The Weekly Sift

Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

– Martin Luther King
“Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967)

This week’s featured post is “The Corruption of the Evangelical Movement“, which is my review of Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.

This week everybody was talking about the Yemen attacks

Thursday, the US and the UK, supported by a number of other allies, launched air attacks on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. If you responded to that news by asking “The Who rebels Where?”, I sympathize. Yemen is a pretty much godforsaken place south of Saudi Arabia, where the Red Sea turns a corner and becomes the Gulf of Aden. You probably don’t own anything imported from Yemen. It has few resources, it’s running out of water, and its people are desperately poor.

Yemen also has a civil war that’s been going since 2014, because no matter how poor a nation is, it can always afford more guns. There’s a Sunni government backed by the Saudis, and the Shia Houthi rebels are backed by Iran. The Economist reports:

The UN estimates that 223,000 people have died from hunger and lack of medical care since the war began. 80% of the population now lives in poverty.

Last week I talked about terrorist strategy, where sometimes it makes sense to provoke someone much stronger than you in hopes that their over-reaction will win you international sympathy and new recruits. That seems to be what is happening here. The US doesn’t want to get involved in the Yemen war, where there really are no good guys. But for weeks the Houthis have been using Iran-supplied drones and missiles to attack ships in the Red Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest and most important trade routes. (More geography: The Suez canal sits at the other end of the Red Sea, so the Red Sea is the most efficient way for ships to pass between Europe and India or East Asia. It’s also how oil tankers from the Persian Gulf get to Europe.)

The Houthi attacks were starting to have a significant effect on world trade, so the Biden administration felt like it had to do something.

But the attacks are unlikely to end the Houthi rebellion, or even to deter it much. The Houthis have already endured much worse at the hands of the Saudis. At best, we have destroyed a chunk of their offensive capacity, so their attacks on shipping will have to die down until Iran can resupply them. The Economist again:

Conflict with the West could have other benefits for them. Their supposed blockade of Israel has already won them new admiration across the Arab world, tapping into pro-Palestinian sentiment at a time when Arab states are feckless bystanders to the war in Gaza. Being targeted by America, while anti-Americanism is running high because of Mr Biden’s support for Israel, will add to their popularity.

and the looming government shutdown

The observation that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it is attributed to Santayana, and the underlying idea goes back to Cicero. Usually when we quote that, we’re talking about things that happened decades or centuries ago, but in the current situation “history” is what happened in September and November, which we are now repeating.

The short version is that Republicans have a small majority (down to two seats now) in the House, while Democrats control the Senate and the White House. In order for the government to spend money (which it needs to do to keep the doors open), all three have to agree. MAGA radicals in the House believe that this position should allow them to dictate large cuts in federal spending (which are popular in the abstract, but unpopular when implemented). Democrats disagree, believing that the public will blame Republicans for any pain caused by a government shutdown. So they’re not inclined to roll over and accept the MAGA-demanded cuts, which probably can’t even pass the House.

In September, Speaker McCarthy saw this reality and negotiated a continuing resolution which more-or-less left federal spending intact until November. That act of rationality could not be allowed to stand, so MAGA Republicans forced McCarthy out. After much turmoil, he was replaced by Speaker Mike Johnson, whose conservative bona fides are much stronger than McCarthy’s were.

But reality is reality, so Johnson had to make a similar deal in November, cutting the federal-spending can into two pieces and kicking them to different points on the calendar. The first can comes up Friday, and reality still has not changed.

Last night, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released the text of a continuing resolution that would kick both cans into March. The House “Freedom” Caucus is outraged again, but what it will do is unclear.

and the Trump trials

Trial season is gearing up, and it’s hard to tell the players without a program. Closing arguments in New York State’s civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization happened last week. It’s a bench trial, so now we’re waiting on the judge rather than a jury. Judge Engoron has already issued a summary judgment that the Trumps committed fraud, so the trial was largely to assess damages.

Engoron will consider whether to grant the attorney general’s request to fine Trump $370 million, ban him from the state’s real estate industry for life and bar him from serving as the officer or director of a New York corporation.

Engoron knows Trump is looking for grounds to appeal, so he will be very careful in how he justifies his judgment. Observers are predicting a decision in “weeks” rather than days or months.

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The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial starts tomorrow. Basically, Carroll says Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in 1995. Trump met those charges (in a book Carroll wrote) with insults, so Carroll sued him for defamation. The statute of limitations had passed for accusing him of the original assault, but New York changed the law in 2022. So she sued for damages from the assault and for insults he made after he left office. She won a $5 million settlement, which Trump is appealing.

Now the original defamation suit is coming to trial, having been delayed by all sorts of wrangling about when presidents can be sued. The judge is refusing to let Trump relitigate issues resolved in the first trial, such as whether the assault happened and whether his comments were defamatory.

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We’re waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity prevents the government from trying Trump on January 6 charges. They are unlikely to agree with Trump on this, but how exactly they refute his claim of immunity will be important. Also important: how long they take to rule and how much time they allow for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

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The Supreme Court has agreed to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that Trump is disqualified from the presidency by the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 8. It’s hard to imagine this Court kicking Trump off the ballot, but it’s not clear how exactly they’ll get around the text of the 14th Amendment.

