lower mercantile trade deficit is not always a good thing.

GDP presents another how-to-cover-this quandary: What should I say when the administration makes ridiculously optimistic predictions, and then the results that come in are just OK?

So, after some delay due to the government shutdown, the 2018 GDP stats are in: The economy grew 2.9%. That’s not bad, and even kind of good when looked at realistically. It’s at the upper range of recent annual growth results. GDP grew 2.9% in 2015, but that was the top mark for the Obama administration. 2016 came in at 1.6%. Under Trump GDP has grown 2.2% and 2.9%.

That would be great if 2.2% and 2.9% were the beginning of an up-trend, but it doesn’t look that way. The CBO predicts 2.7% and 1.9% for the next two years. That’s not what Trump promised.

Throughout the 2016 campaign and since, the president and his party have vowed to kick-start tepid Obama-era economic growth. Specifically, they insisted tax cuts and deregulation would return growth to its post-World War II average of 3 percent — a level, candidate Trump said derisively, that President Barack Obama became “the first president in modern history” never to reach in a single year.

So the Trump numbers are not at all terrible; in fact, they’re about what you’d expect from another two years of Obama, particularly if Congress would have let Obama run the kind of deficits Trump is running.

Jobs. The reason growth projections for the next two years are not as high is that the tax cut isn’t having the kind of structural effect on the economy that its backers claimed. Instead, it has stimulated the economy the same way any deficit-increasing measure does.

February job numbers were outright lousy, but it’s a mistake to make too much of that yet. The economy added 20,000 jobs in February, which is pretty sickly: It has been averaging 100K-300K new jobs per month since the end of the recession.

So if 20,000 is where job-creation is going to be now, or worse, if it’s the start of a down-trend, then that would be worrisome. But as you can see in the graph, the monthly data is noisy. Random fluctuation is more likely than the beginning of a new trend.

But take a closer look at that graph without paying attention to the years on the lower axis: Can you tell where the Obama economy ends and the Trump economy starts? I can’t.

That’s how just about all the economic graphs look. After all the sturm-und-drang we’ve had about tax cuts and tariffs and trade deals, and all the hype about how great the Trump economy has been, the Trump economy mostly looks like two more years of the Obama economy.

You wanted to separate children and families, and you wanted to do it with compassion?

– Rep. Nanette Barragán,
questioning Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen

This week’s featured posts are “Where is Congress’ Center on Climate Change?” and “The Balloon Pops on Trump’s Economic Promises“.

This week everybody was talking about investigations

Last week’s Michael Cohen testimony was just the overture. This week House Democrats started the hard work of investigating the many irregularities of the Trump administration. The NYT runs down the various avenues of investigation.

• Judiciary Committee (chaired by Jerry Nadler): obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
• Oversight Committee (Elijah Cummings): hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen MacDougal, and Trump’s over-ruling of the ordinary security clearance process to get clearances for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
• Intelligence Committee (Adam Schiff): Russian interference in US elections, as well as undue influence over Trump wielded by Saudi Arabia or other nations.
• Ways and Means (Richard Neal): Trump’s tax returns.
• Foreign Affairs (Eliot Engel) (in concert with Intelligence and Oversight): the meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin with no other Americans present.

Nadel announced a sweeping document request this week, sending letters out to 81 people or entities. However, this set of requests was not as onerous as it might otherwise sound: The Judiciary Committee has started by requesting documents that have already been turned over either to Mueller’s investigation or someone else.

Republicans, who investigated Benghazi eight times and would probably launch a ninth if Hillary Clinton seemed likely to run again, objected to Democrats’ overreach, obstructionism, and waste of time.

Various pearl-clutching folks worry about a public backlash against investigating Trump, similar to the backlash against the Bill Clinton impeachment. But I think that only happens if the investigations are perceived to be making a big deal about nothing, as Republicans often did when Obama was president. It looks to me like there’s so much Something to investigate that Democrats won’t get around to investigating Nothing for a long, long time.

In addition to the investigations focused on Trump himself and the Trump Organization, there are also hearings about the administration’s policies. Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified before the House Homeland Security Committee about the general situation on the Mexican border, and in particular about the zero-tolerance policy that has separated immigrant children from their parents. (Full C-SPAN video here.)

Chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi led off by citing the numerous false statements the president has made to justify his national emergency declaration, and said:

Today, the secretary can choose whether to be complicit in this administration’s misinformation campaign or she can correct the record.

Nielsen tried to do neither; she acknowledged facts (the number of people trying to cross illegally is down substantially since 2000, the great majority of drug smuggling comes through ports of entry rather than across the unwalled parts of the border) without admitting that she was contradicting the President.

Questioned about kids in cages, she got semantic about the definition of a cage. And the kids weren’t kids, they were UACs (unaccompanied minors). I’ll let WBUR’s Steve Almond sum up:

Her performance was among the most chilling spectacles of the Trump era. … What stood out was Nielsen’s robotic manner, her sheer bureaucratic heartlessness. …

Over and over again, legislators asked Nielsen to reckon with the effects of tearing young children away from their parents. Nielsen responded with the kind of bureaucratic doublespeak more commonly associated with fascist regimes — a rhetoric intended to eliminate the moral problem of her own conduct by dehumanizing the children her agency routinely traumatizes.

and Paul Manafort

Trump’s former campaign chairman was sentenced to 47 months in prison, drastically less than the sentencing guidelines (19-24 years, essentially a life sentence for a man about to turn 70) for the crimes he was convicted of. The best response I saw is in a New Yorker cartoon. A couple is in their living room and Trump is on the TV. “On the other hand,” the wife is saying, “four years can seem like a life sentence.”

This sentence results from only one of Manafort’s two trials, the one in Virginia where the judge has consistently seemed sympathetic to him. He still hasn’t been sentenced for his convictions in D.C. The Virginia sentence covers the eight felonies he was convicted of there: five counts of filing false tax returns, two counts of bank fraud (i.e., getting bank loans under false pretenses), and one count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account. According to reports, only one holdout juror prevented his conviction in ten more crimes. The Washington Post described the eight felonies in everyday English:

At a trial last year, Manafort was found guilty of hiding millions he made lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian politicians in overseas bank accounts, then falsifying his finances to get loans when his patrons lost power.

The comparatively light sentence raises three issues:

• In general, courts treat white-collar criminals with more leniency than street criminals. Manafort is an example of the adage Mario Puzo put into the mouth of Don Corleone in The Godfather: “One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” The lawyer will also go to prison for less time. There are a variety of reasons for this: The white-collar criminal has better lawyers, so the government is usually happy just to get a conviction. Also, judges identify more with educated suit-wearing criminals than with lower-class muggers or burglars. Judges find it harsh to put an educated professional in prison, which they see as an appropriate place for low-lifes.
• The judge at times expressed resentment with what the prosecution was trying to do: convict Mueller of crimes that had nothing to do with Trump or Russia, in order to put pressure on him to talk about Trump and Russia. This is a common enough tactic in organized-crime cases, but Judge T. S. Ellis didn’t like it here. Manafort wasn’t being prosecuted for being close to Trump, but if he hadn’t been at the center of the Trump/Russia scandal, investigators probably wouldn’t have devoted enough resources to his case to prove his crimes, so he probably would have gotten away with all this. You have to wonder how many similar crooks are walking around free. Does that make you feel like Manafort is being treated unfairly, or not?
• Beyond simple class affinity, Ellis seemed to have a bizarre personal identification with Manafort, crediting testimony that he has been “a good friend” and “a generous person”, and absurdly concluding that Manafort has “lived an otherwise blameless life”. (A person who had lived an otherwise blameless life wouldn’t be awaiting sentence for a different set of felonies in another jurisdiction.) In response, The Atlantic laid out how Manafort’s career has revolved around enabling bad people to do bad things. Even when he wasn’t breaking the law, he was happy to be paid in blood money from the tobacco industry; from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos; from apartheid-funded Angolan generalissimo Jonas Savimbi; and from Putin’s client in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. In short, Manafort is a dyed-in-the-wool villain. Villains may also have friends, and if they sometimes distribute their dubious profits more generously than people whose money comes from honest work, that doesn’t disprove their villainy.

Ellis is a Reagan appointee. It seems sad that we have to mention the political affiliations of judges, but that’s the point our legal system has reached. I don’t know how to explain this sentence without invoking political bias.

This week, Manafort faces another sentencing hearing in the District of Columbia, where he has pleaded guilty to witness tampering and conspiracy against the United States. Judge Amy Berman Jackson (an Obama appointee) has shown him far less sympathy. This is also where his cooperation agreement blew up because he continued lying to prosecutors and may have spied on them for Trump.

Also, Bloomberg reports that New York state is ready to file charges against Manafort if President Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.

At the state level, [New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.] is preparing an array of criminal charges. While their full extent isn’t clear, they would include evasion of New York taxes and violations of state laws requiring companies to keep accurate books and records, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the investigation is confidential.

While we’re on this topic, I’m seeing all sorts of speculation about when the Mueller report will come out and what it will say. What if it has some smoking-gun evidence against Trump? What if it doesn’t? What if Trump has AG Barr try to suppress it? I just want to remind everybody: Speculation can be fun, but it doesn’t really matter. Mueller will produce something eventually. The House majority will figure out a way to see the significant parts of it. It will say what it says. At that moment, all the TV-hours and column-inches of speculation will instantly become irrelevant.

So if speculation is a fun game you play with your friends, go ahead. But if it’s making you nuts, you can stop. Reality can take care of itself.

A piece that skirts the edge of speculation, but has value anyway, is Quinta Jurecic’s in yesterday’s NYT. The headline “Will There Be Smoking Guns in the Mueller Report” teases speculation, but the value of the article is in organizing our thoughts about what questions still need answers.

and economic reports

I cover them in one of the featured posts.

and you also might be interested in …

Arizona Senator Martha McSally revealed that when she was in the Air Force, she had been raped by a superior officer. McSally retired as a colonel in 2014.

She joins another Republican senator, Joni Ernst, who said in January that she had been raped in college, and that her husband had assaulted her. Their divorce was finalized in January.

I wish I’d gotten to edit the New Yorker’s article about Fox News: It mixes really alarming stuff with the kind of stuff we’ve come to expect.

The most alarming thing is that Fox had the Stormy Daniels story before the election, and decided not to run it because “Rupert wants Donald Trump to win.” It’s also alarming the way that Fox has merged with the administration, so that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s leading who. Did the Fox & Friends hosts get an idea from Trump, or did Trump get it from them?

Similarly, people go from Fox to the administration and back, with no clear change of loyalties. It’s all one big operation. “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV,” says the University of Virginia’s Nicole Hemmer.

Trump has taken over Fox the way he’s taken over the Republican Party: Both used to represent American conservatism, but there’s really no room in either any more for an anti-Trump conservatism. Reagan conservatism — free trade, pro-NATO, pro-immigration, willing to compromise — is pretty much dead.

Speaking of the Fox/Trump pipeline, former Fox executive Bill Shine is out as White House communications director.

The administration is trying to hassle reporters who tell the American people what’s actually going on at the border.

Customs and Border Protection has compiled a list of 59 mostly American reporters, attorneys and activists who are to be stopped for questioning by border agents when crossing the U.S.-Mexican border at San Diego-area checkpoints, and agents have questioned or arrested at least 21 of them, according to documents obtained by NBC station KNSD-TV and interviews with people on the list.

Looks like the Trump/Kim romance has hit a rough patch. North Korea is preparing a new missile launch.

The collapse of a chain of for-profit colleges that leaves 26,000 students in the lurch illustrates the whole problem with for-profit colleges: They have no mission to educate. Rather than a duty to the students, they have a duty to make money for their stockholders.

The easiest way to extract profit from students who dream about having a college degree is to manipulate government programs: Sell the students a fantasy, get them to max out their student loan potential, and give them as inexpensive an education as will keep the scam going. If and when the whole thing goes belly-up, the scammers keep their profits and the kids are still on the hook for loans.

The wrinkle in this particular collapse is that the collapsing entity is technically non-profit: The Dream Center is a spin-off of a Los Angeles megachurch. It acquired the for-profit Education Management Corporation in 2017 in a transaction the Trump administration approved despite the church’s complete lack of experience in higher education. The original press release said:

As part of the acquisition, the Dream Center Foundation will be converting the EDMC schools into not-for-profit institutions with the intent of investing a percentage of revenue into humanitarian and charitable programs supported by the Dream Center Foundation in Los Angeles and throughout the United States.

In other words: profit by another name. The colleges would be cash cows for other Dream Center programs.

Dream Center showed little inclination to curb the tactics that got Education Management in trouble, like misleading students about their employment prospects. The executives it installed cultivated a high-pressure culture in which profit surpassed all other concerns, according to a report filed last year by Thomas J. Perrelli, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the schools’ compliance with their state settlements.

The students are left with nothing. They won’t get the degrees they were working for. Their credits probably won’t be accepted by any accredited institution. And they still owe on their loans for previous semesters, though this semester’s federal loans will be forgiven under a school-closure program.

Obama tried to shut these scams down, but the Trump administration has relaxed the regulations again.

and let’s close with something aetherial

I’ve been hearing for years that Iceland in winter is a great place to see the aurora borealis, but this display of a dragon and a phoenix are a bit much.

When terrorists publish manifestos, I don’t usually read them. They tend to be long, and the people who do read them tell they are rambling and incoherent. But I did read the manifesto of the white nationalist who killed all those Muslims in Christchurch, and I think it’s worth your attention. What struck me is that it actually is coherent: a fairly small number of bad beliefs lead logically to a whole bunch of bad results. What’s more, that ideology links a large number of pathological views that liberals like me often address in whack-a-mole fashion. I think we need to consider white nationalist ideology as an underground stream that unites much of the Trumpist agenda.

With that in mind, in today’s featured post I’ll attempt a deep reading of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. There’s still a lot of work to do on that yet, including picking a title, so it may not be out until around 11 EDT. The weekly summary also has a lot to cover — the college admissions scandal, Congress’ rejection of Trump’s emergency, and a few other things — so it may not be out before 1.

The Christchurch shooter’s manifesto is a Rosetta Stone for multiple strains of crazy.

I don’t usually recommend that you read something I totally disagree with, but this week I’ll make an exception: If you have the time, look at the the 73-page manifesto posted by Brenton Tarrant, who apparently killed 50 worshipers Friday at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. If you don’t have quite that much time, just look at the Introduction on pages 3 and 4.

Manifestos of terrorist murderers are usually described in the press as the incoherent ramblings of diseased minds. And perhaps sometimes they are; I haven’t read that many of them. But reading this one struck me the opposite way: The ideas fit together, and once you accept a fairly small number of baseless notions and false facts, everything else spins out logically. What’s more: this ideology links a large number of right-wing notions that we on the left usually imagine as separate pathologies, and either ignore as absurd or argue against in a whack-a-mole fashion.

So I think it’s worth trying to understand.

The assumption in the background. One idea seems so obvious to Tarrant, and presumably to his target readers, that it goes without mentioning until fairly deep in the text: Races are real things. So there is a White race, and its members are united by something far greater than a tendency to sunburn. Whites are a “people” who have a culture. [1] Whiteness is an identity, an Us that exists in an eternal evolutionary war with all the Thems out there.

To Tarrant, there is some essential nature to all the races and peoples.

Racial differences exist between peoples and they have a great impact on the way we shape our societies. … A Moroccan may never be an Estonian much the same as an Estonian may never be a Moroccan. There are cultural, ethnic, and RACIAL differences that makes interchanging one ethnic group with another an impossibility. Europe is only Europe because if its combined genetic, cultural, and linguistic heritage. When non-Europeans are considered Europe, then there is no Europe at all. [2]

Birthrates. There’s a worldwide phenomenon that is fairly well understood: When a society becomes wealthy, educates its women, and gives them opportunities in addition to motherhood, birth rates go down. A woman who has a shot at being a CEO or a cancer researcher may or may not decide to have children, but she almost certainly won’t have 7 or 8 of them. That’s why educating women is seen as a possible long-term solution to the population explosion.

There’s nothing about this phenomenon that is specifically white — it applies equally well to Japan, for example, and countries in Africa have seen the same effect among their educated classes — but European countries (and countries like the US and Australia that were largely settled by European colonists) do tend to be wealthy and relatively feminist. So birthrates are down across Europe. And in the US, recent immigrants of non-European ancestry have higher birthrates than whites.

So largely as a result of their own economic success, majority-white countries tend to have birthrates below replacement level. As economic growth continues, opportunities open up for immigrants, who retain their higher birthrates for a generation or two after they arrive. All over the world, then, majority-white countries are becoming less and less white, with the possibility that whites themselves might eventually become a minority.

One recent estimate has the United States becoming a minority-white country by 2045. As I pointed out in August, we’re-losing-our-country is an old story in the US: Once the US was majority-English, until German immigrants (and Africans brought here by force) made the English a minority. For a while longer, it was majority-Anglo-Saxon, until a wave of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants put an end to that. Each time, alarmists claimed that the nation was losing its soul — Ben Franklin worried about the arrival of the Pennsylvania Dutch — but somehow America continued to be America.

But now combine the diminishing white population with the conviction that race really means something. Sure, 21st-century Americans can laugh at Franklin’s fear of people who put hex signs on their barns and make all those buttery pies. But now we’re talking about a whole different race. This was a white country, and now it’s being taken over by other races! Other peoples are taking what’s ours, but they’re doing it through demographics rather than warfare.

We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. [3] Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally, invited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labor, new consumers, and tax base that the corporations and states need to thrive. … Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic bonds, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples — long before low fertility rates ever could. Thus, before we deal with the fertility rates, we must deal with both the invaders within our lands and the invaders that seek to enter our lands. We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.

Tarrant presents demographic estimates of what will happen:

In 2100, despite the ongoing effect of sub-replacement fertility, the population figures show that the population does not decrease in line with these sub-replacement fertility levels, but actually maintains, and, even in many White nations, rapidly increases. All through immigration. This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement.

THIS IS WHITE GENOCIDE.

If you believe in this demographic invasion that is taking your people’s lands, then it follows logically that there are no non-combatants. People are stealing your country simply by being here.

There are no innocents in an invasion. All people who colonize other peoples’ lands share their guilt. [4]

In particular, children are not innocent. They will grow up and vote and reproduce (probably in large numbers, because “fertility rates are part of those racial differences”). So Tarrant was not worried that he might kill children. The point here is not to kill all the immigrants, but to kill enough to drive the rest out and deter future immigrants from coming.

Few parents, regardless of circumstance, will willingly risk the lives of their children, no matter the economic incentives. Therefore, once we show them the risk of bringing their offspring to our soil, they will avoid our lands. [5]

Why don’t I fear losing my country? As I said, Tarrant’s demographics aren’t wrong, at least in the US. (White nationalists in European countries tend to overestimate how many non-whites surround them. France, for example, is still about 85% white. The prospect of whites becoming a minority there is still quite distant.) So why don’t I, as a white American, feel as alarmed as he does?

And the answer is that I don’t see any reason why non-whites can’t be real Americans. Back in the 90s, my wife and I went to China to support our friends as they adopted a baby girl. That girl is now in her mid-20s, and I have watched her grow up, including seeing her on every Christmas morning of her life. To the best of my ability to judge such things, she is as American as I am. I do not worry in the least that some essential non-American nature is encoded in her genetic makeup, or that her presence is turning America into China. [6]

In my view, America (or Western culture, for that matter) isn’t something that arises from the essential nature of the White race. America is something we do, not something we are. It is an idea that can be shared by anyone who is inspired to share it.

So when I picture that white-minority America of 2045 (which I have a decent chance of living to see), I don’t see it as a country that “my people” have lost. That’s because I already see the idea of America and Western culture being shared by lots of other folks that Tarrant would see as invaders, like, say, Fareed Zakaria, Ta-Nahisi Coates, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I have faith in the continuing strength of the American idea, which I believe will continue to inspire a majority of Americans well beyond 2045. California, where whites are already less than half population, still feels like America to me.

Assimilation. Tarrant lacks faith in assimilation, because he sees race as having a direct effect on culture. This is a common belief among white nationalists, and many whites who resonate with white-nationalist concerns, even if they don’t identify with the movement.

A frequent complaint on the American right, which you will hear often on Fox News, is that recent immigrants are not assimilating the way previous waves of immigrants did. The data does not bear this out, but it is believed because white-nationalist ideology makes it seem necessary: Hispanics and other non-white immigrants can’t assimilate the way Italians and Poles did, because they aren’t white.

In memory, we tend to forget how long it took waves of European immigrants to assimilate. Whites who can remember their grandparents speaking Hungarian at home are somehow appalled that Hispanic immigrants don’t instantly learn English, or that they form ethnic enclaves (like, say, Little Italy in New York). American Catholics may feel that immigrant Muslims are changing the essential Christian nature of their country, but they forget that America once saw itself as a Protestant nation, and many felt threatened by immigrant Catholics in precisely the same way. (Catholicism was viewed as a fundamentally authoritarian religion that could never adapt to republican America.)

In fact, Catholics from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other European countries did change America. But America also changed Catholicism. The same thing is happening with Islam.

Anti-democracy. If shared genes are what makes us a people, if immigrants by definition can’t join us, and if my people are in danger of losing their land due to a demographic invasion, then democracy as it is currently practiced — where immigrants gain citizenship and become voters — is just part of the national suicide process. An invasion isn’t something that can be voted on, especially if the invaders are allowed to vote.

Worse, even before the invaders become the majority, democracy has been corrupted by those who hope to gain from the invasion and the “cheap labor, new consumers, and tax base” that it brings. So Tarrant has no love of democracy.

Democracy is mob rule, and the mob itself is ruled by our own enemies.

Until now, I’ve relegated comparisons to American politics to the footnotes. But this is where it needs to come into the foreground. Because several important Trumpian concepts have moved onto the stage:

• the notion of a unified corporate/government “elite” whose interests are at odds with the American people
• a fundamental disrespect for democracy
• the righteousness of violent action if and when the wrong side wins elections.

Trump and his allies have not come out and said openly that democracy is bad, but the notion that gerrymandering, the Electoral College, purging legal voters from voter lists, and various forms of voter suppression are undemocratic carries very little weight with them. The myth that undocumented immigrants vote in large numbers, which circulates despite an almost total lack of evidence, persists as a stand-in for an unspoken underlying concern: that immigrants become citizens and vote legally.

Trump fairly regularly either encourages violence among his supporters or hints that violent action might follow his impeachment or defeat.

All of this makes sense if you believe that democracy is only legitimate as a way for a People to govern itself, and becomes illegitimate when a system designed for a People becomes corrupted by the votes of invaders.

Sex and gender. Tarrant’s manifesto is addressed almost entirely to White men, whom he urges to defend their homelands.

Weak men have created this situation and strong men are needed to fix it.

He has little to say about women, but the implications of his beliefs should be obvious: If the underlying problem is a low birthrate among whites, the ultimate fault lies with white women. Women who let their professional or creative ambitions distract them from motherhood, who practice birth control, abortion, or lesbianism — their failings aren’t just matters of personal morality any more, they’re threats to the survival of the race.

The closest Tarrant comes to addressing this is:

Likely a new society will need to be created with a much greater focus on family values, gender and social norms, and the value and importance of nature, culture, and race.

But it doesn’t take much imagination to picture this new society: It will have fewer opportunities for women, and less acceptance of women in roles other than motherhood. It will also discourage men from abandoning their procreative roles through homosexuality, and will in general support the “traditional value” of separate and unchanging gender roles.

It is easy to see the attraction of this ideology to a variety of crazies, including incels, who have themselves at times become violent terrorists. The same opportunities that have diverted women from motherhood have likewise made them more picky about the men they choose to procreate with, with the result that some men find themselves unable to have the active sex lives they feel they deserve. Incels are already overwhelmingly white, so the attraction of a white-nationalist ideology that would restrict women’s choices should be obvious.

Power and purpose. All of these positions enhance the power of groups that are already privileged: whites, the native-born, Christians, and men. They could be attractive to those groups on that cynical ground alone. But cynicism alone seldom succeeds for long, because the pure quest for power and advantage only inspires sociopaths. The rest may pursue that quest, but never without misgivings.

The charm of an ideology, though, is that it can give power-seeking a higher purpose: I seek these advantages not just for myself, but to save my people from annihilation!

The underground stream. Few American politicians openly embrace white nationalism as a label, even if their views align with it. Even Steve King disclaims the term, and Republicans who share many of his white-nationalist views have felt obligated to distance themselves from him.

At the same time, though, something is motivating them. It is hard to listen to Trump’s litany of falsehoods about the border without wondering what the real justification for his Wall is. Obviously it’s something he doesn’t think he can get away with saying in so many words.

Similarly, it’s hard to see what other ideology unifies the full right-wing agenda: anti-illegal-immigration, anti-legal-immigration, anti-democracy, anti-abortion, anti-birth-control, anti-women’s-rights, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, anti-black, and so on.

When asked about white nationalist terrorism after the Christchurch shooting, President Trump waved off the problem, saying: “It’s a small group of people.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps it is the ideology that dares not announce itself: Its followers just “know” the truth of it, but can’t say so because of “political correctness”. More and more, white nationalism — and the demographic fear at its root — looks like the underground stream that feeds all the various insanities of the Right.

[1] I discussed and rejected this notion a couple years ago in a piece called “Should I Have White Pride?” The artificiality of “white culture” becomes obvious to me when I start trying to imagine a White Culture Festival: What food would we serve? What traditional costumes would we wear? It makes sense to hold a German Festival or a Greek Festival, but a White Festival, not so much.

[2] The evidence for this impossibility is of the we-can’t-imagine-that variety. If you picture a Moroccan and an Estonian next to each other, they just seem different, at least to Tarrant and his target audience.

But of course, the same is true for any lands that are far apart, even within Europe. Italians seem different from Swedes, when you picture them, but somehow they are all white Europeans. To see if the concepts of whiteness and European-ness have any real substance, you’d want to check what happens at the boundaries. So better questions would be: Could a Greek become a Turk, or vice versa? Could a Moroccan became a Spaniard? Those transformations don’t seem nearly so difficult, and in fact are easier for me to imagine than a Spaniard becoming an Estonian.

But in fact, such transformations happen all the time, particularly here in the United States, where we have a long history of light-skinned blacks passing as white, to the point that after a few generations the shift may be forgotten. If you have a Greek-American immigrant living on one side of you and a Turkish-American immigrant on the other, you might have a hard time telling the difference, either racially or culturally. Both would likely have dark hair and make baklava and strong coffee. Both sets of children will likely be as American as yours.

[3] President Trump agrees with Tarrant about this. On the same day as the 50 murders — and, in fact, during a public appearance that began with his statement of support for New Zealand in dealing with these attacks — Trump announced his veto of the bipartisan Congressional resolution to terminate the national emergency that he intends to use to commandeer money to build his wall. Within a few paragraphs, he went from denouncing the “monstrous terror attacks” in New Zealand to echoing the attacker’s rhetoric.

People hate the word “invasion,” but that’s what it is. It’s an invasion of drugs and criminals and people.

[4] Several people have cited this and many other of Tarrant’s statements as examples of projection. Who, after all, has done more colonizing of “other peoples’ lands” than Europeans? Isn’t that how the US, New Zealand, and a bunch of other places became “White nations” to begin with?

Though accurate, I doubt this observation would unsettle Tarrant. “Guilt” here is a relative concept, and is not related to a universal morality. Of course peoples contest with each other for possession of lands in the evolutionary Us-against-Them struggle for survival and dominance. Of course native peoples should have regarded colonizing whites as invaders and tried to repel them.

[5] There’s a strong resonance here with the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Like Tarrant’s attacks, it is an intentional cruelty whose purpose is to deter future immigrants by threatening their children.

[6] Iowa Congressman Steve King disagrees. He tweeted:

[Dutch nationalist leader Geert] Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.

We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally, invited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labor, new consumers, and tax base that the corporations and states need to thrive. … Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic bonds, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples — long before low fertility rates ever could. Thus, before we deal with the fertility rates, we must deal with both the invaders within our lands and the invaders that seek to enter our lands. We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.

— The Manifesto of Brenton Tarrant
explaining why he killed 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand

Last month, more than 76,000 illegal migrants arrived at our border. We’re on track for a million illegal aliens to rush our borders. People hate the word “invasion,” but that’s what it is. It’s an invasion of drugs and criminals and people.

— President Trump,
explaining his decision to veto the bipartisan Congressional resolution
terminating the state of emergency he declared in order to build his wall

This week’s featured post is “Fear of White Genocide: the underground stream feeding right-wing causes“.

This week everybody was talking about white supremacist terrorism

50 people were killed and another 41 injured in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday. One man has been charged with murder, and two other suspects have also been arrested.

The suspect, Brenton Tarrant, live-streamed 17 minutes of the massacre on Facebook, and had previously published a manifesto on 8chan. I look at the manifesto in the featured post.

Josh Marshall echoes my feelings about how Trump responded:

He gave a generic condemnation of the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand and then proceeded to give a meandering speech about foreign “invasion”, i.e., immigrants “rushing our border”, calling them “murderers and killers”. In other words, moments after denouncing the massacre he went on with a lie-laden screed much of which was indistinguishable from the attacker’s manifesto.

and the college admissions scandal

As so often happens when some illegal plot is uncovered, it turns out that the bigger scandal is what people do legally every day.

As it stands now, well-to-do families can game the college admission process in a lot of ways, and there’s no consensus about where to draw the line. Of course parents who can afford it move to the upscale school district that will give their kids the most advantages. From there, families with money can spend it on courses that will pull up SAT scores, producing an additional advantage over students too poor too afford such courses, as well as those too poor even to retake the test. At an elite high school, you can make the varsity team in sports that inner-city public-school kids may never have heard of, like water polo or lacrosse. Ivy League schools have teams in such sports, so you might get recruited as an athlete, increasing your chances further.

Maybe Mom or Dad is a good writer who can coach you on writing a convincing college-application essay, or maybe they’ll get frustrated with you and just write it themselves. They can even hire a consultant to design your whole high school career, so that your resume will look good to Ivy League schools. Activities originally envisioned as opportunities to find yourself — sports, theater, music, student government, community service — instead teach you to manufacture a persona that will be attractive to those who will judge you. Or your wealthy parents can help you fake that career, bribing teachers and coaches to back up your story, or paying proctors to look the other way when a smarter kid takes a test for you.

Those last things are illegal, but you crossed the line into unfair a long time ago. But where, exactly? What’s cheating, and what’s just doing right by your child? How are you going to feel as a parent if you challenge your sons or daughters to make it on their own, and then you see less deserving kids vault over them?

One corrosive idea in the background of all this is that getting onto the right track is more important than learning the virtues that a meritocratic system is supposed to nurture and reward. Getting degrees is more important than developing talents. High test scores matter more than the knowledge the tests are supposed to measure. Education is not a thing of value in itself, it’s a gate to get through any way you can.

and  the first significant Republican rebellion against Trump

The Senate took two moves to oppose Trump this week.

Thursday, 12 Republicans crossed over to vote with the Democrats on the resolution to terminate Trump’s national emergency declaration. The emergency is still in effect though, because Trump vetoed the resolution. There weren’t enough votes in either house to overturn a veto, so now the issue is up to the courts.

This issue gave senators a clear choice between supporting Trump and defending Congress’ constitutional power to control spending. The 41 Republicans who supported Trump should be reminded of this every time they try to pose as defenders of the Constitution. That ship has sailed and they chose not to be on it.

One interesting fact about who sided with Trump against the Constitution: Republicans who are up for re-election in 2020. Among that group, only Susan Collins voted for the resolution. Thom Tillis of North Carolina had a particularly bizarre performance: He had explained in the Washington Post why his principles required him to vote for the resolution, and then he voted against it. I guess we know what his principles are worth now.

Wednesday, the Senate voted 54-46 to end US aid for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The resolution is virtually identical to one passed by the House in February, so some Yemen resolution should soon be headed to the White House, where Trump is expected to veto it. The Senate had previously passed a Yemen resolution in December, when Republicans still controlled the House; then-Speaker Paul Ryan refused to let the House vote on it.

The resolution invokes the War Powers Act of 1973, which puts a time limit on conflicts not approved by Congress. In the unlikely event that Congress could override Trump’s expected veto, there would undoubtedly be a battle in court over the constitutionality of the WPA, which both Congress and the White House have danced around since 1973. Presidents of both parties have held that the WPA intrudes on the President’s constitutional power as commander-in-chief, while supporters of the WPA have held that it reclaims Congress’ constitutional power to declare war. (Significantly, the WPA itself was passed over President Nixon’s veto.)

The Yemeni War started in 2015, when Houthi rebels deposed President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been trying to restore him to power ever since, while the rebels are believed to be armed by Iran (though both the Houthis and Iran deny this). Since the Obama administration, the US has provided logistic and intelligence support for the Saudi forces, but US troops have not been involved in the fighting.

Increasingly, the Yemeni War is seen as a humanitarian disaster. National Interest sums it up:

Four years later, the Saudis have failed to disgorge the Houthis from the capital city or make significant inroads in the country. The deaths from direct violence and the Saudi bombing campaign are inconclusive but are estimated at over 50,000 people. Before the intervention, Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East and had to import over 90 percent of its food supplies. A Saudi naval blockade along its coasts has led to a man-made famine with up to fourteen million people on the brink of starvation. The lack of nutrition and the destruction of health- and water-related infrastructure due to the bombing has led to the largest outbreak of cholera in modern history, with 10,000 new cases a week. It is the worst humanitarian crisis happening in the world.

Saudi Arabia has become a source of conflict between Trump and Senate Republicans. The Trump administration has identified itself with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), a friend and possible financial patron of Jared Kushner, and Trump himself has accepted MBS’ improbable claim of innocence in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In December, the Senate passed a resolution condemning MBS’ role in the murder.

The killing of Khashoggi now appears to be part of a much larger scheme to silence critics of MBS.

and gun control

The Connecticut Supreme Court rejected a lot of the claims that parents of Newtown massacre victims raised against the company that manufactured the weapon, but it left one tantalizing avenue open: wrongful marketing. The claim is that Remington advertised the Bushmaster rifle in a way that encouraged its illegal use.

The case is still far from won, but it does get to go to the discovery phase. That means plaintiffs can look at the Remington emails and internal memos concerning the Bushmaster’s marketing, which might be very embarrassing for the company.

and you also might be interested in …

Beto is in, Sherrod Brown is out. Now we’re mainly waiting on Joe Biden’s decision to complete the field. (I refuse to devote serious attention to this race until we have a complete field.) Beto’s first campaign event was in Keokuk, Iowa, the next town up the river from Quincy, Illinois, where I grew up. So I watched the video wondering, “Why haven’t I ever been to that coffee shop?”

One way to defuse criticism about lack of experience is ignore it and to do your job at a high level. In Congress, that means Investing time in researching the issues, so you can ask questions that are smart and pointed rather than just showy. Here, second-term Rep. Nanette Barragan of California nails Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen about the Trump administration’s illegal policy of turning away migrants seeking asylum.

And here, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York grills Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross about where the idea of adding a citizenship question to the census actually comes from. (This clip was posted by the conservative Daily Caller, so the title seems critical of AOC. But I’m using it because it includes her full questioning of Ross, rather than just the highlights.)

Peter Beinart notes a dog that hasn’t been barking: Most Democrats running for President did not invoke God in their announcement speeches. This is a change from a few cycles ago, when such speeches routinely ended with “God bless America” or some other religious phrase.

A second interesting point: Not long ago, political rhetoric in both parties had an ecumenical slant, with worship of God portrayed as something that united Americans, even if Americans pictured God in divergent ways. Now, at least on the left, religion is more likely to be mentioned as a source of divisions we need to overcome.

Meanwhile, rhetoric on the right has become increasingly sectarian. Republicans uphold Christianity while denouncing Islam (something George W. Bush pointedly refused to do after 9-11: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”). On the extreme right, blatant anti-Semitism is common. And while Trump himself on occasion denounces anti-Semitism in general, he has refused to recognize or criticize anti-Semites in his base (like the neo-Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville), and used anti-Semitic tropes himself in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Remember how Barack Obama hinted that his supporters might riot if he lost? Me neither, because it never happened.

Trump, however, did just that this week:

I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

The New York attorney general’s office isn’t letting go of the Trump Foundation scandal. New York wants Trump to pay $5.6 million “in restitution for spending money from his charitable foundation on business and political purposes”.

and let’s close with something

My favorite performers of anachronistic music do the Pinky and the Brain theme in an early-20th-century nightclub style.

We’re in a particularly strange part of the news cycle: The Mueller Report is finished, but we don’t really know what it says yet. We have a four-page summary by Attorney General Barr, which came out yesterday, but does not completely answer our questions. Barr says he’ll release as much as he can of the rest of the report, after he has combed it to protect the integrity of the grand-jury process. We’ll see if that happens, how long it takes, and whether Barr decides to err on the side of transparency or hide as much as he can get away with.

In the meantime, we have the summary to digest: no further indictments or sealed indictments, a conclusion that Trump was not a conspirator in the Russian effort to make him president, and a decision by Barr that evidence of obstruction of justice (which Mueller collected, but did not make a recommendation about) does not rise to a level that is worth pursuing in an indictment.

I’ll talk about that in one short featured post, which should be out before 9 EDT. The other featured post will be more light-hearted: “Confronting Season-Change Denial”, which makes an analogy between arguments about climate change and the difficulty New Englanders have convincing each other that spring has really come, with summer to follow. That should be out before 11.

The weekly summary will cover developments in the 2020 race, New Zealand’s fast reaction to the mosque shootings, Trump’s strange obsession with John McCain, the World Happiness Report, and a few other things, before concluding with a marvelous graphic presentation of how the world’s largest cities change through time.

Yesterday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr delivered to congressional leaders his summary of the conclusions of the Mueller report, which he received Friday. You might as well read it yourself, because it’s only four pages long. Key quotes:

The report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public.

The report outlines the Russian effort to influence the election and documents crimes committed by persons associated with the Russian government in connection with those efforts. … The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election … despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.

The Special Counsel did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct [of the President] constituted obstruction. … The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” … Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.

[M]y goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel’s report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.

A few things worth noting.

1. Once Mueller found that Trump was not involved in the original crime, obstruction became harder to establish. Barr reviews the three factors needed to prove obstruction:

• “obstructive conduct”, i.e., doing something that impedes the investigation
• “nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding” i.e., not just making investigators’ lives difficult in some generic way, but disrupting an effort aimed at charging some particular crime
• “corrupt intent”

All three have to be present in the same action. So while it’s undeniable that Trump has been undermining the investigation in all sorts of ways, proving in court that a particular action was done knowingly to prevent investigators from reaching a particular outcome might be difficult. If Trump had been involved in the Russian conspiracy, then the corrupt intent that he not be caught would be obvious.

Mueller apparently thought that judgment was beyond his pay grade, so he gathered the evidence and kicked the decision upstairs, where Barr and Rosenstein decided there wasn’t enough to prosecute. The issue of whether a sitting President can be indicted didn’t come up, because the process didn’t get that far.

2. The “applicable law, regulations, and Department policies” that could prevent parts of the report from becoming public have to do with the rules that prevent abuse of the grand jury process. This is not a phony issue, because theoretically a prosecutor could use a grand jury to dig up all sorts of non-criminal dirt about somebody — including speculative testimony that isn’t corroborated by any other evidence — and then publish it.

That said, the regulations themselves could be used to cover up stuff that the public ought to know. We’ll have to see how this plays out.

3. So far, the process seems to be working, despite fears on both sides. On the one hand, Mueller was allowed to finish his work and write a report, which (so far, at least) the Attorney General seems to be handling in a responsible way. On the other, there’s no sign of the “witch hunt” by “angry Democrats” that Trump has been ranting about.

4. If it’s really true that Trump didn’t conspire with the Russians to get elected, that has to count as good news.

5. One reason the Trump-conspired-with-Russia theory has been so persuasive was that it explained a number of things that otherwise seem mysterious: Why did so many of Trump’s people have contacts with Russians during the campaign? Why did they lie about those contacts later? And why has Trump been so subservient to Vladimir Putin since taking office?

If Trump didn’t conspire with Russia to get elected, those mysteries don’t go away, and they require some alternative explanation. The first could possibly be pinned entirely on Russia: Putin’s people tried really hard to infiltrate the Trump campaign, so they approached anybody they could. But the second still seems mysterious to me. Why, in particular, did Michael Flynn need to lie to the FBI about conversations during the transition concerning sanctions against Russia? Why did Jared Kushner leave his conversations with Russians off his security clearance form?

And then there’s the mystery of Helsinki. What makes it impossible for Trump to disagree with Putin in public, even when all his intelligence services tell him something different than Putin is saying? Does it have something to do with Russian money that has gone into Trump’s real estate projects in the past? Is it related to prospects for future Trump Organization profits? Congress needs to pursue this.

How can we be sure those predictions of 90-degree August days aren’t just alarmism?

For months now, scientists have been predicting a warming trend in the northern hemisphere. The exact reasons are a little technical — something to do with the tilt of the Earth’s axis as it makes its annual trip around the Sun — but the overwhelming majority of scientific experts have formed a consensus around a theory called “season change”. Supposedly, we were in “winter” back in January and February, but some time in the last couple weeks we passed into “spring”, which the theory says will lead into “summer”, a bizarre time when the snow will vanish completely, trees will sprout green leaves so dense that they will form shade-casting canopies over some small-town streets, and ultimately temperatures will be hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk (a practice that is not recommended).

I grant you that this all sounds a bit unlikely in light of our recent weather experiences here in New England, and the idea that we have crossed into a new “season” of growth and going outside without coats sounds a little New-Agey, a bit too similar to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. After all, we supposedly crossed into spring on Thursday, but I didn’t feel any change, and when I got up Saturday morning (in Bedford, Massachusetts) there was new snow on the ground.

All the same, though, I’m told that the science here is pretty solid. And if the eggheads’ predictions are true, then there’s no time to waste. We are already experiencing the early effects of season change, and if we’re going to be ready for the greater changes to come, we need to start taking action now: planting gardens, checking air conditioners, finding our baseball equipment, getting the lawn mower out of storage, reserving that cottage in Maine, and stocking up on the shorts, sandals, and sunblock that we will all need if we are going to survive the coming hot times.

If you start making these preparations, though, you’re bound to trolled by an annoying chorus of science-rejecting nay-sayers: season-change deniers. “All this talk of ‘spring’ and ‘summer’ is so much ivory-tower mumbo-jumbo,” says my friend Jim, who sells snow-blowers. “It’s a hoax perpetrated by the apparel companies to make you box up perfectly good wool sweaters and down jackets, so that they can sell you flip-flops and T-shirts. And don’t get me started on the seed companies.”

