So Trump is meeting Putin in Helsinki as I type this. We haven’t been told what this meeting is about, and it’s behind closed doors with no one but interpreters present, so we may never know. We can be sure that Trump will emerge from the meeting and declare it a great success, no matter how many concessions he yielded or how little he got in return.
Anyway, I’m not equipped to do breaking news, so I’ll try to suppress the temptation.
There will be two featured posts this week. The first one explores a different aspect of an issue I raised in the weekly summary last week: Trump usually frames his objections to immigrants in terms of illegal immigration of unskilled people, and talks about how we need to enforce our laws, while also changing them to claim a more useful class of immigrant. But that’s not really what’s going on. Last week I linked to articles describing how he’s making life harder for legal immigrants, and blocking their paths to citizenship. This week I’ll describe how he’s discouraging skilled immigrants from coming to America. The point is to keep America white; everything else is just rhetoric.
I haven’t titled that article yet, but it should be out before 9 EDT.
The second featured post will look at Judge Kavanaugh and ask what we could expect from him as a justice on the Supreme Court. There’s been a huge amount of speculation both ways about whether he would reverse Roe v Wade, and I’ll cover that, but a lot of other important issues are at stake: the government’s ability to regulate corporations at all, including worker-safety regulations; the survival of any right (other than corporate rights) not specifically listed in the Constitution; the Court’s willingness to reverse precedent; the limits of presidential power; the increasing partisanship of the Court; and so on. I’ll try to get that out by 11.
The weekly summary will discuss Trump’s tumultuous European tour, the new Mueller indictments, Peter Strzok’s televised testimony to Congress (which already seems so long ago, but it was Thursday), Jim Jordan, the administration’s declaration of victory in the War on Poverty, and a few other things, before closing with a very satisfying story about a guy tormenting email spammers. I’ll try for noon, but it may slip to 1 or so.
This week’s featured post is “‘America First!’ means China wins.” I’ve been working on this piece for a few weeks and I’m pleased with it. Take a look.
This week everybody was talking about the next Supreme Court nominee
who is supposed to be announced in a prime-time extravaganza tonight. (Don’t watch. It only encourages him.) It’s tempting to speculate about who Trump will name, but it seems silly when we’ll know so soon. It’s not like any of the names being discussed are significantly better than the others.
What kind of opposition the nominee will face is another question. Politico asks the question “Will Susan Collins Get Snookered Again?“, which kind of answers itself. The article explains what a senator with Collins’ professed beliefs could do if she had some iron in her spine.
Here’s how she can get what she wants: partner with red-state Democratic senators, and anyone else who’s willing, and jointly announce that they will not vote for any nominee who isn’t the result of bipartisan consultation, in advance.
Trump would have to scrap his vaunted judges list, which Collins has criticized as too heavily influenced by the conservative Federalist Society. Either he nominates a ninth justice who will hold the center, or it’s a 4-4 court until the president relents.
It’s a fun scenario to think about, but it’s not going to happen because of the whole iron-in-the-spine thing. (An aside: I happened to be in Portland Friday, when I ran in to Collins’ Democratic challenger, Zak Ringelstein, who was standing on the Congress Street sidewalk shaking hands. I know nothing about him, but he looks like an energetic young guy.)
Pruitt was the most blatantly corrupt member of Trump’s cabinet. He openly took valuable favors from lobbyists and granted them favors, apparently in return. He treated the EPA staff as his personal assistants and wasted millions of public dollars on himself. He is the subject of 13 ethical or legal investigations. He covered up his cozy relationships with polluting-industry lobbyists by “scrubbing” his published schedule to remove questionable meetings, which violates government transparency laws. He demoted or reassigned underlings who raised questions about any of this.
Most of this illegal and unethical activity has been public for a long time, but Trump didn’t seem to care. Pruitt was doing what Trump and many Trumpists wanted: re-orienting the EPA to protect polluters from the law rather than using the law to protect the environment from polluters. His corruption was an acceptable part of that package. (Pruitt’s deputy, a former vice president of the Washington Coal Club and lobbyist for energy companies, will continue his work.)
In his resignation letter to Trump, Pruitt admitted nothing and apologized for nothing, citing only “unrelenting attacks” on himself and his family that have “taken a sizable toll on all of us”. Obsequious to the end, Pruitt closed his letter with the kind of flattery that used to be anathema within the American government, but is all too common in this administration, where expressions of praise and personal thanks to the president are expected from both cabinet secretaries and religious leaders.