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Meanwhile, Trump threatens “bedlam” if court decisions don’t go his way. And Judge Engoron suffered a bomb threat at his home. Judge Tanya Chutkan was the victim of a “swatting” incident, in which a false emergency call sent armed police to her home.

Elected Republicans almost universally ignore all this. It’s just become accepted that Trump will goad on his violent supporters, and that crossing Trump will entail physical risk. It’s the modern version of the Nazi brownshirts.

but I wrote about the Evangelical heresy of Christian Nationalism

Or, more precisely, Tim Alberta wrote about it, and I reviewed his book.

and you also might be interested in …

The Iowa Caucuses are tonight. I can’t remember the last time these were a smaller deal. Democrats aren’t having one, and Trump will obviously win the Republican caucuses. The only suspense is whether Nikki Haley can finish second. If she does, Ron DeSantis should drop out.

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The Hunter Biden circus continues. Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee debated citing Hunter Biden for contempt because he refused a subpoena to be interviewed behind closed doors and insisted on testifying in public. Who should show up for this hearing but Hunter himself?

The debate went forward, underlining what a farce it all is. Republicans would say that the American people deserve answers from Hunter, and Democrats would respond: “There he is. Let’s ask him”, which the Republicans would refuse to do.

I’m adding this Oversight Committee Democrat, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, to my list of politicians I would pay money to hear. Watch this clip from Wednesday night’s Chris Hayes show.

Friday, Hunter announced he would appear for non-public testimony.

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South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and is seeking an immediate order to stop the military campaign in Gaza.

A decision on South Africa’s request for so-called provisional measures will probably take weeks. The full case is likely to last years.

Vox explains:

Under international humanitarian law, proving allegations of genocide is incredibly difficult. And even if South Africa does prove that Israel is committing genocide — or that it is failing to prosecute incitement to genocide or prevent genocide from occurring — ICJ decisions aren’t necessarily easy to enforce. But these initial arguments aren’t yet entering that complicated territory.Instead, they’re about whether the ICJ will issue a preliminary order for Israel to stop its onslaught in Gaza immediately; the court will rule on that issue after hearing arguments from South Africa and Israel Thursday and Friday. Though Israel could ignore that ruling if it’s issued, it could make Israel’s allies less inclined to support the war.

Despite the difficulties, NYT contributor Megan Stack says the charges deserve serious consideration.

The word “genocide” rings loudly in our imagination. We think of Rwanda, Bosnia, the Armenians, the Trail of Tears and, of course, the Holocaust. I have heard many people balk at the suggestion that Gaza could be experiencing genocide. The Holocaust, after all, wiped out over 60 percent of European Jews. Israel’s war — instigated, no less, by the murder of Jews — has killed about 1 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza. One percent is terrible, of course, but genocide?

Under the genocide convention, though, the term describes an intent to wipe out a defined group of people and taking steps to achieve that end. There is no threshold of death, or proportion of death, that must be reached. It is possible to kill a relatively small number of people, but still commit an act of genocide.

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Saturday, the people of Taiwan shrugged off Chinese threats and elected another president from the Democratic Progressive Party.

The result shows voters backing the DPP’s view that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign nation that should bolster defenses against China’s threats and deepen relations with fellow democratic countries, even if that means economic punishment or military intimidation by Beijing.

It is also a further snub to eight years of increasingly strongarm tactics towards Taiwan under Xi who has vowed that the island’s eventual “reunification” with the mainland is “a historical inevitability”.

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The New Yorker lays out the case that a Texas woman died because of that state’s abortion laws. This case gets to the heart of how tricky life-of-the-mother exceptions really are.

Yeniifer Alvarez was an uninsured woman living in a part of central Texas without good health care, particularly prenatal care. She was overweight, diabetic, and had a history of pulmonary edema “in which the lungs fill with fluid, that strains the heart and can be fatal”.

Her pregnancy was obviously risky, and a wealthier or better-insured woman would have been under constant observation. In a state with different laws, a precautionary abortion might have been performed, under the theory that the risks were too high. When the crisis came, it took too long to get her to a hospital capable of handling her case, and she died in an ambulance.

Life-of-the-mother exceptions in abortion laws tend to assume binary choices: She gets the abortion or she dies. The less solid notion of unacceptable risk just doesn’t enter the picture.

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Here’s Kat Abu’s weekly recap of Fox News.

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Josh Marshall makes an unpopular point that I happen to agree with: Bad as the execution looked at the time, Biden was right to get us out of Afghanistan.

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I made a New Year’s resolution to highlight more positive news about the climate and efforts to cut carbon emissions. In that vein, the Dutch company Elysian is trying to develop the first practical electric airliner. Previous electrical plane designs have carried few passengers relatively small distances, but Elysian is picturing a 90-seat plane that can go nearly 500 miles on a charge.

For comparison, New York to Boston and New York to D.C. are each a little over 200 miles.

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The New York Times Magazine raises an interesting question: Could an engineering project divert warm-water flows away from a Greenland glacier and prevent it from sliding into the ocean and melting? If that idea is feasible, how big an expense would it justify?

and let’s close with something adorable

The young of just about any species can be cute. But baby rhinos? Yes, baby rhinos.