Season-change deniers have their own web sites and Facebook groups, where they share counter-arguments to anything you might throw at them in your attempts to prove that the seasons are changing. “It was 64 degrees in Boston on March 15,” I tell him. “That never happened in February. That must prove something.”

But, of course, pointing to a warm day just allows him to point to a cold day, like the snow I already mentioned on Friday night. One day’s weather, I’m forced to admit, does not make a season. And while I can find graphs of January through March that show a clear temperature uptrend, he can respond with his own graphs, like this one from timeanddate.com, that starts on that warm March 15.

“As you can clearly see,” his email tells me, “the temperature trends have been down for the last ten days. So even if there once was some kind of ‘seasonal warming’ going on, it ended in mid-March.”

I suppose I could reject his graph by throwing back at him his previous claim that data like this ultimately comes from weather services, which he doesn’t believe because they are all staffed by season-change believers. (That’s true, it turns out. If you call any weather service in the country, the person you talk to will endorse season-change theory without even mentioning arguments against it.) But conversations like that have not gone well in the past. They tend to spiral off into claims and counter-claims that make me lose track of how we got onto this subject.

Pointing to buds on trees only leads him to claim that he saw similar buds during that warm spell in January. I don’t remember them, but he does, so that discussion also goes nowhere.

There’s one argument, though, that Jim has never really had a good answer for: the days are getting longer and the nights shorter. The warmth of the sun is something we can all feel, so it seems intuitively clear that all the extra sunlight is eventually going to lead to warmer weather — and perhaps, by July and August, to oppressively hot weather, hard as that is to imagine. And unlike temperature, the length of the days doesn’t fluctuate: Every one is a little bit longer than the one before, and will be until the summer solstice in June.

In the past he has dodged and distracted when I bring up the lengths of days, so maybe if I compile a list of sunrise and sunset times going back to the winter solstice and projected ahead to the summer solstice, that will finally get through to him. I should probably try that. But I’m not sure I’m going to have time today; I need to go out and buy a pair of shorts.

Afterward. Obviously, I’m making an analogy to climate change, and the kinds of arguments you will hear from people who deny the science around that. The explanation of why climate change is happening is a little more complicated than the explanation of season change — the position of the Earth’s axis relative to its orbit around the Sun produces longer days in the northern hemisphere, and all that extra solar energy eventually warms the atmosphere — but not that much more complicated: Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide, which collects in the atmosphere and acts as a greenhouse gas, preventing some of the Earth’s heat from escaping into space; the more carbon dioxide, the less escaping heat, and hence a warmer planet.

The analogy to the days getting longer is the rising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. (Temperature will, of course, fluctuate during the year according to time and place, and even year-to-year statistical measures like the average global temperature don’t increase in lockstep, with each year warmer than the last. That’s why you will see those claims that global warming ended in 1998 or 2005 or some other hot year. My season-denialist’s claim that seasonal warming peaked on March 15 is an exact analogy to that argument.) But other than an annual cycle caused by northern-hemisphere forests binding CO2 into their leaves, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere does indeed go up every year. Even if this year turns out to be cooler than last year, atmospheric CO2 is still increasing.

Living in New England, I experience a number of chilly March and April days when I think, “Is spring really going to happen this year?” But I look at the sunrises and sunsets, and that fear goes away.

Similarly, but with the dread pointed in the other direction, I also sometimes look at temperature graphs and wonder if maybe global warming has leveled off without us having to make any sacrifices. But then I look at the CO2 graphs and know that these hopes are just wishful thinking. As long as atmospheric CO2 keeps rising — and it has shown no signs of stopping for a long, long time — hotter years are coming just as surely as August will be warmer than March.

In Charlottesville and around the globe, we stand firmly in stating there are not very fine people on both sides of this issue.

– Charlottesville, VA Police Chief RaShall Brackney
announcing the arrest of a teen who threatened an “ethnic cleansing”
at Charlottesville High School

This week’s featured posts are “A Very Early Response to the Mueller Report” and “Confronting Season-Change Denial“.

This week everybody was talking about the Mueller Report

It’s done, but you don’t get to read any of it yet, beyond Attorney General Barr’s four-page summary. It’s easy to get caught up in speculation, which I tried to keep to a minimum in the featured post.

and the 2020 Democrats

Remember: At this point four years ago, the Republican front-runners were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, and people argued over whether dark horses like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz might overtake them. Trump wouldn’t come down the escalator talking about Mexican rapists until June, and most self-appointed prognosticators weren’t taking his candidacy seriously until he won New Hampshire the next February. (I’ve got nothing to brag about in that regard.) There was even a Ben Carson boom in November, 2015 (a point still 8 months in the future for this cycle) when he briefly passed Trump in the polling averages.

So take all this with a grain of salt, but right now polls say Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the front-runners, with Biden maybe a nose ahead. There’s also buzz about Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke. Maybe that’s meaningful, but maybe it isn’t. Most of the candidates are people that the public has barely heard of. And even if you do know about Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar, you may not have put much serious thought yet into imagining any of them as president.

My personal guess, for what it’s worth, is that both Biden and Sanders are vulnerable. I don’t have any idea who comes out of this scrum, but if you offered me the Field against Biden and Sanders, I’d take the Field.

Biden’s support is largely nostalgia for Obama, and Biden isn’t Obama. That will quickly become clear when his official campaign starts. And Bernie’s popularity has long been exaggerated, first by his underdog status against Clinton, and then by regret after Clinton lost. Campaigning as a co-frontrunner will be a completely different experience for him. That fact is already showing up in his favorable/unfavorable numbers, which are starting to look like any other candidate’s.

One theme I see developing in the early stump speeches is the contrast between values and policies. Elizabeth Warren has been very policy-heavy, with proposals like breaking up the big tech companies and changing the way capitalism works in this country. Bernie Sanders also has a very specific list of policies — Medicare for All and free college being the foremost — and his followers are using them to test whether other candidates are progressive or not. (Since the policies come from Bernie’s list, ultimately he’s going to be the only candidate who qualifies as a progressive.)

But it’s an interesting question how many voters care about such specific proposals, and how many write them off as undeliverable promises. At the other extreme, Beto O’Rourke talks mainly about progressive values — like taking care of sick people and helping young people get the education they need — while dodging questions on specific proposals. Talking about values can be more inspiring than explaining the details of your legislation, but I think voters also need some assurance that the values aren’t empty: Maybe you don’t go deeply into the details, but we need some assurance that you have done your wonkish homework and could get into that if anybody wanted to hear it.

538 pours cold water over those what-voters-want-in-a-candidate surveys.

The reality is that what voters say they value doesn’t appear to match which candidates they support. … Indeed, what voters say they value can change depending on which way the political winds are blowing. To see this, we need only go back to the last presidential primary. In March 2015 — the same point in the 2016 cycle as we are in now for the 2020 cycle — 57 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters told the Pew Research Center that it was more important for a candidate to have experience and a proven record than new ideas and a different approach. Only 36 percent preferred a candidate with a fresh approach. But when Pew asked the same question just six months later, the results were reversed: 65 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners preferred new ideas and a different approach, while 29 percent said experience and a proven record were more important.

I have to admit: When first I heard that a 37-year-old gay mayor of a medium-sized city (South Bend, Indiana) wanted to run for president, I decided this news was not worth my further attention.

But maybe it is. There seems to be a minor (so far) Pete Buttigieg boomlet underway. He’s made some well-received appearances on TV, and this interview in Esquire hits all the right notes. Suddenly he’s polling in double digits in Iowa.

By coincidence, I’ve just finished reading Jim and Deb Fallows’ book Our Towns, where they visit a bunch of small and medium-sized American cities that are doing something right. One of their underlying themes is that while national politics is polarized and log-jammed, local politics actually works in a lot of places. They suggest that mayor may be the best job in politics right now, because you have a chance to carry out your vision and do things that produce positive change in your constituents’ lives. So it makes sense that a mayor would project a nice balance of principles and practicality.

One of the impressive things in this clip from The View is how easily and naturally he talks about his Christian religion. Unlike Trump, he clearly knows something about that religion. He lays claim to the Bible’s progressive views on helping the poor, while neither pandering to fellow Christians nor casting non-Christians as the enemy.

and the electoral college

One of Elizabeth Warren’s many policy proposals is to get rid of the Electoral College, as she suggested at her recent CNN townhall meeting in Jackson, Mississippi.

My view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means: Get rid of the Electoral College.

When you consider that two of the last five presidential elections have been won by the popular-vote loser, and that those presidents (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) have been pretty horrible, the Electoral College is hard to defend.

But it’s been interesting to watch Republicans try. The EC gives small states disproportionate weight, which in general shifts power in the direction of rural areas, which tend to be more white and more Republican than the country as a whole. (All of those statements are generalities that have specific exceptions. Texas is a big conservative state, while Vermont is a small liberal state. Rhode Island is a small state whose electorate is overwhelmingly urban.)

Mark Thiessen writes:

The purpose of the electoral college is to protect us from what James Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.” Each state gets to cast electoral votes equal to the combined number of its U.S. representatives (determined by population) and its senators (two regardless of population). The goal was to make sure even the smallest states have a say in electing the president and prevent those with large, big-city populations from dictating to the less populous rural ones.

This is totally fake history. Madison and the Founders did worry about the tyranny of the majority, but their solution was to put limits on what government could do, by precisely enumerating the government’s powers and by adding a Bill of Rights that protects individuals. Also, the largest state at the time was Virginia, which was dominated by its rural plantations rather than its big cities.

The Electoral College was about something else entirely, and doesn’t work anything like the way the Founders envisioned. They intended electors to run on their own reputations as men (yes, men) of wisdom, not on their prior support of specific candidates. The EC would then make a judgment entirely separate from the voters. And since the Founders didn’t believe in political parties, probably the electors wouldn’t be organized enough to give anyone a majority vote (except in cases where the choice was obvious, like George Washington). So in most cycles they’d end up being a nominating body for the House of Representatives, which would make the final choice. In short, the Founder’s fear wasn’t about the tyranny of the majority, it was about the ignorance of the rabble — a point present-day Trumpists should probably stay away from.

So the present effect of the EC has little to do with the Founders’ vision, and has instead evolved into a simple boost for rural white voters, whose votes have more weight than those of urban people of color. Defending that system involves arguing that rural whites deserve a weightier vote. Thiessen does that like this:

Thanks to the electoral college, Democrats have no choice but to try to win at least some of those voters back if they want to win the presidency. But if we got rid of the electoral college, Democrats could write off voters in “fly-over” country and focus on turning out large numbers of their supporters in big cities and populous liberal states such as New York and California. Unburdened by the need to moderate their platform to appeal to centrist voters, they would be free to pursue full socialism without constraint.

In other words, rural white voters deserve a weightier vote because they are more sensible than urban people of color, who might get hoodwinked into electing socialists. That’s what this argument boils down to.

and you also might be interested in …

In the wake of the Christchurch mosque shooting, it took New Zealand less than a week to ban military-style weapons.

“In short, every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country,” said [Prime Minister Jacinda] Ardern.

Wednesday an anonymous post on 4chan (a favorite discussion site for white supremacists) “threatened an ethnic cleansing in the form of a shooting at the poster’s school, telling white students at CHS to stay home”. By Friday, Charlottesville, VA police had arrested a 17-year-old who isn’t a Charlottesville High student. Charlottesville schools had been shut down for two days.

An arrest was also made Friday in response to a threat against nearby Albemarle High School. That threat appeared on Thursday. The two arrested teens don’t seem to have conspired, but whether or not the Albemarle threat was inspired by the Charlottesville threat is still being investigated.

From Associated Press:

The Alabama Senate has approved a bill to abolish judge-signed marriage licenses as some conservative probate judges continue to object to giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples. … A few Alabama probate judges for years have refused to issue marriage licenses to anyone so they do not have to give them to gay couples.

To me, this issue underlines the fact that “conscience” is a special right reserved for Christians. Any government officials who imposed their sincerely held non-Christian beliefs on the public would soon find themselves unemployed.

Picture it: Your county’s chief health inspector believes that his Jain religion forbids his participation in the killing of animals. So he refuses to approve any meat-serving restaurants. How long does he keep his job?

We’re #19! We’re #19!

The new World Happiness Report is out. The happiest country in the world is still Finland, followed by Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. (I detect a correlation between socialism and happiness. MAHA!) The US is 19th, between Belgium and the Czech Republic. According to the FAQ:

The rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the [Gallup World Poll]. This is called the Cantril ladder: it asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.

The report then interprets the extent to which a country’s happiness depends on six factors (which the report calls “sub-bars”): “GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption”. Some news sources (the Washington Post, for example) erroneously report that the rankings are “based” on these factors, but the FAQ explicitly says that’s not true.

The sub-bars have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but instead are just a way of explaining for each country the implications of the model estimated in Table 2.1. People often ask why some countries rank higher than others – the sub-bars (including the residuals, which show what is not explained) are an attempt to provide an answer to that question.

As I’ve said many times, when you rant at length about whatever dumb or crazy or offensive thing President Class Clown just said, you’re playing his game. So I’ll just briefly note something that got a lot of attention this week: He can’t seem to stop dissing John McCain, whose death prevents him from responding.

People are talking about this as a bad-taste or low-character thing, but it strikes me as a sign of mental instability. I think lots of us occasionally find ourselves arguing  with the dead people who live on in our heads. But when you start defending your side of that argument out loud, in front of living people who don’t hear those voices, it’s a sign you need help.

I’m not just making a cute jibe; I’m serious. Stuff like this is why I think even Republicans should be worried about Trump continuing in office. He’s been lucky so far, in that he hasn’t faced a challenge on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But if something like that comes up, are you really confident he won’t snap completely?

and let’s close with something illuminating

A fascinating presentation of population data — historical and projected — about the world’s largest cities. from 1950-2035. A similar video goes from 1500 to the present.

We’re in this bizarre period where the Mueller Report exists, but we can’t see it. So the advantage goes to whoever can most shamelessly make claims about something they haven’t seen. In other words, this situation is perfectly tailored for the talents of our president.

I, on the other hand, do not feel well suited to this moment. My inclination is to wait until I know something before I comment, and Attorney General Barr’s just-a-little-bit-longer tactic sets exactly the kind of trap I’m prone to walk into. All through the investigation, I’ve tried to resist speculating about what Mueller was up to, or reading between the lines of his indictments. Eventually there will be real knowledge, I’ve kept saying, and then all this speculation will evaporate.

But now here we are, still waiting for knowledge, while Trump and his minions claim to be vindicated and are already starting to demand revenge on the people who dared to challenge them. (The crowd at Trump’s Grand Rapids rally chanted “Lock them up!” about Democratic politicians like Adam Schiff.) So we have to go out and meet this moment, no matter how much we wish we could wait a couple weeks (or maybe longer, if Barr or Trump decide to change the rules) until we could really know what we’re talking about.

That’s what I’ll try to do in this week’s featured post “Mueller By Gaslight”, which should be out around 10:30 or so, EDT.

The weekly summary covers a collection of oddities that is unusual even by Trump Era standards. Betsy DeVos explained to Congress why she was defunding the “awesome” Special Olympics, and then purported to be happy when Trump overruled her. Trump promised his Michigan crowd full funding for the Great Lakes Restoration project, whose only real enemy these last two years has been him. (Still no word on whether the 90% cut is still in his budget proposal.) Trump is threatening to shut down the Mexican border this week, even though nobody who would have to carry that order out seems to know anything about it. The original Brexit deadline passed on Friday, with the British Parliament still having no plan. (The new deadline is April 12.) Oh, and the Trump administration wants the courts to throw out ObamaCare, despite having no healthcare plan of its own.

That post should be out around noon or so.

Last Monday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report had only been finished for a few days, and Attorney General Bill Barr’s first letter to Congress had only come out the day before. All through this process, I’ve been urging patience over speculation, so my initial impulse was to give Barr the benefit of the doubt, at least for a little while. After all, he was promising to do the right thing:

[M]y goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel’s report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.

His second letter, written Friday, fleshed that out a little.

I anticipate we will be in a position to release the report by mid-April, if not sooner.

In between, though, Trump and his supporters have gone on a scorched-earth victory lap. First he claimed a vindication that so far is not supported by the available facts,

No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!

He went on to demand revenge against the enemies who supported investigating the President’s dubious relationship with Russia in the first place.

Congressman Adam Schiff, who spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking, should be forced to resign from Congress!

Trumpists in Congress — who said nothing when Schiff’s predecessor Devin Nunes ran the House Intelligence Committee in a thoroughly partisan manner — joined in:

Republicans in Congress and the White House are calling for Rep. Adam Schiff to resign his position as the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The president and his supporters say Schiff perpetuated a false narrative about Trump and his potential illegal activities.

At a rally in Grand Rapids Trump listed his enemies — Schiff, Jerry Nadler, the media — and led a chant of “Lock them up!“. Lindsay Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to investigate the people who investigated Trump:

We need a special counsel to look at the potential crimes by the Department of Justice — the FBI — regarding the Clinton e-mail investigation and the Russian investigation against Trump early on.

Trump also wants revenge against the media.

So funny that The New York Times & The Washington Post got a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage (100% NEGATIVE and FAKE!) of Collusion with Russia – And there was No Collusion! So, they were either duped or corrupt? In any event, their prizes should be taken away by the Committee!

(MSNBC’s David Guru examined how the NYT and WaPo reporting holds up: pretty well, it turns out.)

The Trump campaign sent out a memo asking networks to blacklist critics of the administration:

“Moving forward, we ask that you employ basic journalistic standards when booking such guests to appear anywhere in your universe of productions,” the memo read. “You should begin by asking the basic question: ‘Does this guest warrant further appearances in our programming, given the outrageous and unsupported claims made in the past?‘”

The memo, written by communications director Tim Murtaugh, lists Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and former CIA Director John Brennan.

And all this is based on what exactly? A four-page letter written by an attorney general that Trump hand-picked for this purpose. And that letter itself may not say as much as it seems to.

Barr’s summary. In general, as facts trickled out of the Special Counsel’s office during the last two years, I have tried to avoid tea-leaf reading. I figured that there would eventually be an actual report that said things clearly. I stuck to that policy last week, and did not do a word-by-word analysis of Barr’s letter. But if Trump and his supporters are going to get this far ahead of the facts, and to try to bully various players in our political system into actions based on their extreme interpretation of Barr’s letter, then I think it would be irresponsible to let those interpretations own the field until Barr sees fit to release some version of Mueller’s actual report.

So what exactly did Barr say?

The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

I think it’s rational to assume that Barr is being a good servant to his master here: Assuming that what this passage says is true at all (always a major concession when dealing with the most dishonest administration in my lifetime), it reads Mueller’s report in the way most favorable to Trump’s interests. And it does not say “no collusion”. It says that Mueller could not prove that the Trump campaign and the Russian government were directly conspiring. But was Roger Stone part of the Trump campaign? Was Russian oligarch (and Paul Manafort’s former employer) Oleg Deripaska part of the Russian government? What if WikiLeaks was a middleman, conspiring on the one hand with Russia and on the other with the Trump campaign?

In other words, the quote could mean what Trump wants it to mean: that Mueller found the accusations of collusion entirely baseless. Or it could mean that Mueller found a lot of suggestive and suspicious evidence, perhaps better than 50/50 evidence, but no smoking gun — at least not one that would stand up in a criminal trial — that could be tied all the way back to Trump in one direction and Putin in the other. We won’t know which is closer to the truth until we can read the full report.

The second part of Trump’s claim — “no obstruction” — has nothing to do with Mueller. Barr writes:

The Special Counsel did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct [of the President] constituted obstruction. … The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” … Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.

Again, not a clean bill of health, just a statement that the evidence is insufficient to prove a crime in court, at least in Barr’s mind, though not necessarily in Mueller’s. (If Rod Rosenstein really does agree with Barr’s conclusion, I’d like to hear him say so himself, rather than let Barr put words in his mouth.) And if that’s the most favorable-to-Trump interpretation possible, then I have to agree with George Conway (Kellyanne’s husband):

Americans should expect far more from a president than merely that he not be provably a criminal.

To conclude this section: Nothing in the information currently available would justify making Schiff resign, rescinding the Pulitzers of the Times and Post, investigating the investigators, letting the Trump campaign write a media blacklist, or locking up any Trump critic. If Trump thinks the full Mueller report contains such information, well, release it and then we’ll all see.

Why the delay? Which brings up the question of why no one can see the report yet. (Alex Cole pointed out how typical this is: “Donald Trump is: 1) ‘a billionaire’ but you can’t see his taxes 2) ‘a genius’ but you can’t see his grades 3) ‘exonerated’ but you can’t see the report.)

In his first letter, Barr listed two things he needed to redact before making the report public. His second letter expanded it to four things:

• proceedings of a grand jury
• whatever might compromise intelligence sources and methods
• material that could affect “other ongoing matters”, which I take to mean open investigations
• “information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties”.

House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler has pointed out that these may be considerations that limit what can be released to the public, but they shouldn’t (and usually don’t) apply to Congress.

[R]ather than expend valuable time and resources trying to keep certain portions of this report from Congress, [Attorney General Barr] should work with us to request a court order to release any and all grand jury information to the House Judiciary Committee — as has occurred in every similar investigation in the past.

Similarly, the House Intelligence Committee routinely deals with intelligence sources and methods; there’s no reason to keep any part of the report secret from them on that account. Having seen how Mueller writes his indictments, I would be greatly surprised if information that could affect “other ongoing matters” hasn’t already been identified and segregated.

And then we come to the “reputational interests of peripheral third parties”. This looks like a black hole that could suck down anything Barr doesn’t want the public to know. Because who exactly are peripheral third parties? Trump family members? Anybody not specifically indicted? And I’m not aware of any widely accepted definition of “reputational interests”.

Since there really is no good reason that the report has been held so closely, I have to assume that the motive is political: to intimidate Trump’s critics, and so create a period during which Trump’s defenders would own the field. If during this period they succeed in bullying Democrats into silence, then perhaps they won’t have to release the report at all.

Don’t think nobody has thought of that. A recent poll showed that 40% of Republicans think that Barr’s letter is enough; nobody needs to see the rest of Mueller’s report. If Democrats got sufficiently intimidated, not releasing the report could be spun as a magnanimous gesture: There’s no need to embarrass Democrats further; let’s just move on.

And what about Barr’s promises? Well, these things have a way of evaporating if nobody insists on them. Remember when Trump was going to have a news conference to present the evidence that Melania came to America legally? Never happened. And who can count the number of times Trump said he was going to release his taxes?

The gaslighting hasn’t worked. For a few days, Barr’s first letter and Trump’s response to it threw Democrats for a loop: What if Mueller’s report really does totally vindicate Trump? What if it all does turn out to be a big nothingburger and we have to eat all the words we’ve said in the last two years? Do we really want to say more words, knowing that they might come back to us along with all the others?

But by mid-week I think a lot of people independently came to the same conclusion: If this report really did exonerate Trump, it would already be public. And the rush to judgment among Trump supporters has been a little too extreme. You don’t do that when you know that the slowly grinding mills are going to get you what you want.

Thursday, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee read a letter asking Chairman Adam Schiff to resign, and Schiff was ready for them. He listed all shady stuff we know about Trump and Russia in a litany of “You may think it’s OK if …”. It went viral.

Since then, I think a lot of us have been in a mood to call Trump’s bluff: You think you’ve got the goods? Let’s see them.

It will all come out eventually. I suspect we will at some point see nearly all of the Mueller Report. It will come out, because the benefit of keeping it secret is fading: If it exonerates you, let’s see it. If we can’t see it, it probably doesn’t exonerate you.

Some parts of the public report may be redacted, and a few names of more-or-less innocent people may be replaced by the kind of placeholders that labelled Trump as “Individual 1” in the Michael Cohen indictment. But we will see it, and Congress will see it in its original form.

This is a testing period, where Trump’s people have been gaslighting us with their interpretation of the report we can’t see, and are floating the idea of keeping the report secret just to see if they can get away with it. In the end, I suspect, the public and the Democrats in Congress will stand firm, and Barr will magnanimously fulfill his promise. “See,” we’ll be told, “you’ve been getting all upset about nothing again. We said we’d release it, and here it is.”

However, the test is real. If they could get away with burying the report, they would. The first version Barr releases will probably be inadequate in one way or another, and the deadline for releasing it might slip further, just to see if anyone cares. But people care.

And when it does come out, the Adam Schiff approach is exactly right. “Does this evidence establish a crime beyond a reasonable doubt?” shouldn’t be the only question. We also need to ask: “Is this kind of behavior OK? Are we willing to accept that American democracy will look like this from now on?”

Inside the Trump bubble it will make no difference. Fox News has trumpeted that the Mueller Report clears Trump, and that conclusion will be allowed to stand after the report comes out, whether it is accurate or not. Anyone who dares to raise the issue will be treated as a traitor and drummed out of the community.

But for the rest of the country, I think the answer will be No. We don’t want our presidents getting elected this way. And once they’re in office, we don’t want them to behave in a way that makes us wonder if they’re loyal to a foreign adversary. That may or may not be a crime. But it’s not OK.

Americans should expect far more from a president than merely that he not be provably a criminal.

– George Conway

This week’s featured post is “Mueller By Gaslight“.

This week everybody was talking about the Mueller Report

which none of us have been allowed to read. So the advantage at this point goes to people who are comfortable making bold claims about things they know nothing about. Has there ever been a situation so tailor-made for Donald Trump?

In the featured post, I realize that I can’t wait until I know what I’m talking about, because then Trump and his people own the field, a position that they have been abusing mightily this last week. So I say what I can.

In general, I find myself agreeing with Matt Yglesias:

I continue to be confused as to why republicans are working so hard to suppress the contents of a report that exonerates Trump and utterly discredits Dems + the media.

and ObamaCare

After spending a bunch of the mid-term campaign denying that they wanted to take health insurance away from people with pre-existing conditions, the Trump administration is back to trying to take health insurance away from people with pre-existing conditions.

This week, his Justice Department filed a legal brief arguing that a judge should find Obamacare unconstitutional — a decision that would turn the insurance markets back into the Wild West and eliminate Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans. By at least one estimate, a full repeal could cost 20 million Americans their health care coverage.

But rather than deal with that reality, the Trump administration retreated into fantasy.

President Donald Trump has insisted his party “will become ‘The Party of Healthcare!’” and said things like, “if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we will have a plan that’s far better than Obamacare.”

He’s been talking about this mysterious plan since his campaign, and during that time no single detail of it has ever leaked out. I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s because there are no details to leak. Trump has never in his entire life had two consecutive thoughts about healthcare.

The basic outline of the plan Republicans want goes like this:

• It covers everybody.
• It doesn’t force healthy people to pay for sick people’s coverage.
• It costs less money.
• It provides better care.
• It doesn’t raise taxes.
• It doesn’t lower the profits of drug companies, insurance companies, or hospitals

There is no such plan, but as long as you don’t nail down any details, you don’t have to admit that.

and the border

In the latest manufactured crisis, Trump is threatening to close the border with Mexico this week (cutting off trade worth $612 billion last year) because of “the mother of all caravans“, which the Mexican interior secretary says is forming in Honduras. (Honduras knows nothing about it, and immigration activists call the story a hoax.)

I recommend reading this morning’s Washington Post article on this, which captures the atmosphere of surrealism. Both Trump and Chief of Staff Mike Mulvaney say closing the border is a real threat. “I’m not playing games,” Trump said Friday. On a Sunday interview show, Mulvaney said that only “something dramatic” could persuade Trump not to close the border. However,

Administration officials have offered no details about the president’s intentions, and border control officials have received no instructions to prepare for a shutdown, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue. Implementing such an order would require time to notify Congress and labor unions representing Border Patrol agents and customs officers, the official said.

A Pentagon spokesman said the military, which has about 5,300 troops in the border region, has not received such orders either.

It’s not clear that Trump has any idea what “closing the border” even means. Factories on both sides of the border will close for lack of parts, just to name one consequence. You also might want to stock up on avocados.

Even if the mother of all caravans were forming, it would constitute a conspiracy to do something legal: ask for asylum in the United States. Trump actually admits this is legal, but does it in his usual backhanded way:

“We have the most laughed-at immigration laws of anywhere in the world,” Mr. Trump said to reporters as he and [resigning SBA Director Linda] McMahon sat in the ornate front room of the club. “They’re the Democrats’ laws, and I got stuck with them.”

The implication here is that the laws of the United States can be separated into Democratic and Republican laws, and that Trump’s oath to “faithfully execute the laws” doesn’t apply to Democratic laws. I can only imagine the heads that would have exploded if President Obama had ever made such a claim.

Another part of Trump’s threat is to cancel assistance to the countries the refugees come from: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. (A Fox News chyron proclaimed “Trump cuts aid to three Mexican countries“.) As anyone should be able to imagine, cutting aid to these countries will make conditions worse there, and motivate more people to try to leave for the United States.

I can’t decide whether that plan is stupid or diabolical. Maybe Trump understands that cutting aid will produce more refugees for him to demonize.

The House failed to override Trump’s veto of the bipartisan Congressional resolution to revoke the state of emergency Trump proclaimed in order to build his wall. Only 14 Republicans were willing to defend Congress’ constitutional power of the purse.

USA Today reports that there is indeed a surge of immigrants coming across the southern border: about 100,000 in March, “the highest monthly total in over a decade”.

Think about that: “over a decade” probably puts us in the Bush administration, when some people were concerned about immigration, but hardly anybody thought it constituted an emergency. We have seen these kinds of numbers before, and dealt with them without attacking the constitutional separation of powers.

Around 90 percent of those – or 90,000 – crossed the border between legal ports of entry. The vast majority of those crossing between ports of entry turn themselves into Border Patrol agents, seeking asylum.

Turning yourself in and requesting asylum is the appropriate legal process. So this is not an “invasion” or a wave of criminal activity. The article makes one more observation: Trump’s Wall would be useless to stop asylum-seekers, because in many places it will sit back from the actual border.

A wall would go up on levees about a mile from the winding Rio Grande, which is the U.S.-Mexico border. Migrants will just have to cross the river to be in U.S. territory and seek asylum, [McAllen Mayor Jim Darling] said.

and the administration’s proposed budget

If you were looking for something to watch on TV and came across a movie that IMDB told you was about billionaire politicians conspiring to kill the Special Olympics, you’d know right away that this was not high drama. No serious director would allow his or her villains to be so cartoonish.

But that’s the movie we were living in for a few days this week. The proposed Trump budget cut the Department of Education budget by $7 billion, and achieved $18 million of that total by zeroing out the federal contribution to the Special Olympics. That’s just the highlight of broad cuts in special education generally.

To defend those cuts to Congress, Trump sent out yet another billionaire, Education Secretary Betsy Devos. For reasons I can’t put my finger on, DeVos always makes me think of Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies. Apparently I’m not the only one to see the resemblance; this photo-pairing is going around on social media.

But Rep. Mark Pocan wasn’t having it. His largely futile effort to get any kind of straight answer out of DeVos is worth watching.

After considerable public outcry, Trump announced that Special Olympics wouldn’t be cut. (But the broader cuts to special education and education in general stand.) DeVos (whose budget request has defunded Special Olympics three years in a row) then issued this statement:

I am pleased and grateful the President and I see eye-to-eye on this issue and that he has decided to fund our Special Olympics grant. This is funding I have fought for behind the scenes over the last several years.

Which raises the question: Who did she fight behind the scenes with? If it’s not her, then who is the mysterious Special-Olympics-hating villain within the Trump administration?

Similarly, Trump promised a crowd of his supporters in Michigan that he will get full funding for the Great Lakes Restoration program, which his budget proposes to cut by 90%.

Trump also called for decimating funds for the program in 2017 and 2018, but funding was saved both years by Congress, which would likely do so in the next budget as well. President Barack Obama supported funding for the program each year since it was established in 2010. Yet Trump tried to portray himself at the Midwestern rally as the savior of the program.

It’s not new that politicians promise to back some program and then end up cutting it later. But I can’t recall a situation — let alone so many situations simultaneously — where a politician promised to defend something at the exact same time that he was in the process of slashing it. We’ve never seen this kind of disinformation campaign in America before.

and you also might be interested in …

When I first heard the idea that Joe Biden might run for president in this cycle, I prepared myself for a Me-Too moment. Not because I think Biden is unusually suspect in this area, but just because he’s a man from an era with different standards of behavior. I doubted that he had grabbed anybody by the pussy, as certain other politicians of his generation have bragged about doing, but I found it hard to believe he hadn’t patted somebody’s butt in the wrong way at some time or another.

So Friday, Lucy Flores published her account of a rally in 2014 when Biden was supporting her run for lieutenant governor of Nevada. As the speakers are lining up to go on stage, Biden is standing behind her. He puts his hands on her shoulders and kisses the back of her head.

To me that sounds more grandfatherly than predatory — a sort of “Go get ’em, girl” encouragement — but I wasn’t there, and either way it’s not appropriate either for 2014 or for today. Flores says she found the experience “demeaning and disrespectful”, which is entirely her judgment to make.

I doubt this is the last we’ll hear of this kind of thing. Whether he intends disrespect or not, Biden tends to be touchy-feely in a way that used to be accepted, but isn’t any more. That problem interacts badly with at least one of his other problems: the resentment some women still feel about his treatment of Anita Hill when he was chairing Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination hearings.

I continue to think that this presidential cycle will take many twists and turns before it gets wherever it’s going. Being on top of the polls right now counts for very little.

According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who identify their religious tradition as “no religion” is now 23.1%, or slightly larger than either Evangelical Christians or Catholics. And yet, do you ever hear pundits speculate about how people of no religion might react to some public issue?

I think it’s important to understand that the so-called Nones are not necessarily agnostics or atheists. They may have spiritual intuitions or practices. They may pray to someone or something. And they might admire religious leaders like Pope Francis or the Dalai Lama. They just don’t identify with any of the publicly recognized faiths. I suspect many would agree with what Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man.

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

The relative stability of Catholicism masks a lot of churn, I think. If we just looked at native-born Americans, the Catholic line in the graph might fall off the way that the mainline Christian line does. But a constant inflow of Catholic immigrants hides that decline.

While we’re looking at graphs, here’s one that has me shaking my head. Americans are having less sex. Partly that’s caused by the population getting older. But another major factor is the unusual number of celibate 20-somethings.

In particular, since 2009 celibacy has been disproportionately rising among young men.

The article cites three possible factors:

• The percentage of young men in the workforce has declined, and unemployed men have a hard time attracting partners.
• A lot of 20-something men are living with their parents, which is just not an attractive situation.
• “There are a lot more things to do at 10 o’clock at night now than there were 20 years ago. Streaming video, social media, console games, everything else.”

I’m not buying the first explanation, because the graph doesn’t seem to follow the economy. The third factor strikes me as weak. I mean, TV has improved in recent decades, but it’s not that good. (A social media post I can’t find now reproduces the graph above, draws an arrow at the turning point and captions it “Fallout 3 released”.) Living with parents … maybe. (I mean, there are still cars.) I don’t feel like the article has really gotten to the bottom of this mystery.

Conservatives have started to notice that their beliefs don’t track with the Bible. Solution? Re-translate the Bible to make it fit.

OK, we’ve gotten used to the idea that Trump appoints ignorant and incompetent people to high office. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch the Betsy DeVos clip I referenced above.) For the most part, Republicans have been OK with that, because large chunks of the government don’t matter to them. So if Ben Carson knows zip about public housing, well, who cares about public housing anyway? Scott Pruitt and his successor Andrew Wheeler aren’t interested in protecting the environment, but from a Republican point of view that’s just fine.

In two years, Trump nominated more judges rated “unqualified” by the ABA than the last four presidents put together; but conservative judges don’t need to know the law, they just need who they’re for and against: for the rich, corporations, and fundamentalist Christians, against workers, the poor, non-whites who want to vote, and LGBTQ people. You don’t need to go to Harvard Law to learn that.

But now we’re seeing that obliviousness challenged. Trump has nominated Stephen Moore to a position that even Republicans have to think matters: the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

Moore is not an economist; he is a booster. His career includes neither major academic posts nor practical experience in banking. Instead, he has lived entirely inside the world of right-wing policy think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Club for Growth, and so on. He promotes the snake-oil notion that taxes should always be lower, and that cutting tax rates will produce more revenue because of the growth that the lower rates will stimulate. That claim flies in the face of all evidence, but boosters don’t face either peer review or angry stockholders, so they can be wrong again and again without consequences.

The Fed, on the other hand, is one of the most consequential institutions our system has: It defines what money means. What money is and why it has value is one of the High Mysteries of Economics, and the Fed Board of Governors is the priesthood whose rituals manage that mystery. Is the Republican Senate really willing to let somebody like Stephen Moore screw around with that?

The session in which the Pennsylvania legislature would swear in its first Muslim woman began with prayer: State Rep. Stephanie Borowicz mentioned Jesus 13 times, including “at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are Lord”. She also thanked God that President Trump “stands by Israel”.

A reporter spoke to her afterward and tweeted:

“That’s how I pray everyday.” When asked to respond to Dems calling for an apology she says “Oh no, I don’t apologize ever for praying”

In case you’re ever in a position to open some public meeting, I want to point out the difference between an invocation and a prayer. An invocation calls people together, reminds them of the values they share, and challenges them to put aside ego as they take up their public responsibilities. For example:

We gather together here today intent on doing good work.

We seek to represent fairly and well, those who have given us this task. May our efforts be blessed with insight, guided by understanding and wisdom.

We seek to serve with respect for all. May our personal faiths give us strength to act honestly and well in all matters before us.

On the other hand, a public prayer is a moment when believers in a particular god collectively address that god. The more sectarian your prayer is, the greater its expression of your group’s supremacy. “We own this room,” it announces.

And so, ironically, even as Borowicz was supporting Israel, she was telling Pennsylvania’s Jewish legislators that they don’t really belong. What was objectionable in her prayer wasn’t the Christianity, it was the expression of Christian supremacy in the legislature.

The original Brexit deadline passed on Friday, but Parliament still doesn’t have a plan. The deadline has been pushed off to April 12.

A new Banksy was unveiled in time to mark the occasion:

and let’s close with an unusual sporting event

This year’s ACC Tournament Baby Race featured an amazing comeback.

This Sift doesn’t have a featured post this week. In part that’s because the weekly summary has a lot to cover: the continued delay in either publishing the Mueller Report or delivering it to Congress, the reports that Mueller’s people feel that their work is being misrepresented, Joe Biden’s response to charges that he touches people inappropriately, the ongoing Brexit follies, Kristjen Nielsen’s resignation and a series of other stories about the border (pointing to Trump’s increasing frustration at being bound by US law), Democrats’ attempts to get Trump’s tax returns, and so on. Buried under all that: Congress invoked the War Powers Act for the first time in history, in an attempt to end our role in Yemen’s civil war.

But there’s another reason: I’m not sure exactly what made this week different from all the others, but it got under my skin in a way that most weeks don’t. Whenever I started to write any longer piece, it turned into a rant. Ranting is not what I’m trying to do here. I’m sure you get plenty of that elsewhere, and I’m not convinced that my rants are that much better than the general run of rants. Again and again, I would write some line that felt emotionally satisfying, and then not have a good answer to the question “How does this serve my readers?”

So this week I plan to ramp up my mental hygiene practices and try to get back to my usual relationship with the news.

The weekly summary should be out maybe around 11 EDT.

It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.

— Nancy Pelosi

There is no featured post this week. This summary is all I’m posting.

This week everybody was talking about the cover up

I’m ready to start describing the slow-walking of the Mueller Report as a cover-up. The Mueller Report has been done for more than two weeks, and all the public or Congress has seen is a four-page summary that we now have reason to believe is inaccurate.

During the investigation the Mueller team was famous for not leaking. They published indictments and made motions in court that became part of the public record. Beyond that, our information came second-hand, from the witnesses they interviewed, from lawyers for potential targets of the investigation, and from watching who came or left the courtroom.

This week they began to leak. It started with a New York Times article on Wednesday:

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

The Washington Post confirmed via their own sources that the investigators were unhappy with Barr’s conclusion that the President had not obstructed justice.

[M]embers of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant. “It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” said one person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.

Barr originally said that his redacted version would be available by mid-April “if not sooner”. That’s in the next week or so. Assuming he follows through, we’ll see then whether the redactions are insubstantial enough to be worth a what-were-you-worried about response, or so extensive as to be one big fuck-you to Congress and the public.

In either case, Congress needs to know what Mueller found out, and not just what Trump’s hand-picked protector deigns to tell them.

In a similar story about Congress’ oversight duty, Democrats are also trying to get Trump’s tax returns.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) Wednesday evening sent IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig a request for six-years worth of Trump’s personal and business tax returns. Neal made the request under a part of section 6103 of the federal tax code that states that the Treasury Secretary “shall furnish” tax returns to the chairmen of Congress’s tax committees upon written request, so long as the documents are viewed in a closed session.

According to Maddowblog’s Steve Benen, section 6103 was put in the tax code in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, which centered on President Harding’s Treasury secretary. Up until then, only the President had the power to examine tax returns, but Teapot Dome brought up the possibility that the President might be politically motivated not to investigate his own administration. So the appropriate committee chairs in the House and Senate were also given the power.

Since this is the Trump administration, the fact that the law is clear doesn’t mean it will be followed, at least not without a fight. (Chief of Staff Mulvaney pledges that Democrats will “never” see Trump’s taxes.) Republicans in Congress seem likely, once again, to back Trump in his attempt to subvert Congress’ legal power.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Thursday that courts have ruled that congressional requests for information need to have legitimate legislative purposes, and Democrats have fallen short on that front.

The administration routinely rejects courts looking into whether its own actions have legitimate purposes, arguing instead that the judicial branch owes deference to the executive branch’s judgments. (This came up, for example, in the Muslim ban case, where Trump’s claims about national security were clearly specious. It will likely come up again in the lawsuits of his border-wall national emergency, which is similarly based on nonsense.)

Section 6103 hasn’t been invoked since Watergate, because Trump is the first post-Watergate presidential candidate to keep his tax returns secret. It’s illuminating to watch both sides spin this dearth of examples. Fox News describes this as “the first such demand for a sitting president’s tax information in 45 years” while Benen notes that “no administration has ever denied a lawmaker access to tax returns under this law”.

A subsequent Fox News article links to the first one to back up its clearly false claim that the Democrats have made an “unprecedented demand“. Again, the only unprecedented thing here (at least in the post-Watergate era) is that the President’s tax returns are not already public. The last time a president’s returns weren’t public (i.e., Nixon), Congress received them under Section 6103.