My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people. Thank you again Mr. President for the honor of serving you and I wish you Godspeed in all that you put your hand to.
For contrast, look at Hillary Clinton’s resignation letter as Secretary of State and the statement Eric Holder made when he resigned as Attorney General. Both cited the good work of the people they had managed. (Pruitt’s letter reads as if he had worked alone.) They thanked President Obama for the opportunity to serve the country, not Obama personally. Holder referred to Obama as “my friend”, not as a superior being or an instrument of God’s plan.
That attitude towards government service — that equal citizens work together for the country rather than under a divine-right King who “leads” the People and “makes decisions for” the People rather than serving them — is an American thing, not a partisan thing. Look at Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation letter as President Bush’s Secretary of Defense. He compliments Bush’s leadership and wishes him well, but his good feelings are primarily directed outward, not upward towards the Great Man:
It has been the highest honor of my long life to have been able to serve our country at such a critical time in our history and to have had the privilege of working so closely with the truly amazing young men and women in uniform.
That’s what Americans sound like. Let’s not forget.
and trade war
Trump’s trade war with the rest of the world (China, Europe, Canada) had mostly been a lot of bluster until this week.
The United States just after midnight on Friday made good on its threat to impose sweeping tariffs on Beijing, putting a 25 percent border tax on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods imported to the US. China responded with $34 billion of tariffs of its own on its imports from America.
It’s been two weeks now since Harley Davidson announced it was moving some of its production to Thailand to avoid European Union tariffs that were imposed in response to Trump’s tariffs on European steel and aluminum. Competing manufacturer Polaris may do the same.
One of the most worrisome things about the trade war is that it’s not clear what would end it. Getting-tough-on-trade seems to be its own goal. What concessions does Trump want before he will call it off? No one seems to know.
For some reason the Trump administration can’t seem to reunite the families it broke up, in spite of an approaching court deadline to do so. Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee put it in terms anybody should be able to understand: “I’ve seen coat check windows operate with a better system.”
gives the government until Tuesday to reunify children younger than 5 with their parents, and until July 26 for older children.
The government has asked for more time in general. Friday, the judge said no, but acknowledged that he might agree to a looser deadline in specific cases, if some special factor made that reasonable.
The government still doesn’t seem to grasp that it has done something horrible and needs to make it right. For example, HHS wants to be let off the hook for finding parents who have already been deported and getting their children back to them, because that would be hard. A further revelation came from Gov. Inslee, who tweeted:
My office recently learned the shocking revelation from @HHSGov that reunification could mean placing a separated child with ANY long-term sponsor — regardless of whether it’s their parents, other family in the US, family back in their home country or in long-term foster care.
Having been careless about taking the kids away, the government now wants to be extra-careful about giving them back. It’s insisting on DNA tests to match parents and children. What will happen to adopted children or step-children is anybody’s guess, and it’s not clear what the government will do with this highly personal information going forward.
One fact bears repeating every time this story is discussed: Coming the the United States to seek asylum is not illegal. Our laws obligate us to give asylum-seekers a fair hearing, and there is no justification for treating them like criminals. The question isn’t whether they will obey our laws, but whether we will.
Conservatives like to pretend that their problem is only with illegal immigration, but that doesn’t explain the behavior of this administration. Friday, AP reported:
Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged. … The service members affected by the recent discharges all enlisted in recent years under a special program aimed at bringing medical specialists and fluent speakers of 44 sought-after languages into the military. The idea, according to the Defense Department, was to “recognize their contribution and sacrifice.”
Instead, the Trump administration has abruptly raised the standards on background checks, which either the soldiers fail (because “they have relatives abroad”) or the soldiers get discharged because the checks can’t be completed in a timely fashion.
Also, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service is going after immigrants who are already citizens. A task force is trying to identify people who may have lied on their applications for citizenship, even if it happened decades ago. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen describes what that can mean:
Back in 1989, I had to make a decision about whether to lie on my citizenship application. At the time, immigration law banned “aliens afflicted with sexual deviation,” among others suffering from “psychopathic personality,” from entry to the United States. I had come to this country as a fourteen-year-old, in 1981, but I had been aware of my “sexual deviation” at the time, and this technically meant that I should not have entered the country. I decided to append a letter to my citizenship application, informing the Immigration and Naturalization Service that I was homosexual but that I disagreed with the exclusion and would be willing to discuss the matter in court. …
My application was granted without my having to fight for it in court. I hadn’t thought about my naturalization for years, but I find myself thinking about it now, thankful for the near-accident of not having lied on my application.