My guess: Not even this Supreme Court can ignore such a clear statement of law. The main question is how long Trump’s legal challenges can delay the matter.

and Joe Biden’s touching problem

Biden still hasn’t announced his candidacy, but it’s looking more and more like a foregone conclusion that he will. This week he put out an I-get-it video to respond to the accusations of inappropriate touching. It wasn’t exactly an apology, but he acknowledged that standards of propriety have changed and promised “I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future.” That started an is-that-good-enough debate that got more intense after he joked about having permission to hug a child.

One problem Democrats are having dealing with situations like this is that abuse-of-women is often framed as a where-to-draw-the-line problem. But like many problems, abuse is a continuum that ranges from the annoying to the criminal.

What Biden has been accused of doing is down in the second-lowest row. (Accusations against Trump and Brett Kavanaugh are much higher up.) Biden denies having bad intentions, and so far no one has claimed otherwise. But it’s still not OK. Doing what Biden did creates opportunities for people who want to do worse.

We’re also struggling over how to forgive inappropriate behavior, and how one should seek forgiveness. I think a lot of people in privileged groups — not just men, but also whites, straights, cis-gender, and so forth — share a partly-but-not-entirely-irrational fear of being exiled to Siberia for violating (through obliviousness rather than malice) some norm we’d never heard of before. (That fear hit close to home recently. I’m a contributing editor for UU World magazine. In the current issue, one of the other contributing editors published an article that a number of transgender and gender-nonbinary people found offensive, and for which the magazine has apologized. It was disturbingly easy for me to imagine winding up in a similar situation myself.)

I found this how-to-respond graphic helpful.

I wasn’t planning to support Biden in the primaries anyway, though I’ll happily vote for him over Trump if he is the nominee, and I’m not inclined to trash him unnecessarily. To me, this flap is not so damaging in itself, but putting a weight on Biden’s negative pan raises the question: What are the positives that we’re counting on to outweigh this?

Biden arrived at the Senate in 1973 as a 30-year-old whiz kid. He came of age politically in an era shaped by Reagan’s annihilation of Carter in 1980 and Mondale in 1984, Dukakis’ landslide loss in 1988, the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, and Bill Clinton’s successful rightward shift in 1996. During that time liberals became timid, and felt that they needed some signature conservative issues and sound bites to prove that they weren’t crazy McGovernites.

All that stuff will return to haunt him in the coming months, making him look inauthentic. He’s not really inauthentic, or at least no more than anybody else. He’s just a politician of his time and place. But this is a different time, and once the campaign gets rolling I think candidates who don’t have to answer for the 1980s and 1990s will have an advantage over him.

and Brexit

Brexit is one of those strange situations where every conceivable outcome is accompanied by a rational and coherent explanation of why it can’t happen. But something will have to happen, at least eventually.

Friday is the latest deadline for that Something, but no one knows what it is yet, so Prime Minister May is seeking an extension to June 30. (What will change by then is unclear.) This would mean that the UK participates in European Parliament elections in May. All 27 of the other EU nations would have to agree to the extension. If not, the disaster of a no-deal Brexit could happen as early as Friday.

The biggest obstacle to implementing any form of Brexit is the Good Friday Agreement that ended the so-called “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. The GFA requires a soft border between Northern Ireland (which is part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (which remains in the EU). But control of the border (to keep out immigrants not just from Syria, but also from <gasp> Poland) is what Brexit was all about in the first place. If job-stealing Poles or terrorist Muslims can walk in from Ireland, Brexiteers ask, what was the point? On the other hand, no one wants the Troubles back.

The New Yorker has a clear explanation of all the possible resolutions of Brexit’s Irish-border problem, and why each of them is opposed by some veto-wielding party.

I have a tangential personal connection to the Troubles. In 1985, I attended an IEEE information-theory conference at the Metropole Hotel in the English seaside resort of Brighton. (Claude Shannon spoke, and, though clearly aging, was still dexterous enough to juggle oranges.) The original announcement had sited the conference at the Grand Hotel, but that was before the IRA blew it up. (During a break in the conference, I walked past the rubble.) It was like I had a reservation on the Titanic’s second voyage.

I am told that brexit has become a verb: to announce that you’re leaving and then not go. So you might call your sitter and say: “I thought we’d be home from this party by now, but Bob has been brexiting for nearly an hour.”

and the border

Kirstjen Nielsen resigned as Homeland Security secretary yesterday, just days after Trump withdrew his nominee for head of ICE because he wants someone “tougher”. The NYT news article on her resignation says that Nielsen repeatedly made Trump angry by telling him what the law said. Reportedly, he felt “lectured to”. The partner NYT editorial says:

The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

Nielsen’s career should be a lesson for anyone thinking of working in the Trump administration. Her reputation is ruined: For the rest of her life, she will be the woman who put children in cages. And she leaves not with the President’s gratitude and the support of his base, but taking the blame for the failure of his harsh policies to stop migrants from coming to our border.

This is what Trump does: He uses up whatever credibility people can bring to his organization, until the only value they have left is to be sacrificed as scapegoats.

On the subject of mistreatment of migrant children, the government Friday estimated it would take two years to identify all the children it took from their parents. Think about how long two years is for a child.

Trump had been making a lot of noise about closing the border with Mexico, and then suddenly backed down. I assume somebody finally explained to him what “closing the border” actually means. (Maybe that was one of the “lectures” that got Nielsen ousted.) It would disrupt trade and tourism in both directions, interrupt supply chains for factories on both sides of the border, and do nothing to stop either those who are trying to cross the border illegally, or those who are planning to turn themselves in and claim asylum.

Before his retreat, Trump had been expected to announce the border closing when he went to the Calexico Friday. He was there to dedicate what an official plaque calls “the first section of President Trump’s border wall.” It actually isn’t.

A fence had existed at the spot for decades. … [T]he Border Patrol had identified this section as a priority for replacement in 2009, during President Barack Obama’s administration.

In fact, no new sections of border fencing have been built during Trump’s administration.

While at Calexico, Trump repeated a popular bit of white nationalist rhetoric, saying “Our country is full.” SNL’s Michael Che had already answered that last week: “How can America run out of space? We’ve still got two Dakotas.”

The Mexican Wall play/counterplay so far: Congress denied Trump’s budget request for money to build more of the wall, so Trump declared a national emergency that he claims allows him to seize the money from other programs, so Congress passed a bipartisan resolution rescinding the emergency, so Trump vetoed that resolution, so Congress tried to override his veto and failed.

Next move: House Democrats are going to court., joining the states that have already filed suit.

but I read a book

I continue my quest to understand Trump’s base voters, but I’m starting to lose hope. A few weeks ago I told you about Timothy Carney’s Alienated America. The key insight there is that the original Trump supporters, the ones who were with him in the primaries and helped him take the Republican Party away from the Jeb Bushes and Marco Rubios, were people who were doing relatively well in communities that were doing badly. Yes, they were angry, but not so much on their own behalf. They were angry because they saw their towns and their families crumbling around them.

That explained why they might take a flier on an untried candidate who promised to shake things up, but not why they would stick by him while he did nothing to help their communities, choosing instead to enrich himself, increase government corruption, and give big tax breaks to his fellow billionaires. (There’s a reason why he doesn’t want you to see his taxes, people.)

This week I read Robert Wurthnow’s The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. Wurthnow is a Princeton sociologist, and believes that when you don’t understand people, you should go out and talk to them.

That makes sense up to the point where you realize that what they’re telling you is bullshit. So, for example, rural Americans claim they were incensed by the deficits that Obama ran up, but they are strangely unmoved by Trump’s large deficits. They claim they have to be anti-abortion and anti-gay because of their religion and how much they value their religious communities. But many of them left the Christian denominations they were born into when those churches got soft on abortion and gays. (It’s like what Bush did in the Iraq War: He always followed the advice of his generals, but he’d fire generals until he got one that gave him the advice he wanted.)

In short, listening to the nonsense they say isn’t helping me understand them.

and you also might be interested in …

If you’re a regular Sift reader, you’ve heard most of these ideas before, but this video from Represent.US puts them together effectively.

Israel has elections tomorrow. Benjamin Netanyahu is going for his fifth term as prime minister, and is promising to unilaterally annex chunks of the occupied territories if he wins. The peace process has been going nowhere for many years now, but such a move pretty announces Israel’s intention to impose its will on the Palestinians.

Israel’s attorney general has announced its intention to indict Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, but the charges have not been filed yet. The polls are close.

Josh Marshall raises a good point: Trump often talks to American Jews as if they were expatriate Israelis. Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition on Saturday, Trump referred to Netanyahu as “your prime minister”. In October, when Trump visited the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (site of the mass shooting), he met the Israeli ambassador at the front gate — as if the synagogue were a piece of Israel inside the US.

This kind of othering is a classic anti-Semitic tactic, and is consistent with the way that many white ethno-nationalists support Israel: as the true home of all Jews, even the ones who think they’ve made a home here.

I know what you’ve all been thinking: “I wish the government would stop doing all those invasive inspections and leave the pork industry alone.” Well, our populist government has heard you and is responding to the public demand for privatized meat inspection.

The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees. Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds.

Back when Trump started saying “Make America Great Again”, many of us wondered what time period the “again” referred to. Now we know: the era of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Jill Filipovic wrote in the NYT about age and the female politician:

They are seen as too young and inexperienced right up until they are branded too old and tedious.

I don’t entirely follow her point about Kirsten Gillibrand, who at 52 and in her second Senate term is youngish and newish for a presidential candidate, but not strikingly so. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, at 69

finds herself put in the same “old” category as Mr. Sanders and Joe Biden, even though both men are nearly a decade older than she is. Men who are more or less the same age as Ms. Warren — Sherrod Brown (66), John Hickenlooper (67), Jay Inslee (68) — are not lumped in with the white-hairs.

In 2016 I wrote about the stereotypes that portray a man’s deficiencies as virtues: the charming rogue, the wheeler-dealer, and so on. Filipovic points to another one that Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke are taking advantage of: the fresh face, the new kid on the block. JFK, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama — there’s a well-established pattern of a man coming from nowhere and jumping the line to the top job. Young Paul Ryan hit Congress as a young gun or a whiz kid; I haven’t heard those phrases used to describe AOC.

My can-you-believe-this story last week was Stephen Moore being nominated to the Federal Reserve Board. This week’s is that Trump is getting ready to nominate Herman Cain. The point isn’t to change the economic philosophy of the Fed, it’s to fill the Board with Trump loyalists who will pump the economy full of cheap money to get him re-elected in 2020. (Cain would also join the fairly large contingent of people in the administration who have been accused of harassing women.)

That’s the pattern with several of the recent Trump appointees: Bill Barr in the Justice Department and Charles Rettig and Michael Desmond at IRS. They’ve been appointed to serve Trump, not to serve the country.

The next time somebody tries to tell you that both parties are the same, remember Thursday’s vote in the House to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. It passed 263-158. The No votes were 157 Republicans and 1 Democrat. The bill faces challenges in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Here’s the main point of contention:

Under current federal law, only people convicted of domestic violence offenses against spouses or family members can lose their gun rights. The [new version of the] VAWA would add people convicted of abusing their dating partners, closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole.” It would also prohibit people convicted of misdemeanor stalking offenses from owning or buying firearms, as well as abusers subject to temporary protective orders.

That provision is too much for the NRA, and so for the Republicans the NRA controls. The gun rights of stalkers and abusers should be protected, even if that means more women will die.

A study comparing abused women who survived with those killed by their abuser found that 51 percent of women who were killed had a gun in the house. By contrast, only 16 percent of women who survived lived in homes with guns.

Even if you don’t care about women, there’s still good reason to support adding this provision to the VAWA: When you look at mass shooters and ask “How could we have known what he would do?”, one strong clue is a history of domestic violence. Keeping guns out of the hands of abusers would probably save a lot of men’s lives too.

After some legislative shenanigans on Mitch McConnell’s part, Congress passed a resolution invoking the War Powers Act to end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. Trump is expected to veto it.

Trump’s constant lying got renewed attention Wednesday after he uncorked a slew of them in 24 hours, including a ridiculous one (that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer) and a transparent and pointless one (that his father was born in Germany when he was actually born in New York). Anderson Cooper debunked a bunch of Trump lies in one segment. Social media just had fun with it all.

Sportswriter Rick Reilly claims to have played golf with Trump. This is from his article “Whatever Trump is Playing, it isn’t Golf“, which looks like an abstract of his new book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.

If Trump will cheat to win $20 from his friends, is it that much further to believe he’d cheat to lower his taxes, win an election, sway an investigation?

Yet another lie: Puerto Rico has not received $91 billion in hurricane relief aid.

and let’s close with something to envy

Helsinki’s new Oodi library.

Upon entering Oodi, an enforced hush does not descend. Nor are there any bookshelves in sight, but on the first floor – a large, fluid space – there is a cinema, a multi-purpose hall and a restaurant. The second floor, called the “attic”, is entirely dedicated to skills development. Here the public can use 3D printers and sewing machines, or borrow musical equipment and rock out in specially modified studios. There is even a kitchen and socialising area, which can be hired for a small fee, where the librarians hope birthday parties will take place, perhaps followed by a spot of karaoke. Staff roam the site ready to help the public use the resources available. …

“We believe,” [Helsinki’s executive director of culture Tommi] Laitio expounds, “that everyone deserves to have free access to not only knowledge, but also our shared culture, spaces that are beautiful, and to dignity.” Central to Oodi’s concept, he explains, is bringing a wide range of people together under one roof. “A lot of emphasis has been put on how we make sure that this building is safe and welcoming to homeless people [or] to CEOs with a couple of hours to spare … We need to make sure that people believe that we can live together, and I don’t think €100m for that feeling is a lot of money.”

If AG Barr has been telling the truth, his redacted version of the Mueller Report should be out this week. There’s little point in speculating about what it will say or how much of it we’ll get to see, but all the same it was odd how little of the week the news shows spent discussing it. What we saw instead was Trump’s ability to control the narrative by doing and saying outrageous things.

One piece of news he didn’t control was the back-and-forth between Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Pence, which I’m going to focus on in the featured post. It started eight days ago with Buttigieg’s speech to the LGBTQ Victory fund, in which he pointed out the main theological weakness in the religious right’s anti-gay position: God’s creation includes people born to be gay. If you are one of those people, accepting yourself as gay can be a big piece of making your peace with God.

It has been fascinating to watch Pence (who was mentioned by name in Buttigieg’s speech) and the rest of the religious right wriggle and distort to avoid meeting Buttigieg’s challenge. This is really not a conversation they want to have. My post on this, which includes video of the full 19-minute speech, should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will say very little about the Mueller Report, because we still don’t know anything about it. But there’s a lot else to discuss: whether the administration will obey the law on a number of fronts (including the border and Trump’s taxes), Netanyahu’s re-election, Julian Assange, the new Brexit deadline, and a few other things. It should be out between noon and 1.

Liberals have been yielding the high ground on religion for far too long. Maybe that’s going to stop.

There are two ways to seek people’s political support: You can lay out policy proposals to address the problems that concern them — like Medicare for All or a plan to cancel student debt — or you can show them that you’re on their side by taking on the people that threaten or intimidate them.

It’s not an either/or, of course. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has no trouble taking on the bankers who illegally foreclosed on your house while at the same time laying out policies that would stop them from foreclosing on someone else. Ultimately, a politician’s willingness to fight for you in the public square will come to nothing if he or she doesn’t also enact substantive changes after taking office.

But if you doubt the power of a pure I’ll-stand-up-to-your-enemies message, you need look no farther back than 2016. Candidate Trump’s policy proposals were often an incoherent mess. He said he’d replace ObamaCare something “fantastic” and “wonderful” that would take care of everybody. The government would pay for it, but it would neither raise your taxes or impinge on your freedom. (That’s not a synopsis of his program; that’s the whole program.) His foreign policy was both bellicose and promised an end to the endless wars. He was in favor of both LGBT rights and the religious right. He would simultaneously cut taxes, increase defense spending, and repay the national debt. He promised to build a wall, while his supporters argued among themselves about whether the wall would be literal or metaphorical.

But whatever he might propose, and however he might contradict that proposal the next time he opened his mouth, one part of Trump’s message was clear, and remains clear today: If you feel threatened by immigrants of color, by people who don’t speak English, by scientists who think they’re smarter than you, or by advocates of “political correctness” who tell you that you can’t say this or do that any more, then Trump has your back. If you’re sick of liberals calling you “racist” or “sexist”, well, Trump glories in being called those names, and strikes back at the accusers twice as hard.

A week ago yesterday, in his own soft-spoken way, Pete Buttigieg did something similar: At the annual champagne brunch of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, he took on Vice President Mike Pence by name, and challenged the religious right not just politically, but morally and religiously. When his words got national attention and Pence answered (dishonestly), Buttigieg did not back down.

The message was clear: He’s not intimidated by Mike Pence, so you don’t need to be either. And if the “Mike Pences of this world” think that they own religion or Christianity or words like morality and freedom, then Pete Buttigieg has news for them.

The speech. His 19-minute speech is worth listening to in its entirety, if you have the time. He is talking to a friendly audience of those who fight for LGBTQ rights, so it may not be as immediately courageous as, say, Catholic JFK’s speech to the protestant ministers of Houston. But in an era when everything is recorded, everything gets out, and your words live on forever in hard drives all over the world, it is quite striking.

We often hear the term “gay pride”. Buttigieg’s speech is a clear and simple assertion of gay pride. He’s not claiming to be better than straight people, but he’s also not apologizing for his sexuality or hoping that critics will ignore it. He is proud of his life, proud of his marriage, and proud of the spouse he married. He will not keep Chasten hidden and hope that his opponents will be gracious enough not to bring him up. Instead, Buttigieg talks about meeting Chasten, and adds:

One of the best things about these last couple months has been watching America meet him too, and start to fall for Chasten just like I did.

But he then goes on to talk about his struggle to accept his sexual orientation.

When I was younger, I would have done anything to not be gay. When I began to halfway realize what it meant that I felt the way I did about people I saw in the hallways in school or the dining halls in college, it launched in me something I can only describe as a kind of war. And if that war would have been settled on the terms that I would have wished for when I was 15, or 20, or frankly even 25, I would not be standing here. If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water.

It is a hard thing to think about. It’s hard to face the truth that there were times in my life when if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.

The room is completely silent at this point. What he is presenting is the religious right’s fantasy: that homosexuality is curable, and that 15-year-olds like Buttigieg could be offered the chance to sign up for some kind of conversion therapy (which is now illegal in 16 states, partly because it doesn’t work, and partly because forcing a child into such therapy is believed to increase the risk of suicide). The fantasy says that these men will be grateful later, when they look back on a life that includes wives and naturally-conceived children. But Buttigieg represents the polar opposite of that fantasy: Looking back on his life, he is grateful that he didn’t get that choice.

The real reason it’s so hard to think about is that if I had had the chance to do that, I would never have found my way to Chasten. The best thing in my life, my marriage, might not have happened at all. … How dark the thought, that the man that I admire and care about, and love sharing with the rest of the country, and even more importantly, can’t wait to share one day with raising children, might not have been part of my life at all. Thank God there was no pill. Thank God there was no knife.

And “thank God” is not just figure of speech. It segues Buttigieg into religion, and into the moral issue of marriage equality.

It’s a moral issue because being married to Chasten has made me a better human being, because it has made me more compassionate, more understanding, more self-aware, and more decent. My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man. And yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.

He explains exactly what “closer to God” means to him.

You may be religious and you may not. But if you are, and you are also queer, and you have come through the other side of a period of wishing that you weren’t, then you know that that message, this idea that there’s something wrong with you, is a message that puts you at war not only with yourself, but with your Maker.

And speaking only for myself, I can tell you that if me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my Creator.

The response. This is a story and an argument that many straight Americans have never heard: Accepting your sexual orientation or gender identity or some other aspect of yourself (that you didn’t choose and can’t un-choose) can be part of a journey of coming to terms with God.

The religious right will tell you that accepting homosexuality means rejecting God. (In a Fox News piece responding to Buttigieg, Log Cabin Republican Rob Smith says precisely that: “those on the left … have been very successful at convincing a generation of young gays and lesbians to reject God in favor of their cult of intersectionality and identity politics.”) It will tell you that gays want to tear down Christianity, and that the point of same-sex marriage is to undermine marriage in general. But Buttigieg is saying the exact opposite: Accepting how you were made is part of accepting God’s creation.

Buttigieg is challenging not the politics of the religious right, but its morality and its theology. This isn’t just about the Constitution or the law, it’s about what it means to be in right relation with God.

You can tell how threatening Buttigieg’s message is to the Mike Pences of the world by how hard they try not to hear it, and to pretend that Buttigieg said something else. Pence himself responded with this non sequitur:

I hope that Pete will offer more to the American people than attacks on my Christian faith or attacks on the President as he seeks the highest office in the land. He’d do well to reflect on the importance of respecting the freedom of religion of every American.

But Buttigieg didn’t “attack” anybody’s Christian faith. He challenged Pence’s interpretation of it. In particular, there was no attack on Pence’s “religious freedom”. No one, least of all Buttigieg, is preventing Pence from believing whatever he wants, from trying to convince others to agree with him, or from living his faith. [1]

But you know what prominent conservatives did next? They attacked Buttigieg’s Christian faith. Erick Erickson, for example, described progressive Christianity as “hypocritical farce”  and “corrupt and flawed”. The Episcopal Church that Buttigieg belongs to “is no longer a Christian institution“.

Buttigieg did not back down to Pence, saying:

I don’t have a problem with religion. I’m religious too. I have a problem with religion being used as a justification to harm people. … I’m not interested in feuding with the Vice President. But if he wanted to clear this up, he could come out today and say that he’s changed his mind, that it shouldn’t be legal to discriminate against anybody in this country for who they are.

Some very old arguments. Buttigieg’s challenge brings up several longstanding theological issues that conservative Christians would prefer to sweep under the rug. Though different, they all revolve around the notion that (in spite of the purported changelessness of Christian doctrine) the image of God that was taught centuries ago is something most people just can’t believe in today. [2]

One of those issues is predestination, the idea that God’s omniscience included knowledge of the destiny of the souls He was creating. [3] From the beginning of time, a few souls were predestined for Heaven and the vast majority for Hell. This belief turns God into a monster, because He created most of humanity for no other purpose than to torture them for all eternity.

Current religious-right teachings about gender and sexuality contain echoes of this monstrosity. If LGBTQ people in their many varieties are not choosing a lifestyle, but in fact are discovering an inner nature that has been theirs from birth, and if that nature either damns them to eternal torment or permanently cuts them off from sex, children, and the kind of deep relationship that Buttigieg describes making with Chasten, then something very similar to predestination is happening. [4]

An even larger and older issue goes back to the reformulations of the Axial Age, which never quite completed its mission: Is religion fundamentally about a list of rules and the rewards and punishments that enforce those rules? Or is it about becoming (in Buttigieg’s words) “more compassionate, more understanding, more self-aware, and more decent”. If it is about rules, do those rules have to make sense, or is their very arbitrariness a measure of God’s majesty? [5] In the Christian tradition, this issue is the heart of the New Testament arguments between Jesus and the Pharisees. But the modern religious right has forgotten Jesus and taken the Pharisee side: The rules are the rules, and if we have to be cruel to enforce them, that’s just how it is.

And finally, there is the issue that religion itself can become a kind of idol: Rather than worshiping God, you can find yourself worshiping a scripture or a church or a set or rituals.

It’s not surprising that the religious right doesn’t want to talk about any of this.

We’re not supposed to challenge them. Conservative Christians have gotten used to being able to define the playing field. When they involve themselves in political discussions, we are all supposed to accept as given that they are good, decent people who are just trying to live according to their faith. We are supposed to accept the moral and theological premises they offer, and yield to them all the powerful vocabulary and imagery of Christianity.

But they don’t deserve that kind of consideration. They are offering us a God who is monstrous, and a religion that justifies discrimination and bigotry. They need to be called on that, not just because it’s bad law and bad politics, but because it’s bad religion.

I’m still waiting for a detailed set of policies from Buttigieg, and who knows whether I’ll like it when I see it. But this part of the message he’s gotten right.

[1] I won’t go into this in detail today, because I already have here and here. What masquerades as “religious freedom” for conservative Christians is actually a demand for special rights. They want a special exemption from discrimination laws, because they’re Christians. As the cartoon below demonstrates, it’s laughable to imagine the rights that conservative Christians claim being applied generally, to issues other than their hobby horses of homosexuality, abortion, or birth control.

[2] I mean can’t in a literal sense. If you can picture such a being at all, you will feel revulsion, not awe or wonder. If this is God, then maybe Lucifer was right to rebel.

[3] I’m describing God as “He” here, because in the theologies I’m describing, God is male. That’s not something I do when I describe my own beliefs.

[4] In contrast to Buttigieg’s coming closer to God, Chris Steadman describes (in the book Faitheist) going through a period of rage at a God who created him gay and then condemned gays to Hell.

In Evolving in Monkey Town Rachel Held Evans, whose path of spiritual growth has taken her out of Evangelicalism and into the Episcopal religion that Erickson finds so objectionable, recounts one of the first cracks in her childhood faith: Going on a mission trip to China, looking out a bus window, and realizing that a billion people out there were going to Hell. What kind of God would set the world up like that?

[5] Occasionally you’ll hear the conundrum expressed like this: Do we worship God because He is good, or because He is God? In an earlier era, this question made sense, but today we are more inclined to ask: Why would we worship a God who is not good?

At long last, it is Spring. All around us, the ancient miracle is happening once again. The season of Death is behind us, and new life is springing up. You have an invitation to join that renewal, but the Earth will not wait for you. So don’t delay until the yeast has raised the dough; make your bread without it. Have your walking stick ready; it’s time to go. The stone has been rolled away and the path to the light is open.

Are you coming? It’s too late to wish you could be replanted somewhere else, because it’s time to sprout. Here. Now. It’s Easter.

– from my 2013 sermon “Struggling With Easter“

This week’s featured post is “Buttigieg vs. Pence“. You also might want to look at the church service the quote above is from. I’ve never liked Easter services, but that year I volunteered to lead a service in my hometown without realizing that date was Easter. With some trepidation, I accepted the challenge and did an all-spring-holidays-at-once service. I’m happy with how it came out. If you don’t care for Easter services either, check it out.

This week everybody was wondering whether the administration will obey the law

This was a question that united a number of news stories: the purge at DHS, Mnuchin’s refusal to let the House Ways and Means chair see Trump’s tax returns, the plan to dump detained immigrants in sanctuary cities, and whether Trump offered a pardon to the Custom and Borders Protection Commissioner to induce him to ignore laws about applicants for asylum.

DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned last Monday, just in time for me to mention it in last week’s summary. Tuesday, Acting Deputy Secretary Clare Grady was also forced out, leaving the Department in the hands of the next-in-line, Kevin McAleenan.

Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles was ousted, and at least two officials have been named as possibly heading out the door: US Citizenship and Immigration Services director Francis Cissna and Office of the General Counsel’s John Mitnick.

On April 5, Trump withdrew his nomination of Ron Vitiello to lead ICE, saying he wanted to go in a “tougher direction”. Vitiello was already the acting head of ICE.

Thursday, a Washington Post scoop began to flesh out what a “tougher” head of ICE might do.

The White House believed it could punish Democrats — including Pelosi — by busing ICE detainees into their districts before their release, according to two DHS whistleblowers who independently reported the busing plan to Congress. … Homeland Security officials said the sanctuary city request was unnerving, and it underscores the political pressure Trump and Miller have put on ICE and other DHS agencies at a time when the president is furious about the biggest border surge in more than a decade.

“It was basically an idea that Miller wanted that nobody else wanted to carry out,” said one congressional investigator who has spoken to one of the whistleblowers. “What happened here is that Stephen Miller called people at ICE, said if they’re going to cut funding, you’ve got to make sure you’re releasing people in Pelosi’s district and other congressional districts.”

… “It was retaliation, to show [Democrats in Congress], ‘Your lack of cooperation has impacts,’ ” said one of the DHS officials, summarizing the rationale. “I think they thought it would put pressure on those communities to understand, I guess, a different perspective on why you need more immigration money for detention beds.”

Administration sources initially described this as a “nonstory”, but then Trump himself verified it.

Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities

CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin:

These are human beings, and treat treat them like a form of plague that you want to impose on your enemies is really grotesque.

This fits into the larger context of the Trump administration breaking down barriers between politics and law enforcement. Little by little, we are losing the democratic ideal that political appointees set priorities and make policy, while the government’s career professionals are mission-driven and carry out their jobs apolitically. Instead, Trump is moving us toward the authoritarian model where everything is political.

Masha Gessen makes a good point: This is one of those stories that is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know how to respond. Merely pointing out the illegality of using government resources to punish uncooperative congresspeople yields a point that shouldn’t be yielded: These immigrants are not a plague. They don’t bring crime and drugs and disease as Trump keeps claiming.

The response Gessen favors is similar to the one given by Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan:

Here’s a message to President Trump: Seattle is not afraid of immigrants and refugees. … This president believes that immigrants and refugees burden our country and burden cities like ours. But he could not be more wrong. In Seattle, we know that our immigrant and refugee communities make our city a stronger, more vibrant place. … So if this president wants to send immigrants and refugees to Seattle and other welcoming cities, let me be clear: We will do what we have always done, and we will be stronger for it. And it will only strengthen our commitment to fighting for the dignity of every person. We will not allow any administration to use the power of America to destroy the promise of America.

I think it’s important to keep telling immigrants’ stories, because they’re so antithetical to the image Trump is trying to sell us. Mother Jones tells about Ansly Damus, a Haitian who legally sought asylum in the US, and has been held like a prisoner for two years.

Friday, the New York Times added:

President Trump last week privately urged Kevin McAleenan, the border enforcement official he was about to name as acting secretary of homeland security, to close the southwestern border to migrants despite having just said publicly that he was delaying a decision on the step for a year, according to three people briefed about the conversation.

It was not clear what Mr. Trump meant by his request or his additional comment to Mr. McAleenan that he would pardon him if he encountered any legal problems as a result of taking the action.

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal requested six years of Trump’s tax returns last week. The law authorizing him to make this request is clear: It instructs the IRS to deliver the documents.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is delaying, while not admitting that he intends to disobey the law. Instead, he pretends that there is some kind of legitimate legal issue here.

Mnuchin, who has consulted with the White House and Department of Justice about Trump’s tax returns, said earlier this week that Neal’s request raised concerns about the scope of the committee’s authority, privacy protections for U.S. taxpayers and the legislative purpose of lawmakers in seeking the documents.

Think about what Mnuchin is putting forward here: that the executive branch has the right to judge the “legislative purpose” of the legislative branch. In other words, Congress is not really an equal branch of government.

Sarah Sanders to Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

Frankly, Chris, I don’t think Congress — particularly not this group of congressmen and women — are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be,” Sanders said. “My guess is most of them don’t do their own taxes, and I certainly don’t trust them to look through the decades of success that the president has and determine anything.

It’s laughable that Trump can question the intelligence of Chairman Neal.

and a black hole

or at least a picture of where one ought to be.

and the Israeli elections

Netanyahu will be prime minister for another term. Israel will impose its will on Palestine, and keep pushing until there’s another intifada. I continue to believe that ultimately this situation is headed towards an ethnic cleansing.

and Julian Assange

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been inside the Ecuadoran embassy in London for the last seven years, until Thursday, when British police arrested him after Ecuador stopped granting asylum.

His arrest raises a bunch of issues about freedom of the press that I haven’t unraveled yet — like “What’s the difference between journalism and espionage?” — so for now I’ll just link to a CNN article that points to the complexity.

and Brexit

There’s a new deadline: Halloween. It’s still not clear what will be different then.

Channel 4 commentator Jon Snow (not the Game of Thrones guy) touched off an uproar while he was covering a rally outside the Prime Minister’s residence by angry pro-Brexit protesters. “I’ve never seen so many white people in one place,” he said.

Why, wondered Myriam François in The Guardian, would white people be upset to be identified as white people?

First, white people are not used to being marked out by race. Despite habitually racialising others, we generally don’t take well to being racialised ourselves. Acknowledging our “whiteness” means accepting that our worldview isn’t universal nor objective. It is a white perspective, forged by a particular experience. The “facts of whiteness”, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, make many white people uncomfortable.

It’s telling that Snow’s remark has sparked more outrage than the fact that a rally held in a city with 40% black and minority-ethnic population was almost entirely white. Far-right extremist Tommy Robinson addressed crowds in Parliament Square and somehow this doesn’t raise questions about race? If we weren’t so intent on ringfencing white people from any introspection, white people themselves might legitimately ask why the leave campaign has attracted so many racists and so few people of colour.

and you also might be interested in …

If Attorney General Barr has been telling the truth, his redacted version of the Mueller report should come out this week. (Thursday, possibly.) Trump has gotten nearly a month to shape a “no collusion, no obstruction” narrative, which his base will probably continue to believe even if the report says something different.

The Trump tweet linking Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and 9-11 is not worth discussing in itself. The speech Omar’s one line was lifted from was making the point that Muslims are not collectively guilty for 9-11, so attacking their civil liberties was unjustified. Trump’s tweet essentially makes the point that Muslims are collectively guilty for 9-11. I think we all (in one way or another) resemble people who have done bad things, so any support for the idea of collective guilt should threaten all of us.

What is worth discussing is the role Trump is playing in what has come to be called “stochastic terrorism“. Omar reports that her death threats have skyrocketed since Trump’s tweet, and Nancy Pelosi has asked the House Sergeant-at-Arms to pay special attention to Omar’s security, noting that Trump’s “hateful and inflammatory rhetoric creates real danger”.

Trump himself is not threatening to kill Omar, and he is not conspiring with any particular assassin. But he knows full well the kind of people who are out there, and how they might react to what he says.

It took about a month for New Zealand to change its gun laws after the horrific March 15 mosque shootings. The Prime Minister got behind a bill to ban military-style assault weapons, and Parliament passed it 119-1 on Wednesday.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been raising the question of whether Republicans would allow Trump to fill the Federal Reserve Board of Governors with stooges like Stephen Moore and Herman Cain. I mean, it’s one thing to let know-nothings take charge of education or public housing or the environment, but this is money we’re talking about. Billionaires and multinational corporations are counting on money to continue having meaning, so you’d think Republicans in Congress would want to keep the likes of Moore and Cain from screwing around with it.

It turns out they do. Four Republican senators — Cramer, Romeny, Murkowski, and Gardner — have come out against Cain’s nomination, which pretty much dooms it. Stephen Moore still might get the job.

Politico’s account of Trump’s visit to Mount Vernon sounds like something from The Onion.

“If [George Washington] was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

The tour was for visiting French President Emmanuel Macron, who was more into it than Trump.

The president’s disinterest in Washington made it tough for tour guide Bradburn to sustain Trump’s interest during a deluxe 45-minute tour of the property which he later described to associates as “truly bizarre.” The Macrons, Bradburn has told several people, were far more knowledgeable about the history of the property than the president.

I suspect if you picked a subject at random, Macron would be more knowledgeable about it than Trump.

I’m looking forward to a book that comes out this week: A Lot of People Are Saying by Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum. It talks about conspiracy theories, and about a subtly different concept: conspiracism.

In an interview with Vox, Rosenblum explains the distinction: Conspiracy theories are attempts to explain something, and often to re-explain randomness by imposing a cause-and-effect structure on it, however unlikely. In my view, Kennedy assassination theories are the archetypes: It seemed inconceivable that a lone loser like Lee Harvey Oswald could bring down a popular president, so bigger explanations were invented.

Conspiracism, though, is “conspiracy without the theory”. There are no dots to connect, just a bald assertion that somebody you don’t like is up to something.

For example, Trump’s claim that elections are rigged to favor Democrats (and hence that he’d have won the popular vote without the millions of illegal Hillary votes) is not an actual conspiracy theory, because he offers no explanation of how this could have happened. It’s not at all like a Kennedy-assassination theory, where the theorists can drown you in detail.

It would be great if white people would listen to black people’s explanations of privilege, but for a lot of whites that’s just never going to happen. So there’s a need for articles like this one by white NBA player Kyle Korver, where a white guy suddenly gets it.

By the way, there have been several books lately that belie the stereotype of the dumb jock. For example, look at Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by NFL defensive lineman Michael Bennett or The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and what matters in the end.

I’ve got to plug an explanation of the current Supreme Court gerrymandering cases co-authored by my nephew Mike Stephens, a recently-minted lawyer.

and let’s close with some low-tech high-tech

One of the problems with renewable energy sources like wind and solar power is how to regulate the flow: the times when you need the most power may not be the times when the most power is being generated. A lot of work has gone into designing batteries, but a conceptually simpler idea may work better: stacking concrete blocks. When you have more power than you need, you build the tower higher. When you need more power than you have, you let a block fall, generating power as it goes.

Another company is working on a similar notion, but instead of building a tower, it raises and lowers weights inside a deep mine shaft.

Most weeks I face the same quandary: Do I go for the bright, shiny object and focus entirely on Trump’s latest outrage, or do I put aside that immediate emotional rush and call attention to the broader issues facing the country and the world?

This week, though, I give in. I spent most of the week reading the Mueller Report, and just about the entire Sift this week is either about the report itself, how the report was handled, or reactions to the report. Climate change, income inequality, and health care will have to claim my attention some other week.

The first featured post, which is pretty much done and should be out before 9 EDT, concerns the most disturbing thing we learn in the report, a conclusion Mueller refuses to draw himself, but that we can draw from the information he provides: Trump obstructed justice. In “Yes, Obstruction”, I’ll explain Mueller’s reasons for not drawing the conclusion himself, and then go through the ten incidents he examines — six of which have all components of obstruction.

The question that follows is: What should be done about that? Is it time for impeachment? I foresaw this moment (or something like it) last June, and made sure to write down my ideas about impeachment then, precisely to avoid crafting my opinions around the case we happen to have. In today’s second featured post, I’ll do my best to apply those standards to the present situation. That may take a while, so I’ll guess the post will be out around noon. The weekly summary, which is mostly about other people’s reactions to the report, with a little extra about the Notre Dame fire, the Sri Lanka bombings, and a few other things (culminating with Sesame Street characters trying to teach HBO characters about respect) should be out around 1 or so.

Mueller gave his reasons for not reaching a conclusion on obstruction. Those reasons don’t apply to the rest of us.

I draw three main conclusions from the Mueller Report:

• Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign for the purpose of electing Donald Trump.
• While Trump and his campaign welcomed and at times even encouraged Russian help, the evidence the investigation collected doesn’t support a charge of criminal conspiracy, and the evidence isn’t sufficient to charge any individual connected to the Trump campaign (officially or unofficially) with acting as a Russian agent.
• In view of the Justice Department guideline that a sitting president can’t be indicted, Mueller assembled evidence about the instances where Trump may have obstructed justice, but left the ultimate judgment to people in a position to take action: Congress or post-Trump-administration prosecutors (and not Bill Barr).

Since these are not at all the conclusions Attorney General Barr put forward in his four-page summary or his introductory press conference, I am led to a fourth conclusion: Barr has been acting as a personal attorney for Trump, and not as the attorney general of the United States. [1]

No judgment about obstruction. The third conclusion is the one most distorted by Barr, so it needs the most explanation. Here’s what the report says in the introduction to Volume II, which discusses Trump’s possible obstructions of justice:

[W]e determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes. … Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought. The ordinary means for an individual to respond to an accusation is through a speedy and public trial, with all the procedural protections that surround a criminal case. An individual who believes he was wrongly accused can use that process to seek to clear his name. In contrast, a prosecutor’s judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.

On the other hand, if the evidence clearly showed that no crime was committed — that would be the “total exoneration” Trump keeps announcing — Mueller had been prepared to say that. Unfortunately, he couldn’t.

[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

In addition to the facts investigation has assembled, convicting Trump of obstruction of justice would depend on judgments about his intent as well as legal judgments about when the official actions of a president can be considered obstruction. Mueller has opinions about those subjects and expresses them in the report, but is not comfortable drawing all of that into a conclusion that could not be tested in court for the rest of the Trump administration.

Nothing in the report suggests that he is kicking the decision upstairs to the attorney general, as Barr put forward.

Actions that might be considered obstruction. The report examines ten incidents as possible obstruction-of-justice counts. [2] In each case, Mueller analyzes the three factors that would need to be established:

• an obstructive action (which need not necessarily succeed),
• some connection (“nexus”) to an official proceeding
• corrupt intent

Some of the ten, Mueller dismisses as not chargeable. For example, Trump’s effort to keep the content of the Trump Tower meeting from becoming public, including his dictation of a false statement that the meeting concerned Russian adoptions rather than a Russian offer of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton: It’s not obstruction because Trump was hiding the truth from the press and the public, not from an official investigation.

Each of these efforts by the President involved his communications team and was directed at the press. They would amount to obstructive acts only if the President, by taking these actions, sought to withhold information from or mislead congressional investigators or the Special Counsel.

Trump asking Comey to let Flynn go. Mueller’s analysis seems to confirm that each of the three factors is present here, but the case hangs on believing James Comey’s version of his conversations with Trump rather than Trump’s version. However, it’s not a pure he-said/she-said: “substantial evidence corroborates Comey’s account”.

Trump’s reaction to the continuing Russia investigation. This includes pressuring Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself, and pressuring the DNI, CIA director, and NSA director, as well as Comey, to make public statements clearing him of involvement with Russia.

While these actions are “relevant to understanding what motivated the President’s other actions towards the investigation”, they don’t seem chargeable in themselves because “the evidence does not establish that the President asked or directed intelligence agency leaders to stop or interfere with the FBI’s Russia investigation”.

Firing James Comey. While Trump’s “stated rationales for why he fired Corney are not similarly supported by the evidence”, this action also was arguably motivated by Comey’s refusal to tell the public that Trump wasn’t under investigation, rather than by a desire to shut down the investigation. [3]

In fact, Comey’s firing didn’t shut down the investigation, and could not have been expected to. (Steve Bannon had told Trump that he could fire Comey, but he couldn’t fire the FBI.) It would also be obstruction of Trump intended Comey’s firing to intimidate the next FBI director, but that also has not been proved.

Attempts to remove the Special Counsel. Trump denies that he ordered Don McGahn to instruct Rod Rosenstein to fire Robert Mueller (and McGahn ignored him anyway). [4] But “substantial evidence” supports the conclusion that he did.

the attempt to remove the Special Counsel would qualify as an obstructive act if it would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry. Even if the removal of the lead prosecutor would not prevent the investigation from continuing under a new appointee, a factfinder would need to consider whether the act had the potential to delay further action in the investigation, chill the actions of any replacement Special Counsel, or otherwise impede the investigation.