Gessen thinks twice, and realizes that she might have to lie if she were doing her paperwork today.
Question 26 on the green-card application, for example, reads, “Have you EVER committed a crime of any kind (even if you were not arrested, cited, charged with, or tried for that crime)?” (Emphasis in the original.) The question does not specify whether it refers to a crime under current U.S. law or the laws of the country in which the crime might have been committed. In the Soviet Union of my youth, it was illegal to possess foreign currency or to spend the night anywhere you were not registered to live. In more than seventy countries, same-sex sexual activity is still illegal. On closer inspection, just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar.
It seems more and more obvious that the primary goal of Trump’s immigration policy across-the-board is to delay the day when whites become a minority in the US. Talk about jobs or crime or security risks is just a smokescreen.
And Katha Pollitt at The Nation points out that the owner of the Red Hen Restaurant just gave the wrong reason for refusing service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Instead of basing her objection on the discomfort of her LGBT staffers, she should simply have said serving Sanders was against her religion. She could have quoted Psalm 101:7: “No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.”
“Religion,” Pollitt observes, “gives you freedom of speech denied to your opponents.” At least if you’re Christian.
Claiming that religion gives you the right to harm your fellow Americans probably works best if you are Christian. Only Christians get to impose their religion on others. A Hindu wouldn’t get very far with a lawsuit to shut down the beef industry.
And if you want to be uncivil, it helps to be conservative.
No matter how vulgar, gross, threatening, cruel, illegal, and insane the right becomes, it’s always the left that is warned against piping up too loudly and in the wrong way. It’s like the old Jewish joke: Three Jews stand before a firing squad. Each is offered a blindfold. The first Jew takes a blindfold. The second Jew takes a blindfold. The third Jew refuses the blindfold. The second Jew elbows him and says, “Moshe, take a blindfold—don’t make trouble.”
but I noticed the Republican trip to Russia
Something very odd happened this week: A delegation of seven Republican senators and one Republican House member visited Russia over the Fourth of July break, hoping to talk to Putin. Putin was too busy to fit them into his schedule, so they met with their counterparts in the Russian Duma.
There’s some disagreement about the topics of discussion and the emphasis. Senator Richard Shelby sounded conciliatory, almost deferential.
“I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” Shelby told Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. “I’m saying that we should all strive for a better relationship.”
In other words: Let’s forget all about the fact that you’ve been waging an information war against us and our allies, and just move on from here. It’s hard to imagine a weaker message. It’s like a bullied junior high kid saying “I’m willing to overlook that you’ve been stealing my lunch money. Let’s both strive for a better relationship.”
Duma member Vyacheslav Nikonov, on the other hand, said he had met with many American lawmakers in years past and that this meeting “was one of the easiest ones in my life.” The question of election interference, he said, was resolved quickly because “the question was raised in a general form. One shouldn’t interfere in elections — well, we don’t interfere.”
A few of the Republicans have tried to portray their message as much more stern. Senator Kennedy of Louisiansa
described the meetings as “damn frank, very, very, very frank, no holds barred.”
“I asked our friends in Russia not to interfere in our elections this year,” Kennedy said. “I asked them to exit Ukraine and allow Ukraine to self-determine. I asked for the same thing in Crimea. I asked for their help in bringing peace to Syria. And I asked them not to allow Iran to gain a foothold in Syria.”
I think it’s telling that Kennedy described himself as “asking our friends” rather than demanding that enemies stop attacking us. Senator Moran of Kansas told NPR:
There is no way that a Russian official, the people that we met with, could come away from those meetings without believing that we sincerely believe [election meddling] happened. We believe we have the proof that it happened, and that if anything is going to improve, it involves stopping what’s occurred to date.
But whatever was said, coming as a partisan group was very unusual, and that by itself sent a weak message. (By coincidence, I just finished reading John McCain’s recent book The Restless Wave. He tells many stories of being on foreign trips with Democratic senators like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton. Traveling in bipartisan groups is the norm. Partisan groups larger than two or three senators are almost unheard of.) In December, Republican Senators Johnson of Wisconsin and Barrasso of Wyoming cancelled a trip to Russia when the Russians refused to give a visa to Democratic Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire. That sent a powerful message that Americans stand together, and that Russia can’t exploit our partisan differences.
This trip sent the opposite message: Republicans are willing to seek their own relationship with Russia, independent of the national interest.Of course, the Republican senators’ trip is just a prelude to the Trump/Putin summit in Helsinki next Monday, when the two leaders will meet with no one present but their interpreters. Meeting without advisors present is also very unusual, especially for a president who has so little foreign-policy experience and such sketchy knowledge of the issues between the two countries. They spoke privately once before, last summer at a G-20 dinner in Germany, where no other Americans were involved and only Putin’s interpreter was used.
There’s been a lot of speculation about why they would meet this way, but I have an interpretation that explains everything: Putin is giving Trump his annual performance review.
The across-the-board increases cast doubt on whether Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar can pressure manufacturers to voluntarily drop prices without the threat of specific consequences.
One of the mysteries I’ve been studying in recent months is how Evangelicals manage to keep supporting Trump in spite of (1) his personal life contradicting all their standards of good character, and (2) his policies contradicting all the teachings of Jesus. Useful input on this question comes from John Fea, a historian at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.
Fea argues that Evangelical support for Trump arises from projecting a religious narrative onto American history: The US is a Christian nation with a divinely appointed destiny.
Ever since the founding of the republic, a significant number of Americans have supposed that the United States is exceptional because it has a special place in God’s unfolding plan for the world. Since the early 17th century founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony by Puritans, evangelicals have relished in their perceived status as God’s new Israel—His chosen people. America, they argued, is in a covenant relationship with God.
Like much of the Evangelical worldview, this idea is totally non-Biblical. (You’d have to do some serious stretching of the text to find some mention of America in the Bible.) It’s also false history. But Evangelicals have found their own pseudo-historians (David Barton being the most prominent) to promote the belief that the Founders intended to create the new Israel.
So why don’t real historians dispel all this nonsense?
We do.
We have.
But countering bad history with good history is not as easy as it sounds. David Barton and his fellow Christian nationalist purveyors of the past are well-funded by Christian conservatives who know that the views of the past they are peddling serve their political agenda. Barton has demonized Christian intellectuals and historians as sheep in wolves’ clothing. They may call themselves Christians on Sunday morning, but, according to Barton, their “world view” has been shaped by the secular universities where they earned their Ph.Ds. Thanks to Barton, many conservative evangelicals do not trust academic and professional historians—even academic and professional historians with whom they share a pew on Sunday mornings.
If you read the comments on Fea’s article, you’ll fine abuse from several Evangelical commenters. All of which proves Carl Sagan’s point:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
… The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced. … Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.
You know who finally stepped up to submit the resolution? Russia. For whatever reason, Trump never threatens Russia. (It would probably hurt his performance review.) So they get to be the good guys in this story.
China either is already the world’s largest economy or soon will be. In order to compete for world leadership in the coming decades, the US will need to represent a community of like-minded nations, not go it alone.
America First. The foreign policy Donald Trump ran on came down to two words: “America First!”
He never spelled out exactly what policy agenda that slogan entailed — Trump 2016 was never the kind of campaign that constructed 12-point plans or posted white papers on its web site — but the attitude it expressed was clear: Both economically and militarily, the United States is the world’s 800-pound gorilla, and we need to start acting like it.
According to Trump’s populist critique, past administrations of both parties worried too much about principles like free trade and human rights, and invested too much of their hopes in multinational organizations like the UN, the WTO, and NATO. The Bushes and Clintons and Obama — and basically every president since Truman — tried to create a world of rules and mutual commitments, and failed to recognize something Trump finds obvious: Rules protect the weak. A world without rules is governed by the Law of the Jungle, and under that law the 800-pound gorilla always wins. That’s why he felt confident promising us “so much winning“.
To Trump and his followers, it makes no sense that the US has been trying to lead the world by setting a good example, rather than dominate it by telling other countries how things are going to work. It’s been crazy to keep our markets open when other countries close theirs, respect their intellectual property when they don’t respect ours, or extend our military shield over allies who don’t invest in their own armed forces the way we do. Our strength ought to get us a better deal, but it doesn’t because we keep volunteering to take a worse one.
So if it meant anything, “America First!” meant that it was high time we stopped volunteering to take the short end of the stick. Stop trying to create a world of rules that apply equally to everyone and stop averting our eyes when other countries cut corners. Instead, deal with every country one-on-one, a situation where our superior power will let us tell them what’s what. And what we will tell them is: “You need us more than we need you. So we win, you lose.”