That sounds like a yes to me. At this point Trump knew he was under investigation for obstruction of justice, at the very least. So the second box is checked as well, and checked for all subsequent incidents.

Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct

So this count is a good candidate for an obstruction of justice charge. The fact that McGahn didn’t do what the president told him to do saves McGahn from being guilty of obstruction, but not Trump.

Attempts to curtail the scope of the investigation. Two days after telling McGahn to get Mueller fired, Trump was telling Corey Lewandowski to instruct Jeff Sessions to unrecuse himself and instruct Mueller to limit his investigation to “election meddling for future elections”. (Lewandowski likewise didn’t deliver Trump’s message. Instead he passed it on Rick Dearborn, who didn’t deliver it either.)

The three factors are all present here. This is another good candidate.

Further attempts to get Sessions to unrecuse and take control of the investigation. This count hangs on whether Trump believed Sessions would impede or restrict the investigation if he were back in charge of it.

A reasonable inference from those statements and the President ‘s actions is that the President believed that an unrecused Attorney General would play a protective role and could shield the President from the ongoing Russia investigation .

The charging decision would revolve around whether a “reasonable inference” is strong enough.

Ordering McGahn to deny that Trump told him to fire Mueller. When the New York Times broke the story about McGahn being ordered to get Mueller fired, Trump wanted McGahn to deny it, and to write a letter “for our records” denying it.

The President’s repeated efforts to get McGahn to create a record denying that the President had directed him to remove the Special Counsel would qualify as an obstructive act if it had the natural tendency to constrain McGahn from testifying truthfully or to undermine his credibility as a potential witness if he testified consistently with his memory, rather than with what the record said.

… Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated , the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn ‘s account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President’s conduct towards the investigation.

The fact that Trump wanted a letter for the files indicates that this wasn’t just a press strategy.

Another good candidate.

Attempting to affect the cooperation or testimony of Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and somebody else whose name is redacted. This has to do with the repeated hints that Trump might pardon people who stand by him. His public comments also might have been intended to sway the jury in Paul Manafort’s trial. In Flynn’s case, the broadest hints came primarily through Trump’s lawyers, so it’s not possible to know whether that message came from Trump himself.

Evidence concerning the President’s conduct towards Manafort indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government.

That would be witness tampering, which is a type of obstruction.

Attempts to influence Michael Cohen. This is similar to the Flynn/Manafort stuff in the last section, but moreso.

We gathered evidence of the President ‘s conduct related to Cohen on two issues: (i) whether the President or others aided or participated in Cohen’s false statements to Congress, and (ii) whether the President took actions that would have the natural tendency to prevent Cohen from providing truthful information to the government.

On (i), Mueller says that the evidence does not establish that Trump “directed or aided” Cohen’s false testimony. On (ii), the logic is similar to Flynn/Manafort, but also included Trump accusing Cohen’s wife and father-in-law of committing crimes.

The evidence concerning this sequence of events could support an inference that the President used inducements in the form of positive messages in an effort to get Cohen not to cooperate, and then turned to attacks and intimidation to deter the provision of information or undermine Cohen’s credibility once Cohen began cooperating. … the President’s suggestion that Cohen ‘s family members committed crimes happened more than once , including just before Cohen was sentenced (at the same time as the President stated that Cohen “should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence”) and again just before Cohen was scheduled to testify before Congress. The timing of the statements supports an inference that they were intended at least in part to discourage Cohen from further cooperation.

In other words, witness tampering.

Summary of obstruction incidents. By my count, six of the ten incidents look like obstruction of justice. The other four may not contain all the elements of obstruction, but they lend themselves to an overall pattern of obstruction.

Although the events we investigated involved discrete acts- e.g., the President’s statement to Corney about the Flynn investigation , his termination of Corney, and his efforts to remove the Special Counsel – it is important to view the President ‘s pattern of conduct as a whole. That pattern sheds light on the nature of the President ‘s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.

And the pattern is the point. In some of the six obstructions, you might decide that the “substantial evidence” Mueller cites is not beyond reasonable doubt. But when you see the whole list, reasonable doubt vanishes. The President obstructed justice. [5]

[1] ] As Joyce Vance put it: “the President’s lawyer, not the People’s lawyer”. The notes of sadness, disappointment, and puzzlement in her voice are worth listening to. She “looked up to and admired attorneys general” during her 25 years in the Justice Department, which included Barr’s term as AG under the first President Bush. “To hear an attorney general lie from the podium at the Justice Department about the contents of a report that had been done on a serious criminal case is so stupefying.”

Barr raises the same question as John Kelly, Kirstjen Nielsen, and countless other administration officials: You had a respectable career and a solid reputation; why are you lighting it on fire for this unworthy leader?

[2] If you want a more detailed description of each incident, look here, or in the report itself. I’ve chosen to focus on Mueller’s obstruction reasoning.

[3] This was an extraordinarily petty reason for a president to tear down the norms of FBI independence that previous administrations had built up, but norms are not laws.

[4] This is a pattern in many of the incidents Mueller examined: Trump ordered a subordinate to do something illegal, but the subordinate didn’t do it.

The President ‘s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests. Corney did not end the investigation of Flynn, which ultimately resulted in Flynn’s prosecution and conviction for lying to the FBI. McGahn did not tell the Acting Attorney General that the Special Counsel must be removed, but was instead prepared to resign over the President’s order. Lewandowski and Dearborn did not deliver the President ‘s message to Sessions that he should confine the Russia investigation to future election meddling only. And McGahn refused to recede from his recollections about events surrounding the President’s direction to have the Special Counsel removed, despite the President’s multiple demands that he do so. Consistent with that pattern, the evidence we obtained would not support potential obstruction charges against the President’s aides and associates beyond those already filed.

This is also a pattern we can see elsewhere in the administration: in immigration policy, for example. Trump wants people who will break the law for him. You have to figure that eventually he’ll find some, if he hasn’t already.

An attempt to obstruct an investigation need not succeed in order to be illegal. And if it does succeed, and the underlying crime is covered up, you run into the opposite argument, which Trump’s people are also making: How can it be obstruction if you don’t know of any crime for the investigation to find? Between the horns of that dilemma, the crime of obstruction disappears completely.

An example of the opposite horn: We’ll never know what crimes Paul Manafort might have revealed if he had actually cooperated.

[5] The next question is: What should be done about it? I’ll take that up in my next post, which should be out in a few hours.

The downside of doing something to keep yourself honest is that it might force you to stay honest.

Last June, I anticipated that the Mueller Report would eventually come out, and that we might then have to decide whether to support an impeachment. I also anticipated that partisan pressures would be intense at that point, and that people on both sides would face a strong temptation to shape their ideas about impeachment around the particulars of the evidence Mueller had found: If you were pro-Trump, no amount of wrong-doing would justify impeachment, but if you were anti-Trump, whatever Mueller found would be enough.

Certainly, we have seen enormous flip-flops among politicians who have been around since the Clinton impeachment. (Lindsey Graham is the most egregious example.) But the partisan winds affect all of us, and so I decided I wanted to get my ideas about impeachment written down before I knew precisely what Mueller would find. So I thought things through in the more-or-less abstract and posted “What is impeachment for?” I was trying to come up with an answer that I could stand by whether the target of impeachment would be a Republican or a Democrat. It should be consistent with the Founders’ intentions as expressed in the Constitution, as well as with my intuition about the impeachments in my lifetime. (I thought the Nixon impeachment was justified but the Clinton impeachment wasn’t.)

My standards for impeachment. Here’s what I came up with:

The Founders believed that any legitimate sovereignty had to come from the People, but they understood that the People would make mistakes. It was inevitable that sooner or later the United States would elect a bad president — a demagogue who was unwise, uninformed, and temperamentally unfit for the job.

It’s clear what they saw as the primary remedy for a bad president: Wait for his term to end and elect somebody else. (In the meantime, the other branches of government should use their checks and balances to minimize the harm he could do.) … Impeachment is in the Constitution for those rare cases where the country just can’t wait. … A legitimate impeachment case needs to argue that the Republic is in danger. There must be some reason why waiting for the next election either won’t work or isn’t good enough.

That led me to four situations that merit impeachment:

1. The president is not loyal to the People of the United States.
2. The president’s actions threaten the integrity of the election process.
3. The president’s actions prevent investigations of (1) or (2).
4. Congress has no other way to protect itself or the judiciary from presidential encroachment.

So if Mueller had found that Trump was conspiring with Putin, that would be a slam-dunk example of (1). But that’s not what he found. Instead, he assembled evidence of obstruction of justice, which I find convincing. So I believe that the President of the United States is a criminal.

However, back in June I anticipated this situation too:

The offense Mueller is most likely to find is obstruction of justice. The question I would have at that point is whether the obstruction succeeded. (Firing Comey, for example, may have been intended to derail the Russia investigation, but it obviously didn’t.) If Mueller’s conclusion is that Trump’s obstruction prevents us from knowing whether he was part of a treasonous conspiracy, then I would want to impeach him for that. But if Mueller did in fact get to the bottom of the Russia affair, then the impeachment decision should be based on the answer to that question.

The only loophole I can picture in that is if you hold Trump responsible for Paul Manafort’s non-cooperation, and believe that a cooperating Manafort would have revealed a treasonous conspiracy. That’s not impossible, but it seems like a stretch at this point.

Is the Republic in danger, and if so, from what? I won’t pretend that I wasn’t frightened by what I read in Mueller’s report. In one example after another, Trump displayed an attitude of lawlessness; he wanted what he wanted, and if someone told him it was illegal, he’d ask someone else to do it. (We’re getting similar reports about his immigration policy. He is already ignoring our laws defining the asylum process, and his rhetoric is preparing his cult of followers for worse abuses — for example, when he refers to laws he doesn’t like as “Democrat laws“, as if that invalidates them.) I don’t think we’ve ever had a president with such a cavalier disregard of his prime constitutional duty: to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

The president’s refusal to be interviewed by Mueller, and the answers he did give to written questions (Appendix C of the report), also show a frightening level of disrespect. If Trump really has so little memory of what he has done and who he has talked to, then the Vice President should invoke the 25th Amendment on the grounds of senile dementia.  More likely, though, he just sees “I don’t remember” as a lie no one can catch you in.

In 2016, the 46% of the voters who voted for Trump, and so allowed the Electoral College to install him in office, clearly made precisely the kind of mistake that the Founders foresaw. Elections have consequences, and so our Republic is suffering for that lack of wisdom. We have already lost many of the norms that protect us from authoritarianism; for example: the independence of the Justice Department, the expectation that a president would be shamed if caught in a lie, and the expectation that a president would not profit from dealing from foreign countries (and would show us his finances so that we can check).

If the House doesn’t impeach Trump and the Senate remove him from office, what is the remedy?

In part, we’ve been living it for two years now: checks and balances need to limit the damage Trump does until the voters can repudiate him. Other government officials have repeatedly refused to carry out some of Trump’s illegal orders, and judges have stood in the way of others. Congress has refused to let him pay Putin back by relaxing sanctions. The voters elected a Democratic House that can block many of his worst ideas, and can expose wrongdoing to the public.

In some ways, though, the checks and balances are failing. It is within Congress’ power to enforce the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution more rigorously, but it hasn’t done so. Congress could have defended its own power by overriding Trump’s veto of the resolution rescinding his state of emergency, but it didn’t. But these are failures of the same people who would have to remove Trump from office in impeachment. If you can get two-thirds of the Senate to see the problem and take action, then arguably you don’t need to remove Trump from office.

But that points to the real problem: Congress doesn’t have a supermajority willing to defend the Republic against a bad president. And behind that is another problem: While polls consistently show that Trump is unpopular, the public has not decisively rejected him in the way that, say, they rejected Richard Nixon once the details of the Watergate scandal became clear.

That’s the real source of danger: About 40% of the public doesn’t believe in the American system of government any more. They are fine with a lawless, dishonest president, as long as they believe he’s on their side.

A thought experiment. How would you feel about impeachment if Trump were already a pariah, if Congress routinely overrode his vetoes, and if candidates were lining up to challenge him not just on the Democratic side, but on the Republican side also? If you were confident that he faced a landslide loss in 2020, and that Republicans might anticipate that and not renominate him — would you feel better about waiting for his term to end?

I would. In large part, my urge to impeach is driven by my fear that the electorate can’t be trusted to repudiate Trump.

But of course, as long as that’s true, the Senate will never remove him from office. If the voters won’t defend the Republic, nobody else will either.

Hazards of not impeaching. In large part, Democrats are facing now the kind of problem that Republicans faced during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal: What can we do with our moral outrage? Republicans read the Starr Report in 1998 (unlike Mueller, Starr timed his report for maximum political effect), were outraged at the thought of extra-marital oral sex in the Oval Office, and felt: “This can’t stand. We have to do something.” [1]

The danger of doing nothing is that it creates the impression that Trump did nothing wrong. “If this were serious,” his supporters will say, “you’d be trying to impeach him.” It also immunizes him against further revelations that may come out of the investigations that Mueller spun off. It encourages him to take even more lawless actions, and may convince his subordinates that it would be no big deal to go along with him.

The politics. Some leading Democrats are taking the position that impeachment should be off the table because it’s not the best political move: Making Trump the center of the 2020 campaign plays into his hand. Instead, 2020 should be about health care, climate change, income inequality, and voting rights.

That’s true up to a point. Many of the voters we need to turn out aren’t concerned about “process issues” like whether the president respects the law. They want to know what each party plans to do for them, and what the Democrats plan has far more appeal than what Trump plans. (Most of those voters don’t really care about stopping migrant caravans either.)

Democrats shouldn’t get so caught up in opposing Trump that they lose sight of all other values. But in addition to pocketbook issues, Democrats need to be the party of honesty and good government. The very idea that Trump is a threat to American democracy, but that we’ll ignore it because that issue isn’t polling well for us right now — it undermines everything else. Some things are too important to calculate over, and this is one of them. The world where principles are just for show, and really everybody does whatever works to their advantage — that’s Trump’s world. If we move there, we lose.

Keeping the pressure on. The trick will be to find a middle way: to continue calling Trump’s lawlessness to public attention, while arguing that political repudiation is the voters’ job, and that indictment after he leaves office is a sufficient legal response. The issues raised by the Mueller report need to stay in the spotlight. For now, congressional hearings should be able to serve that purpose: Mueller and Barr need to testify in public, certainly, and probably a number of the administration officials who were told to break the law, like Don McGahn.  Lawlessness in other areas, like border enforcement, needs to be pulled into the theme.

But there’s no reason why these sorts of hearings have to eclipse all other issues. The House has already passed a comprehensive voting-rights bill. It can pass bills to define the rest of a positive agenda.

[1] Our outrage, I think, is far more justified, for two reasons: The obstruction case against Trump is far stronger than the one against Clinton, and it involves misuse of his presidential powers rather than just personal vices.

When I listened to the Senate hearing of the Clinton impeachment, I was amazed by how weak the obstruction case was: Republican prosecutors told a plausible story of obstruction — Clinton induced Monica Lewinsky to lie in a civil deposition by convincing Vernon Jordan to get her a good job at Revlon — but beyond showing that all the people who needed to conspire had opportunity to communicate with each other, they had no evidence.  The conspiracy was denied by everyone supposedly involved, including people who had nothing to gain by lying, like Lewinsky (who had immunity) and the folks at Revlon.

The President ‘s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.

– The Mueller Report

This week’s featured posts are “Yes, Obstruction” and “Is Impeachment the Right Answer?“.

This week everybody was talking about the Mueller Report

I discussed that in the featured posts. Here I’ll talk about the issues surrounding the report.

First, reading the report makes it clear that Attorney General Barr has been misrepresenting the it, both in his four-page summary and in the press conference [video, transcript] he held just before releasing his redacted version of the Report. The benefit of the doubt I granted him four weeks ago was undeserved.

Barr began his summary of the report (that reporters and the country still had not seen) with an actual partial-sentence quote, that the

investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

But the full sentence is a little less favorable to Trump:

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Imagine if the AG had selected the other part of this sentence to emphasize: “the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”.

A bit later, the Report explains what “did not establish” means:

while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.

But Barr pretended “did not establish” meant that the opposite was established, and he spun “evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges” into “no evidence”.

But thanks to the Special Counsel’s thorough investigation, we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign – or the knowing assistance of any other Americans for that matter.

He repeated some version of Trump’s “no collusion” mantra four times, in spite of the fact that Mueller rejected that term.

All along (there are numerous examples given in the Report itself), Trump has been complaining that Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, did not “protect” him. In other words, he expected the attorney general to be his lawyer, not the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Barr has clearly taken this to heart; his performance would have been appropriate for the President’s personal lawyer.

The basic structure of the press conference was bizarre. Typically, when the Justice Department holds a press conference to announce the release of a report, reporters have gotten advance copies of the report “under embargo”, meaning that they can’t talk about it until the release time. That makes meaningful questions possible. This time, no one could see the report until more than an hour later, so questions could only be shots in the dark.

Also, Justice Department press conferences typically center on the people who did the work. But Bob Mueller was nowhere to be found.

Stephen Colbert summed up what Barr was doing with this analogy: “Officer, before I open the trunk of this car, I’d like to first give a short speech about what you’re about to smell.”

Former FBI counter-intelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains the Russian disinformation tactic of “reflexive control”, and how it relates to Trump’s manipulation of the legally meaningless word collusion.

“collusion” is now the same as “conspiracy,” and without proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the latter, the former doesn’t exist.

He warns that we’re being similarly manipulated now by the word spying, which Trump often says and Barr used in his congressional testimony.

One winner from the Mueller Report: the news media. A lot of those stories that Trump called “fake news” turn out to be true. (Biggest example: Trump asked Don McGahn to fire Mueller. At the time, Trump characterized the newspaper report as “A typical New York Times fake story.”) Those anonymous sources quoted by the New York Times and Washington Post usually turned out to be real people who said the same thing under oath.

Trump, on the other hand, has been a font of fake news. His “total and complete exoneration” was just the latest. And conspiracy theories that got a lot of play on Fox News (like the claim that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was the actual source of the WikiLeaks material) were debunked by Mueller.

What Ross Douthat sees in the Mueller Report is “the same general portrait” as Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury:

Donald Trump as an amoral incompetent surrounded by grifters, misfits and his own overpromoted children, who is saved from self-destruction by advisers who sometimes decline to follow orders, and saved from high crimes in part by incompetence and weakness.

If you look at the report, be sure to check out Appendix C, which consists of Trump’s written answers to questions posed by the investigation. The word that best describes this testimony is slippery. Trump offers little information beyond what he knows is available to the Special Counsel from other sources, and makes no claims specific enough to be contradicted by other witnesses. In general, he just doesn’t remember.

If he’s not being slippery, the other possibility is senile dementia. I’d like to ask Mike Pence if he has read Appendix C, and if it made him consider invoking the 25th Amendment.

This is how a 30-year career at the Justice Department ends for Rod Rosenstein, who stood behind Barr unblinking and expressionless. Three weeks ago I wrote:

If Rod Rosenstein really does agree with Barr’s conclusion, I’d like to hear him say so himself, rather than let Barr put words in his mouth.

Thursday, Rosenstein looked like somebody whose daughter is being held in an undisclosed location pending his good behavior. Once again, Barr made claims in his name, but Rosenstein never spoke. Twitter noticed.

Barr’s redactions also drew some humorous comment.

and this musical spoof from Jimmy Fallon:

I’m glad we got this settled:

President Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Sarah Sanders pushed back Friday against allegations that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report exposed a culture of lying at the White House.

Sanders says there is no culture of lying at the White House, and why would she lie about that?

She’s under fire because the Mueller Report exposed this blatant lying, which she had to own up to under oath:

In the afternoon of May 10, 2017, deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders spoke to the President about his decision to fire Corney and then spoke to reporters in a televised press conference. Sanders told reporters that the President, the Department of Justice, and bipartisan members of Congress had lost confidence in Corney, ” [a]nd most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director. Accordingly, the President accepted the recommendation of his Deputy Attorney General to remove James Corney from his position.” In response to questions from reporters , Sanders said that Rosenstein decided “on his own” to review Corney’s performance and that Rosenstein decided “on his own” to come to the President on Monday, May 8 to express his concerns about Corney. When a reporter indicated that the “vast majority” of FBI agents supported Corney, Sanders said , “Look, we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things.” Following the press conference, Sanders spoke to the President, who told her she did a good job and did not point out any inaccuracies in her comments. Sanders told this Office that her reference to hearing from “countless members of the FBI” was a “slip of the tongue.” She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Corney was a comment she made “in the heat of the moment” that was not founded on anything.

Typically, White House press secretaries correct their honest “slips of the tongue”. (WWCJD?) But that’s too high a standard for this White House.

Mitt Romney was the first major Republican to criticize Trump after reading the Mueller Report, tweeting:

I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President. I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia — including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine.

Republican leaders fall into three basic groups:

• gung-ho Trumpers (Mike Huckabee, for example, or Jim Jordan) who shout down any criticism of him, no matter how justified.
• cowards (too numerous to name) or corrupt bargainers (Mitch McConnell) who recognize the damage Trump is doing to America, but avert their eyes and keep their heads down in hopes of surviving into the post-Trump era.
• hand-wringers who want credit for their high moral principles, even though they are unwilling to take any action on them. (Susan Collins)

Mitt is hand-wringing here. That’s better than keeping his head down or actively collaborating, so it marks progress of a sort. I wish more Republicans would speak out like this, even if they don’t intend to do anything either. But I can’t get too excited about it. If Mitt starts demanding change and either calls for impeachment or supports a primary challenge to Trump, let me know.

and the Sri Lanka Easter bombings

Suicide attacks killed nearly 300 people in Sri Lanka yesterday. Three Christian churches and three major hotels were bombed. An Islamic terrorist group is suspected, and the government has arrested 24 people.

and Notre Dame

The iconic Paris cathedral burned last Monday. The spire fell, but the two towers, with their famous stained glass rose windows, survived.

Tragedies typically bring people together in a sense of loss and grief. So I found it bizarre how many folks tried to make this event divisive. When art, architecture, and historic relics are lost, we are all the poorer for it. OK, maybe there have been other losses that should have evoked a similar response, but didn’t. Maybe rich donors ponied up quickly for this, when they have no money for other worthy projects. I don’t care. Losses like this are emotional, and emotions can’t be weighed and measured like that.

I also have no patience with the folks who want to see some special providence in the fact that the disaster wasn’t worse, or that some particular object was saved. It would have taken only a smidgen of godly power to site somebody with a fire extinguisher in the right place when the whole thing started, but God seems not to work that way. The fact that shit happens, but that humanity survives somehow nonetheless, neither raises nor lowers the odds on the existence of a higher power.

I’m reminded of this exchange on Game of Thrones.

Jon Snow: What kind of God would do something like that?

Melisandre: The one we’ve got.

and you also might be interested in …

Everybody else is running for president, so why not my congressman, Seth Moulton? I just moved to this district in the fall, though, so I can’t claim to have any special insight. Moulton is the 19th Democratic candidate. Joe Biden, the current front-runner in most polls, is expected to become the 20th on Wednesday.

Noah Smith explains in two graphs why you shouldn’t read too much into polls about specific issues: A poll that phrases the issue differently might get a different result, and a large number of people might reject the inevitable consequence of something they support.

For example: whites who think we spend too little on “assistance to the poor” change their minds when you call it “welfare”.

And Americans favor eliminating “health insurance premiums”, but not eliminating “private health insurance companies”.

While we’re talking about redactions …

Two examples of how religion is favored in America, and those who consider themselves non-religious are discriminated against.

Friday, an appeals court ruled that the House chaplain doesn’t have to allow atheist guest chaplains to deliver the invocation. The judge wrote:

House counsel represented to this court that the House interprets its rules to require ‘a religious invocation’.

Atheists, by definition, can’t be religious. (Of course, this interpretation will go out the window the next time it’s convenient to claim that atheism is just another religion.)

Second: Lawsuits that try to enforce the wall between church and state sometimes leave the names of the plaintiffs out of the public record for their own safety. A law that just passed the Missouri House will make this illegal, but just for church-and-state suits. In other words, if you represent a Christian majority that is imposing its will on the public square, you have the right to know exactly who is challenging you, in case you want to threaten or intimidate them. Other defendants in other suits don’t have that right, because they’re not the Christian majority.

and let’s close with something incongruous

Sesame Street invades HBO. First WestWorld,

and then Game of Thrones.

No sooner do I say that removing Trump needs to be the voters responsibility than he starts acting in a way that violates my impeachment standards again: Placing himself and his administration above congressional oversight.

But first, I want to talk about something else: A WaPo columnist’s critique of Senator Warren’s free-college plan, and the question it brings up: Is liberalism fundamentally about helping the poor, or about re-shaping the economy so that people don’t become poor? That’s the subject of “Charity Liberalism and Justice Liberalism”, which should be out shortly.

I still haven’t decided whether to break impeachment talk off into its own post or include it in the weekly summary. The summary will also include the census citizenship-question issue, 2020 Democrats, and a few other things, before closing with a real-life fantasy of having one golden moment in your life. That should be out between noon and 1 EDT.

Should the point of liberal programs be to help the poor? Or to change the economy so that people don’t become poor?

In Thursday’s Washington Post, Catherine Rampell pointed out a subtle but important distinction that liberals should never lose sight of: Elizabeth Warren’s free-college and student-debt-relief plans, Rampell claimed, are “liberal but not progressive”, because “they give bigger benefits to higher-income families than to lower-income ones that actually need the help.” Rampell would rather see money targeted more directly at college-eligible low-income students.

This is a longstanding argument in liberal circles. On the one hand we have universal programs like Social Security, and on the other hand are targeted programs like food stamps. In an economic sense, targeted programs are more efficient at helping the poor — doing more with less. But that efficiency comes with some non-economic costs: increased red tape (you have to prove you qualify) and greater stigma for the recipients.

A universal entitlement is conceptually simpler: If you go to college, we’ll help you pay for it. But it costs more, because (as Rampell points out), we’ll be helping Bill Gates’ kids too. And since everything has to be paid for somehow, the universal program is more invasive to the pre-program economy. You have to tax more so that you can spend more.

A related (but not quite identical) distinction applies to our motives for having a program to begin with: Targeted programs have an air of charity about them. They don’t argue with the underlying structure of the economy, they just try to change the results. Do some people not make enough money to eat properly? Very well, then, we’ll give them food. We’ll leave alone whatever it is about the economy that creates unemployment or produces jobs that pay below-subsistence wages. We’ll just fix the food part.

Universal programs tend to be motivated more by notions of social justice: It isn’t just the outcome that’s wrong, it’s the fundamental structure of things. Yes, a targeted program would be a lighter-handed tweak of the underlying economy. But if the underlying economy is fundamentally unjust, why is a lighter hand good?

Rights. The reason it’s important to understand this distinction is that it’s easy for charitable and targeted-program attitudes to sneak their assumptions into a discussion. “Efficiency” always sounds good. But as soon as you start arguing about efficiency, you’ve bought the assumption that smaller changes are better. And often you’ve also bought an additional assumption about the program’s proper goal.

A universal program establishes a basic right, and re-defines the economy to fulfill it. Re-defining the economy is, in large part, the purpose of the program. The point of making public colleges free isn’t just to help the poor pay for education. The point is that public colleges ought to be free. A society in which public colleges are free is a more just society.

The same ideas apply across the board. One failing of our healthcare system is that too many people get priced out it, with corresponding effects on their ability to survive and thrive. ObamaCare targets people in danger of being priced out and subsidizes their health insurance, so it helps resolve that particular failing (or would if it were properly funded and overseen by an administration that believes in its purpose). But ObamaCare does not establish health care as a basic right.

The point of Medicare for All or some other universal-healthcare plan isn’t just to help the people who are being priced out of healthcare. The point is to make healthcare a basic right. That requires more government spending and taxing than even a fully funded ObamaCare. In that sense, it’s a “less efficient” use of the government’s fiscal powers, a heavy-handed reorganization rather than a light-handed tweak. If you believe that the current economy — where many people who work fulltime still can’t afford to take care of themselves or their children — is fundamentally just, then this heavy-handedness must seem outrageous.

But if you believe that the current economy is unjust, then changing it is a virtue, not a vice. There are efficiency/inefficiency arguments to be made at a number of levels, but the more important point is this: A society in which healthcare is a basic right is a more just society than the one we have now. The problem isn’t just that the current economy produces some downtrodden people who need charitable help from the rest of us, which we choose to channel through government. It’s that everyone should have a basic right to healthcare, and right now they don’t.

Vulnerability. Whether a plan gets framed as a basic right or as charity channeled through the government makes a huge difference in the politics. Most voters see charity-justified, means-tested programs as something the government does for “them”, not for “us”. Such generosity is fine as long as “we” are feeling prosperous and “they” seem deserving. But either of those factors can change, or can be changed through political rhetoric.

Means-tested programs are always open to forms of attack that universal programs are immune to: denigration and demonization of the beneficiaries. “Those people” don’t deserve our help because they are lazy or immoral or have made bad life choices. And usually, there’s no obvious place to draw the line: Are the best-off recipients truly in need, or are they just scamming us? Wherever the cut-off is, why shouldn’t it be lower?

If you think about it — and we seldom do — plenty of Social Security recipients fit the same profile as the demonized beneficiaries of means-tested programs: They’re healthy and could get jobs, but don’t want to. The reason conservative politicians don’t rail about their laziness and sense of entitlement is that Social Security is an “us”, not a “them”. They’d be demonizing their own voters, not some isolated scapegoat class.

But if Social Security ever became means-tested — as conservatives and a few efficiency-minded liberals often propose; I mean, what’s the point of sending government checks to Warren Buffett? — we’d soon see the same kinds of rhetoric and tactics: outrage at people who spend their benefits on luxuries, tightening requirements so that fewer and fewer people qualify (“I want to help the truly needy, but …”), and making the experience degrading and dis-spiriting with drug tests, long lines to file your annual re-applications, paternalistic restrictions on how you spend the money, and so on.

The rhetoric just writes itself: Picture all those lazy, able-bodied 60-somethings living on the beach in Florida, spending your tax dollars instead of working. They didn’t save when they were younger, and now they expect the government to make up the difference! Doesn’t that boil your blood?

Local services. You can see the same logic play out locally. In some cities everybody uses public transit. (I’ve taken the BART during rush hour in San Francisco. There were a lot of three-piece suits in the car.) Correspondingly, the service is good in those cities, because transit-riders are an “us”, not a “them”. But in cities (or even neighborhoods within cities) where only the poor use public transit, bus-riders are a “them” and you can forget about rail. In those places, buses are crowded and dirty; schedules are sparse and inconvenient.

Ditto for public schools. In towns where kids of all economic classes go to the same schools, standards are high and it’s not hard to pass a funding increase. But in towns where the public schools are for the poor, and the wealthy all send their kids to private schools, public education is a charity. What do “those people” expect the rest of “us” to provide for them?

Expect worse outcomes yet if Betsy DeVos ever gets her way and public schools are phased out entirely, in favor of private schools that accept government vouchers. The system will quickly devolve into two tiers: Schools that you can pay for solely with a voucher, and schools where the voucher only covers part of the cost. The voucher-only schools will be for the poor, and the vouchers will gradually shrink down to charity levels: Do “those kids” really need music or foreign languages? Are they capable of appreciating literature or higher mathematics? Why should we pay for more than just keeping them under control all day?

Of course, we’d never ask those questions about “our” kids. But “their” kids?

Back to Warren’s proposal. What Senator Warren proposed last week was a program to end tuition-and-fee costs for undergraduates at all public colleges and universities, and to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt. (There are a few means-tested pieces in her program, the biggest being that you’re only eligible for the full $50K if your annual family income is $100K or less, with the benefit phasing out by the time you hit $250K.)

It’s expensive. It costs $1.25 trillion over ten years. She plans to pay for it with an idea that will make plutocrats rage: a wealth tax on households with $50 million or more in assets.

So, no doubt about it, it’s a heavy-handed intervention in the economy. Rampell’s efficiency argument is correct: We could spend and tax a lot less if we carefully targeted the benefits on students who won’t be able to go to college otherwise, and calibrated the size of the benefit to correspond to their precise needs. That would achieve the effect of helping poor kids and working-class kids go to college with minimal changes to the rest of the economy. If you think the rest of the economy is just, that makes perfect sense.

But Warren’s plan does something that no efficiently targeted and calibrated plan can ever do: The option to go to college becomes a basic right. Whose kids are the beneficiaries? Everybody’s. It’s something that we are joining together to do for ourselves, not for some downtrodden “them”. The affected students are not recipients of our charity who constantly have to prove that they come from the deserving poor rather than the undeserving poor.

Socialism? South American Archbishop Dom Helder Camara once said: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hardly anybody is really a communist any more, if they ever were. Our era’s scare-word is socialism, but it means roughly what the archbishop was talking about: building a society where a certain level of dignity and opportunity is a basic right, and does not require that you meet the standards of some paternal benefactor, who can withdraw patronage if you begin to appear undeserving.

I don’t just want to maintain the well-behaved poor at some subsistence level, while the productive power of the Earth and of our complex society accumulates in a few hands. I want our collective inheritance — the planet and the productive legacy of past generations — to work for all of us. If that earns me the title of socialist, well then, so be it.

[If you want to hear more about this point of view, check out a sermon I’ve done at several churches “Who Owns the World?“]

Just as I was turning against impeachment, Trump changed my mind.

Last week I re-examined my prior standards and determined that removing Trump from office was a job for the voters, not for the impeachment process. That judgment went against my inclinations, but my purpose in writing down general standards last summer (long before I knew what the Mueller investigation would find) had been precisely that: to keep me from warping my standards to match the facts available.

The logic behind my conclusion was that impeachment needs to be a forward-looking process, not a backward-looking one. (I hadn’t put it that concisely until just now, but that really is the gist of it.) When presidents have done bad things, most of the time the right solution is to wait for the term to expire and elect somebody else, then prosecute the ex-president for any crimes. Impeachment shouldn’t be a form of punishment, but rather a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option. You impeach not because a president is guilty, but because leaving him or her in office is dangerous.

That’s why treason and bribery are the crimes explicitly mentioned in the Constitution: If the president is under the control of some foreign power or wealthy paymaster, that’s dangerous. The country can’t wait for the next election, not because of what the president has done, but because of what the president might do between now and then.

As you might imagine, my model didn’t look kindly on the Clinton impeachment. I understand why some people would be outraged or embarrassed by the sexual revelations in the Starr Report, and might have wanted to punish Clinton in some way. But by no stretch of the imagination was it dangerous to leave him in office, and in fact the country did just fine after the Senate failed to remove him.

From that point of view, Mueller’s failure to find evidence of Trump conspiring with Putin was the key point. Leaving in power a president who was beholden to a foreign dictator would be precisely the kind of situation that impeachment is meant for. Mueller did find considerable evidence of Trump obstructing justice, and I hope both that the voters will take that seriously and that he’ll be prosecuted for it after he leaves office. But it’s not the same kind of emergency.

That said, I don’t think the Mueller Report is the final word on Trump’s culpability. I think we still need to know whether he is being financially influenced by Moscow, Saudi Arabia, China, or private interests in the US. And with regard to the other scandals of the administration, from Stormy Daniels to the widespread corruption in the cabinet to Jared’s clearance, Congress should be acting to collect information for the 2020 voters, who, if they are doing their duty by our founding principles, will resounding kick Trump out of office. (If they don’t, we’ve got bigger problems that just a bad president.)

So it’s very disturbing that Trump is once again upping the stakes: The Washington Post’s Steve Vladeck summarizes:

Trump, characteristically, seems to be taking the sort of fight most of his predecessors have had with the legislative branch and making the stakes far greater — and the possible damage far worse — than ever before.

The administration’s emerging position appears to be that Congress does not really have the power to investigate the president, at least not when one chamber is controlled by his political adversaries, even if whatever information it seeks might eventually be used in an impeachment proceeding. That’s a deeply disturbing argument, and one that, if successful, would tilt the separation of powers, perhaps irrevocably, toward the executive branch.

And the NYT’s Charlie Savage went into detail:

On Wednesday, the Justice Department said a civil rights division official, John Gore, would defy a subpoena to testify on Thursday about its addition of a citizenship question to the census. This week, White House lawyers indicated that they would tell the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II and other former officials not to comply with subpoenas for their testimony, a person familiar with the legal strategy said.

Mr. Trump has also sued to block a congressional subpoena of his accounting firm, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin missed a deadline to turn over Mr. Trump’s tax returns to lawmakers and the former head of White House personnel security, Carl Kline, ignored a subpoena ordering him to appear for a deposition about overriding recommendations to deny security clearances.

Together, the events of the week made clear that Mr. Trump has adopted a strategy of unabashed resistance to oversight efforts by the House — reveling in abandoning even the pretense of trying to negotiate accommodations and compromise with the institution controlled by his political opponents.

“The president is attempting to repeal a congressional power of oversight that goes back to the administration of George Washington,” said Charles Tiefer, a former longtime House lawyer who is now a University of Baltimore law professor. He said “the comprehensiveness and intensity of this presidential stonewalling” exceeded anything he had seen in his 40-year career.

In other words, he wants to stop Congress from collecting information that would help the voters make their judgment about him and his administration, or that could reveal additional avenues for impeachment. And that changes the game: If the president interferes in this way, he’s preventing not just Congress from doing its job, but the voters as well. If that’s allowed, then the idea that removing Trump is the voters’ job falls apart — and once again, impeachment becomes necessary.

That thought sent me back to look at “What is impeachment for?” again. My fourth legitimate reason for impeachment is:

Congress has no other way to protect itself or the judiciary from presidential encroachment. This is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Constitution, but constitutional government doesn’t work otherwise. Congress necessarily relies on the executive branch to carry out the laws it passes. Presidents famously find loopholes that allow them to do things they want and avoid doing things they don’t want. But if a president ignores clear laws or disobeys direct court orders, Congress has to have some way to preserve the powers of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Waiting for the next election isn’t good enough, because (once the pattern is established) the next president might usurp power in the same way. Impeachment is the ultimate arrow in Congress’ quiver.

That’s the situation we seem to be in at this moment. If Trump won’t submit to the same level of congressional oversight that all previous administrations have allowed, that’s reason to impeach.

It is not your job to tell us what we need, it is your job to comply with things we need to provide oversight over you. The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day that he was subject to impeachment, because he took the power over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury.

– Lindsey Graham,
House debate on the impeachment of Bill Clinton
12-18-1998

This week’s featured posts are “Charity Liberalism and Justice Liberalism” and “Impeachment: On second thought …“.

This week everybody was talking about obstruction of Congress

This week Trump announced his intention to fight “all the subpoenas“. That’s an authoritarian position that, if he gets away with it, will fundamentally change our constitutional system. That was enough to change the position against impeachment that I announced last week.

Part of that obstruction is that Bill Barr is now backing out of his commitment to testify about the Mueller Report.

and the census

For several years now I’ve been chronicling the Republican Party’s attempts to rule from the minority. Their positions on the issues are increasingly unpopular and demographic trends are against them, but rather than move with the country they’ve decided to change the rules to make their voters count more than other voters. Hence gerrymandering, voter suppression, felon disenfranchisement, and so on, plus removing all restrictions on the ability of the rich to buy elections. These factors pile onto the already anti-democratic parts of our constitutional system, like the Electoral College and the fact that small states get as many senators as large states.

As a result, a president elected with a minority of the vote can combine with a Senate majority elected by a minority of the country to appoint Supreme Court justices who will rubber-stamp these minority-rule tactics.

The latest move in that game is to rig the census. The Constitution is clear that the census is supposed to be the “actual enumeration” of “the whole number of free persons”, and that the number of congressional seats and electoral votes each state gets is based on that number. It says nothing about citizenship or eligibility to vote, but excludes “Indians not taxed”, i.e., those living in their own nations.

The Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question to the census,

which the government stopped asking in the 1950s because of the projected undercount in communities with large immigrant populations.

But to Republicans, that undercount isn’t a bug, it’s a feature: They want states with a lot of non-citizens to lose representation.

A lawsuit is trying to block that move, largely because it was made outside the process established by Congress. The suit has now reached the Supreme Court. Given the questions asked by the justices during the hearing, predictions are that the Court will back the administration on this, on a 5-4 vote decided by those judges appointed by this minority president and approved by this minority Senate.

and 2020

Biden is in, making 20 Democratic presidential candidates. Is that everybody now? Biden opened with this video. The message is all theme and no policy:

I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as a aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.

That’s the biggest campaign-strategy split among Democrats so far: The Buttigieg/Beto candidates put values and narrative first, and the Warren/Sanders candidates have long lists of policy proposals.

I understand the argument for Biden: He won’t scare away people in the center, so he’s a good bet to hang on to those formerly Republican suburban voters who were responsible for the Democrats retaking the House in 2018. He has a working class image, so he should be strong in the industrial Midwestern states that put Trump over the top in 2016.

But here’s something to think about: What does Biden bring to the table that Amy Klobuchar doesn’t? And she doesn’t have the baggage of Anita Hill, voting for the Iraq invasion, …

Nate Silver rates Biden’s chance at the nomination higher than any other current candidate, but still makes him an underdog against the field. Although Sanders leads in at least one poll, Silver’s polling average has Biden at 28% and Sanders at 20%.

there’s a gap between where Sanders is polling and where Biden is, and empirically, it’s a relevant one. Based on historical data, we estimate that candidates with high name recognition who are polling at 20 percent (Sanders) in early national polls can expect to win their nominations about 15 percent of the time, other factors held equal. But candidates who are polling at 28 percent (Biden) win their nominations something more like 35 percent of the time, or roughly twice as often.

The interesting number in the new WaPo/ABC poll is that a majority of Democrats (54%) haven’t picked a candidate yet, and they don’t seem to be making up their minds very fast. (The same number was 56% in January.)

The Post-ABC poll, conducted largely before Biden’s Thursday campaign announcement, asked whom respondents support in an open-ended format that did not name any of the candidates. The results show notably lower levels of support than produced in polls that ask people to pick from a list of names.

So Biden leads the pack with 13% support and Sanders is second with 9% — not the kind of numbers that should scare other candidates out of the race. (One of Nate Silver’s points is that candidates who are already well-known have less room to grow their support. The undecided 54% know what Sanders and Biden are about, but they’re still looking.)