During the campaign, examples of how Trump pictured this working would occasionally pop out: If we were going to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, we should have taken their oil to make it worth our while. If our military is going to keep defending Europe, they should pay us. Shortly after taking office he told the CIA the principle we ought to live by: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Once the Trump administration gets outside the restrictions of multinational agreements and into bilateral negotiations, it makes big demands and waits for other nations to back down, threatening terrible consequences if they don’t. Strangely, these tactics have yet to work anywhere. Mexico still isn’t paying for the wall and just elected a government more resistant to American pressure than ever. No one — not China, not Canada, not the EU — is knuckling under to our trade demands. North Korea gave us some pretty words, but doesn’t seem inclined to abandon its nukes.
Those problems, the administration assures us, are just short-term. As soon as other countries understand that we’re serious, they’ll realize who has the upper hand. Thursday night, Trump told a rally in Montana: “We’re going to win [the trade war with China] because we have all the cards.”
So far, that hasn’t been true: We hit them, they hit back — as if we were equals or something. But who knows? Maybe in the medium term Trump’s strategy works out. Maybe over the next year or so Canada and Mexico will decide that they do need to renegotiate NAFTA so that it tilts more in our favor. Maybe China and the EU will drop their reprisal tariffs and be content to let us buy less from them. Maybe we’ll get a new Iran deal that restricts their nuclear program for longer than Obama’s deal did, or adds provisions about ballistic missiles or exporting terrorism. Maybe the North Korea denuclearization agreement will turn into more than a handshake and a photo op.
I’d be surprised, but what do I know? Stranger things have happened.
But now let’s expand our time horizon and recognize one obvious fact: In the long run, it’s China who will be the world’s 800-pound gorilla. If the world is running according to the Law of the Jungle in 2030 or 2050, they win, not us.
How the US and China stack up. At the moment, China has around 1.4 billion people, about 1/6th of the world’s population and four times America’s. Per capita, it’s still a much poorer country than we are, but the national totals are starting to even out.
Depending on how you measure, China either has already overtaken us as the world’s largest economy or soon will. [1] It’s more-or-less inevitable: As Japan and South Korea and Singapore have shown, it’s much easier to bring your people up to a standard that some other nation has already achieved than to create an entirely new standard of wealth. So China’s GDP grows over 6% in a bad year, while ours grows 3% in a good year. [2]Over time that adds up. If China ever manages to achieve a per capita income that is just half of ours, its total economy will be twice as large. That will give it a leading role on the world stage.
Already China is flexing its muscles in terms of soft power. Its Belt and Road Initiative is a multi-trillion-dollar plan to rebuild Eurasia’s infrastructure around China-centered trade routes and financial institutions.
Think about what this means diplomatically. China can approach Pakistan with its plan for a Pakistan-China Economic Corridor. What’s our vision for Pakistan? China foresees a high-speed-rail network that connects Shanghai to Singapore and Bangkok. What do we foresee?
It may not happen right away, but over time you have to expect China to exert the kind of world influence that comes with being the world’s largest economy. They will have the tax base to outstrip us in military spending eventually, if they choose to. Someday Shanghai or Hong Kong might replace New York as the world financial capital. Already, China can challenge us as a regional military power in Asia. Eventually it will have the resources, if it wants, to challenge us around world — at least if we are foolish enough to take them on by ourselves.
We need allies. We need institutions. In short, this is a uniquely bad time for the US to set up the world to be dominated by an 800-pound gorilla. Because before much longer, that gorilla won’t be us.
For the United States to continue to be the world’s most influential nation, we’re going to have to rely on two factors that Trump wants to turn his back on.
We represent values that the world admires, not just our own money and power.
We lead a community of nations who share those values.
If those two things are true, then America is the leading member of a coalition China won’t be able to bully for a very long time, or maybe ever: ourselves, the EU, Japan, the English-speaking parts of the British Commonwealth, South Korea, Taiwan, and maybe a few other countries. As India, Brazil, and other nations achieve relative economic equality with the countries in that coalition, there’s reason to hope that they will find it a club worth joining.
Whatever you may think of how the Trans-Pacific Partnership turned out in its final form, this was the geo-political vision that got it started: We would not negotiate trade with China by ourselves, but would get together with a large number of like-minded nations to write rules of the road. Long-term, we hoped that China might someday accept our rules in order to get the benefits of belonging to our club. There are many reasonable arguments against the TPP as it eventually was negotiated, but to scrap it and replace it with nothing will eventually prove to be a huge missed opportunity. (Pulling out of the WTO, which Trump is reported to be considering, would be even worse.)
Going forward, we want to live in a world of multinational institutions, because in a world of bilateral agreements, more and more it will be China who tells other nations how things are going to be.