If you chase the link to the poll questions, one of them seems a lot more significant than it actually is: 47% of Democrats say they’re looking primarily for someone who agrees with them on the issues, while 39% say they’re primarily looking for someone who can beat Trump. Here’s why that result isn’t interesting: Just about everyone I know thinks that the way to beat Trump is to nominate someone who agrees with them on the issues. I think the tail wags the dog here. If you like Bernie, you think he’s the best bet to beat Trump. If you like Biden, you think he is, and so on down the line.

I think the best candidate to beat Trump is someone who threads the needle: progressive enough to motivate the base, but not scary to the suburban college-educated whites who had trouble deciding between Bush and Kerry in 2004 and probably voted for Hillary in 2016. Threading that needle was the secret to Obama’s 2008 landslide: He held Kerry’s voters, picked up some Bush voters, and motivated new people to come to the polls. Probably neither Biden nor Sanders is the person to pull that off in 2020, but I don’t know who is yet. So I’m in the 54%.

One of the things that worries me in this crowded primary race is that candidates will take positions that will come back to haunt them in the general election. I’m not talking about core issues of the progressive agenda, like Medicare for All or free college. I mean hot-button issues that most of the country is not even considering, and that will produce an immediate “That’s just wrong” reaction from a large segment of the electorate.

I feel like Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris did that in their CNN town halls, in calling for felons currently in prison to retain their voting rights. Don Lemon specifically mentioned the Boston Marathon bomber, but Bernie affirmed that all prisoners should be voting. Harris responded with a less commital “We need to have that conversation.”

That’s an attack ad waiting to happen. Given the racial disparity in felony convictions, Democrats definitely need to make an issue out of restoration of voting rights after prison terms end. But in a crowded field, there’s always a temptation to push a position too far. Murderers and rapists lining up to vote in prison is an image that will scare lots of otherwise persuadable people.

The homophobic dog whistles have started: Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera describes Pete Buttigieg as a “the young buckaroo with flamboyant ideas”. Flamboyant is a dog whistle for gay, the same way that inner-city is a dog whistle for black. Rivera makes it sound like Buttigieg is campaigning in one of Elton John’s old costumes rather than a white shirt and dark tie. And which Buttigieg ideas are so “flamboyant”?

The principles that will guide my campaign are simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: freedom, security, and democracy.

Abe Lincoln could have said that. Then again, he may have been gay too.

and Charlottesville

Biden’s video begins with the Charlottesville neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally, and with Trump saying that there were “very fine people on both sides”.

I think it’s a good move for Democrats to keep reminding the country of this moment (the low point so far in Trump’s national approval rating), because Trump can’t really counter. He continues to wink-and-nod at the extreme right, even as he denies being racist. Racism is a key part of the attraction between Trump and his base, and he’s never going to produce the whole-hearted denunciation that the majority of the country would like to hear.

He’s still winking, still pushing a false counter-narrative in which good and decent Confederate sympathizers were “quietly” protesting the removal of a Lee statue when a few violent folks got out of hand — as if that’s what the Unite the Right rally was ever about.

All you have to do to refute that story is look at the posters that convinced people to attend. The headliner was Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who got mainstream attention after his Nazi-salute producing “Hail, Trump!” speech. Numerous posters included the white nationalist “You will not replace us!” slogan, which turned into “Jews will not replace us!” during the march. The Daily Stormer poster above is nakedly anti-Semitic.

So if you went to this rally intentionally, you knew what you were supporting. And if you happened to stumble in by mistake, the “Sieg Heil!” chants should have tipped you off. So I can assert with some confidence that the number “very fine people” in that torchlight parade was very close to zero.

Meanwhile, there’s been another synagogue shooting, apparently committed by someone who buys into the kinds of conspiracy theories Trump has been pushing. But Trump himself takes no responsibility.

Speaking of Lee statues … If you ever doubt that Confederate monuments are really monuments to white supremacy, consider who almost never gets memorialized: James Longstreet. He was a top Confederate general, arguably second to Lee in military significance. But after the war he supported Reconstruction, endorsed Grant for president, resisted the Lost Cause mythology, and urged Southern white politicians to cooperate with black politicians. That got him thrown out of the Confederate pantheon.

If you were trying to commemorate Confederate military history, you’d have as many monuments to Longstreet as you do to Stonewall Jackson, and way more than to KKK-founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. But if you were trying to celebrate the heroes of white supremacy, you wouldn’t. The South didn’t.

and you also might be interested in …

Yuval Levin is a conservative writer who tries to maintain some kind of intellectual rigor. In National Review, he points out the same thing a lot of people have seen in the Mueller report: the extent to which “the people who work for the president use their judgment to decide when to do what he says and when to ignore him or flatly contradict his decisions.”

This feature of the Mueller report didn’t surprise him, though, because he has been seeing the same pattern from the beginning of this administration.

On January 15 of 2017, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, the President-Elect was interviewed by the Washington Post, and when asked about health care he said his team would soon propose its own health-care reform—that it was worked out, and that it would not reduce coverage numbers but would cost less than Obamacare. The statement sent the little conservative health policy world into a frenzy: What was this plan? Who was working on it? What kinds of ideas was it based on? The barrage of group emails was soon ended, however, by a note from a member of Trump’s little policy circle, who would soon become a senior administration official. The message was simple: Trump had no idea what he was talking about, the proposal he mentioned was a figment of his imagination, and don’t worry about it—everything was under control.

This was simultaneously reassuring and alarming in the way that Mueller’s window into the administration is. It was evidence that there were people around the president who were doing the work required to govern and make decisions, but it was also evidence that the president was not at the center of that process, and that a significant amount of their work involved deciding when to ignore him.

I will point out that this is not a general or typical feature of the American presidency. It’s the unique property of an administration whose president has not earned the respect of the people who deal with him most closely.

Nothing like it appears in the various Obama-administration insider accounts I’ve read or heard about. In fact, I can’t think of a single Obama-administration tell-all book. By and large, people left the Obama administration believing that Barack Obama was an intelligent person trying his best to do a very difficult job. What passed for a shocking revelation was that Obama sometimes sneaked a cigarette after telling Michelle he had quit. That’s the Obama equivalent of paying off the porn stars you’ve had sex with while your wife was pregnant.

Michelle Cottle of the NYT editorial board wonders what Sarah Huckabee Sanders job is: Press secretaries used to hold daily briefings, but Sanders has held only two so far in 2019. She frequently doesn’t respond to press inquiries, and what she does say is often untrue.

Veteran reporter Sam Donaldson says this isn’t normal:

“Look, I’ve had the pleasure of working with almost every press secretary beginning with Pierre Salinger of John F. Kennedy’s administration and, except for Ron Ziegler who lied for Richard Nixon, I’ve never seen anything like this with Sarah Sanders,” Donaldson told CNN host Anderson Cooper.

Donaldson explained, however, how Ziegler lied only about matters related to the Watergate scandal but “would often be truthful” on other issues.

Sanders “simply lies about everything” on behalf of President Donald Trump’s administration, Donaldson claimed. “Not just one thing.”

Twitter managed to all but eradicate ISIS propaganda on its platform, but has been much less successful with white supremacist and neo-Nazi propaganda. At an all-hands meeting, an employee asked why.

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, [a responding executive] explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

I think that if Twitter can’t teach an AI to distinguish between you and a neo-Nazi, maybe you need to take a long look in the mirror.

Interesting bit of nostalgic thinking in this morning’s NYT: Helen Andrews laments that there isn’t a Phylliss Schlafly in her generation to lead the anti-feminist fight. My hunch is that an interesting point is being obscured by distorted framing and bad prior assumptions, but I haven’t thought it all through yet.

The interesting part is the nostalgia for the days when one middle-class income was enough to raise a family on, allowing for the model of a breadwinning parent (usually male) and a caretaking parent (usually female), if that’s what a couple wanted to do. The problem, of course, is that in those days the model was more-or-less forced on couples, with a strict gender-based assignment of roles.

The bad background assumption is to connect the increase in women’s incomes with the stagnation of men’s incomes, and with the cost-explosion in housing, healthcare, and college that make two incomes necessary for a middle-class lifestyle. Those things happened at the same time, but I suspect the cause was something else entirely: The conservative political revolution that put the government on the side of employers rather than workers. With their increased bargaining power, employers squeezed workers incomes enough that the addition of a second income had minimal effect on household prosperity.

There should be a contest: What will the 10,000th lie be about?

Trump got accused of obstruction of justice by an unexpected critic: Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano. Trump, naturally, ignored the content of the criticism and went straight for an ad hominem argument:

Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile!

Orrin Kerr comments:

In Trump’s world, everyone who turns on him at one point asked him for a favor and was turned down, making Trump the top dog in the end.

and let’s close with a fantasy that came true

Have you ever dreamed about having one golden moment that everyone will still be talking about when you’ve died, even if it’s half a century later?

“Hi, my name is John Havlicek. I played for the Boston Celtics. And on April 15, 1965, I stole the ball.”

It’s interesting to consider what makes a moment like that, in addition to the beauty of the play itself. There’s the immediate situation: the deciding game of a playoff series, a one-point lead with five seconds left. And Havlicek is memorable in his own right; he went on to have a hall-of-fame career. But the play also crystalized a larger story: The biggest rivalry in 1960s basketball was Wilt Chamberlain vs. Bill Russell. Chamberlain always had better statistics (30 points in this game to Russell’s 15), but Russell’s teams almost always figured out a way to win, as they did here.

The recent sports event that comes closest is Malcolm Butler’s Super-Bowl-saving interception in 2015. Now imagine that Butler followed that moment with another dozen years of stardom, and that Super Bowl XLIX had been a Brady/Manning showdown with both still in their prime. Then you’d have another Havlicek-stole-the-ball.

I’m hoping to start driving west this afternoon, so I’ll try to accelerate the usual Monday schedule a little.

The featured post this week is “What should ‘electable’ mean?” Democrats all want a nominee who can beat Trump, but a lot of “electability” talk seems misguided to me. I don’t believe electability corresponds to a demographic profile, a position on the progressive/moderate spectrum, or even (at this point) a big lead in head-to-head polls against Trump. I think it’s pretty clear what Trump’s 2020 campaign will look like. What skills and background would best equip a Democrat to counter it?

That post should be up before 9 EDT.

The weekly summary will start with Bill Barr, Robert Mueller, and the House Judiciary Committee. Then it moves on to the various foreign-policy stories: China, North Korea, Venezuela. A number of short notes follow, before I close with a video fixing some misconceptions about Cinco de Mayo, which was yesterday. I’m hoping to put that out before noon.

I want to beat Trump as much as anybody does, but figuring out which candidate has the best chance isn’t as simple as many make it sound.

Democrats and other liberals may be splitting their loyalties among more than 20 candidates at the moment, but nearly all of us agree on one thing: It’s vital that we beat Donald Trump next year.

If Trump has four more years to assault the norms of democratic government, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, by 2024 the country will be virtually unrecognizable. For four more years, the US would be fighting for climate change rather than against it. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court would rise from 5-4 to 6-3 or 7-2 — locking in for decades the advantages corporations have over workers and consumers, upholding all the tools of minority rule, and constantly inventing new rights for conservative white Christians. Executive-branch corruption would become even more blatant, with Congress unable even to investigate it, much less do anything about it.

We can’t let that happen.

Searching for the anti-Trump. So there’s very good reason why a large chunk of the Democratic primary electorate lists “somebody who can beat Donald Trump” as their top criterion when looking for a candidate to support. Polls on this question are volatile and depend significantly on how the question is phrased, but all of them show electability as a huge factor. One poll in February found 56% of Democrats preferring “a Democrat you do NOT agree with on most issues, but would be a stronger candidate against Donald Trump” to “someone who agrees with you on most issues, but would have a hard time beating Donald Trump”. Only 33% made the opposite choice. A more recent poll phrased  the question differently [“What’s more important to you – that Democrats nominate the presidential candidate whose positions on the issues come closest to yours, or the candidate who seems most likely to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020?”] and showed smaller but still sizeable emphasis on winning [47% for “closer on the issues” vs. 40% for “more likely to win”].

Admittedly, it’s easy to overstate those results, because poll respondents undoubtedly assume that any Democrat will share certain core positions. Democratic candidates may, for example, disagree about whether universal health care is an immediate priority or a long-term goal, but none oppose it in principle. They may have more ambitious or less ambitious plans for dealing with climate change, but none argue — as Trump has — that Obama was already doing too much. Within these bounds, though, a large number of Democrats are willing to sacrifice ideological purity for someone they think will win.

But there’s a problem. Electability is not an objective quality. Without much argument, we can sort candidates into bins like male and female, white and non-white, gay and straight, young and old, and perhaps even progressive and moderate. But who is electable and who isn’t?

The economist John Maynard Keynes once compared investing in the stock market to gambling on a beauty pageant: You win not by betting on the most beautiful contestant, but by identifying the one that other people will find beautiful. That’s what we’re trying to do when we search for an electable candidate. It’s not enough to find the one who would be the best president by your own lights; you need to pick out the one that other people will vote for. The New Republic’s Alex Pareene doubts that anyone can do that:

While the impulse to vote according to how you think a candidate would appeal to people who don’t share your priorities might make sense in theory, practice has revealed time and time again that no one involved in electoral politics—from the pundits down to the caucus-goers—has a clue who or what Americans will actually vote for.

WaPo’s Dan Balz examines past failures to predict electability, starting with Donald Trump in 2016, and going back from there to Barack Obama in 2008, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. All started their campaigns by outcompeting candidates that the consensus said were more electable, and then proved their own electability by getting elected.

I confess to feeling conflicted about all this. I recognize what critics are saying, but I really, really want to beat Trump in 2020. So I want electability to mean something. But how should I look for it?

False notions of electability. Polls only help up to a point. Several polls have Joe Biden beating Trump by the widest margin, while one recent poll had Beto O’Rourke as the Democrats’ best bet. But do polls now tell us much about who the voters will support 18 months from now, after a long (and presumably dirty) campaign? Biden’s candidacy already seems a bit dull; by Election Day will marginal voters be too bored with him to show up? Beto is more exciting, but also less well known. I expect the Trump campaign to have limitless resources to devote to smearing his opponent. Will the mud more easily slide off of a candidate we already know well? Or does a long career just provide more targets?

I had similar qualms in 2016. Leading up to the primaries, polls consistently showed both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton beating Trump, but Sanders by a wider margin. (Hillary ultimately did beat Trump by 3%, which wasn’t quite enough to counter his Electoral College advantage.) But Republicans had been smearing Hillary for decades, and had not yet begun to go after Bernie. So I tried to imagine how they would in a pre-New-Hampshire-primary post. How durable, I wondered, would Sanders’ poll lead over Trump be once he had his own invented scandal, like Obama’s birth certificate or Hillary’s role (whatever it was supposed to have been) in Benghazi? (This time around, Republicans are already working to create a scandal for Biden.)

Another thing electable shouldn’t mean is white straight Christian male. A black man and a white woman have won the popular vote in the last three presidential elections. Nancy Pelosi was supposed to doom Democrats’ chance of taking the House in 2018, but she didn’t. Women like Amy Klobuchar have won Senate seats by wide margins in the kinds of states Democrats need to win in 2020 (Minnesota). Kirsten Gillibrand’s first seat in Congress came from a red district in upstate New York. Pete Buttigieg may be the first major gay contender, but I want to see what actual voters have to say before I eliminate him.

I’m also suspicious of ideological definitions of electability. The centrist version says that Trump has abandoned the educated suburban Republicans, whose votes might be available to a Democrat moderate enough not to scare them away. 2018 seemed to bear this out; the gains that allowed Democrats to retake the House came mostly in suburban districts that had formerly elected Republicans. But the long-term record of this idea is poor; Republicans have been constantly shifting to the right since Ronald Reagan nearly took the nomination from incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976, and yet somehow the abandoned center never provides enough votes to sweep Democrats into uncontested power. Instead, Democrats’ refusal to defend their left flank has pushed ambitious liberal ideas out of the national conversation entirely, and (until recently) has caused the center to move steadily to the right at the Republicans’ pace.

So electable can’t just mean moderate. It also can’t just mean progressive. The left-wing theory of electability is that in a polarized country, elections depend on turnout, so the candidate who best excites the base is most electable. Since turnout tends to be lowest among the poor, non-whites, and young people, candidates who appeal to these groups — generally more progressive candidates — should do better than moderates.

As sensible as that may sound in theory, evidence of it actually working is pretty thin. I’m still waiting for the progressive version of Marco Rubio: In 2010, he ran as a Tea Partier, won the Republican primary against an establishment candidate, and then went on to capture a Senate seat in a purple state. Stacey Abrams almost pulled off an even more impressive feat last year in the Georgia governor’s race, but fell short (with some voting irregularities that may have made the difference). So far, successful progressive stars have come areas that Democrats would hold in any case, like Vermont (Bernie Sanders), Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren), and Queens (AOC). They’re winning blue districts by matching the people who already vote, not by stimulating new turnout that flips red districts.

Both sides try to claim Barack Obama as an example of their theory working, because Obama’s 2008 landslide did everything right: He inspired new turnout and he held the center. In the most impressive Democratic victory of recent years — Doug Jones winning a Senate race in Alabama — Jones won as a moderate alternative to the far-right Roy Moore, not as a progressive. But he got a big turnout from black voters anyway.

How the 2020 campaign shapes up. Trump won in 2016 with only 46% of the vote, and many his voters did not have a particularly high opinion of him. (In an exit poll, only 41% of Trump voters said they strongly favored Trump, while 50% cited dislike of his opponent as their motivation.) According to 538’s weighted average of approval polls, he had a brief honeymoon period shortly after the inauguration, when his approval was higher than his disapproval, but still not over 50%. (Obama’s approval during his honeymoon period was in the high 60s.) More recently, he’s been stuck in a narrow 39%-43% approval range. No jobs report can bring that number up; no gaffe or evidence of corruption can bring it down.

In short, it is inconceivable that Trump will be re-elected because a majority of voters actually like him or want him to continue as president. The number of people who say they will definitely not vote for Trump in 2020 has been running in the 55%-58% range.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t win; just that he only has one route to victory: Some chunk of the electorate — just enough to let Trump sneak through the door — needs to conclude that the Democrat is even worse. So Trump needs to sow dissension among Democrats, as he (and the Russians) did in 2016.

To a certain extent he’ll run by raising support: He’ll take credit for the economy (assuming that it’s still good) and for a few other (mostly fake) accomplishments like the denuclearization of North Korea. He’ll remind Evangelicals how he came through for them with judicial appointments. He’ll tell nativists about the invasion of Hispanics he’s prevented. He’ll wink and nod at white supremacists, while distancing himself from the terrorists he clearly inspires. He’ll claim to have helped farmers, even though he hasn’t. He’ll conjure up another fantasy about the fantastic healthcare plan he’ll reveal someday, the one that covers everybody and costs less and doesn’t require any new taxes.

But a lot of the positive hopes he inspired in 2016 aren’t credible any more. We all know he isn’t going to fill his administration with “the best people” or make “great deals” to end the trade deficit. He’s not going to make other countries respect America. His tax cut isn’t going to pay for itself and isn’t going to provide any serious relief to working people. His infrastructure plan is always going to be vapor. He isn’t going to settle down and become more presidential someday.

In short, that 39%-43% isn’t going to grow, because he’s really not even talking to anyone else. His famous “What have you got to lose?” message to black voters in 2016 is paradigmatic: It wasn’t delivered to blacks at all. He was speaking about blacks in Detroit, but to whites in a suburb of Lansing. The point of that speech was to convince his base that he has a message for blacks. That’s all.

Without growing his base, how will he get up to the 46%-or-so that he needs to let the Electoral College work its dark magic? He’ll need to smear the Democratic candidate enough that dissident Republicans will get behind him and marginal Democrats will decide not to vote. That’s the only path to victory, so that’s what he’ll do.

How do we cope with that? The #1 thing Democrats need to avoid is framing the 2020 primary campaign as a death struggle between rival factions, one of which will lose and probably still feel disaffected in November. If Bernie-ites see beating Biden as revenge on the establishment for his loss to Hillary in 2016, or if centrists who are still angry with Bernie for pushing his 2016 campaign long past the point of hopelessness pull out all the stops to deny Bernie again, then we’re in trouble. There’s going to be conflict in the primaries, but it needs to be a fight between siblings, not enemies.

Each campaign talks about “vetting” its rivals, but there’s a difference between raising difficult issues and laying the groundwork for a Trump smear. So, for example, it’s fine to question Sanders or Warren about how they plan to pass and pay for their ambitious plans, but it’s out of bounds to make them answer for “socialism” in Venezuela. It’s fine to point out that Klobuchar and Booker are not supporters of Medicare for All, and that each has benefited from pharmaceutical-industry contributions in past campaigns. But it’s out of bounds to declare, as if it were a proven fact, that either is “bought and paid for”. And so on.

Admittedly, my Facebook news feed is probably not the most representative window into American opinion. But there’s one pattern among progressives that has me worried: a tendency to inflate Bernie’s support (the one recent poll that had him ahead of Biden got an amazing amount of attention on my feed, and the other recent poll that had him far behind got dissed on bogus grounds) combined with a persecution narrative about all the dark forces that are working behind the scenes to ruin his chances. (MSNBC is supposedly in the tank for Biden because it’s owned by Comcast, even though I’ve seen no evidence that Comcast is either rooting for Biden or interfering with MSNBC’s editorial decisions.) It’s obvious how that could play out disastrously: If Bernie’s support turns out to be less than his supporters have convinced themselves it is, the conspiracy-theory explanation of that shortfall will be ready, and Trump will be ready to exploit it to divide his opposition.

I think that all candidates currently in the race deserve a presumption of good will. No matter now much I may disagree with some position one of them takes, I’m going to listen to their justification and consider the possibility that they really believe it. I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that they must be either crazy or corrupt, as Trump is bound to claim.

Who is electable? When I judge electability, I’m not looking for a demographic profile or a particular set of policies. Instead, I’m looking for someone who will make a good spokesperson for Democratic values, who has the skills to perform well in a debate with Trump, who thinks well on his or her feet, and who demonstrates an ability to appeal to people of all races and classes and religions and genders. I’m looking for someone who can deliver an anti-Trump critique without sounding like the pot criticizing the kettle.

I’m looking for someone mud won’t stick to, who can deflect criticism with humor, and who can deliver a sting without sounding nasty. I want a candidate who can stand up to hostile questioning without getting flustered or testy or evasive. I want someone who can get specific on policy details, but never loses sight of the millions of Americans who aren’t political wonks.

Most of all, I’m looking for someone who uses the Light Side of the Political Force, someone who can raise enthusiasm without resorting to fear or anger. Fear and anger live on Trump’s home turf; going there plays into his hand, and will motivate his voters more than ours. But our candidate also can’t be dull. If none of the people who pay attention to politics this early can get excited about a candidate, how are we going to convince the apathetic to come out and vote?

As I hope you can tell, I haven’t determined yet who the most electable candidate is. I think establishing who does or doesn’t have these qualities is what this part of the campaign is for. At this point, I’m rooting for all 20+ of them. I hope one of them surprises me.

No Sift next week. The next posts will appear on May 20.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

– James Comey, “How Trump Co-Opts Leaders Like Bill Barr“

This week’s featured post is “What should ‘electable’ mean?“. If you happen to be near Quincy, Illinois (my hometown) next Sunday, I’ll be speaking at the Unitarian church at 10:45.

This week everybody was talking about Bill Barr, Robert Mueller, and Congress

Trump is now saying that Mueller should not testify to the House Judiciary Committee. May 15 had been put forward as a date for Mueller to appear, but no definite agreement had been made.

It’s not clear to me how much power Trump has to stop Mueller’s testimony, or whether he is officially invoking that power or just blathering. Mueller is still a DoJ employee, so Trump could order him not to testify. But Mueller has been expected to leave his job soon, now that his investigation has wrapped up. Once he is a private citizen, it would be up to him whether to testify, though he may still honor executive privilege claims that seem legitimate to him. Mueller himself hasn’t commented yet.

This is another example of incoherence in Trump’s message. He claims Mueller has “totally exonerated” him. If that’s the case, he should want Mueller testifying in public as much as he can.

Tuesday it came out that Barr had received a letter from Mueller protesting Barr’s characterization of the report and requesting that the summaries contained in the report itself be released, which Barr decided not to do. In his subsequent testimony to Congress, Barr was asked whether Mueller agreed with his summary, and his answer gave no indication that there was any friction between them. The exact statement of the question and answer leave me thinking that it couldn’t be prosecuted as lying to Congress, but I agree with Senator Leahy: “”Mr. Barr, I feel that your answer was purposely misleading, and I think others do, too.”

Barr testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee the next day, and the hearing was contentious. He was clearly playing his role as Trump’s defender rather than attorney general. He made hair-splitting distinctions (like the difference between “firing” Mueller and “having a special counsel removed for conflict” even though the conflicts were bogus). When asked whether the White House would claim executive privilege, Barr’s answer talked about what “we” would do, not what the White House would do.

He put forward a bizarre explanation of why Trump did not obstruct justice, which Jonathan Chait summarized as “It’s not obstruction if the obstruction works.” He made a big deal about the lack of an underlying crime, which is not a factor in the definition of obstruction.

Barr then refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, and has ignored a subpoena for the unredacted Mueller Report. The Judiciary Committee is threatening to find him in contempt, though it’s not clear how they would enforce any penalties. Chair Jerry Nadler:

The choice is simple: We can stand up to this president in defense of the country and the Constitution we love, or we can let the moment pass us by.

Bill Barr’s complete embrace of Trumpism and rejection of traditional Justice Department standards of independence and the rule of law has provoked a lot of discussion about what happens to people when they join the Trump administration. Jim Comey, who has been in Trump’s orbit before being ejected from it, thinks he knows.

Trump’s corruption of those around him starts with behavior Comey has experienced first-hand.

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. … Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.

Then his expectations and peer pressure push you to flatter him in public.

From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.

Then you stop defending the institutions you’re responsible for.

Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. Yet you are silent.

You become convinced that if you weren’t in your current position, things would be much worse.

you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now.

By the end, you have convinced yourself that you must hold onto your job, no matter what it takes to do so.

You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

and foreign policy

China: For some while we’ve been hearing that a trade deal with China was near. Then yesterday Trump tweeted:

For 10 months, China has been paying Tariffs to the USA of 25% on 50 Billion Dollars of High Tech, and 10% on 200 Billion Dollars of other goods. … The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday.

Stock markets around the world started plunging. Chinese officials “had been scheduled to arrive Wednesday for what was shaping up to be the final round of negotiations”, but now they’re not sure when or whether to come.

North Korea: Increasingly, it looks like the Trump/Kim summits have accomplished nothing beyond raising Kim Jong Un’s stature at home. This weekend, North Korea fired “multiple projectiles” towards Japan in what appears to be some kind of weapons-system test.

Trump has claimed that his diplomacy with Kim was getting rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, tweeting at one point that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

Saturday’s launch comes weeks after North Korea announced it had conducted a test launch of a “new-type tactical guided weapon” that was personally overseen by Kim.

The North Korean leader declared a moratorium on missile and nuclear testing last year, but satellite imagery reported in recent months has shown continuing nuclear activity at the country’s plants.

Venezuela: An attempted coup to unseat Venezuelan President Maduro failed this week.

The NYT has an interesting article about how coups work, and why this one didn’t. It reminded me of the high-school-party problem: The cool kids will come only if they think the other cool kids are coming. Nobody wants to be on the losing side, so a coup gets the support of the various power brokers only if they think the other power brokers are in.

A weird addendum to the whole event came after Trump talked on the phone to Putin. Trump came out of the call claiming that Putin “is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela, other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela.” WaPo’s Aaron Blake points out that Secretary of State Pompeo is saying the exact opposite: He characterized the Russian (and allied Cuban) presence in Venezuela as “an invasion”.

It’s yet another example of Trump talking to Putin and then repeating Putin’s propaganda, even when it undercuts his own administration.

but here are two article you might like that have nothing to do with Trump or politics

InVerse reports what happens when researchers hook monkeys up to an AI image generator, looking to home in on images that provoke the most neural stimulation. The maximally stimulating images are vaguely dream-like: They have realistic elements (that resemble, say, faces) but are also oddly wrong.

Don’t miss Guinevere Turner’s “My Childhood in a Cult” in the April 29 New Yorker. Turner grew up in the Lyman Family, a little-known cult that is still around.

What makes her account unique is that she didn’t experience two of the standard elements in the typical I-left-a-cult story: She wasn’t recruited and didn’t escape. Her mother joined the Family when she was pregnant with Guinevere, and (although mother and child had little to do with each other inside the cult), she was thrown out at age 11 when her mother left. She went back for a visit before starting college at 18, thought about staying, but then didn’t.

That allows her to give a remarkably balanced view of life in the Lyman Family. She sees the absurdity (Lyman’s central tenet was that spaceships would come to take him and his followers to Venus) and the ugliness (cult leaders sometimes chose 13-year-old girls to be their wives). But she also has good memories of living in a close-knit community.

In the back yard of our Los Angeles compound, the adults built a wooden pyramid, big enough to hold about twenty kids, small stilts raising it a few feet off the ground. The smell of blooming jasmine surrounded us as we climbed into it at night, sat cross-legged in a circle, and sang one note all together. We would do this for hours. There were skylights in the ceiling, and we stared up at the stars as we sang. I loved those moments, holding on to the note until I thought my lungs would burst, then taking a deep breath and starting again. It felt as if we were one being

and you also might be interested in …

I’m having a hard time figuring out whether the Trump/Schumer/Pelosi agreement to pursue an infrastructure plan actually means anything. I suspect it doesn’t.

Senate Republicans are cold to the idea, so Trump would have to do some serious arm-twisting to make legislation happen. His own chief of staff is also against it, which suggests that Trump was just free-lancing here and has no plan beyond the initial headline.

The shooter at the Poway synagogue belongs to a congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, an off-shoot that finds mainstream Presbyterianism too liberal. Apparently his manifesto (which I have not read) is full of “not only invective against Jews and racial minorities but also cogent Christian theology he heard in the pews.”

If we were talking about a mosque rather than an evangelical Christian church, we’d be hearing claims that the young man had been “radicalized” by his religious institution, or that someone at the church must have known what he was planning, but didn’t report it. But no one is going to suggest that the government should “watch and study” OPC churches, or that some of them may have to be shut down. That because we have freedom of religion in America — at least for Christians.

Another good jobs report pushes down the unemployment rate. This looks good for Trump, but it’s important to put it in the right context: Trump is continuing a trend that started in Obama’s first term.

Paul Krugman’s “The Trouble With Joe and Bernie” makes a good point: Neither candidate seems prepared for what would obviously happen after they got elected.

No matter how many friends he has made across the aisle in Congress, Biden is not going to get Republicans to negotiate bipartisan solutions. Obama tried that and it didn’t work.

what Sanders appears to believe is that he can convince voters not just to support progressive policies, but to support sweeping policy changes that would try to fix things most people don’t consider broken.

That, after all, is what his Medicare for All push, which would eliminate private insurance, amounts to. He is saying to the 180 million Americans who currently have private insurance, many of whom are satisfied with their coverage: “I’m going to take away the insurance you have and replace it with a government program. Also, you’re going to pay a lot more in taxes. But trust me, the program will be better than what you have now, and the new taxes will be less than you currently pay in premiums.”

Could those claims be true? Yes. Will voters believe them? Probably not.

I’m always amused when somebody presents an example they think obviously favors their point, when to me it obviously doesn’t. Electoral College defender Dan McLaughlin poses this hypothetical:

R candidate wins 48 states by identical 54-46 margins, D wins CA, NY & DC by 75-25 margins, D wins national popular vote. Who should win?

And my answer is: The candidate who gets the most votes. I don’t see why votes should count less if they clump together in a few states. Americans are Americans, no matter what state they live in.

Rachel Held Evans, a liberal Christian writer that I have quoted several times on this blog, died this week at age 37.

Remember the Deepwater Horizon disaster, when a problem with an offshore drilling platform caused 4.9 million barrels of crude oil to pour into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of months? Afterward, new rules were put into effect to prevent something like that from happening again. This week the Trump administration is expected to roll back a bunch of those rules. Oil companies will be grateful.

When Stephen Moore was nominated for the board of the Federal Reserve, I wondered if Senate Republicans could go that far. I mean, it’s one thing to appoint know-nothing yahoos to manage things Republicans don’t care about, like education or public housing. But the Fed controls money. Surely, I suggested, there are still some standards when we’re talking about money.

Well, apparently so. Moore’s nomination was withdrawn Thursday afternoon after a number of Republican senators expressed their doubts about supporting him. This follows fellow know-nothing Herman Cain withdrawing from consideration for the Fed board two weeks ago.

For years, anti-gay Christians have piously talked about loving the sinner while hating the sin. Now a Methodist confirmation class has flipped the script on their denomination, whose General Conference strengthened its prohibitions against gay clergy and raised the penalties for performing same-sex marriages.

The eight 13-14-year-olds making up the confirmation class at First United Methodist Church in Omaha read a letter to the congregation expressing great love for their church, but declining to participate in the denomination’s immorality by becoming members.

We have spent the year learning about our faith and clarifying our beliefs. Most of us started the confirmation year assuming that we would join the church at the end. But with the action of the General Conference in February, we are disappointed about the direction the United Methodist denomination is heading. We are concerned that if we join at this time, we will be sending a message that we approve of this decision. We want to be clear that, while we love our congregation, we believe that the United Methodist policies on LGBTQ+ clergy and same-sex marriage are immoral.

and let’s close by fixing a common mistake

If you celebrated Cinco de Mayo yesterday, you probably did it wrong.

Much to cover today. I suspect the Sift will run a bit late this morning, because I’m in the Mountain Time Zone (just outside of Glacier National Park). On the other hand, my body is still on Eastern Time, so maybe it will all even out.

Today’s featured post, “The Weakness of America First” will link two big stories that are usually discussed separately: the trade war with China and the prospects of a shooting war with Iran. In both cases, President Obama had a multi-lateral approach in place, which Trump has junked in favor of one-on-one pressure, so far without any positive results. I’ll argue that not only is a go-it-alone approach fundamentally weaker, but that a pure self-interest pitch abandons the persuasive moral force of a policy based on a principled vision of a world order. Imagine being a citizen of Iran or China: Obama wanted your country to become a responsible member of the community of nations, while Trump just wants to push you around.

That should be out around 9 EDT (7 MDT) or so.

The biggest news these last two weeks has been Alabama’s abortion ban, which is the most outrageous of a series of red-state attempts to force the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. If you’re an Alabama man who wants to make sure his genes propagate into the next generation, rape has become a viable strategy.

Two other things shouldn’t get pushed out of our attention, though: A UN assessment of global biological diversity says that a million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades. And Trump’s recent moves in his struggle with Congress greatly increase his threat to American democracy.

That’s depressing enough to call for an optimistic closing: Finland is educating its people on how to spot fake news, and it seems to be working. Those will all be in the weekly summary, which I’ll predict to appear around 1 EDT.

If we’re just for ourselves, why should anyone else cooperate with us?

The news these last two weeks has been full of foreign policy. The trade war with China has heated up. Conflict with Iran seems closer than ever to a shooting war.

It’s easy to get lost in the details of either story and miss the larger picture: These are both countries that President Obama tried to deal with by forming a broad alliance based on principles. But Trump tore up those agreements and processes in favor of going it alone as part of his “America First” vision.

In both cases, Trump’s approach has put the United States in a far weaker position.

China. On trade, American policy for decades has revolved around establishing “rules of the road”: principles of fair trade that large coalitions of nations could agree to, establishing a club that rogue nations might want to join badly enough to change their behavior. You can argue with the content of any particular agreement — maybe you have a different vision of fair trade and want different rules — but the principle is sound.

Trump has taken a different approach: The United States is bigger than the other kids on the playground, so we’ll make them play a game that we win. Our size advantage is bigger when we deal with other nations one-by-one, so that’s how we’ll do it.

It hasn’t worked. Sovereign nations don’t like to be dictated to, and a foreign leader can gain political support by resisting our domination, even if there’s an economic price to pay.

We should have learned this lesson from Cuba. We are much, much bigger than Cuba, and we threw the biggest economic punch we have: a complete embargo. Cuba is probably considerably poorer than it would be if it had been trading with America these last 57 years. But that economic blow did not destabilize the Castro government or make it do what we wanted.

A more recent signal is that Friday the Trump administration punted on its tariffs on Canadian and Mexican steel and aluminum, getting little more than a return to the status quo ante. No major economy is more dependent on the American market than Canada is. If we can’t use that advantage to push Canada around, what countries can we expect to yield to this approach?

Not China, apparently. China’s economy will be equal to ours in a few years, if it isn’t already. (Roughly, China has four times as many people at a quarter our standard of living. Catching up is easier than leading, though, so their economy is growing much faster than ours. The question is when their economy will pass ours, not whether.) China’s economy is more dependent on exports than ours is, so a tariff war strikes harder there. But I suspect their government is less vulnerable to popular discontent than ours, which points the other way.

So Trump’s tariff threats have not brought the Chinese to their knees. And since that’s the only card he knows how to play, he has to keep raising the stakes, assessing larger and larger tariffs on more and more Chinese goods. Meanwhile, Chinese reprisals are hitting America farmers hard, and government bailouts are a poor substitute for a fair price on soybeans.

In addition to just wanting to export more and import less, the US has legitimate issues with China: protecting intellectual property, mainly, and perhaps also an artificially low valuation of China’s currency. But those are rules-of-the-road issues. Wouldn’t it make more sense to form a club that obeyed those rules, and make it so attractive that China would change its behavior in order to join?

That was the whole idea behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump pulled the plug on. I know lots of people had lots of complaints with various features of the TPP, but the general strategy was correct: Don’t negotiate with China one-on-one, negotiate as part of a trade alliance that also includes Japan, Canada, Singapore, and a bunch of other nations.

Iran. The other big foreign-policy story of recent weeks has been the increased tensions with Iran, which led to this Trump tweet on Sunday:

If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!

This resembles his fire-and-fury threat against North Korea, which has led neither to fire and fury nor to any substantive concessions from the Kim regime. The Hill sums up recent escalations:

In recent weeks, the U.S. has deployed a carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf in response to what national security adviser John Bolton said were aggressive moves by Iran in the region. On Wednesday, the State Department pulled all nonemergency personnel from Iraq, citing possible threats from sectarian militias with ties to Iran.

We’ve also made noises about sending 120,000 troops to the area, and have been ratcheting up pressure on Iran’s economy, trying to choke off its oil exports. (Iran’s biggest customer is China, by the way. What if China strikes back against Trump’s tariffs with something more than just reprisal tariffs?)

Many have compared this increasing pressure to the build-up to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2002-2003, but one feature of President Bush’s strategy is missing: our allies. The British, for example, don’t seem to be on board.

The top British general in the US-led coalition against Isis has said there is no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria, directly contradicting US assertions used to justify a military buildup in the region.

Iran is roughly three times the size of Iraq, so a reasonable guess would be that war with Iran would be three times as nasty. Wouldn’t it be nice to confront Iran with a coalition of powerful nations rather than stand alone against them?

Guess what? Obama did precisely that, and Trump tore it up.

The Iran nuclear agreement included not just us and them, but also the United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany, and France, plus the EU. Those countries were all committed to re-establishing economic sanctions if Iran violated the terms of the agreement, which so far it seems not to have done. (Though it has announced that it may start enriching uranium again, given that it’s getting so little benefit out of the deal now that Trump has unilaterally imposed new sanctions.)

If that deal unravels, and if the other parties to the deal blame the US (as they clearly should), then we’ll be in a far worse position than we were before the deal was signed: Iran will be on course for a nuclear weapon again, and we’ll be on our own trying to stop them.

America First means America Alone. The United States is strongest when it stands for something more than just its own interests. If it stands for human rights, for mutual security, for a fair system of international trade, for nuclear non-proliferation, and for a multi-national approach to global challenges like climate change, then the US can lead a broad coalition and get things done.

What’s more, a principle-based approach is a bigger political threat to governments that oppose us. Imagine you’re a citizen of China or Iran. President Obama was asking your country to become a responsible member of the community of nations. But Trump just wants to push your country around and gain an advantage over you. When your own government starts asking you to make sacrifices, aren’t you more likely to make them willingly against Trump?

If we have no vision of a just world order, but are just out to win for ourselves, why should anyone cooperate with us? Why should traditional allies like Canada or the UK support us? Why should dissident elements in Iran or China put pressure on their leaders to make a deal with us?

America First means America Alone, facing rivals who are internally united against us. Far from being “great again”, Trump’s America is considerably weaker than America has been in our lifetimes.

Throughout that first year in Germany [1933-34], [American Ambassador William] Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest.

– Erik Larsen, In the Garden of Beasts (2011)

This week’s featured post is “The Weakness of America First“.

If you’re wondering how I spent my week off, check out the talk I gave at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois: “You’re Not a Thing at All, or the Political Implications of Dunbar’s Number“. It’s not actually about the treatment of trans and gender-binary people, but is more of a broad meditation sparked by those concerns. It includes my typical range of cultural references, from a 1930s Disney cartoon to Tolstoy.

This week everybody was talking about Alabama’s abortion ban

Alabama passed a law making abortion illegal, in direct contradiction to Roe v Wade. The new law would force Alabama’s women — even minors — to carry their rapist’s child, making rape a viable male reproduction strategy. (They may catch you eventually, but your genes will propagate into the next generation.) That’s why I propose renaming this “The Rapist Reproduction Act of 2019”.

Missouri’s legislature also passed a law making abortion illegal after eight weeks. Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, and Georgia have passed six-week bans. These laws are de facto bans on most abortions, since many women will not know they are pregnant at that point.

This Facebook meme suggests in Game-of-Thrones terms how women might handle this news.

OK, OK, I’ll explain it for non-GoT-fans: After seeing her father beheaded and being forced into solitary homelessness herself, but before getting enough training to become the warrior and assassin she eventually becomes, the young Arya Stark comforts herself as she goes to sleep each night by reciting the names of the people she’s going to kill someday.

The meme isn’t about killing per se, but about refusing to forget the wrongs done to you, even if you have no immediate way to strike back. No matter how long it takes, women are going to kill the careers of the politicians who are making war on them.

The apparent purpose of Alabama’s monstrous law is to make this very conservative Supreme Court reconsider the legal status of abortion.

It’s worth remembering how we come to have a Supreme Court majority that is far more conservative than the American people: The Republican Senate (elected mainly by small states, and representing a minority of voters)  denied President Obama (who won his elections by margins of 53%-46% and 51%-47%) his constitutional right to appoint a moderate justice (Merrick Garland) in his final year in office. Instead, the last two extremely conservative justices (Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) have been appointed by a minority-elected president (Trump lost the popular vote 46%-48%, but won in the Electoral College) and approved by that same minority-elected Senate.