The benefits of being a benign superpower. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the chief promoter and protector of the international financial system. Trump and his followers see only the costs of this role and ignore all the ways that it has enhanced American power.
In the world today, the dollar is the international currency. National banks of almost all countries hold large reserves of dollars, and international trade is denominated in dollars. Just about any international transfer of money at some point passes through the US banking system.
What this means is that the market for dollars goes well beyond the needs of the US economy. The Federal Reserve creates dollars at zero cost, by entering numbers into its database. Many of those dollars go overseas eventually, and we get real goods in return: cars, iPhones, oil, steel, and Ivanka Trump’s fashion line. This is the seldom-discussed flip side of our trade deficit: We get away with running that deficit — consuming more than we produce — because the international economy needs a currency, and the dollar plays that role. The dollar is our chief export.
Similarly, US Treasury bills are the world’s default investment. This has allowed us to finance our budget deficit year after year, without suffering any of the ill effects that budget hawks are constantly predicting: Our national debt hasn’t caused inflation. The dollar’s value hasn’t collapsed. We don’t have to offer higher and higher interest rates to get investors to loan us money.
Short of military attack, the most potent weapon we can aim at an adversary is to cut them off from the US banking system. When fully enforced, that sanction can reduce another nation’s international trade to barter, and induce it to invent elaborate and expensive money-laundering schemes. The sanction that hurts Putin’s oligarchs most is the Magnitsky Act, which prevents sanctioned individuals from using the US banking system. The Atlantic explains:
What made Russian officialdom so mad about the Magnitsky Act is that it was the first time that there was some kind of roadblock to getting stolen money to safety. In Russia, after all, officers and bureaucrats could steal it again, the same way they had stolen it in the first place: a raid, an extortion racket, a crooked court case with forged documents—the possibilities are endless. Protecting the money meant getting it out of Russia. But what happens if you get it out of Russia and it’s frozen by Western authorities? What’s the point of stealing all that money if you can’t enjoy the Miami condo it bought you? What’s the point if you can’t use it to travel to the Côte d’Azur in luxury?
Once your wealth is expressed in dollars and recognized by the US banking system, you can take it anywhere and do anything you want with it. But otherwise, it’s barely money at all.
In a lot of ways, our banking power is better than military power. Unlike tanks or even nuclear missiles, our enemies have no answer for it. What are they going to threaten in return — to cut us off from the Russian or North Korean or Iranian banking system? Why would we care?
You might ask: How did we get power like this? Why do other nations let us keep it?
And the answer is that we have been entrusted with this kind of power because (for the most part) we have used it benignly. In theory, the other nations of the world could cut us out of the picture by deciding to use the yen or the Euro instead, or by getting together and creating a truly international currency and a truly international banking system to go with it. But the new currency would be like the Euro on a larger scale: negotiating and managing that new monetary system would be a huge headache, and who knows what holes and glitches it might develop? It’s just much more convenient for everybody to stick with the dollar and the US banking system, because our occasional abuses of that power have stayed within reasonable bounds.
In short, we have been fairly faithful stewards of other nations’ trust.
Or, translating the same idea into Trump-speak: We’ve been suckers. We haven’t put America first. We haven’t used every tool at our disposal to drive other nations to the wall and make them do what we want.
But that’s why other nations trusted us in the first place. And over time, we have benefited a great deal from that trust.
Bad timing. During this era, when we can see China gaining on us in the race for power (and in some areas already beginning to pass us), it’s tempting to try to squeeze all the juice we can out of our superpower status before we lose it. It’s also the worst strategic decision we could possibly make. At best, such a policy might produce a brief flare of American brilliance before our power winks out completely.
Now more than ever, the United States needs an international system based on principles and enforced by international institutions supported by multilateral agreements that all parties can live with and see benefit from. We need a system that isolates rogue nations and draws them into the rules-based community. We need to stand for universally attractive ideals like democracy, human rights, and opportunity for all. If China wants to compete with us for leadership, let it compete to lead the ideals-based coalition we have assembled. Let it compete to be a more admirable nation or a better steward of the world’s trust.
On the other hand, over the next five or ten years there might be some gains to cash in by becoming a rogue nation ourselves, flouting the principles we previously tried to establish, undercutting international cooperation on issues like global warming, and imposing win/lose agreements on weaker countries. The international institutions we helped design would likely wither, and to the extent they survived they would become alliances against our abuses of power. As we turned inward, other nations would as well, and the world as a whole would become a less prosperous place.