Republicans sometimes justify the power of the Senate and the Electoral College by saying it protects against the tyranny of the majority. But in this case it enables a tyranny of the minority, which is far worse. If our system respected the will of voters, the Court would have a solid center-left majority, and Roe would be safe.

A number of constitutional remedies have been proposed to make the Senate more democratic, but here’s a simpler approach: Outlaw gerrymandering (to make the House better reflect the voters) and then move the special powers of the Senate (approving nominees and treaties) to the more representative House. That also would require a constitutional amendment, but one that I believe would be easier to pass than a reapportionment of the Senate.

Disempowering the Senate would resemble the path taken in the United Kingdom: They’ve never eliminated their unrepresentative House of Lords, they’ve just taken away most of its powers.

I’ll take this opportunity to repeat my opinion about abortion and the law: The motive to ban abortion comes from some very suspect and speculative theology. Conservative Christians believe (for reasons I don’t understand, because the Bible says nothing of the kind, see below) that from the moment of conception, a fetus has a soul, so killing it is murder.

I don’t think law should be based on theology, particularly theology that is only believed by a minority sect or faction. The Founders knew their English history, in which religion had been causing repression, rebellion, and civil war for the previous quarter century. They wanted no part of that, so they wrote a secular Constitution and separated church from state. I respect the wisdom of their reasoning in this matter.

What I just wrote says nothing about the morality of abortion, which each person, family, and church can decide for itself. I’m just saying that government should stay out of the issue, because government should take no position in theological arguments.

Back in 2012, I wrote about what legal abortion has meant in my life. It’s not just about women; any man who ties his life to a woman’s (by, say, marrying one) loses the ability to make reliable long-term plans if abortion isn’t an option.

As I’ve previously said on several occasions, I have no idea why so many Protestants think that an anti-abortion position is part of their religion. The Bible says nothing directly about when a soul enters the developing body of a fetus, and what it does say points against the idea that ensoulment happens at fertilization. (Genesis 2:7 gives a strong hint that the soul enters the body with the first breath, which is a common belief among Jews.)

It’s not like the writers of the Bible were unfamiliar with abortion. The kinds of surgical abortions we do now were unknown then, but every culture has had folklore (sometimes fairly accurate) about ways to cause a miscarriage. Women have been using that knowledge to terminate unwanted pregnancies since the beginning of time. If neither Jesus nor the Old Testament lawgivers saw fit to mention this practice, maybe Bible-based Christians shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.

I also think that many people who claim to believe fertilized ova have souls actually don’t believe that. In-vitro fertilization clinics kill several zygotes for every one they implant in a womb, yet that doesn’t seem to upset most of the anti-abortion crowd. The Alabama law, for example, does not mention IVF clinics. The only laws deemed worth passing are the ones that regulate women’s sexuality and ability to control the course of their lives.

If anti-abortion folks don’t believe their own rhetoric, then what does motivate them? Two things, I believe. Some are motivated by a horror of female promiscuity. (Without abortion, there is no completely effective birth control. So promiscuous women face the prospect of an unwanted child.) But simple tribalism explains more than we commonly think. When abortion bans are passed, conservative Christians see their side winning.

and war and trade war

The featured post discusses the common element in our trade war with China and our drift towards a shooting war with Iran: In each case, we’ve left our usual allies behind, and are unilaterally ratcheting up pressure on a rival country on the basis of self-interest, without any principled basis.

With regard to Iran and its “bad behavior“, think about how we’d react if Iran were behaving as badly as our ally Saudi Arabia: What if an Iranian expatriate took up residence in the US, wrote anti-Iran-government articles for the Washington Post, and then was lured into an Iranian embassy and murdered?

Hugh Hewitt cites “Iran’s complicity in the Syrian genocide as Tehran continues propping up Bashar al-Assad”. But he is strangely silent about Assad’s other big ally: Putin’s Russia.

but we need to think about extinction

The UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services put out a report warning that a million species are in danger of extinction in the coming decades.

The report … points to five main drivers of modern extinction. Those factors are, in diminishing order of magnitude, changes in land and sea use, hunting and fishing pressures, climate change, pollution, and invasive species.

and the threat to democracy

I was going to write a separate article about the various ways Trump is threatening American democracy, but CNN’s Julian Zelizer did it for me. All recent presidents have had conflicts with Congress and have tried to expand executive power, but what Trump is doing is substantively different.

For one thing, Trump isn’t just fighting one battle. Across the board, he is making unprecedented claims of power, and denying that the legislative and judicial branches of government have the power to check him or hold him accountable. The breadth of this push towards autocracy in some ways makes the problem harder to see than if Trump’s excesses were concentrated in one area: Rather than a smoking gun, much of the public just sees the fog of war.

Zelizer focuses on four issues:

• delegitimizing Congressional oversight
• using the bully pulpit for disinformation
• normalizing his own conflicts of interest
• using his national emergency power to seize Congress’ constitutional power of the purse.

I would add one more: claiming direct White House control over the Justice Department. For the first time since Nixon’s John Mitchell (who eventually went to jail), an attorney general is repeating partisan talking points, misrepresenting the results of an investigation, and targeting Justice Department officials who dared to investigate the president. It is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the AG and the president’s personal lawyers.

Rachel Maddow dramatized the “delegitimizing oversight” point Wednesday by going back to Trump’s campaign statement that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing any supporters. Rachel elaborated with this question: If Trump did shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, how could he be held accountable for it, given the positions his lawyers and his attorney general have put forward? MaddowBlog’s Steve Benen sums up:

Between Attorney General Bill Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and the president’s private attorneys, we’re supposed to believe that Donald Trump can’t be charged with a crime, can’t be investigated by Congress, and has the authority to end any investigation of which he disapproves.

The “can’t be investigated by Congress” part was new this week. In a court hearing about Trump’s lawsuit to block his accounting firm from responding to a Congressional subpoena, Trump lawyer William Consovoy argued that Congress has no “law enforcement” role under the Constitution, and so any investigation of Trump’s lawbreaking would be unconstitutional. The WaPo’s Dana Millbank pulls this exchange with Judge Amit Mehta out of the transcript:

If “a president was involved in some corrupt enterprise, you mean to tell me because he is the president of the United States, Congress would not have power to investigate?”

No, Consovoy said, because that’s “not pursuant to its legislative agenda.”

Mehta noted that this would have invalidated the Senate’s Watergate hearings.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin made a similar argument in announcing that he would defy the law that gives House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal the right to view any tax return, including the president’s, on request. The law was passed after the Teapot Dome scandal, when Congress realized that the administration would have no motivation to investigate its own wrongdoing. So Neal is applying the law for precisely the purpose Congress intended, and Mnuchin is saying no.

The significance of the third point, normalizing conflicts of interest, doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. Conceivably, one way the China trade war could end is that a Chinese company with government ties rents a big space at Trump Tower (which is having trouble finding tenants) or some other Trump property, and pays an absurdly high rate on it. Given how secretive President 46% is about his finances, we might never know. And even if we did, the quid pro quo might be impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt. (According to Trump’s lawyers, it couldn’t even be investigated before he leaves office.)

In short, Trump’s continuing interest in his business empire leaves the door wide open to any kind of bribe, foreign or domestic. Already it is considered advisable for foreign diplomats to stay at Trump International Hotel. If you’re a businessman or lobbyist and you want access to the president himself, write him a check for $200,000 and join Mar-a-Lago. (Remember when it was supposed to be scandalous that people might hope to gain access by giving to Hillary’s Clinton’s charity? At least they weren’t putting money directly into her pocket.)

This is one way in which Trump’s America already resembles the stereotypical banana republic: If you want to do public business with the government, first do private business with El Presidente or his family.

This morning’s NYT reveals that transactions in Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s accounts with Deutsche Bank raised money-laundering concerns that bank officials chose not to report to the government.

When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.

Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.

The point of presidents putting their assets into a blind trust (or converting them all to government bonds, as President Obama did) is precisely to avoid these kinds of situations, which are common in autocracies.

The administration is also trying to limit judicial power.

Vice President Pence on Wednesday announced that the administration will challenge the ability of federal district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions that halt policies advocated by President Trump.

Courts have repeatedly stopped the administration from doing unconstitutional or illegal things. The first version of its Muslim Ban, for example, was a clear attempt to discriminate on the basis of religion. (The Supreme Court ultimately validated the third version, which had been toned down in certain ways.) Its current efforts to deny asylum claims without a hearing are illegal.

Pence is now proposing that judges only have the power to “decide no more than the cases before them”. If, for example, some new administrative action would infringe on my right to vote or my freedom of speech, a judge might rule in favor of my lawsuit, but all other people affected by the action would have to file their own lawsuits. If a federal judge in Hawaii finds that an immigration ban is illegal, it could still be applied in Virginia.

In short, using the courts to stop Trump from doing illegal things would become much harder, and in some cases impractical.

To sum up: Power has a tipping point. Once a leader acquires a certain amount of power, no one else is strong enough to stand in the way of future power grabs. If Trump gets his way in his current disputes with Congress and the courts, that tipping point will have been passed.

Erik Larsen’s In the Garden of Beasts, which was written before anyone could have imagined a Trump administration, is suddenly topical again. The current parallels with 1933-34 Germany are striking.

“But Trump is not Hitler,” you say, and I have to agree. However, in 1933 Hitler wasn’t Hitler yet either. He was a buffoon who said outrageous things and had followers who sometimes got out of control. All that was easily explained away as rhetoric and excess enthusiasm. (It’s easy to imagine Germans advising each other to take the new chancellor “seriously, but not literally“.) After all, there were still a lot of sensible people in government, and surely they would eventually nudge the leadership into a more moderate course.

and you might also be interested in …

Do communities with a large number of undocumented immigrants have more crime? No.

Joe Biden’s lead in the polls has only increased since he became a candidate, indicating that there’s more going on here than just name recognition. I still think there’s a long way to go, but I also think the media has overstated Democratic voters’ swing to the left.

I’ll repeat a point I made two weeks ago: There’s a difference between vetting a candidate and doing Trump’s work for him. Raising Biden’s difficult issues — Anita Hill, voting to authorize the Iraq invasion, etc. — is perfectly legit. But the possibility that he might be the nominee against Trump is real. So I have no interest in smearing his character or encouraging progressives to sit out a Trump/Biden race because there’s “no difference” between them.

Compare the Obama/Biden record to Trump. That means comparing Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Merrick Garland to Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh; comparing the Iran nuclear deal to the current march towards war; and comparing the “big fucking deal” of ObamaCare to the push to repeal it or have it declared invalid by the courts. That looks like a big difference to me.

Maybe you remember Ralph Nader’s supporters claiming that there was no difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Now imagine where we might be on climate change if there’d been a Gore administration 18 years ago.

SNL puts its finger on Pete Buttigieg’s problem as a candidate:

I may only be 37 years old, but I do feel like I represent everyday Americans. I’m just a Harvard-educated, multilingual war veteran Rhodes scholar. I’m just like you.

When I was in the corporate world, I used to say that the biggest test of an executive’s character is whether he’s willing to hire somebody smarter than he is. (I used gender-biased language in those days.) I have doubts about whether the number of Americans who can pass that test constitute a majority.

and let’s close with something upbeat

Back in 2014, Finland had already recognized Russia’s attempt to disrupt its democracy and started taking steps to combat it. Finland also had one of the top-ranked educational system in the world, and it began shifting its national curriculum to focus on critical thinking skills.

Its efforts seem to be paying off. Finland has the most trusted news media in the world, its people rank first in media literacy, and in press freedom it is second to Norway.

“It’s not just a government problem, the whole society has been targeted. We are doing our part, but it’s everyone’s task to protect the Finnish democracy,” [chief communications specialist for the prime minister’s office Jussi] Toivanen said, before adding: “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher.”

… The initiative is just one layer of a multi-pronged, cross-sector approach the country is taking to prepare citizens of all ages for the complex digital landscape of today – and tomorrow.

One school has

recently partnered with Finnish fact-checking agency Faktabaari (FactBar) to develop a digital literacy “toolkit” for elementary to high school students learning about the EU elections. It was presented to the bloc’s expert group on media literacy and has been shared among member states.

The exercises include examining claims found in YouTube videos and social media posts, comparing media bias in an array of different “clickbait” articles, probing how misinformation preys on readers’ emotions, and even getting students to try their hand at writing fake news stories themselves.

CNN’s article reports success:

Finland’s strategy was on public display ahead of last month’s national elections, in an advertising campaign that ran under the slogan “Finland has the world’s best elections – think about why” and encouraged citizens to think about fake news.

Officials didn’t see any evidence of Russian interference in the vote, which Toivanen says may be a sign that trolls have stopped thinking of the Finnish electorate as a soft target.

It’s another Sift from the Mountain Time Zone (Yellowstone today), so again I’ll be struggling to get posts out somewhere near their usual time.

This week most of the buzz was about impeachment, with more and more Democrats coming out for it and Speaker Pelosi still holding the line against it. This was often presented by the news networks as an internal struggle, but it doesn’t seem as battle-like to me: I think Pelosi wants to end up at impeachment too, but she wants to get there by a less direct route. I’ll discuss that in the featured post “Two Paths to Impeachment”, which should be out around 9 or 10 EDT (7 or 8 MDT).

There’s no lack of other stuff to talk about. Theresa May is resigning (effective June 7) as prime minister of the UK, having failed to resolve the contradictions inherent in Brexit. (A narrow majority voted for “Leave” over “Remain”, but there’s never been a majority for any particular leaving plan.) Trump stomped out of a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer that was supposed to be about infrastructure, because (unlike Nixon or Clinton) he can’t work with Congress while it investigates him. Trump again used emergency powers in an autocratic way (to sell arms to the Saudis this time). Once again, the “emergency” isn’t some unforeseen external development that requires a quick response, it’s that Congress won’t do what he wants.

Bill Barr has been deputized to support Trump’s conspiracy theory about the Russia investigation arising from “treason” at the FBI and possibly elsewhere in the intelligence community. Trump has given him power to review and declassify any information that will make that case (and presumably leave classified any information that refutes it). Julian Assange’s indictment under the Espionage Act has journalists worried.

The weekly summary will discuss all that, before closing with an entertaining piece about recreating the beers of the ancient world. I’m hoping to get that out by 1 EDT (11 MDT).

More and more, it looks like impeachment hearings are going to happen eventually. The main question is when, not whether.

The news media is presenting this as an internal struggle among Democrats, with Speaker Pelosi being against impeachment and an increasing portion of her caucus being for it. But I’m reading those tea leaves a little differently: I think Pelosi wants to get to impeachment by a less direct route — appearing less eager, but gathering evidence and building public support in hearings resembling more ordinary Congressional oversight. Her plan, if all goes well, is to arrive in the same place at more-or-less the same time.

Channeling the Speaker. I think her reasoning is correct as far as it goes: While the Democratic base is strongly in favor of impeachment, the party did not run on impeachment when it won its decisive victory in 2018. [1] Pelosi knows that her majority rests on swing districts where voters are not yet convinced that impeachment is necessary.

In Pelosi’s vision (as I channel it), the investigations currently underway in a variety of House committees will eventually produce stunning revelations from subpoenaed documents (like Trump’s tax returns) and riveting public testimony from witnesses (like Robert Mueller and Don McGahn). This will turn public opinion in favor of impeachment, and Democrats can then claim to be following the public rather than leading it somewhere it doesn’t want to go. Conversely, if the public sees the evidence and doesn’t care, a Democratic push to impeach could be a Charge of the Light Brigade — courageous, but ultimately suicidal. [2]

This week, though, Pelosi has barely managed to keep down a revolt in her ranks, from Democrats who want the Judiciary Committee to start impeachment hearings immediately. Their argument is also correct as far as it goes, and Pelosi does not really dispute it: The Mueller Report shows (but does not conclude) that Trump committed obstruction of justice on numerous occasions. [3]

Grounds. More than 900 former federal prosecutors (400 when the linked article was written) have signed a statement including the following:

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The seven obstructions of justice are in addition to a number of other possible offenses, such as violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause and the violations of campaign finance law involved in the payoff to Stormy Daniels. [4]

Abuse of power can also be impeachable, even if the laws have not been technically broken. [5] Now that Trump is making a regular practice out of abusing the national-emergency laws to usurp Congress’ constitutional powers, and denying that Congress has any role in overseeing the Executive Branch, impeachment may be the only way for Congress to defend its status as an equal branch of government. [6]

And in spite of the President’s “no collusion” mantra, the Mueller Report did not completely settle that issue either. At least one of Trump’s obstructions may have succeeded in preventing Mueller from getting to the bottom of things: We know that Paul Manafort gave campaign data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik, but we don’t know precisely what or why — possibly because Trump’s witness tampering kept Manafort from cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

Why not now? The impeachment-now argument has two pieces:

• Regardless of any political calculations, Congress has a constitutional duty to defend the Republic from presidential criminality. Doing nothing doesn’t just leave Trump in office until the voters (we hope) remove him in 2020; it changes the rules for all future presidents.
• At crucial moments, Congress has a responsibility to lead the public rather than just follow it. So the Democratic House majority shouldn’t just sit tight and hope that the public catches on to the danger of leaving Trump in office. It needs to go to the public and make that case. By leaving open the possibility that it might not proceed to impeachment, the House is signalling to the American people that what Trump has done and continues to do is not that bad.

What has pushed Democrats towards revolt recently has been Trump’s brazen stonewalling of the various House investigations. More and more, he seems to be claiming an absolute supremacy for the presidency, without checks-and-balances from Congress or the courts. [7]

If his effort succeeds, Congress will not be an equal branch of government any more. Republicans who doubt this should try to imagine their own reaction if President Obama had simply denied that Benghazi was any of the Republican Congress’ concern, and refused to let any executive-branch officials testify to congressional committees.

Appeal to the courts. Trump’s resistance underlines a weakness in our constitutional system: Congress has a great deal of power on paper, but using it largely relies on the good faith of the executive branch. A bad-faith president has many ways to stymie Congress, which has no police force, army, or jail of its own.

And so the House committees have had to go to the third branch of government, the courts, in an effort to enforce their subpoenas. This is necessarily a slow process, and leaves open the possibility that Trump’s lawlessness may lead him to defy court orders the same way that he has been defying congressional subpoenas, moving us near the point of a coup. If it comes to that, the courts command no more guns than Congress does. [8]

The slowness of the legal process, and the possibility that neither Trump’s taxes nor Don McGahn’s testimony will ever become public, has caused Democrats’ frustration to boil over into impeachment talk, in spite of Pelosi.

But Pelosi’s allies raise this point: What problem does an impeachment inquiry solve? An impeachment subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee would subpoena the same documents and witnesses as the other committees have. Trump would likewise refuse to cooperate with those subpoenas, and the subcommittee would file the same lawsuits the other committees have already filed. So where’s the win?

An impeachment subcommittee would be on somewhat more solid legal ground, because it would be addressing an issue that the Constitution delegates to the House specifically. But so far, the House’s position has not lacked for legal strength.

This week, two judges rejected out of hand the Trump administration’s contention that Congress’ investigative power is tightly constrained. They did not suspend their rulings pending appeal, indicating their opinion that Trump’s arguments are baseless. Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly appeal, but will be forced to appeal quickly before the documents are turned over, rather than using the legal process to stall.

Where the conflict goes. If you believe, as I do, that both paths ultimately go to the same place, ultimately this is all going to come down to three questions:

• Is the Supreme Court (and its two Trump appointees) as partisan as it sometimes appears, or will it reject Trump’s baseless objections and enforce legal subpoenas?
• If the Supreme Court rules against him, will Trump comply, or will he defy the united opinion of the legislative and judicial branches of government? This would amount to proclaiming the complete supremacy of the executive branch, and set the stage for dictatorship. [9]
• If Trump’s disregard of constitutional government becomes that blatant, will Senate Republicans finally turn against him and vote to remove him from office?

I can only hope that by 2021 these scenarios will look hysterical. But given the once-unthinkable actions we’ve seen these last two years, they don’t seem hysterical to me now. I don’t expect events to go this way, but it seems likely enough that we need to be prepared.

If things do go that far, America will face a fourth question, one that comes up frequently in fragile democracies, but has never been raised in the 232 years since the ratification of the Constitution: If Trump would refuse to accept removal from office, what would the armed forces do? My firm belief is that they would back the law rather than the removed president. But let’s hope we never need to find out.

[1] It’s worth noting that, unlike President Trump, Speaker Pelosi represents a majority of the American people.

Democratic candidates for the House got nearly 10 million more votes in 2018 than Republican candidates, winning a 53%-45% popular vote victory. That victory was larger in both raw votes and percentage than the Republicans’ 2010 rout. However, gerrymandering held Pelosi’s majority down to 235-199, compared to the 2010 Republicans’ 242-193 margin.

[2] I often see reference to the public’s reaction against the Clinton impeachment. But Democrats’ shouldn’t read that as a rejection of impeachment in general. The public supported Clinton because they came to believe he was being impeached for what was essentially a private matter. Hillary should have been furious about Monica Lewinsky, but it really wasn’t Congress’ business.

The challenge for the Democrats is to make it clear that a Trump impeachment is about protecting democracy, not just partisan pique.

[3] I counted seven when I read the report. Many people say ten, but that’s not quite right. Mueller examined ten incidents that had some appearance of obstruction, but found all three elements of obstruction in only seven.

I don’t think that makes a significant difference. It’s not like the first seven obstructions of justice are free, but an eighth puts you over the limit.

[4] Michael Cohen has already gone to prison for this.

[5] We have this on the authority of no less an expert than Lindsey Graham.

The point I’m trying to make is you don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office.

[6] Defending the status of Congress was what pushed me over to the impeachment camp a week after writing that I didn’t think the Mueller Report justified it.

[7] I’ve tended to shy away from psychoanalyzing Trump, but here it seems relevant: Throughout his life, Trump has taken a sociopathic view of rules, in which they are simply obstacles to overcome on the way to getting what he wants. By contrast, a properly socialized person sees rules as defining a game we play together. We obey rules not just because we will be punished for breaking them, but because we want the game to continue. (Marriage — another institution whose rules Trump has repeatedly flouted — is a good example here. In a healthy marriage, neither spouse examines the wedding vows for loopholes. Instead, each asks what effect an action has on the relationship, rather than whether it is technically permissible.)

Trump’s attitude occasionally seemed abnormal even in the rough world of New York real estate, where he would honor only as much of a contract as the other party was willing and able to enforce in court. But no previous president — not even Nixon — has ever approached the presidency in such a way. In any conflict, Trump looks at a move and asks “Will it get me what I want?” without regard to whether he is breaking American democracy.

[8] As Stalin is supposed to have asked in regard to the moral force of the Catholic Church, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” John Roberts has the same number.

[9] If he got away with this, Trump might subsequently go along with the forms of democracy, in the same way that Caesar Augustus allowed the forms of the Roman Republic to continue. But like Augustus, he will have shown that no one can stop him from doing whatever he wants.

The rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

This week’s featured post is “Two Paths to Impeachment“.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

In the featured post I discuss the Democrats’ internal debate on whether to start impeachment proceedings. On the Republican side, Michigan Congressman Justin Amash became the first Republican in Congress to call for Trump’s impeachment.

This move led a number of other Republicans to attack Amash, often dishonestly, as The Atlantic fact-checks. Until this moment, Amash has been a member in good standing of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which is demonstrating that all its previous rhetoric about the Constitution has been opportunistic blather.

Mitt Romney also claims to have read the Mueller Report and come to a different conclusion than Amash, that Trump did not obstruct justice. Teri Kanefield finds Romney’s statement to be “astonishing nonsense”, and outlines the analysis technique used in the report. She challenges trained lawyers like Romney to show their work.

People like Sen. Romney who come to a different conclusion should show the public their analysis, and explain which of the three elements [of the definition of obstruction] haven’t been met and why. It would also be helpful if they explained which particular parts of Mueller’s analysis clear Trump and why.

Otherwise, we really have no choice but to conclude that they are telling a politically expedient lie.

and the President’s temper tantrum

Wednesday, Trump walked out of a meeting with House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The White House meeting was supposed to flesh out details of the $2 trillion infrastructure program the three had tentatively agreed to in a previous meeting, but Trump wasn’t having it.

According to a Democratic aide, Trump walked in, didn’t shake anyone’s hand or sit in his seat. He said he wants to do infrastructure, trade agreement, farm bill and other things, but that Pelosi “said something terrible today” when she accused him of a cover-up.

He then went to the Rose Garden, where a podium had already been decked with a “No Collusion, No Obstruction” sign detailing the expenses (but not the results) of the Mueller investigation, and said:

I walked into the room, and I told Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, I want to do infrastructure, I want to do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at it, that’s what I do. But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with.

In other words, he’s back to holding the government hostage: Do what I want, or the roads and bridges get it. Numerous pundits, like NPR’s Ron Elving, noted how unusual this was. During impeachment hearings, Presidents Nixon and Clinton both emphasized that they would not be distracted from doing the people’s business.

His move was widely described as a “temper tantrum”, an accusation that Trump responded to in a typically Trumpian way: He once again described himself as a “stable genius“, and called on his staff to verify one-by-one how calm and rational he had been in the three-minute meeting he walked out of.

It was one of those creepy scenes that Trump stages periodically, like the cabinet meeting where all the department secretaries were obliged to praise Trump and tell everyone what a privilege it was to serve him, or the meeting with black religious leaders where each minister was given an opportunity to thank Trump for all he’s done. Far from persuasive testimony, it was a demonstration of the soul-eating power Trump wields over his staff. (If Obama had ever tried to pull such a stunt, his people would have laughed at him. And once they started laughing, Obama would have laughed at himself.)

It’s important to keep pointing out how strange all this is. People who are actually intelligent, actually sane, and actually innocent don’t act anything like the way Trump does.

It seems like the only sane reaction was to go over the top.

Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped: “All told [the meeting] was over in three minutes. According to Stormy Daniels, that’s two bonus minutes.” Paul Krugman invoked a famous scene from The Caine Mutiny: “it was very clever of Nancy Pelosi to steal Donald Trump’s strawberries, pushing him over the edge into self-evident lunacy.”

Even Trump’s podium sign became a meme.

Next the nation was treated to a smearing of Nancy Pelosi. A video was altered to make her appear impaired, and Trump retweeted it. As usual, he was not embarrassed to be caught doing something dishonest, but claimed only that he didn’t know the video was altered — as if a President of the United States bears no responsibility to verify the truth of what he says before he says it.

and Theresa May’s resignation

Having repeatedly failed to do the one thing she became prime minister to do — pass a plan that would fulfilll the Brexit referendum by taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union — Theresa May resigned Friday morning. She will leave office on June 7, immediately after the ceremonies commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

Together with a small party representing Northern Ireland’s Protestants, the Conservative Party retains its majority in Parliament, so presumably May’s successor will be another Tory. (The Tories used to have a majority by themselves, but lost it in a 2017 election May had called.) But who that will be or what Brexit plan the new PM will propose remains up in the air. Boris Johnson, a Brexit hardliner, is considered the frontrunner.

I have frequently compared the Tories’ Brexit conundrum to US Republicans’ problems trying to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, which they failed to do in the last Congress, despite controlling both houses and the presidency. In each case, the popularity of the slogan (“leave” or “repeal and replace”) hides the fact that no majority supports any particular plan.

Another analogy: It’s like being part of a family that unanimously wants to take a big vacation this year, but some of you want to ski in the Alps, some want a beach vacation in Bermuda, and the rest are holding out for an Alaska cruise. You all agree until it’s time to make a real plan.

The biggest problem of any Brexit plan is what to do with the Irish border. Like Trumpists in America, hardline Brexiters want the UK to control its own borders and keep out “undesirable” immigrants from poorer EU countries, as well as non-European refugees that other EU countries have let in. That would mean enforcing a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, where passports are checked and cargo rigorously examined.

Unfortunately, that would undo the Good Friday Agreement that ended “the Troubles“, an irregular civil war between Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics that frequently spilled into the rest of the UK until peace was worked out in 1998. Catholics are a minority in Northern Ireland, but a majority in the Irish island as a whole; many would like to unite with the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland’s Protestants, meanwhile, hate the idea of becoming a minority in a united Ireland. Prior to 1998, a fairly large number of Northern Irish on both sides were willing to kill or die over this issue.

The current soft border allows Northern Ireland’s Catholics (and their relatives in the Republic of Ireland) to come and go as they please. They may not be part of a united Ireland, but they all belong to the EU. Largely for this reason, Northern Ireland had a substantial (56%-44%) Remain majority in the Brexit vote. For Northern Ireland’s Protestant party (the Democratic Unionist Party) to cast the decisive votes in a hard-border Brexit plan might push things over the edge.

Scotland had an even larger Remain majority than Northern Ireland: (62%-38%). Scottish independence has been a simmering issue since the Acts of Union turned England and Scotland into Great Britain in 1707. Scotland voted 55%-45% to stay with the UK in a 2014 referendum, but that was before Scots understood that staying in the UK meant leaving the EU. A messy exit plan from the EU will raise that issue again, as the cartoon below illustrates.

It would indeed be ironic if Brexit ultimately takes the Great out of Great Britain.

and Julian Assange’s indictment

The WikiLeaks guy has been indicted for violating the Espionage Act, from when he made public a trove of documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. In many ways this is a tough case to wrap my mind around, because the old ways of thinking about such things were based on categories that don’t necessarily make sense any more, like whether or not Assange is a journalist.

The NYT’s Charlie Savage (who knows a few things about investigative journalism) quotes a source who sees a dangerous precedent:

For the purposes of press freedoms, what matters is not who counts as a journalist, but whether journalistic activities — whether performed by a “journalist” or anyone else — can be crimes in America. The Trump administration’s move could establish a precedent used to criminalize future acts of national-security journalism, said Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“The charges rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day,” he said. “The indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom.”

Savage talked to “a Justice Department official who stayed behind to answer questions on the condition that he would not be named” who nonetheless wouldn’t answer the question of

how most of the basic actions the indictment deemed felonies by Mr. Assange differed in a legally meaningful way from ordinary national-security investigative journalism — encouraging sources to provide secret information of news value, obtaining it without the government’s permission and then publishing portions of it.

Here’s what makes this case difficult for me: When the First Amendment was written, “freedom of the press” was very literal. If you owned or otherwise got access to a press, you could print what you wanted, without seeking anyone’s prior approval. (Slander and libel rules applied after the fact, of course, and you might also be challenged to a duel if you defamed someone unfairly.) But in the 19th and 20th centuries, journalism became institutionalized and “journalist” became a profession with professional standards. In effect, journalists were a protected class under the First Amendment as it came to be construed.

With the advent of the internet, though, anyone can claim to be a journalist, so the rights of journalists and the rights of ordinary people have to come into some kind of convergence. An ordinary person who received hacked Top Secret documents and posted them to Facebook would probably be considered a spy. Charlie Savage — obtaining the same documents, applying principles of responsible journalism, and publishing only those parts where he judges that the public interest outweighs the harm — probably shouldn’t be. But the line is not so easy to draw now.

So for me the Assange case is more complicated than just picking a side. The question is how to reconstruct First Amendment protections for the current era.

and Bill Barr’s new powers

For years now, Trump has trying to delegitimize the Mueller investigation by concocting a conspiracy theory about how it started. Before Republicans lost their House majority in 2018, his main accomplice was House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes. Who can forget the Nunes Memo, which was supposed to be an Earth-shaking expose’, until it was finally declassified and proved to amount to nothing?

Jeff Sessions never wanted to get involved in this attempt to slander the Justice Department he led, not to mention the US intelligence community. But Bill Barr is the unscrupulous attorney general Trump always wanted. Two weeks ago Barr named Connecticut US Attorney John Durham to lead the investigation into those who dared to investigate the Great Leader.

Thursday, Trump gave Barr the authority to review and possibly declassify any documents related to the origin of Russia investigation. This has produced two widespread fears, which I share:

• Given the deceptive way he has spun the Mueller Report in Trump’s favor, Barr may do the same thing with the classified record: He might cherry-pick documents to find ones that can be spun to support Trump’s conspiracy theory, while leaving classified any documents that provide refuting context.
• Along the way, valuable intelligence sources (for example, sources close to Putin) might be compromised. Not only will this allow Putin to clean house — yet another dividend from his support of Trump — but it will discourage future sources in all countries from trusting US intelligence services.

Trump has already announced the conclusion he wants this investigation to reach: FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, FBI Director James Comey and Assistant Director Andrew McCabe, as well as “people probably higher than that”, have committed treason. People higher than the FBI director might be Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch, or maybe President Obama himself.

The charge, by the way, is ridiculous from the outset. Treason is defined in Article III, section 3 of the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

It’s outrageous to think that investigating the President, or a candidate for president, equates to “levying war against the United States”. To date the only evidence for the conspiracy theory are the tweets Strzok and Page sent each other, in which it is clear they didn’t want Trump to become president (perhaps because they feared he had been compromised by Russia).

Well, more than 65 million Americans didn’t want Trump to become president. Are we all traitors? Will Bill Barr be unleashed on us also?

One possibility we can’t lose sight of is that Barr’s investigation is supposed to be ridiculous. The point probably isn’t to prove anything, but to delegitimize the whole idea of finding truth through investigations. This is the reverse-cargo-cult propaganda technique pioneered by the Soviets and carried forward by Putin.

but we should talk more about legislation the House is passing

One of the charges against House Democrats pushing impeachment is that they’re investigating instead of legislating. But the problem isn’t a lack of legislation, it’s that the news media isn’t covering the bills the House passes. The real graveyard of legislation is Mitch McConnell’s Senate, which has devolved into a judge-confirming machine that shows no real interest in governing.

Vox produced a list of the 49 bills the House has passed since the Democrats took over.

House Democrats have passed a wide range of bills since they came to power in January, ranging from a sweeping anti-corruption and pro-democracy reform known as HR 1, to bills to save net neutrality, establish background checks for guns, and put the United States back in the Paris Climate Accord.

They have also put a large emphasis on health care, a defining issue of the 2018 election after Trump and Senate Republicans attempted to pass a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Democrats have focused on bills to lower prescription drug costs, protect preexisting conditions, and condemning the Trump administration’s legal battle to strike down the ACA in the courts.

Much of this agenda is sitting in the Senate.

and you also might be interested in …

Another step towards autocracy happened Friday:

The Trump administration has declared an emergency to bypass Congress and expedite billions of dollars in arms sales to various countries — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — citing the need to deter what it called “the malign influence” of Iran throughout the Middle East.

Presidents typically declare states of emergency in order to act quickly in situations that are moving too fast for legislation. Such actions go back at least as far as the Civil War, when President Lincoln defended the capital while Congress was in recess, and asked Congress for its after-the-fact approval later.

But Trump uses emergencies differently. He is not just getting ahead of a slow-moving Congress; he’s doing things that Congress has already disapproved. In the case of his border-wall emergency, he re-directed money to wall construction after Congress had already had the time to debate and turn down such an appropriation. This arms-sale “emergency” seems similar.

“President Trump is only using this loophole because he knows Congress would disapprove of this sale,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said in a statement. “There is no new ’emergency’ reason to sell bombs to the Saudis to drop in Yemen, and doing so only perpetuates the humanitarian crisis there. This sets an incredibly dangerous precedent that future presidents can use to sell weapons without a check from Congress.”

Congress has already passed a ban on support for the Saudi war in Yemen, with bipartisan support. Trump vetoed that bill, and the Senate failed to override.

Speaking of the border wall, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from constructing the wall using the money Trump “reprogrammed” from the Pentagon budget via an emergency declaration. The judge wrote:

According to Defendants [i.e., the Trump administration]: “If Congress had wanted to deny DOD this specific use of that [reprogramming] authority, that’s something it needed to actually do in an explicit way in the appropriations process. And it didn’t.” But it is not Congress’s burden to prohibit the Executive from spending the Nation’s funds: it is the Executive’s burden to show that its desired use of those funds was “affirmatively approved by Congress.”

… Congress’s “absolute” control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the Executive Branch regarding initiatives it views as important—is not a bug in our constitutional system. It is a feature of that system, and an essential one. … In short, the position that when Congress declines the Executive’s request to appropriate funds, the Executive nonetheless may simply find a way to spend those funds “without Congress” does not square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic.

The Washington Post summarizes another point:

The law the administration invoked to shift funds allows transfers for “unforeseen” events. [Judge] Gilliam said the government’s claim that wall construction was “unforeseen” “cannot logically be squared” with Trump’s many demands for funding dating back to early 2018 and even in the campaign.

The injunction applies to $1 billion that has been reprogrammed so far. This is only part of the DoD money Trump has announced he is transferring, but is the only money to be specifically identified.

A March study by the Federal Reserve (summarized by MarketWatch) finds that wealth is continuing to concentrate at the top. The top 1% of Americans now control 32% of the nation’s wealth, up from 23% in 1989.

Deutsche Bank economist Torsten Sløk largely blames the Fed itself.

“The response to the financial crisis was for the Fed to lower interest rates which in turn pushed home prices and stock prices steadily higher over the past decade,” Slok said. “And another consequence of the financial crisis was a decline in homeownership and stock ownership among households,” he said.

A number of people in my social-media universe flagged the USA Today opinion piece “Rural Americans would be Serfs if we abolished the Electoral College“, but none of them really put their finger on what’s wrong with it.

The obvious problem, of course, is that the essay is essentially a guy explaining why his vote should count for more than other people’s. But the problem goes deeper than that if we decode his arguments:

This is why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Instead of winning over small-town Americans, she amassed a popular vote lead based on California and a few big cities. She won those places with huge margins but lost just about everywhere else. And the system worked. The Electoral College requires more than just the most raw votes to win — it requires geographic balance. This helps to protect rural and small-town Americans.

“California” is code for Hispanic/Asian voters and “a few big cities” is code for black voters. “The system worked” because “rural and small-town Americans” (i.e. white voters) got their candidate elected, even though he lost by 2.8 million votes. It’s impossible to imagine the author taking a similarly sanguine view if the candidate supported by white voters had lost in spite of getting more votes. (“Geographical balance” apparently is still satisfied if you can’t carry cities.)

The headline itself reprises a historic bit of rhetoric. Throughout American history, it has been non-whites who have been the “serfs”. But there’s a long history of whites expropriating the moral capital of their victims, and warning about their impending “slavery”. When John Calhoun gave the famous speech “Slavery a Positive Good” in 1837, he clearly meant to defend only African slavery. He begins by denouncing compromise with the abolitionists of the North in these terms.

I do not belong to the school which holds that aggression is to be met by concession. Mine is the opposite creed, which teaches that encroachments must be met at the beginning, and that those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves.

So in the first paragraph of the very speech where he extols the virtues of African slavery, he warns that white Southerners will become slaves if they fail to defend this principle.

Ditto here: Rural American whites are not and have never been serfs, slaves, or anything similar. Abolishing the Electoral College would eliminate their disproportionate influence and reduce their votes to the same value as everyone else’s. Horrors!

This is yet another example of the phenomenon I noted in “The Distress of the Privileged“: When you are accustomed to privilege, being treated like everyone else feels like oppression.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is postponing the Obama administration’s plan to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman. But artist Dano Wall has a work-around: a way to stamp Tubman’s picture over Jackson’s.

and let’s close with a nightcap

Travis Rupp and Patrick McGovern are “beer archeologists“. From the recipes in ancient documents, the residues embedded in ancient vessels, and a variety of other clues, they attempt to reproduce what our ancestors were drinking.

One of the weirder beverages they have each independently reproduced is chicha, which was brewed in Peru before the Inca.

The recipe for the Peruvian corn-based beer, cobbled together from bits of pre-Incan archaeological evidence, called for chewed corn partially fermented in spit.

McGovern’s version was eventually brewed by Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware (one of the classiest brewers around). I’m intrigued, but would I drink it? Maybe instead I’ll order a Midas Touch, a drink from ancient Turkey combining “grape wine, barley beer and honey mead”, which might also have had grated cheese sprinkled on top.

Surprise! There’s a new trade war! This one is with Mexico, and Trump says it will last until the Mexicans solve his border problem.

We also had another mass shooting, but no one is even pretending this will lead to any action on guns.

Robert Mueller made his first public statement since … I’m not sure. Probably since he solved Cain-and-Abel case. Liberals reacted with disappointment, because all he did was repeat what he said in his report. Conservatives were outraged, because how could he say these terrible things they’d never heard before? Wasn’t he directly contradicting what AG Barr has been saying about Mueller’s investigation and everything Fox News has reported about it? How can he do that? Anyway, saying out loud the stuff that he wrote appears to have moved the public discussion towards impeachment.

Missouri’s last abortion clinic can stay open until at least tomorrow, so no worries there. Evidence emerged that the proposed citizenship question for the census is indeed part of a Republican scheme related to gerrymandering. (But will the Supreme Court care?) Jared Kushner’s Middle East Peace Plan is almost ready to announce. It’s the result of intense discussions with the Israeli government and more-or-less complete ignorance of anything the Palestinians want, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem.

All that will get covered in the weekly summary, which I’m hoping to put out by noon EDT. (I’ve made it back to the Central Time Zone this week, which is so close to Eastern it’s hardly worth mentioning.)

But the featured post doesn’t elaborate on any of that. Instead, I’m going back to Trump’s repetition of his self-description as a “stable genius” and trying to imagine how he justifies that in his own mind. True, he’s not a Rhodes scholar like Bill Clinton or a Harvard professor like Elizabeth Warren. He doesn’t speak a bunch of languages like Pete Buttigieg, and he doesn’t possess either the verbal skills of Barack Obama or the engineering chops of Jimmy Carter. But maybe those are just pointy-headed-liberal-elite notions of the signs of genius. Maybe when Trump looks in the mirror he sees a different kind of intelligence entirely.

I took a clue from a comment Trump made in one of his debates with Hillary Clinton. When she suggested he didn’t release his tax returns because they would show he had managed to avoid paying taxes, he said, “That makes me smart.” Once I realized that tax evasion is smart, I looked at Trump’s life and found all kinds of similar evidence of intelligence, which I pulled together into a piece called “What makes Donald Trump so smart?” That should be out before 9 EDT.

Trump wants to believe, and wants us to believe, that he’s very intelligent.
But what kind of intelligence is he talking about?

When Donald Trump first described himself as an “very stable genius” — and was roundly ridiculed for doing so — I figured it was just one of those unfortunate phrases that sometimes slip out in the back-and-forth of social media. (I hate to think what a close inspection of my Facebook activity log would turn up.) But when he chose to repeat it just a week or so ago, it became clear that he really means it. Apparently “extremely stable genius” is part of the self-description that bounces around inside his head.