None of this would thwart China’s rise. And as the American Era ended, our legacy would not be an international system of mutually beneficial principles, rules, and institutions, but a Law-of-the-Jungle world, where the 800-pound gorilla always wins.
Unfortunately, that 800-pound gorilla would be China. China would owe us a great debt of gratitude for establishing a world system that allowed it to throw its weight around, dominating smaller nations (including us). However, I suspect China would never feel obligated to offer us anything to settle that debt. After all, gratitude is for suckers.
[1] If you google “countries ranked by GDP“, you’ll see lists from various international organizations that make it look like we still have a wide lead. For example: $19.4 trillion to $12.2 trillion in the World Bank list for 2017.
However lists like that are suspect for the following reason: They usually start by estimating a country’s annual GDP in the local currency, and then convert that estimate to dollars using the current exchange rates. But it’s widely suspected that China’s currency is undervalued; that’s what gives it such a big advantage in trade. Once you adjust for that undervaluation, you get very different numbers.
Economists argue about how to make that adjustment. One complex tool called “purchasing power index” says that the Chinese GDP really represents $21.4 trillion of purchasing power.
That’s calculation is hard for a non-economist to follow, but one quick-and-dirty (not to mention amusing) method for comparing the value of products across currencies is to use the Big Mac Index: Express all prices in units of locally produced Big Macs, which are assumed to be more-or-less identical around the world. (Example: If an iPhone 8 costs about $700 and a Big Mac sells for $3.50, an iPhone 8 costs 200 Big Macs.) At current exchange rates, you can buy 1.8 Chinese Big Macs for the price of 1 US Big Mac. So (adjusting everything by a factor of 1.8) annual Chinese GDP represents a number of Big Macs that would sell for around $22 trillion in the United States.
[2] In his 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney made the wildly optimistic prediction that his economic policies would lead to 4% growth. If Chinese growth got down to 4%, it would be a national emergency.
Tonight we get to find out just how bad Trump’s Supreme Court pick will be. I refuse to speculate.
The featured post is something I’ve been working on for a while. The main thesis is that we’re at a point in history where China is about to pass us in a variety of measures, and so this is the worst possible time for us to go it alone in an “America First” foreign policy. We have a few more years where we could reap some benefits by acting like the world’s 800-pound gorilla, abandoning all principles, and trashing multilateral agreements and institutions. But then we will start wishing we had those institutions and alliances to rein in China. Long-term, the only way we will be able to compete with China is by representing values that the world admires and leading a coalition of nations that share those values.
The post is called “‘America First!’ means China wins”. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will talk briefly about the Supreme Court (still refusing to speculate). Then I’ll discuss Scott Pruitt, the trade war, immigration, the Republican senators’ trip to Russia, the ongoing discussion of “civility”, and a few other things, before closing with a speculation that the first Hogwarts grad to headline a movie was actually not who you think.
This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court
Not only did the Court end it’s spring term with a number of disappointing decisions — I listed them in the previous post — but we also got an additional piece of bad news: Justice Kennedy is retiring, giving Trump an opportunity to appoint his replacement while Republicans still control the Senate.
In general, Kennedy has been part of the Court’s conservative majority, as he was on several decisions this week. But in the past he has also sided with the liberals on a number of key social-issue decisions: most notably the series of cases leading to the Obergfell decision, which affirmed a same-sex couple’s right to marry, but also upholding Roe v Wade, which keeps Congress or the states from outlawing abortion altogether.
As the Court stands now, Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas are doctrinaire far-right extremists, particularly on social issues. They routinely award special rights to Christians, and have only a hazy notion of the separation of church and state. (Thomas believes that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment only prevents the federal government from establishing a religion. If Texas wanted to declare itself a Baptist state or Utah wanted to establish Mormonism, he’d be fine with that. I’m not exaggerating.)
If Trump appoints another Gorsuch to the Court, then Chief Justice Roberts becomes the fifth-and-deciding conservative vote. Roberts also has a conservative voting record, but is cagier than the other three: He seldom writes a ringing opinion that enunciates some new conservative principle, but instead has a way of seeming to re-affirm a previous decision while actually gutting it. (In 2012, for example, his vote upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare, but did so by destroying the Commerce Clause justification Congress had in mind when it passed the law. He invented a much narrower constitutional basis for ObamaCare, which is now under fire in a new case. Similarly, he upheld the Voting Rights Act while destroying the main mechanism for enforcing it.)
So on social-issue cases — gay rights, civil rights, abortion, etc. — the typical decision will be a ringing piece of conservative rhetoric representing Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, and the new guy, and then a more reasonable-sounding concurrence by Roberts that comes to the same conclusion on this particular case in a less sweeping way.