He also puts a lot of stock in the intelligence of others, or at least in its lack: Many of his insults directed at others target their intellect. Recently he tweeted that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un had called Joe Biden a “low-IQ individual”, a comment that made him smile. (Kim’s assessment of Trump himself as a “dotard” is apparently long forgiven.) Politico notes:

In recent years, Trump has accused Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), actor Robert De Niro, Washington Post staffers, former President George W. Bush, comedian Jon Stewart, Republican strategist Rick Wilson, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, and Rick Perry, now his energy secretary, of having low IQs.

Back in 2013 he tweeted:

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.

Apparently, though, not everyone does know it. (According to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump claiming that everyone agrees with him is a tell that he’s lying.) Rex Tillerson called him a “fucking moron” and Jim Mattis said he had the understanding of “a fifth or sixth-grader”. Numerous other high-ranking Trump appointees (John Kelly, Steve Mnuchin, Reince Preibus, H. R. McMaster) have referred to him as an “idiot”, with former economic advisor Gary Cohn adding that he is “dumb as shit”.

You might imagine that insults like this naturally fly back and forth in a high-pressure environment like the White House. But I haven’t come up with a comparable example from the previous administration, where someone who worked closely with President Obama claimed he had below-average intelligence. Maybe I’ve just forgotten.

How to prove you’re smart. Trump could of course settle all this by releasing an IQ test, the way that he has often demanded that others (Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren come to mind) release personal information to prove their claims. He could also support his “stable genius” claim by releasing stellar grades, or pointing to some singular academic honor (like Bill Clinton and Pete Buttigieg can point to their Rhodes scholarships, or Barack Obama his presidency of the Harvard Law Review).

Or he could demonstrate his intelligence to us directly, by speaking to the American people about difficult subjects and impressing us with the clarity of his thought. Barack Obama used to do that. I’ve often come away from an Obama speech feeling like I had learned something, and understood some topic in a way I never had before.

He could show an ability to think on his feet. He could submit to unscripted questions from voters or journalists. And rather than go off into a word salad of free association, he could answer those questions with facts (that are actually true) and insights the questioners hadn’t anticipated. I have attended a bunch of New Hampshire townhall meetings in the last few presidential cycles and watched politicians do this, some more skillfully than others. John McCain was brilliant at fielding whatever question anyone wanted to throw at him, even after he had been on his feet for hours. So was Chris Christie. I didn’t have to agree with their conclusions to appreciate their intelligence.

Obama could even face an audience of enemies and answer whatever questions they raised. He once went to  retreat of the House Republican caucus and owned the room. They couldn’t touch him. The best evidence that they knew they were beaten is that they never invited him back.

A different kind of smart. But maybe I look for that kind of evidence because I don’t define smart the same way Trump does. Maybe my notion of intelligence is self-serving: I was good at tests and classes, so that’s what I look for. I’m good with words and explaining things, so that’s how I want intelligence to be judged.

But maybe when Trump looks in the mirror, he sees a different kind of smart.

The best evidence that he does comes from a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton. Clinton suggested that Trump doesn’t release his tax returns because

maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.

Trump didn’t dispute Clinton’s claims, but spun them in a positive direction: “That makes me smart.”

To me, that suggests a whole different vision of human intelligence and its uses. Maybe life is a game where we’re all trying to gain advantages over each other. And anybody can claim an advantage they deserve. Millions of Americans, for example, avoid paying taxes by being poor; that’s not very smart. But claiming an advantage you don’t deserve, like not paying taxes when you’re rich — you have to be pretty smart to do that.

As soon as I understood that simple notion, I began to appreciate Trump’s genius. Once you know what kind of intelligence you’re looking for, you can see it all through his life.

Avoiding military service is smart. Risking your life is not smart at all, especially if there are other people who can serve in your place.

Trump avoided the draft during the Vietnam War by getting a medical deferment based on having bone spurs on his feet. But are those bone spurs real? The daughters of the (now dead) podiatrist who signed off on the bone-spur claim believe their father made the diagnosis as a favor to Trump’s father. “Elysa Braunstein said the implication from her father was that Mr. Trump did not have a disqualifying foot ailment.”

Democratic candidates Pete Buttigieg and Seth Moulton are simpletons by comparison. They could have avoided risking their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq without faking anything; all they had to do was not volunteer. But like many people less smart than Trump, they try to make the issue about him rather than them. Buttigieg said:

If you’re a conscientious objector, I’d admire that. But this is somebody who, I think it’s fairly obvious to most of us, took advantage of the fact that he was the child of a multimillionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place.

And Moulton put it like this:

I don’t think that lying to get out of serving your country is patriotic. It’s not like there was just some empty seat in Vietnam. Someone had to go in his place. I’d like to meet the American hero who went in Donald Trump’s place to Vietnam. I hope he’s still alive.

As with so many controversies, Trump could easily clear this up: He could release x-rays of his feet.

Stiffing your contractors is smart. In 2016, USA Today documented hundreds of examples of Trump refusing to pay for work he had hired individuals or contracted small businesses to do. (YouTube lets you watch several of his contractors tell how they were short-changed.)

Michael Cohen’s testimony backed up USA Today’s reporting:

Some of the things that I did was reach out to individuals, whether it’s law firms or small businesses, and renegotiate contracts after the job was already done, or basically tell them that we just weren’t paying at all, or make them offers of, say, 20 cents on the dollar.

Vox summarizes the tactic:

The basic Trump method, established as far back as his Atlantic City casino days, goes like this:

• First, Trump contracts with someone to do some work for him.
• Second, the work gets done.
• Third, Trump does not pay for the work.
• Fourth, the people Trump owes money threaten to sue him.
• Fifth, Trump offers to pay a small fraction of the sum they originally agreed on.

The person Trump owes money to is now faced with an unattractive choice. He can accept 20 or 30 percent of what he is owed right now. Alternatively, he can hire a lawyer and fight out a lawsuit that might take months or years. Since Trump is rich and has lawyers on his staff, it’s nothing to [him] to fight an extended legal battle. And since Trump is the one not paying the bill, delay is inherently in his favor.

If you’ve ever had work done for you, you probably paid the money you agreed to. That’s because you’re not as smart as Donald Trump.

Choosing the right parents is smart. The reason Donald became rich isn’t that he’s a great businessman, it’s that his father Fred was a great businessman — and a brilliant tax evader. (That apple didn’t fall far from the tree.)

Last October, the New York Times published its research on how much Donald got from Fred: at least $413 million, “much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s”.

The most overt fraud was All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company formed by the Trump family in 1992. All County’s ostensible purpose was to be the purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. It did no such thing, records and interviews show. Instead All County siphoned millions of dollars from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners — Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin. Fred Trump then used the padded All County receipts to justify bigger rent increases for thousands of tenants.

Dealing with Russian oligarchs is smart. According to Foreign Policy,

By the early 1990s [Trump] had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times. When would-be borrowers repeatedly file for protection from their creditors, they become poison to most major lenders and, according to financial experts interviewed for this story, such was Trump’s reputation in the U.S. financial industry at that juncture.

The money for the Trump Organization’s comeback came mostly from overseas, and particularly from Russia, where the fall of the Soviet Union had created new billionaires who didn’t trust the Russian legal system and so wanted to get their money out of the country. The Center for American Progress investigated the many business ties between the Trump Organization and Russian oligarchs.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was vital to get the money out of Russia without a trace, stashing it away from the prying eyes of tax agencies or law enforcement. Clandestine transfer was particularly critical if that money represented proceeds of a crime. Foreign real estate soon emerged as a preferred safe harbor.⁷⁸ And because the Trump Organization reportedly had a reputation for not asking too many questions, Russian money flowed into Trump’s properties. … In September 2008, Donald Trump Jr. famously boasted of the Russian money “pouring in” and then observed that, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”⁸⁴

CAP’s Moscow Project goes into more detail:

Some of the individual deals have attracted attention, most notably the Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev’s 2008 purchase of one of Trump’s mansions in Palm Beach. He paid a reported $95 million for it—$53 million more than Trump paid for it four years earlier. The transaction has received scrutiny from investigators, particularly because, though Trump justified the price increase by claiming he had “gutted the house” and spent $25 million on renovations, there were few apparent alterations. Such rapid and unexplained increases in price are frequently cited as red flags for money laundering through real estate.

It’s worth noting that the overall Florida real estate market had crashed between 2004 and 2008. Not many Florida property owners were smart enough to double their money during that period.

Trading in your wives is smart. Trump’s brilliance is not restricted to the business world. That whole “forsaking all others” and “till death do you part” thing is just another example of a contract that smart people can wriggle out of. Only suckers grow old with their first spouses, watching their bodies sag and wrinkle with age.

Ivana may have been a 28-year-old model when Trump married her in 1977, but by 1992 she was over 40 and had given birth to three Trump children. Her body was a depreciated asset by that point, so Trump moved on to Marla Maples, who he had met in 1989 when she was 25, and began a relationship with well before his divorce from Ivana. Trump and Maples then divorced in 1999, possibly because he had started dating 28-year-old Melania in 1998.

This short account leaves out his various affairs unrelated to marriage, like Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, as well as the women he has bragged about “grabbing by the pussy“.

At 72, is he done trading for newer models? Melania will turn 50 in 2020, a milestone no previous Trump wife has ever reached.

Employing undocumented immigrants is smart. American workers and green-card holders may have a lot of virtues, but they’re expensive and have a tendency to insist on their rights, all of which is very inconvenient for a business trying to make a profit.

Naturally, then, Trump’s clubs and golf courses have a long history of employing undocumented immigrants. It’s a win-win thing.

Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.

Now the 34-year-old lives with his wife and daughters in a sturdy house built by “Trump money,” as he put it, with a porch to watch the sun go down.

It’s a common story in this small town [in Costa Rica].

Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

Cheating people who trust you is smart. The image Trump has consistently presented, particularly in The Art of the Deal, is of a brilliant businessman who received relatively little help from his father or Russian oligarchs, but made billions through his own remarkable abilities.

Who wouldn’t want to learn the secret tactics and techniques of such a successful money-maker? That was the premise of Trump University, a series of workshops and courses available to anybody who believed in the story Trump told about himself. The ads said:

He’s the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth. . . . And now he’s ready to share—with Americans like you—the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market.

It was a con, one aimed not at bankers or other real-estate moguls or the government, but at “Americans like you”.

Jason Nicholas, a sales executive at Trump University, recalled a deceptive pitch used to lure students — that Mr. Trump would be “actively involved” in their education. “This was not true,” Mr. Nicholas testified, saying Mr. Trump was hardly involved at all. Trump University, Mr. Nicholas concluded, was “a facade, a total lie.”

Retirees and other folks who couldn’t afford to lose the money were encouraged to max out their credit cards to pay Trump U’s fees. After all, one of Trump’s get-rich secrets was to use other people’s money.

If he hadn’t been elected president, Trump might have stalled the lawsuits from his marks students long enough to get them to settle for far less than the $5 million profit he’s estimated to have made off them. But after the election he decided he needed to make this potential scandal go away, so he settled for $25 million.

Sometimes it’s smart to let the smaller con go so you can pursue the bigger con.

Profiting from public office is smart. Previous presidents have either put their investments in a blind trust or moved them into non-conflicting vehicles like treasury bonds. No law forced them to do this, it was just a political norm that they assumed voters cared about.

It took someone as ingenious as Trump to realize that voters actually don’t care, or that they’ll get used to conflicts of interest that occur on a massive scale.

This effect is similar to the Big Lie technique developed in Germany before World War II: Ordinary people tell little lies, so they’re well practiced at spotting them. But a big lie requires the kind of audacity that ordinary people lack. Since they can’t conceive of telling such a lie, they assume there must be some truth behind it. As one German leader put it: “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Same thing here: Ordinary people understand small-scale cheating, so they’ll get upset if a politician hires an illegal immigrant as a nanny, for example. But if a president spends over $100 million of public funds on golfing at his own properties — more or less just transferring money from the Treasury into his own pocket — it goes right past them. They’ll care if contributions to a Clinton charity might get you an appointment with the Secretary of State, but if $200,000 paid directly to the President gets you membership in a club he visits almost every weekend, and might result in an ambassadorship, or even put you in a position to run a major government agency, it is so bold that people assume it must be OK.

Ditto for the people who contribute to Trump’s campaign: A big chunk of their contribution goes straight into his pocket, because the campaign is run through Trump properties. Since he became the 2016 nominee, Republican Party events have also largely been moved to Trump properties, generating a considerable profit. It’s right out there in the open, so it can’t be corrupt, can it?

He also profits from foreign governments and US companies who want to get in good with him: They are major patrons of the Trump International Hotel and Trump World Tower. The favors they want come from Trump the President, but the payments go to Trump the businessman.

A related issue is corruption throughout the administration. If one cabinet secretary is corrupt, he or she will stand out and be a scandal. But if nearly all of them are, the story is too big for the public to comprehend.

Changing your beliefs is smart. When Trump was breaking into New York society as the son of a new-money upstart, it was a good idea to profess New York ideas. In 1999, for example, he told Meet the Press:

Well, I’m very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debate the subject. But, you still, I just believe in choice.

In the past, he also has supported gay rights and even trans rights. Over time, though, all that has vanished as he has harmonized his views with the Evangelical Christians who form a large part of his base.

Picture it: If you had been a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights, Bible-ignorant, twice-divorced libertine so comfortable in your debauched image that you can joke in public about incest with your daughter, would it have occurred to you that you could become the darling of the religious right? Could you have pulled that transition off?

That takes a kind of genius most of us can’t even imagine.

What about you? If you are a Trump supporter and look too closely at Trump’s ex-wives, Trump U students, or the pro-choice and LGBTQ people who trusted him, you might have a disturbing thought: At some point in the future, he might be able to gain some advantage from double-crossing you too.

Would he do that? Well, ask yourself this: Wouldn’t that be the smart thing to do?

Not executing John Bolton will be a sign of great weakness by the Americans.

– Vee Terra, reacting to the news
that Kim Jong Un had executed his envoy to the U.S.

This week’s featured post is: “What makes Donald Trump so smart?”

This week everybody was talking about Robert Mueller

Bob Mueller made his first public statement since submitting his report. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait observed the wildly different reactions on different sides of the partisan spectrum. If you either read the report yourself or got your news from the so-called liberal media, Mueller’s statement seemed like a non-event: He just repeated what he wrote in the report.

But those who live in the conservative news bubble were shocked.

What so vexed the right about Mueller’s curt affirmation of his previous conclusions? The answer, as we’ll see, seems to be that they believed their own propaganda about what Mueller had (and had not) found. Presented even briefly with reality, their minds have reeled in shock.

Mueller produced massive evidence that President Trump committed Nixonian-scale obstruction of justice in office. But Department of Justice policy prevented him from charging a sitting president with a crime, and Mueller reportedly believes he can’t openly state that this policy prevented him from accusing Trump of crimes. Mueller views his job as sending his evidence to Congress without prejudice, where the impeachment mechanism serves as a substitute for the jury trial that such crimes would normally call for.

Trump, William Barr, and the Republican Party followed a strategy of systematically lying about this.

Conservatives had heard a he-says/she-says that allowed them to continue believing whatever they wanted: Democrats say Mueller found evidence of crimes, but didn’t feel he could charge them; Trump says Mueller found “no collusion, no obstruction”. So they were stunned to be confronted by the idea that there is a fact of the matter — Mueller wrote a report that actually did say something.

and yet another trade war

Trump believes in tariffs so much that he’s going to keep trying them until they accomplish something. The new target is Mexico:

starting on June 10, 2019, the United States will impose a 5 percent Tariff on all goods imported from Mexico. If the illegal migration crisis is alleviated through effective actions taken by Mexico, to be determined in our sole discretion and judgment, the Tariffs will be removed. If the crisis persists, however, the Tariffs will be raised to 10 percent on July 1, 2019. Similarly, if Mexico still has not taken action to dramatically reduce or eliminate the number of illegal aliens crossing its territory into the United States, Tariffs will be increased to 15 percent on August 1, 2019, to 20 percent on September 1, 2019, and to 25 percent on October 1, 2019. Tariffs will permanently remain at the 25 percent level unless and until Mexico substantially stops the illegal inflow of aliens coming through its territory.

Trump’s move is yet another usurpation of congressional power. Normally, Congress would set tariffs, but the President has the power to set them under a “national security” provision. The Eisenhower-era law was meant to apply to products of strategic military importance, with some assumption of good faith on the part of presidents. (If, say, foreign competition was about to bankrupt our last domestic producer of jet engines, the president could use tariffs to protect it.) But Trump is a bad-faith president, so he can claim that all Mexican trade has national security implications.

The president has told his advisers that he likes tariffs because they can take effect immediately and unilaterally.

In other words, he gets to act more like the dictator he wants to be.

Senator Grassley (R-Iowa and chair of the Senate Finance Committee):

Trade policy and border security are separate issues. This is a misuse of presidential tariff authority and counter to congressional intent. Following through on this threat would seriously jeopardize passage of USMCA, a central campaign pledge of President Trump’s and what could be a big victory for the country.

Mexico’s President Andrés López Obrador doesn’t seem inclined to respond to threats:

President Trump: You can’t solve social problems with taxes or coercive measures.

It is hard for me to imagine how any Mexican government could give in to this kind of bullying. (It’s also hard for me to imagine Trump deciding that Mexico had done enough and his imaginary border crisis — “the United States of America has been invaded” — was over now.) The main thing Trump has accomplished here is to doom ratification of the one big trade agreement he has managed to negotiate so far. And then there’s this:

If the tariffs damaged the Mexican economy, more of its citizens would try to cross the border to find work in the United States, experts said.

The point here is not to solve a problem; it’s to rile up Trump’s base.

Vox notes an interesting detail: Trump’s people say they’re going to “judge success here by the number of people crossing the border. And that number of people needs to start coming down immediately in a significant and substantial way.” But that’s bound to happen anyway, because undocumented border crossings always dip in the summer, when heat raises the danger.

Philip Levy, a senior fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, explains why this move undermines any kind of trade negotiations going forward, not just with Mexico, but with all nations.

A very straightforward interpretation is that trade deals with the U.S. buy you nothing. You may be asked to jump through hoops and do things that are painful, but in the end you have no guarantees that the president won’t stick on tariffs when something irritates him.

and another state trying to end abortion

This week’s threat to abortion rights was Missouri, where the attack came not from a new law, but from state regulators, who had refused to renew the license of the state’s last remaining abortion clinic. The license would have expired Friday, but a judge’s order will keep the clinic open until tomorrow, when he will consider an injunction that could keep the clinic open until a hearing can be held on the merits of the state’s complaints.

If the clinic closes, Missouri will become the first state since Roe v Wade to completely shut down access to a legal abortion.

This is the kind of abortion prohibition I can imagine the Supreme Court getting behind: Yes, Roe is still settled law, but who are we to overrule the judgment of the state health board, even if their complaints are obviously manufactured? Is it the state’s fault — or the Court’s — if no clinic can manage to fulfill the requirements to stay open?

and hiding the USS John McCain

As you’ve probably heard, the White House asked the Navy to keep the USS John McCain out of sight during Trump’s visit to Japan, presumably because the sight of a ship honoring his political enemy might anger the President.

I was inclined to ignore this story, but it’s turning into a case where the response is the real scandal. Rather than get bogged down in the administration’s excuses and lies, I think the right way to think about this is to ask: What would an honorable White House have done after this report surfaced?

I think that’s clear. First, the President would have found out what the facts were, rather than immediately tweet that it’s all fake news.

Second, somebody would take responsibility and apologize to the people who have been dishonored. Ideally, the President himself should have been on the phone to John McCain’s widow, and a video statement should have been sent to the crew of the McCain, assuring them that the Commander in Chief is not ashamed of them or their ship, but in fact respects their service.

Of course, none of that will happen, because no one in this administration — from the President on down to the hypothetical (and possibly fictional) 23-year-old staffer that Chief of Staff Mike Mulvaney suggests may have made the request — has enough character to do the right thing. Instead we’ll just hear that no one is to blame and it’s no big deal.

and you also might be interested in …

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un executed the diplomat he blames for the failure of his February summit with President Trump. One Twitter wag opined: “Not executing John Bolton will be a sign of great weakness by the Americans.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell verified that his rhetoric during the Merrick Garland nomination was all bullshit. If a Supreme Court seat comes open in 2020, the Senate will see it filled. A lot of people expressed shock and outrage at this hypocrisy, but I’m not sure why. McConnell only has one principle: to maximize his party’s power. Surely we all knew that by now.

Another thing we all knew: The point of the Trump tax cut was to shift more money into the hands of the rich. A study by the Congressional Research Service shows that this is the main (and perhaps only) effect it had, and yet the people who supported it seem not to care.

From the beginning, it appeared that the administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to next year’s census was an attempt to undercount Hispanics and shift congressional seats from immigrant-heavy blue states to whiter red states.

Now there’s a smoking gun: The idea goes back to gerrymandering advocate Thomas Hofeller, who

wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

The new evidence comes from a hard drive found by Hofeller’s daughter after he died.

But will the obvious fraud being perpetrated matter to the Supreme Court, which will rule on the legality of the census question later this month? As they did in the Muslim Ban case, the Court’s conservative majority may decide that it’s not their role to examine the motives of the Executive Branch (until a Democrat is elected).

It’s going to be a busy month at the Supreme Court. CNN lists the major cases: census, partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, allowing religious displays on public land, and several others.

Trump has arrived in the UK, where he’ll meet the Queen prior to attending a D-Day anniversary celebration. Not everybody in the UK is happy about his visit. Massive protests are expected.

and let’s close with some things I learned during my recent travels

The federal government’s interpretative centers are gems. I’ve been to two recently: the Lewis and Clark Interpretative Center in Great Falls and the National Historic Trails Interpretative Center in Casper. Some are under the National Park Service and others under the Bureau of Land Management. In the future, I will look for them wherever I travel.

Also, I had grossly underestimated the Dakotas, which I had always pictured as Kansas with more snow. But the Black Hills region in South Dakota is well worth your time, especially the unfortunately named Custer State Park. The Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota is not as well known as Yellowstone or Yosemite, but is also well worth seeing. (A hike I had planned got derailed when a bison sat down on the trail.)

Remember the trade war with Mexico? Never mind; that’s over now. Until Trump decides it’s on again.

So what else happened this week? The announcement of a Straight Pride Parade for later this summer in Boston stoked a lot of outrage, which was probably the whole point. Mission accomplished, trolling accomplishment unlocked.

Joe Biden gave in to pressure and reversed his position on the Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from paying for abortions. Biden in general had a bad week and the polls are getting closer, as they were bound to eventually. Trump went to Europe and came back with only the usual amount of embarrassment for the United States, so I guess I’m relieved. He didn’t expose himself to the Queen or anything, so we should all be happy with his behavior.

The weekly summary will talk about all that stuff and a bunch more, including closing with a song from the newly anointed Tony-winning musical Hadestown. I expect that to be out between noon and 1 EDT. (I’m back home in the Eastern Time Zone. Once again I can look at clocks without mentally adjusting for what the time is “really”.)

But before then, probably before 9 EDT, I’ll put out the featured post, “We need hope, not optimism”. I keep running into people who want me to tell them how this is all going to come out: impeachment, 2020, climate change, and so on. Are we all doomed? Do we fix it? What happens? In other words, they are looking for somebody who can decide the optimist vs. pessimist argument that’s going on in their heads.

The point of the post isn’t just I can’t do that job, but that it’s the wrong discussion to be having. What we need now isn’t optimism, it’s hope. That’s a subtle but important distinction I picked up during my writing and speaking about religion, where hope is a central topic. We seldom talk about the difference in the secular world, but we should: A person worried about optimism studies the polls and listens to panels of pundits speculate about what’s going to happen. A hopeful person goes out and does stuff to try to make the future, not predict it.

Don’t worry about optimism; the future will come soon enough and then we’ll all see. Try to be hopeful.

As regular readers probably know, when I’m not writing this blog I’m writing for a religious magazine and giving talks at churches. When you have that much religious exposure, sooner or later you end up thinking about hope, because hope is religion’s central product.

Humanistic religions offer hope for human progress, while salvation-oriented religions offer hope for a better world to come, but pretty much every flavor of religion deals in some kind of hope: for miracles, for eternal life, for an escape from suffering, for strength to change, for the eventual triumph of the better angels of our nature, or some other desirable outcome.

Once you start thinking about hope, your reading will fairly quickly bring you to a useful distinction that (for reasons I don’t understand) never catches on with the general public: Hope is not optimism.

The two words often get used interchangeably in conversation, and you do often find them together in real life: Hopeful people tend to be optimistic, and vice versa. But once in a while the difference between them is important. I feel like that’s true now in American politics, so I’m pointing it out in this secular context.

• Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future. Optimists expect the future to turn out well; pessimists expect it to turn out badly.
• Hope and its opposite (despair) are attitudes towards the present. Hope holds that efforts to make life better are worthwhile, while despair asserts their pointlessness. Hope says, “Let’s try it” and despair answers “Don’t bother.”

So an optimistic person plants a garden because the rains will come and the plants will grow and the harvest will be bountiful. But a hopeful person plants without knowing what will happen, because the possibility of a harvest is worth creating.

Since we seldom actually know what’s going to happen (even when we think we do), optimism is more brittle than hope. After a hot, dry week, favorable assumptions about the future can flip to unfavorable ones, and our optimism can crash: A drought has started, the crops are doomed, we’re all going to starve. The garden might go untended while the formerly optimistic person searches the horizon for signs of rain.

Meanwhile, the hopeful person just keeps gardening. The harvest was uncertain when everything looked fine, and it’s still uncertain now. It’s worthwhile to keep going.

I trust that the application to the current political situation is already clear to you: An enormous amount of political discussion these days is of the optimism-versus-pessimism variety: Will we manage to get rid of Trump, either by impeachment or election? Is democracy already so damaged that it won’t recover in our lifetimes? Assuming we have a next leader, will he or she be able to heal the partisan divisions, or will America keep spiraling towards division or civil war?

And what about climate change? Are we past the point of no return? Will we pass it soon? Is civilization as we have known it already fated for ruin?

Truthfully, I have no idea.

I know most of my readers don’t want to hear that. Every now and then I find myself conversing with someone who has cast me in a Guardian of Optimism role. I think they cast me that way because I keep paying attention to the news and writing this blog every week. Surely all that would be too depressing if I didn’t think everything was going to work out eventually.

So they want me to pass along my optimistic secret: “Tell me it’s going to be OK. Tell me we fix this.”

I can’t. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. To be either an optimist or a pessimist requires a level of hubris I don’t have. For good or ill, reality has a way of doing whatever it damn well pleases, no matter how tightly we think we have it tied down.

So my advice at this point in history is to get comfortable with not knowing and try to stay hopeful. Keep tending the garden and let the rain do whatever it does.

Which means: Try not to waste too much of your time and energy searching poll results for evidence that Trump will or won’t be re-elected. Don’t agonize over who the Democrats will nominate. Don’t watch panels where pundits argue over their predictions. Don’t try to pick the exact year when the climate catastrophe will hit.

Just do something. Campaign, demonstrate, give money, write letters, mobilize your friends. Whatever you can think of.

Will it work? Who knows? We don’t need to know. Someday, maybe, we’ll look back and see that whatever we did either worked or didn’t work. Between now and then, a lot of unforeseeable stuff is going to happen.

So don’t waste a lot of time trying to foresee it. The harvest — as rich or barren as it might eventually be — will get here soon enough. Until then, just keep working. It’s worthwhile to create possibilities.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

– Emily Dickinson

This week’s featured post is “We need hope, not optimism“.

This week everybody was talking about tariffs on Mexico

The Mexican tariffs are over before they started. A deal with Mexico was announced Friday. Trumpists are declaring victory, while anti-Trumpists are saying that Mexico largely reiterated commitments it had already made. (This is similar to the new NAFTA agreement Trump negotiated. Just about everything that wasn’t in the old NAFTA were concessions Mexico and Canada had already agreed to during the TPP negotiations.)

CNBC comments:

Whatever Mexican officials may promise the Trump administration, it’s unclear they would have the capacity to deliver. “Mexico’s immigration and refugee agencies are severely understaffed, under-resourced and overwhelmed by the increased numbers of Central Americans heading north,” [Tony] Wayne [of the Atlantic Council] said.

One way to judge the agreement will be whether the number of migrants apprehended at the US/Mexico border goes down (on an year-over-year basis; we already know apprehensions will go down over the summer because they always do). My prediction: Trump will be unhappy when the apprehension numbers come out, and the tariff threats will be back.

The deal means that we will never know whether Republicans in Congress were serious about trying to block the tariffs.

There are two bits of collateral damage from these negotiations: First, Trump has asserted his right to impose tariffs on any country at any time. So trade deals with the US are basically meaningless; why exactly should any country negotiate one? Second, if indeed more Central American migrants are held in Mexico while their American asylum requests are processed, what will happen to them there? Mexico itself has many of the violence and corruption problems they are fleeing in their home countries. I hope the media will pay attention to the human cost the deal imposes on these already-oppressed people.

The same CNBC article pulls back to take a broader view of the Mexico and China trade disputes.

U.S. economic weapons are the most potent in the world, and 88% of world trade is still done in dollars, although the U.S. share of global GDP has shrunk from nearly half after World War II to 38% in 1969 to about 24% now. That remains the case because for many years a good part of the world viewed this arrangement positively.

It remains to be seen – in Mexico, China and beyond – how much Trump will gain through his unique willingness to use economic weapons.

What’s clear already is that friends and rivals are more interested than ever before in exploring alternatives to the U.S.-dominated system. Such a transition would take many years, involve enormous costs and unfold in stages. However, consistent overuse of U.S. economic power has made the unthinkable more plausible.

Also on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed the significance of climate change by saying:

Societies reorganize, we move to different places, we develop technology and innovation. I am convinced, I am convinced that we will do the things necessary as the climate changes.

Of course, if anyone tries to adjust to climate change by moving to the US, we’ll stop them.

and straight pride

Apparently a “straight pride” parade has been scheduled for August 31 in Boston. The announcement garnered widespread derision, which may have been the point.

I find it hard to believe this event will actually happen, or that the organizers even want it to. If it does, I predict it will be a fairly pathetic event, because there just isn’t much pent-up straight pride that has been unable to express itself until now. Growing up, I remember many sources of insecurity; but worrying that it might not be OK to be straight was not one of them.

Whether the parade happens or not, though, announcing it is a very effective trolling stunt, producing outraged quotes that can be cut-and-pasted into blog posts “proving” how much hatred and discrimination straights are expected to live with. You can already watch that happening here and here.

Here’s my view: In general, overclasses just don’t need special celebratory events. A White History Month is unnecessary, because the historical significance of white people is already being covered quite well. (Picture some tearful white boy desperately searching his textbooks for a hero who looks like him.) Ditto for a men’s studies program. No scripture needs to remind us to remember the rich, because who can forget them? A White Lives Matter movement is superfluous, because white lives already do matter. And so on.

and Trump’s European tour

He’s back from Europe without breaking any treaties or calling for regime change in Belgium; I guess I should be happy. He insulted the Mayor of London and the Duchess of Sussex, and told the UK who their next prime minister ought to be, and let’s not even talk about his ridiculous tux, but he didn’t do anything really outrageous like expose himself to the Queen, so the trip was more-or-less a success.

Does it seem like we’re lowering the bar for the President of the United States? I know it was a long time ago (or at least it seems that way), but didn’t we expect more out of Barack Obama?

Isn’t Photoshop wonderful? The picture on the right is fake, but I have to say it does capture something.

The ceremony to honor the sacrifices made by Allied soldiers at D-Day had to be pushed back 15 minutes while Trump gave an interview to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, in which he described House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “a disaster” and Bob Mueller as a “fool”. We used to say “politics stops at the water’s edge“, but that is another lost norm of American democracy.

We later found out that French President Macron was the actual cause of the delay, but Trump took credit for it:

Listen to those incredible people back there. These people are so amazing, and what they don’t realize is that I’m holding them up because of this interview, but that’s because it’s you. By the way, congratulations on your ratings. I’m very proud.

Ingraham then told her viewers to disregard what they had just heard the President say, because (you know) he says stuff.

Some of you may have heard or read that President Trump supposedly held up the entire D-Day ceremony in order to do this interview with me,. That is patently false — fake news.

and Biden’s Hyde-Amendment reversal

The Hyde amendment is a piece of legislative boilerplate that has been added to appropriation bills ever since Rep. Henry Hyde got it passed in 1976. It prevents federal funding, i.e. Medicaid, from paying for abortions.

At the time, the amendment was viewed as an abortion compromise: Abortion would stay legal, but people who opposed it would know that their tax dollars weren’t paying for it. In practice, though, it has meant that abortion is an option for wealthy and middle-class women, but not poor women. The result has been to keep women trapped in a cycle of poverty: early pregnancy results in early motherhood, which prevents a woman from finishing her education and starting a career that could launch her into the middle class.

Last week, Joe Biden stood virtually alone as a Democratic presidential candidate who still supported the Hyde Amendment. That position was part of his tolerant, don’t-poke-the-bear attitude toward Republicans in general: show some willingness to make reasonable compromises and trust that they’ll do the same.

The problem here is that anti-abortion forces are showing no signs of compromise. Instead, they’re pushing to make abortion completely illegal in places like Alabama and Missouri. If they’re going to send doctors to jail, what exactly are we getting in return for our tolerance and understanding?

Thursday night, Biden reversed himself. He’s now against the Hyde Amendment.

This is both good and bad for his candidacy. For many (me, for example) Hyde is a bridge too far: I care more about women trapped in a cycle of poverty than about the sensitive consciences of anti-abortion zealots. (If they want to reduce abortions, they can help us make contraception more easily available.) Biden has never been my top choice among Democratic candidates, but I hadn’t written him off until the Hyde flap. Now that he’s recanted that position, I’ve returned him to convince-me status.

On the downside, the inherent weakness of a moderate position is that it can seem opportunistic or even wishy-washy. It’s one thing to have middle-of-the-road beliefs, and something else to shift with the winds of public opinion. Biden’s change of heart makes it harder to argue that he comes from a place of deep principle.

Any time I criticize or express doubts about a leading Democrat, I feel obligated to remind everyone of this: Biden is infinitely better than Trump. If he gets the nomination, I’ll support him every way I can.

but we shouldn’t lose sight of the abuses on our border

Jonathan Katz at the LA Times urges us to call the border detention camps what they are: concentration camps. He recounts the series of recent incidents: deaths in custody, herding people into small spaces, not providing adequate medical care, isolation cells for people who are not dangerous, locking children in vans for more than 24 hours at a time, and an end to many educational and recreational services for minors at the camps.

He then comments:

Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

He quotes Hannah Arendt:

The human masses sealed off in [the camps] are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.

Andrea Pitzer, who has written a history of concentration camps, posted a tweetstorm on Trump’s camps:

The longer a camp system stays open, the more predictable things will go wrong (contagious diseases, malnutrition, mental health issues). In addition, every significant camp system has also introduced new horrors of its own, that were unforeseen when that system was opened.

What’s especially ominous about Trump’s concentration camps is that the rhetoric of cruelty is already widely accepted among Trump’s supporters: These people shouldn’t have come here, so we can do whatever we want to them.

Of course this system is going to attract sadists and repel people of conscience. And of course the sadists will do as much as they’re allowed to in an environment where no one is paying attention.

and you also might be interested in …

UU World just published my review of three books about fascism: Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, and Yascha Mounk’s The People Versus Democracy. I’ve already discussed Snyder’s book at more length on this blog, and the other two have been mentioned now and then.

Here’s how skewed things have gotten in Alabama: Not even rich people can speak their minds without reprisal any more if they support abortion rights. Hugh Culverhouse Jr. denounced the state’s recent decision to criminalize abortion, and called on students to boycott U of A until the state relented.

In reaction, the University’s law school sent back his $26.5 million and took his name off their building. Culverson responded with this:

There will be no winners in the wake of the decision Alabama has made to attack the constitutional rights of women. The state will become more divided and isolated, and it will be people such as the future students of the University of Alabama law school who will suffer the consequences. Whether my name is taken down is unimportant, but I hope university administrators will contemplate all the names that will never appear on their admissions rolls, as well.

The U of A business school will continue to be named for Culverhouse’s father, who also supported abortion rights.

Esquire comments on a new report by OpenSecrets on Trump’s widespread conflicts of interest.

It increasingly appears the President of the United States has business holdings all over the world that are drowning in shady money. … The level of lying, corruption, conflicts of interest, and other malfeasance here is just gobsmacking.

And WaPo’s Plum Line column pulls together a series of incidents where people wanting favors found ways to put money in Trump’s pocket.

The White House blocked the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from submitting testimony to the House Intelligence Committee “on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance”.

the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the idea that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.

The Washington Post summarized what the White House found objectionable:

The Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s 12-page prepared testimony, reviewed by The Washington Post, includes a detailed description of how rising greenhouse gas emissions are raising global temperatures and acidifying the world’s oceans. It warns that these changes are contributing to the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

“Climate-linked events are disruptive to humans and societies when they harm people directly or substantially weaken the social, political, economic, environmental, or infrastructure systems that support people,” the statement reads, noting that while some populations may benefit from climate change. “The balance of documented evidence to date suggests that net negative effects will overwhelm the positive benefits from climate change for most of the world, however.”

The senior director for emerging technologies at the National Security Council, Will Happer, is a long-time climate-change denier. He reportedly is advocating for a panel of climate-deniers to “conduct an ‘update’ of the National Climate Assessment” that will make it more friendly to the fossil-fuel industry.

The government just found a novel way to save $40 billion: reclassify high-level nuclear waste as low-level nuclear waste, so that it can be disposed of more easily. What could go wrong?

The waste is housed at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, the Idaho National Laboratory and Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state – the most contaminated nuclear site in the country.

The explanation sounds like it could possibly make sense:

The old definition of high-level waste was based on how the materials were produced, while the new definition will be based on their radioactive characteristics – the standard used in most countries, the energy department said.

The old definition said high-level radioactive waste resulted from a military production stream, [Undersecretary of Energy Paul] Dabbar said. That meant, for instance, that all the waste from plutonium production at Hanford was classified as high level.

It was a “one-size-fits-all approach that has led to decades of delay, cost billions of dollars, and left the waste trapped in DOE facilities in the states of South Carolina, Washington and Idaho without a permanent disposal solution”, the agency said.

But this is where we see the cost of this administration’s constant lying, and the appointment of a know-nothing like Rick Perry as Energy Secretary. (Obama’s first secretary of energy, remember, was a Nobel laureate. Dabbar is a little more qualified than Perry: He may have come to the government from investment banking, but before that he was an officer on a nuclear submarine, though his official bio doesn’t say what his responsibilities were.) There are times when the government really is playing it straight and needs the public to trust that it’s doing the right thing. But how can we?

I agree with Michael Gerson so seldom that I feel like I have to mention it when I do. In a recent WaPo column, he responded to Franklin Graham’s call for a Day of Prayer to support President Trump. Gerson first recalled that praying for a nation’s leaders is fairly common in the Christian tradition and ought to be uncontroversial. But Graham is asking God for a little more than is usually considered proper.

Graham made clear that the real purpose of the event was not to pray for the president, but to pray in his political favor. “President Trump’s enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family and the presidency,” Graham said. “In the history of our country, no president has been attacked as he has.” The American Family Association described the day of prayer as a type of “spiritual warfare,” necessary because Trump’s many accomplishments “make him very unpopular with the Devil and the kingdom of darkness.”

Who are the “enemies” that Graham had in mind? Who represents “the kingdom of darkness”? The Democratic Party? Robert S. Mueller III and the “deep state”? Never-Trump Republicans?

However the conspiracy against the president is defined, I suppose I am part of it. Having been accused of serving the Prince of Darkness, I feel justified in making a frank response.

Gerson goes on to call Graham’s event “blasphemy” and “an abomination” and suggests that Graham has sold out Christ in favor of Trump.

For a minister of the gospel, making Christ secondary to anything is the dereliction of a sacred duty. Making the gospel secondary to the political fortunes of Donald Trump is betrayal compounded with farce.

Sean Hannity thinks it’s “despicable” that Nancy Pelosi wants to see a political opponent (Trump) in locked up. “That happens in Banana Republics,” he says.

I’m not sure what I find so morbidly fascinating about incels, the “involuntarily celibate” men who believe their looks unfairly doom them to lives without the hot chicks they otherwise deserve.

New York Magazine’s Alice Hines uncovers the world of incel plastic surgery, where strong jaw-lines and broad shoulders are created in order to turn incels into “Chads” — the incel name for the small percentage of men who get all the sex.

and let’s close with something award-winning

Saturday I was at a birthday party in Vermont when people started telling me about this neighbor they knew, Anais Mitchell, who kind of came from nowhere (other than down the road) and created a musical and would be up for a Tony award Sunday night.

I hardly ever make it into New York, so I don’t keep track of what’s on Broadway, and had never heard of Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, which was the big winner with 8 awards, including one for Mitchell’s score.

Here’s the audio of “Why We Build the Wall” from Hadestown, which was written before Trump became president.

So poof! Last week’s trade war against Mexico is over, at least for the time being. The new crisis is with Iran: Did they attack oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman? Will anyone believe us if we say they did? What will we do about it and why? In the reality-TV presidency, each week needs its cliffhanger.

But I decided that the featured post needed to be about something that isn’t part of the Trump Show, at least not directly. So I call your attention to the speech Bernie Sanders gave this week defining what he means by socialism and explaining why he thinks we need it. That post “Socialism: What’s in a word?” is about not just Sanders’ speech, but the larger context in which other candidates may agree with Sanders on specific programs but still not want to talk about socialism. Why do either Sanders or his rivals care about this label, so that Bernie wants to claim it and all the other candidates want to avoid it?

That should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary starts out talking about the most recent examples of Trump administration lawlessness: He says he would accept the help of foreign governments in the 2020 campaign, and Kellyanne Conway will continue violating the Hatch Act without consequences. From there it will cover the Mexico deal, such as it is; what we know about the Iran situation; the demonstrations in Hong Kong; the upcoming Democratic debate; and a few other things, before closing with something I haven’t found yet.

Oh, and I went to an impeachment rally in Boston Saturday. I don’t think this is going to happen without people in the streets.

The summary should be out noonish, or maybe a little later.

The word socialism has become a little like the word God: something we can almost all believe in as long as we get to define it our own way. Depending on the speaker, socialism can mean Denmark or Venezuela or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or even the National Socialism of Hitler’s Germany. In FDR’s day Social Security was denounced as “socialism” and in JFK’s day Medicare was. Now those programs enjoy almost universal popularity. So are we all socialists now?

If socialism means buying things collectively through the government, then your local fire department is socialist, and so are the national parks and the interstate highways. Who doesn’t like them? On the other hand, if socialism means buying everything collectively, so that we eat in big government cafeterias rather than in our own kitchens and dining rooms, that would be a lot less popular. So which is it?

And if we can’t decide which it is, why are we talking about it at all?

What Bernie said. Bernie Sanders wants to have that discussion, and I don’t think any of the other Democratic candidates do. Wednesday, he gave a major speech (video, transcript) embracing socialism and attempting to define it his own way.

We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights. That is what I mean by democratic socialism.

He listed these economic rights:

• The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
• The right to quality health care
• The right to a complete education
• The right to affordable housing
• The right to a clean environment
• The right to a secure retirement

How others responded. Among this cycle’s Democratic candidates, none of those rights seems terribly radical. True, not every candidate would agree with all of them. The more moderate ones would see them as goals to work toward rather than rights that need to be delivered immediately. (Let’s extend quality health care to more people, even if we can’t get a universal program passed.) Each candidate would have a different interpretation of those rights (what jobs are “decent”? when is an education “complete”?), of the kinds of programs necessary to ensure them, and how to pay for those programs. But nothing on that list should inspire shocked pointing and cries of “infidel!”

All the same, nobody joined Bernie in endorsing socialism by name. Elizabeth Warren, the candidate whose policy proposals are probably closest to Sanders’, noncommittally said, “I’ll have to hear his speech.” But Warren has kept the word capitalism in her proposals (as in the Accountable Capitalism Act). She styles her program as a reform of capitalism, not a revolution that replaces it with socialism.

Other candidates were more critical.

Of the two dozen Democrats running for president, some are ready to sign on to ideas Sanders has pioneered, such as Medicare for All, but none agree with democratic socialism as a way to govern, or as a pitch that will defeat President Donald Trump. Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who was booed for condemning socialism two weeks ago in a speech before the California Democratic Party, laughed at the title of Sanders’s speech when I read it to him. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado let out an exasperated chuckle. “I don’t think the American people even know what that means,” he told me. “Nobody in my town halls talks about democratic socialism versus oligarchy and authoritarianism.” When I read the title of the speech [“How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism”] to Senator Kamala Harris of California on Monday after an event in Dubuque, she responded with a simple “Huh.”

Republicans, on the other hand, love to talk about socialism, and to label Democratic proposals “socialist”. One favorite technique is to dismiss a Democratic proposal as “socialist” without identifying any specific flaws, as if socialism were a plague that can only be fought by quarantine. Before he officially became a politician, Ronald Reagan attacked a proposal similar to Medicare like this:

I know how I’d feel, if you, my fellow citizens, decided that to be an actor, I had to become a government employee and work in a national theater. Take it into your own occupation or that of your husband. All of us can see what happens: Once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment, from here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism — to determining his pay, and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go, or what they will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

So sure, the idea that Grandma can go to the hospital after she falls sounds good, but it’s socialism. Before long we’ll all be living in government dormitories.

My own view of capitalism and socialism in America. Debating socialism and capitalism, as if they were two distinct roads and we could only choose one, seems misguided to me.

When I look at America, I see capitalist and socialist economies existing side-by-side. We commonly go back and forth between them without thinking about it. Your driveway is part of the capitalist economy; the street is in the socialist realm. When your kids play in the front yard, they’re under the aegis of capitalism. If they go down to the park, they’ve crossed into socialism.

(In Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber also posits an underlying communist system, which we instinctively revert to in emergencies. When the flood hits, you rescue your neighbors in your boat — without going through either a market or a government office — because you have a boat and they need rescuing. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.)

What we’re mainly arguing about when we talk about socialism is where the boundary between the two realms will be. Should our kids be educated in public schools (socialism) or private schools (capitalism)? If we raise taxes to improve the library (socialism), maybe I won’t be able to afford to buy as many books (capitalism).

In my view, the balance has shifted too far in the capitalist direction, and needs to shift back. Market forces are doing a really bad job of organizing our health care (as I see in my own life). Pro-capitalist Republicans deny climate change because capitalism has no answer for it.

So while I have no desire to destroy the capitalist system root and branch, I want to move the boundary to shrink the portion of the economy it commands. I don’t think we need public dormitories and cafeterias, but I also don’t think we want capitalists manipulating the insulin market.

What’s in a word? Whatever politicians say in their speeches, only a few libertarian radicals want to get rid of socialism entirely, and only a few communist radicals want to get rid of capitalism entirely. We’re going to continue living in a mixed economy and arguing about what activities belong in each realm. So the idea that we’re going to accept or reject socialism once and for all is unrelated to the world we actually live in.

But we keep trying to have that conversation, and it seems that every politician but Sanders (Republican and Democrat alike) has come to the same conclusion: Democrats are better off talking about their specific policies — universal health care, free college, sustainable energy, etc. — than having an abstract argument about capitalism vs. socialism.

So why does Bernie want to have that argument? I think the word socialism symbolizes a point he wants to make, something that’s key to his political identity. The argument about socialism has become a metaphor for a more nebulous question: How screwed up are things, what caused it, and how big a change is necessary to set the country on the right track again?

Joe Biden’s message is that Trump screwed things up. The country was more-or-less on the right track under Obama, and we just need to get back there. Trump’s extremism has shown Republicans what their flirting with white supremacy and subverting democratic norms leads to, and once he’s gone they’ll be more reasonable. So there’s no need to change America’s underlying system, we just need a new president — preferably one with a majority in both houses of Congress, like Obama had for his first two years.

Elizabeth Warren’s message is that the turn towards unfettered capitalism is the problem and it began around the time of the Reagan administration. She uses her personal story to say: We used to have opportunity. You could buy a house on one income. You could work your way through college and graduate without a mountain of debt. Now, irresponsible banks throw the world economy into a near-depression, and they get bailed out. CEO pay is out of control. More and more chunks of the economy are monopolies or oligopolies.

So Warren’s message is one of reform: We need to get capitalism back under control, so that it works for the many again instead of just the few.

But Sanders’ message is that America is screwed up at a much deeper level, and it was never really on the right track. In his speech, he points to FDR’s New Deal not as a time when things were going right, but as a time when people had a vision of a better system. In his speech he said:

Over eighty years ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families. Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.

This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.

Unlike Trump, Bernie doesn’t think America can be made great again, because it was never really great. For a while we had a vision of greatness, but we left it unfinished. We don’t need reform, or the mere updating of old values to new circumstances. We need transformation and even revolution.

And let me also be clear, the only way we achieve these goals is through a political revolution – where millions of people get involved in the political process and reclaim our democracy by having the courage to take on the powerful corporate interests whose greed is destroying the social and economic fabric of our country.

And that, I think, is why Sanders embraces the label socialist, while other Democrats shrink away from it. To him, the word symbolizes a whole new system, a revolutionary transformation.

In short, Bernie is appealing to a level of discontent that no other candidate (except maybe Trump, who represents a vision of authoritarian revolution; I would compare him not so much with Hitler as with Franco) sees. Sanders sees a country, a political system, and an economic system that is too far gone to be reformed. Rather than build on what has come before, he prefers a blank-sheet-of-paper approach. Rather than make deals with some collection of the current power brokers, he wants a peaceful popular uprising to blow them away.

So the argument about socialism is really an argument about that extremity of discontent: How many people feel that way? Some, definitely. But are there enough of them to win a nomination and presidency?

Bernie thinks there are. Other candidates disagree — and I guess I do too. But that’s what campaigns are for: We’re going to find out.

According to the Constitution, the duties of the President include “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.  But from the beginning of his administration, Donald Trump has taken the same attitude towards the law as president that he did when he was a New York real estate tycoon: Not “What does the law say I have to do?”, but “Who’s going to make me do it?”

No previous president or administration has had such a disregard for the law, and he seems to be getting more brazen about it. This week included so much lawlessness I need to list it before I go into detail on any of it.

• Trump announced that there is nothing wrong with doing what he was accused of doing in 2016: accepting help from a foreign government during an election campaign. The law may say otherwise, but so what?
• An official watchdog group (whose head Trump himself appointed) reported that Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly and brazenly violated the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from partisan political activity while performing their official duties. The report recommended that she be fired. The White House Counsel rejected the report, and Conway will continue in her job. She has neither apologized nor promised to obey the law in the future.
• Scandals continued to pile up around Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, whose stock in a major road-paving company was long ago identified as a conflict of interest, who attempted to use her position to benefit her family’s company, and who maintains a special pipeline for transportation projects in the home state of her husband, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Friday night, MSNBC’s Ali Veshi (subbing for Rachel Maddow), examined Trump’s long history of telling people to break the law. He mentioned these incidents:

• Trump told border officials not to let asylum-seekers in, in spite of laws saying the opposite. He said they should even refuse a court order.
• He told Native American tribal leaders to ignore laws that prevent them from drilling for oil on their land.
• He told a gathering of policemen to use more violence when arresting suspects.

(Veshi might also have mentioned incidents during the campaign, when Trump urged his audiences to beat up protesters. Or his instructions that his administration should defy “all the subpoenas“, regardless of their lawful authority.) In each case, intermediate officials felt obligated to tell the same people to obey the law rather than do what the President just told them to do.

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Wednesday, Trump said that he would “listen” to any foreign government that offered his campaign dirt on his opponent, and that “maybe” he would call the FBI. But then he elaborated in ways that made the call to the FBI seem unlikely:

I’ll tell you what, I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. You don’t call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do. Oh, give me a break – life doesn’t work that way.

Both Attorney General Barr and FBI Director Wray have said that a campaign receiving offers of help from foreign governments should call the FBI, but Trump explicitly rejected that opinion. “The FBI director is wrong,” he said.

In essence, Trump has announced to foreign governments that he is open for business. If they have anything on his rivals, he wants to hear it. Will he ask questions about whether they broke any laws to get it, as Russia did when it hacked DNC computers? He didn’t say.

Democrats in the Senate offered a bill to require campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance, but Republicans blocked it, as they have blocked every attempt to stop a repeat of Russia’s 2016 interference. It’s hard to come up with an explanation other than the harsh one: Republicans are counting on Russia to help them again in 2020.

When Elaine Chao took office as Transportation Secretary, she pledged to the Office of Government Ethics that she would sell her stock in Vulcan Materials, which the company’s web page describes like this:

Vulcan Materials Company is the nation’s largest producer of construction aggregates—primarily crushed stone, sand and gravel—and a major producer of aggregates-based construction materials, including asphalt and ready-mixed concrete.

Given that the Transportation Department oversees the interstate highway system, the conflict of interest is obvious. She in fact didn’t sell the shares until two weeks ago, after the Wall Street Journal pointed out that she was still holding the shares — whose value had increased by $40,000 in the meantime.

Another obvious conflict is her family’s company, Foremost Group, which the NYT describes as “an American shipping company with deep ties to the economic and political elite in China, where most of the company’s business is centered”. The Times recently revealed that when Chao planned her first trip to China as a member of Trump’s cabinet, she asked for family members to be included in meetings with government officials.

David Rank, who had been deputy chief of mission for the State Department in Beijing, described the request as “alarmingly inappropriate”. The trip was cancelled after State Department officials raised ethical issues. Vanity Fair writes:

Though Chao has not worked for the company since the 1970s, it is the (ongoing) source of her wealth and the political wealth of her husband [Majority Leader Mitch McConnell]. In 2008 her father gave the couple a gift of as much as $25 million, while 13 members of the Chao family, including Foremost CEO Angela Chao, have given more than $1 million to McConnell’s campaigns and to PACs tied to him.

Angela Chao responded to the NYT article with a letter to the editor defending her sister, which in my opinion missed the point and denied charges that were never made.

Finally, there are the conflicts created by her marriage to Senator McConnell of Kentucky. Politico reports:

The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.

Draining the swamp indeed.

The Office of the Special Counsel (not to be confused with Bob Mueller’s office; this one is run by Trump appointee Henry Kerner, formerly a Republican congressional staffer) issued a report recommending that Kellyanne Conway be fired for repeated violations of the Hatch Act. The NYT explains:

The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while they are on the job. Named for former Senator Carl A. Hatch, Democrat of New Mexico, the law has been on the books for 80 years. The act dates to Depression-era reforms intended to prevent machine politics in which patronage jobs were handed out to people who then used their positions to help keep their patrons in power.

The OSC report lists several occasions in which Conway was speaking in her official capacity (for example, giving a press interview at the White House or tweeting on a Twitter account that she also uses for official purposes) and also attacking Democrats like Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, or Elizabeth Warren.

Conway has dismissed the whole issue, and all attempts by ethics officials to work through the White House Counsel’s office have by stymied. The report concludes:

Ms. Conway’s persistent, notorious, and deliberate Hatch Act violations have created an unprecedented challenge to this office’s ability to enforce the Act, as we are statutorily charged. She has willfully and openly disregarded the law in full public view. As recently as May 29, 2019, Ms. Conway defiantly rejected the Hatch Act’s application to her activities, dismissed OSC’s 2018 findings, and flippantly stated, “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.” And she made it clear that she has no plans to cease abusing her official position to influence voters. Ms. Conway’s conduct undermines public confidence in the Executive branch and compromises the civil service system that the Hatch Act was intended to protect. Her knowing and blatant disregard for the law aggravates the severity of her numerous violations.

After the report came out, a Deadline reporter asked Conway for a reaction. She replied: “I have no reaction. Why would I give you a reaction?”

Trump has made it clear that Conway will not be fired or otherwise disciplined. The White House Counsel’s office issued a statement defending her actions, which a University of Texas Law School professor described as “fooling no one“.

In this White House, faithfully executing the laws is not seen as a priority, or even a duty. The law is something to be gotten around, not something to obey.

Let me make something 100% clear to the American public and anyone running for public office. It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election. This is not a novel concept.

– Ellen Weintraub, Chair of the Federal Elections Commission

If somebody called from a country, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.

– Donald Trump

This week’s featured posts are: “Socialism: What’s in a word?” (In short: When candidates argue about socialism, what are they really talking about?) And “The Lawless Administration” (about the most recent examples of disregard for the law).

Readers of the Morning Tease will realize that the second post wasn’t planned. But the notes I intended for this summary grew beyond the usual length.

This week everybody was talking about lawlessness in the Trump administration

See the featured post.

and the Mexico deal

As I was writing last week’s Sift, the deal averting Mexican tariffs had just been announced, and people were arguing over whether Trump had actually accomplished anything or just saved face by repackaging concessions Mexico had already made.

Trump apparently took offense at this lack of credulousness, and started talking about a “secret deal” in which Mexico had agreed to much more than seemed apparent. He waved a piece of paper around, which was supposedly this unpublished agreement.

Well, Mexico has published it. And like the North Korean deal that Trump once suggested should get him a Nobel Prize, it doesn’t amount to much.

The text of the letter reveals a commitment to begin discussions for a future agreement — essentially making it an agreement to negotiate an agreement — and is, as many expected, not a “deal.” … According to the letter, Mexico has agreed that if after 45 days this deployment and any other measures it takes “have not sufficiently achieved results in addressing the flow of migrants to the southern border” in the eyes of the US, then Mexico will take “all necessary steps” to bring the still to be negotiated agreement into force within the next 45 days.

So basically in 90 days we’ll be back where we started.

and Iran

Thursday, two oil tankers — one Japanese and the other Norwegian — were attacked in the Gulf of Oman, which lies just outside the Persian Gulf. The United States is blaming Iran for the attacks, but evidence to support that claim has been spotty, and appears to contradict some of what the tanker companies are reporting.

The larger story looks like this: Last May, the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration agreed to in 2015, despite our own intelligence services verifying that Iran was fulfilling its obligations. (The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in August that Iran was still in compliance.) Since then, the US has ratcheted up pressure on Iran in a number of ways, particularly trying to shut off its oil exports by threatening its trading partners with economic sanctions. Ever since, there has been speculation that Iran might respond by interfering with the exports of American allies like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, which must pass through the Straits of Hormuz to get out of the Persian Gulf. The recent attacks could be that retaliation, or the attackers could be from other nations who want to see a war between the US and Iran, or even non-state actors trying to drive up the price of oil.

The even larger story is that Iran is a regional rival of two US allies: Saudi Arabia and Israel. Iran supports Hezbollah against Israel, and the Houthi rebels who are fighting the Saudis in the Yemeni Civil War. It is allied with the Assad regime in Syria, and is in a political struggle with the US for influence in Iraq.

There are reasons for Americans to be skeptical of a rush to war. National Security Adviser John Bolton has been advocating an attack against Iran since the Bush administration. In living memory, two disastrous wars have begun on false pretenses: the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, and false reports about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program in Iraq.

This is the kind of situation where an administration relies on its general credibility. Sadly, this administration has none. Trump says the tanker attack has “Iran written all over it”. But then, Trump says a lot of things that turn out not to be true.

Matt Yglesias sums up in a tweetstorm:

It’s likely the Trump administration is lying about the tanker just because, in general, they are always lying. But it’s not central to the *policy question* which is dominated by the reality that Trump is single-handedly responsible for the downward spiral in relations. Trump blew up a painstakingly negotiated international agreement that the Iranians weren’t violating & then set about trying to destroy their economy. The only reasonable course of action is for us to climb down from this. The Iranian leadership is bad but nobody can articulate why it’s important that the United States heavily involve itself on the side of the also-bad leadership of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in a regional conflict that has nothing to do with us.

and Hong Kong

Ever since Hong Kong became part of China, Hong Kongers have been determined to maintain the special status they were promised. Recently, a law allowing extradition from Hong Kong to the mainland has caused hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of demonstrators to take to the streets.

Hong Kong’s China-appointed chief executive has backed down somewhat, suspending the proposed law indefinitely. But the demonstrators want it officially withdrawn from consideration, so protests continue.

and the first Democratic presidential debate

The field is set: Twenty candidates, split randomly into two groups of ten, appear on two nights. On Wednesday, June 26: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren

On Thursday, June 27: Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, California Sen. Kamala Harris, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, author Marianne Williamson, and businessman Andrew Yang.

Unlike the Republicans in 2016, it isn’t going to be a major-candidates/minor-candidates split, but things sort of shook out that way: Five candidates consistently poll higher than 5%, and four of them — Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Harris — wound up in the Thursday group. The fifth — Warren — is in the Wednesday group. This is probably a disadvantage for Warren, because everybody who isn’t Joe Biden needs to be going up against Joe Biden.

There were two ways to qualify for these debates: major polls showing that you have measurable support, or a large number of donors in multiple states.

Candidates who didn’t make the cut include Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton (my rep), and Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam. They should take the hint and get out of the race. The qualifying criteria were fair and not that arduous. Twenty candidates is already too many. I hope we get down to ten fairly soon.

This is just my opinion, but in general I don’t think running for president is an appropriate way to introduce yourself to the country. A major-party presidential nomination ought to be the culmination of a career in public service, during which you have championed a number of important causes. Long before you announce, people should have been saying, “I hope she (or he) runs for president someday.”

Just don’t ask me to square that view with the affection I’m developing for Mayor Pete. At the moment I’m leaning more towards Warren — it’s still early — but whenever I see Buttigieg on TV, I find myself rooting for him to do well.

A Quinippiac poll has several major Democratic candidates ahead of Trump nationally: Biden 53%-40%, Sanders 51%-42%, Harris 49%-41%, Warren 49%-42%, Buttigieg 47%-42%, Booker 47%-42%. (Notice that Trump’s support is almost the same in all those races; the difference is whether the non-Trump 58% have decided to support the Democrat yet or not. The poll provides little support for the idea that either Biden or Sanders is attracting significant numbers of Trump voters.)

538’s Perry Bacon cautions against taking these polls too seriously. Historically, polls this far out from the election have been unreliable. Interestingly, the much-maligned 2016-cycle polls were closer to the final vote than most.

The last presidential election featured one of the more accurate sets of early polls for this point in the cycle: Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump 46.2 percent to 41.2 percent in an average of all polls conducted in November and December 2015, missing the eventual national popular vote margin by about 3 points. (The actual result was Clinton 48.0 percent, Trump 46.0 percent.)

538 founder Nate Silver also chides Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager (Faiz Shakir) for pushing the theory that polls are underestimating Sanders’ support because they undersample young voters.

Younger voters are harder to reach, but pollsters attempt to compensate for that by upweighting the younger voters they do reach to match their projected composition of the electorate, as @fshakir surely knows. This adds error/uncertainty, and primary polling is generally a rough enterprise, but the polls are probably about as likely to be overestimating Sanders as underestimating him.

Elizabeth Warren seems to be the tortoise in this race. After being written off early, she’s been steadily gaining support. Some (but not all) polls now have her passing Sanders for second place. Trump appears to have noticed.

I have never figured out what segment of the population my social-media friends represent (they’re certainly not an unbiased sample of the electorate), but for what it’s worth they seem to be settling on Warren, who now also leads in the Daily Kos straw poll.

and you also might be interested in …

Sarah Sanders is leaving as White House press secretary. According to The Beaverton, she is “looking forward to spending more time lying to her family”.

Recently, Sanders has given up all the usual duties of a WHPS, like briefing the press. Why talk to the country, when you can just talk to those who live in the Fox News bubble?

AT&T promised to add 7,000 jobs if Trump’s tax bill passed. Instead they’ve cut 23,000. They’re not the only big corporation to pocket their tax windfall and do nothing for workers.

It’s early to be worried about getting a new budget in place by the start of the 2020 fiscal year on October 1, or the increase in the debt limit that has to happen soon afterward, but the signs are not good: “We’re negotiating with ourselves right now,” says Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby. The White House and congressional Republicans are still looking for a common position they can take into negotiations with Democrats.

Nicholas Kristof points out that everything proponents think they know about the death penalty is wrong: It doesn’t deter murderers; it’s more expensive than a life sentence; a lot of extraneous factors influence who gets the death penalty; and (in spite of all the apparent safeguards) we’re still executing innocent people.

but I went to an impeachment rally

Impeachment rallies happened all over the country Saturday, though it’s hard to find much media coverage of them. I went to the one on Boston Common. I found the crowd size hard to estimate, but I’ll guess there were 250-300 people.

Public pressure is the one thing that’s been missing from the impeachment discussion. (The British did a much better job protesting Trump than we’ve done lately.) What’s needed, I think, isn’t one big march, but a regular series of events, on the model of the Moral Mondays in Raleigh. Rather than try to get the word out for this march or that one (I didn’t hear about this rally until the day before, and could easily have missed it), it should become common knowledge that impeachment rallies are going to be held, say, on the first Saturday of every month.

I’ve discussed in the past the ways in which I think Nancy Pelosi’s strategy makes sense. But its weakness is that it leaves the public confused. If we rally for impeachment, are we rallying for or against the Democratic leadership? The rally I attended had no real headline speaker; I think that probably hurt both the press coverage and the attendance. That’s probably because big-name Democrats aren’t sure what Pelosi wants them to do.

Speaking of Moral Mondays, Rev. William Barber led a group of clergy on a Moral Witness Wednesday march in front of the White House this week. Prior to the march, he tweeted:

Jeremiah 22 tells us that when political leaders abuse their office & hurt the poor, we must show up in person to deliver a prophetic indictment. Now is the time.

Pete Buttigieg, who has made a point of speaking out as a liberal Christian, did not march, but was part of the crowd waiting for the marchers in Lafayette Square.

and let’s close with something mythic

Fenrir contemplates swallowing the Moon.

This picture is one of many interesting photos to be found on the Science Nature Facebook page.

Apparently we came within ten minutes of war with Iran last week. But John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are still Trump’s top foreign policy advisers, so maybe this week.

The week’s biggest talking-head argument, though, was about whether AOC should have called Trump’s immigrant detainment centers “concentration camps”. For a while it looked like we were going to do the usual thing: get distracted by the Right’s bad-faith outrage and lose track of the original issue. But as the week wore on, the mainstream media started paying some real attention to the conditions in those camps. Call them whatever you want, but don’t stop paying attention to them. By any name, they are a national disgrace.

The featured post this week will try to organize what we learned about the camps this week. It’s called “Concentrating on the Border”, and it should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary covers the near-miss with Iran, the launch of Trump’s re-election campaign, the latest sexual assault charge against the President of the United States, Jon Stewart’s well-deserved attack on Mitch McConnell, the slavery reparations debate, and a few other things. It should be out between noon and 1.

Whatever we decide to call the camps where we detain immigrants, they are already a disgrace to our nation. If we don’t do something, they will probably get worse.

This week America’s talking heads argued about a label: Should the places where the Trump administration is detaining immigrants be called “concentration camps”? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term (she wasn’t the first), and then pundits inside the Fox News bubble began demanding she apologize: to Trump, to Jews, to history, and so on.

As so often happens, the perpetrator became the victim. The media hasn’t devoted nearly as much time to the real victims — the immigrants (many of them asylum-seekers who have followed the law and done nothing wrong) being herded into camps of dubious safety and hygiene — as they have to the Trumpists howling with outrage. Instead of “What is happening on the border?” our focus has been on “Is it fair to call them concentration camps?”

I will not get snarky about this, because Alexandra Petri has already done that very well. (“If we do not use the right words for this, we might think that something terrible was happening.”) But I will point out that we had a very similar debate (including some of the same people, i.e., Liz Cheney) during the Bush administration: Should “enhanced interrogation” techniques (water-boarding, beatings, stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold — sometimes resulting in death) count as torture. Instead of discussing exactly what our country was doing to people we had captured, we argued about a word. Those who felt injured by that word often got more sympathy than the people they were (or were not) torturing.

So what is happening on the border? To a large extent we don’t know. In part, this is why the cable news shows have focused on semantics: It’s easier to find talking heads willing to shout at each other about the proper use of words than to get solid information about how the U.S. is treating people who come here fleeing violence in their home countries.

The National Immigration Justice Center writes:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is notoriously obscure about the systems it uses to detain immigrants in the United States. Without a court order, it is rare that DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) divulges any details about where its jails and prisons are located, who or how many people are held there, or any details about how they are managed — including how much taxpayers spend to keep them open, and who gets that money.

But at least we can get some population totals. The Detention Watch Network says:

The average daily population of detained immigrants increased from approximately 5,000 in 1994, to 19,000 in 2001, and to over 39,000 in 2017.

More recent estimates, presumably unofficial, place the detainee population at 52,000 and rising (despite a congressional limit of 45,000 and a goal of 40,000).

Is this explosive growth necessary? No. The number of people arriving at the border without visas has been high lately, but fundamentally that’s not the reason so many people are detained. Vox explains.

During [Trump’s] first week in office, he signed an executive order that declared nearly every unauthorized immigrant in the US a “priority” for deportation. (In practice, most of the people the Trump administration has chosen to detain have been immigrants with past criminal convictions or charges — though plenty of those charges aren’t serious enough to require mandatory detention under the law.) The executive order also removed some of ICE’s flexibility to decide which immigrants it was most important to keep in detention.

This, plus the rise in people coming into the US who can’t immediately be deported because they’re children or families, seeking asylum, or both, means Trump has pushed the detainee population to record highs.

But most of those asylum-seeking children and families don’t have to be detained either. In fact, routinely detaining asylum-seekers may be a violation of international law. The Just Security blog notes:

Crucially, international bodies have made clear that detention of asylum seekers must be a measure of last resort, not a default practice imposed automatically or as a broad rule for a large category of people.

Deterring asylum applicants or discouraging future migration is not a lawful basis for depriving an individual migrant of liberty, either under international law (see Detention Guidelines at para. 32) or under U.S. law (see the preliminary injunction issued in RILR v. Johnson).

The administration’s argument for detaining asylum-seekers rests on two dubious notions: (1) All unauthorized immigrants are threats to public safety; and (2) if asylum-seekers are released, they won’t show up for their hearings and will vanish into the immigrant underground.

The first is the baseless propaganda Trump has been pushing since he came down the escalator, and the second is provably false. Syracuse University’s TRAC Project (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse) reports that families who are given legal counsel overwhelmingly do show up for their hearings.

TRAC found that with rare exception virtually every family attended their court hearings when they had representation. Appearance rates at the initial hearing were 99.9 percent. This is in contrast to appearance rates for unrepresented families of 81.6 percent.

Why does an attorney make a difference? Because confusion and miscommunication, not a desire to flout American law, are the main causes of missed hearings. It turns out that the same government that can’t find the kids it has stolen also has trouble delivering notifications to the right places.

When a family doesn’t show up, it does not necessarily mean they had intended to “skip” their hearing. Some immigrants who don’t appear simply have not received notification of their hearing. Others may receive a written notice, but the notice may have been in English which they couldn’t read.

In short, the “reasons” the administration gives are just pretexts. It detains a lot of immigrants because it wants to detain a lot of immigrants.

Deterrence. That last sentence sounds ridiculous, because why would the government want to create such a big headache for itself? The point of detaining tens of thousands of immigrants in unpleasant and unhealthy conditions, rather than letting them live and work in the US while they wait for their hearings, is to deter other foreigners from coming here. (Extra cash for the private prison industry is just a bonus.) So life should be harsh for those awaiting an asylum hearing, and the harsher the better.

Numerous government officials have talked about “deterrence”, and Trump himself promotes being “rough” or “tough” with asylum-seekers to the point of breaking the law. (“When you do these things we have to do,” he complained to Fox Business Network, “they end up arresting Border Patrol people.”)

This is the most important thing to understand about America’s immigrant detention camps: They’re supposed to be unpleasant. It’s not just that systems are overwhelmed (though they are) or that rogue employees misbehave (though they do). Mistreatment of these immigrants is intentional. We’re making an example of them in order to teach the oppressed people of the world a lesson: “Don’t come here, because we’ll be as nasty to you as we’re being to them.”

New information. Eventually, though, a few media outlets started getting past the AOC/Liz Cheney exchanges and giving us some new information about the camps.

This week, for example, we learned about conditions at the border station in Clint, Texas, where hundreds of children are being held.

Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.

Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.

This is not an oversight. In fact, government lawyers have argued in court that a previous court order that children be held in “safe and sanitary” conditions did not require that the government provide them with soap or toothbrushes, that they have beds to sleep on, or that they be given clean water or adequate quantities of food.

The government knows what it is doing. The cruelty is intentional.

Family separation. The crown jewel in the administration’s program of deterrence has been family separation, which sends the message: “Don’t come here, because we’ll take your kids away and lose them in our system.” That policy was an experiment for about a year, and then was rolled out nationally. Acting Assistant HHS Secretary Steven Wagner said:

We expect that the new policy will result in a deterrence effect, we certainly hope that parents stop bringing their kids on this dangerous journey and entering the country illegally. So we are prepared to continue to expand capacity as needed.

The Trump zero-tolerance policy meant that everyone who surrendered or was caught at the border would be detained. The system for processing asylum claims had an enormous backlog, but court rulings stipulated that minors couldn’t be held more than 20 days. So detaining the adults meant separating them from their children.

Mothers and fathers, most from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, went to jail on charges of misdemeanor illegal entry or felony re-entry. Their children were reclassified as “unaccompanied” and sent into a network of shelters scattered across the country

In all, more than 4,000 children were taken in this manner. Many were not tracked properly, and their parents had a difficult time finding them again once their cases were resolved. In April, the government was estimating it might take two years for some children to be returned.

If you doubt the cruelty of this policy, you should read two articles the New York Times published this week: One is about Baby Constantin, a four-month-old Romanian refugee taken when his father sought asylum for them at the Mexican border.

it would be months before his parents saw him again. Before then, his father would be sent for psychiatric evaluation in a Texas immigration detention center because he couldn’t stop crying; his mother would be hospitalized with hypertension from stress. Constantin would become attached to a middle-class American family, having spent the majority of his life in their tri-level house on a tree-lined street in rural Michigan, and then be sent home. Now more than a year and a half old, the baby still can’t walk on his own, and has not spoken.

His father fell victim to a scam that apparently has been played on a large number of asylum-seekers.

Two months into his detention, an immigration officer came to Mr. Mutu with an offer. As he understood it, if he gave up his claim for asylum, he would be deported back to Romania with Constantin. He agreed, and on June 3, 2018, he was released from his cell and loaded into a van.

He looked everywhere for Constantin and asked the officers where his son was, but was not given a clear answer. At the airport, he refused to board without the baby. The immigration officers, he said, told him that Constantin would be handed to him once he had taken his seat. But the plane lifted off and the baby never came.

In the second article, the same NYT reporter (Caitlin Dickerson) interviews a woman who helped care for Constantin: Alma Acevedo, a 24-year-old who worked for Bethany Christian Services, a foster care and adoption agency that has a federal contract to house immigrant children. It was her first job out of college.

Ms. Acevedo was just settling into the role when things suddenly became more chaotic, in the late summer of 2017. Unlike the teenagers she was used to working with, who had intentionally crossed the border alone, the separated children who began to arrive were inconsolable when they reached her. Each new one seemed to traumatize the rest all over again. “It was horrible,” she said. “We could not do work. It was just a classroom full of crying kids all day.”

… Most days after work, she cried in her car before she left the parking lot. She checked the news on her phone constantly, watching CNN until she went to bed, hoping to find out when the family separations would end.

But they ended, right? Not exactly. You can be forgiven for not knowing that, because a year ago, after a couple months of bad publicity, Trump signed an executive order that purported to end the policy, and a judge ordered that the children be returned.

But remember: The family separation policy didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a desire to be cruel to immigrants, in order to strike fear into the hearts of similar people planning to come here. None of that has changed. The administration separated families not because it needed to, but because it wanted to. It still wants to, and so it finds ways to do so.

Michele Goldberg reports:

To continue separating families, immigration agents appear to be taking advantage of a loophole in the court decision. The injunction doesn’t apply when parents have criminal histories or communicable diseases, which might require them to be quarantined away from their children. Nor does it explicitly apply when children are accompanied by relatives like siblings or grandparents rather than parents, unless those relatives are their legal guardians. And it permits family separation when a parent is deemed a danger to the child.

On the surface, these exceptions seem perfectly reasonable, particularly given the threat of human trafficking. But [Anthony] Enriquez, a lawyer [for Catholic Charities], said they “left a big gaping hole that the government is driving a truck straight through.”

“Criminal history” or “disease” didn’t have to be anything actually dangerous, because the government was looking for pretexts, not reasons.

For example, a 6-month-old was taken from his father because the father had a conviction for marijuana possession. Another dad lost his kid because he admitted to a conviction for driving with an expired license.

In some cases, the parents hadn’t been convicted of anything at all, but border agents claimed that they had gang affiliations. In other instances, agents stretched the definition of “communicable diseases” to apply to situations that don’t involve quarantine. …  Enriquez represented a child who was sent to New York after her mother was hospitalized for a leg injury in California. Even after the mother was discharged and released from immigration custody, Enriquez said, the government balked at returning her daughter to her until he threatened to sue.

But are they concentration camps? So OK. Now that we have discussed what our country is doing, maybe we can spare a little time to think about what to call it.

We have camps where we keep thousands of people who have done nothing wrong. We could just let them live normal lives while they wait for hearings, but instead we have made their lives unpleasant because that serves our purpose: It is supposed to intimidate other people out of coming here.

Should we call them concentration camps?

Letting that term roll out of our mouths seems like an awesome judgment, as perhaps it should. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen (who has much experience with Russians balking at comparing Putin’s dictatorship to Stalin’s) explains:

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. …

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. … Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing.

But Anna Lind-Guzik, a self-described Jewish historian, says that we have to take the comparison seriously.

Applying the term “concentration camp” to the indefinite detention without trial of thousands of civilians in inhumane conditions — under armed guard and without adequate provisions or medical care — is not just appropriate, it’s necessary. Invoking the word does not demean the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, the lessons of the Holocaust will be lost if we refuse to engage with them.

It is true that the immigrant detention camps are not death camps, like Auschwitz or Dachau had become by 1945. But (as an excellent article in Esquire notes) the term concentration camp is older than the Nazis. Historian Jonathan Hyslop, author of The Invention of Concentration Camps attributes the idea to four sources, all in the late 19th or early 20th centuries: the Spanish in Cuba (during the Ten Years War), British in South Africa (Boer War), Germans in Southwest Africa, and Americans in the Philippines.

In each case, a colonial power was fighting guerrilla rebels who had considerable support from a widely dispersed population. “Concentrating” the rebels’ potential supporters in camps allowed the imperial soldiers to assume that any local they met outside the camps was an enemy.

These camps were not intended to be death camps. (Quite the opposite, they “protected” the population both from the rebels and from the empire’s own search-and-destroy missions.) But nonetheless, conditions were harsh and got harsher with time. Large numbers of people died.

Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, says:

There was very little in the way of targeted violence. Instead, people died from poor planning, overloaded facilities and unwillingness to reverse policy, even when it became apparent the policy wasn’t working, inability to get medical care to detainees, poor food quality, contagious diseases, showing up in an environment where it became almost impossible to get control of them.

The life cycle. Even the Nazi concentration camps did not become the death factories we now remember until late in their life cycle. When Dachau opened in 1933, it was a harsh prison for Hitler’s political enemies — at that time, mainly Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. The longer it lasted, the harsher it became. Jews were sent there in large numbers after Kristallnacht in 1938. The Final Solution — the plan to exterminate all the Jews the Nazis could get their hands on — wasn’t formulated until 1941.

Our camps are early in their life cycle. It would be a mistake to imagine that they are already as bad as they will eventually get.

The people in these camps belong to a class (“illegal immigrants”) that our President routinely dehumanizes. Rather than human beings with human rights, or even refugees with recognized rights under our laws, they are regularly denigrated as “animals” or “invaders” or an “infestation“. When a Trump supporter yelled “Shoot them!” during a rally last month, Trump treated it as a joke (and the crowd cheered). Another recent Esquire article elaborates:

The demonization of The Other is a tale as old as America, but Donald Trump has returned the nation to dangerous places in 2019, questioning not just the Americanness, but the very humanity, of Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. He does so by attacking these groups’ violent outliers—the drug dealers and coyotes and ISIS—but these are the only examples of these groups he has ever discussed. There has never been one word about the Guatemalan mother who flees here with her child and works for decades cleaning somebody’s house. It’s only ever the murderers and rapists, and if they’re “invading” your country, any response is justified.

Our stated policy is to be cruel to these dehumanized people, in order to deter other people like them. We are gathering them into camps that are largely hidden from the general public.

It would be amazing if conditions there did not get worse. Caring people (like Alma Acevedo) are not going to want to work there, and such compassionate people who do work there will either harden or leave. Sadists, on the other hand, will be drawn there like flies to roadkill. Out of the public view, ordinary people will find themselves tempted to do incredible things, as ordinary American soldiers did at Abu Ghraib.

So should that count as a concentration camp? I can imagine an argument for saying no: We should reserve the term concentration camp for only the most extreme examples, the ones that are truly Auschwitz-like.

But at best, our own camps are proto-concentration-camps. They are on the concentration-camp spectrum, if still a great distance from the 1945 version of Auschwitz. But it is early in their life cycle, the trends are not good, and who knows how far we will let them go before their story is over.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable: If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. … Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing.

– Masha Gessen “The Unimaginable Reality of America’s Concentration Camps”
The New Yorker, 6-21-2019

This week’s featured post is “Concentrating on the Border“. The back-and-forth about whether to call immigrant internment camps “concentration camps” shouldn’t distract us from what they are.

This week everybody was talking about Iran

By now we all know the pattern: Trump creates a crisis, does something to prevent the worst possible outcome, and then wants credit for what a great achievement that was. Two weeks ago it was Mexican tariffs. This week it was war with Iran.

By Trump’s own account, we were ten minutes away from an attack on Iran that was estimated to kill 150 people. Plans were in motion, but he called them off. The rest of his account sounds like typical Trump story-telling. (I’ll bet Trump’s military advisors told him immediately what the casualty estimates were; they didn’t wait for him to ask and then say “I’ll get back to you.”) But I believe the gist: An attack plan was set in motion and then cancelled.

Instead, we launched a cyberattack and imposed more sanctions.

The attack was supposed to be a reprisal for Iran shooting down a US drone aircraft. Iran claims the drone was in its airspace, which the US denies.

Nobody seems too sure what happens next.

Mike Pompeo went to Congress to make the unlikely case that Shia Iran is allied with Sunni al Qaeda. It’s a little like the global conspiracy of cats and dogs.

The ties between these two arch-enemies, Pompeo claimed, go back to just after 9/11. In other words, his claims are exactly what would be needed to invoke the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to attack Iran. Bogus ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein formed part of the justification for the Iraq War.

and Trump’s campaign launch

He’s officially running for re-election. The first Trump 2020 rally was in Orlando Tuesday.

Here’s the transcript with video, if you really want to know what he said. (If you look at any of it, be sure you also read CNN’s fact check, because much of what he isn’t true. The Wall, for example, is not “moving along rapidly”.) In general, it’s the same-old, same-old: Crooked Hillary, witch hunt, his amazing accomplishments.

“The American Dream is back, it’s bigger and better, and stronger than ever before.” I wonder how that sounds to the millions of Americans who didn’t notice their tax cut, are struggling to pay their student debt, and only have health insurance because (1) John McCain cast a last-minute vote to torpedo Trump’s repeal of ObamaCare, and (2) the courts still haven’t ruled on the Trump-supported lawsuit that would declare ObamaCare unconstitutional.

“Republicans do not believe in socialism, we believe in freedom, and so do you. We will defend Medicare and Social Security for our great seniors.” Consecutive sentences: We don’t believe in socialism; we’ll defend the socialist programs that already exist.

The violent neo-fascist group Proud Boys gathered outside the Orlando rally. Police had to block them from confronting anti-Trump demonstrators. Any other candidate would be expected to denounce such a group of supporters, or at least distance himself from them. But this is Trump, so many news outlets didn’t find their presence worth mentioning.

In 2016, Trump’s outrageousness and unpredictability led cable networks to carry his rallies live, giving him far more free media than any other candidate. CNN and MSNBC appear to be trying to change their ways: Neither televised the whole Orlando speech.

Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz found this lack of free media objectionable. Fox televised the whole Orlando speech.

I suppose it’s fitting for a candidate of no particular morals and zero Biblical knowledge to open his rally with a prayer from evangelist Paula White.

Let every evil veil of deception of the enemy be removed from people’s eyes. So right now, let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus! Let the council of the wicked be spoiled right now. … I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy of the enemy – every strategy – and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.

Of course, if some nutcase does the obvious thing — tries to break the anti-Trump “demonic network” by killing a bunch of “wicked” people “from hell” — White will be shocked that anyone might blame her.