On economic issues, it won’t even be close: Roberts is an economic royalist; he’s for anything that increases corporate power, the influence of the 1%, or the voting power of the white Christian conservative bloc. Kennedy may have written the Citizens United opinion, but it was Roberts who maneuvered the case into position. Roberts is consistently anti-union and anti-consumer. He’ll support voter suppression and gerrymandering, as long as it has a fig leaf of alternative explanation.
I try not to speculate much on this blog, because I think way too much of the media’s “news” coverage is devoted to speculation about things that may never happen, rather than reports about what is happening. But I can’t resist here: In picking Gorsuch, Trump followed conservative orthodoxy. Gorsuch had appropriate experience and looked the part, so he might also have been appointed by President Rubio or President Cruz. I think in his second pick, Trump will want to make the point to Evangelicals that nobody else would have done this for them. That’s why they should be loyal to him personally rather than the GOP generally. So this one is going to be off the wall. If Roy Moore didn’t have that teen-age girl baggage, he’d be perfect.
Reportedly, Trump is using a candidate list created by Leonard Leo, until recently a vice president of the Federalist Society, an organization of right-wing lawyers. Trump has reportedly said he won’t ask candidates about specific issues like Roe v Wade, but that doesn’t reassure me for three reasons:
Undoubtedly Leo already has asked about Roe, and a judge who wasn’t sufficiently committed to overturning it wouldn’t be on the list. So Trump doesn’t need to ask; he already knows.
Trump lies and has no self-control. The fact that he says he won’t ask about something doesn’t mean much.
What really worries me is that Trump will ask for “loyalty”, as he did with James Comey. The Court may soon have to rule on questions like whether Trump can be subpoenaed, how far civil suits against him can go, and whether he can either pardon himself or pardon fellow members of a criminal conspiracy. I don’t want him negotiating a favorable ruling with judges as a condition of appointment.
Democrats currently have 49 senators. If they hold together against Trump’s nominee and John McCain’s health doesn’t allow him to attend, then only one Republican needs to cross over to block the nomination. Susan Collins said Sunday that she “would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade.” But as we saw in the tax-cut debate, Collins looks for reasons to go along, not reasons to resist. She happily settles for empty promises about tomorrow in exchange for a real vote today. So if the nominee says s/he hasn’t promised Trump anything about Roe, and professes a false open-mindedness in committee hearings, I’m sure Collins will be satisfied. When the Court finally overturns Roe she will tut-tut her disapproval, never admitting that she did nothing when she had the chance to prevent it.
In federal court Friday night, Trump’s Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, filed an announcement that it is now keeping families in detention “during the pendency of” their immigration cases. That could easily mean months of detention (or longer) for some asylum-seekers — or, alternatively, a form of “assembly-line justice” that moves families’ cases through too quickly to allow for real due process.
The whole we-have-to-enforce-the-law chorus is ignoring an important point: The law says we grant asylum to people who face persecution in their home countries. If the Trump administration sends them home without a hearing or rams them through a kangaroo court, it is breaking the law. The rule of law means that laws don’t just apply to the powerless, they apply to the government too.
Hundreds of thousands of people attended protest rallies around the county Saturday, the largest being in Chicago, Washington, and New York. In little Nashua, NH, I was at a rally with about 400 others.
A slogan at many of this weekend’s protest rallies was “Abolish ICE”. Trump interprets this as an anarchic slogan that calls for no policing of the border and predicts “Next it will be all police.” Actually, the proposal is quite a bit more sensible than that, as Alt. U.S. Press Secretary explains in a tweet storm:
Let’s talk about #AbolishICE: What it is and what it means. Does this mean getting rid of all border enforcement, or “open borders”? NO. ICE is an interior enforcement agency. They don’t guard the border. Who suggested abolishing ICE? ICE Special Investigators & Special Agents.
ICE consists of two portions with two differing missions. ICE HSI consists of trained investigators who handle highly significant drug tracking, child pornography, and other highly important translational law enforcement. And ICE ERO. ICE ERO does interior enforcement: Arresting people at courthouses, including domestic violence victims, and their places of work. Over 200 people have died in their custody. ICE routinely reallocates resources away from the important work of ICE HSI to ERO.
… ICE HSI and ICE ERO should be immediate separated within DHS, and ERO should be entirely restructured. In the interim, a more established agency such as FBI should manage both of the functions of both ICE HSI and ICE ERO.
and primaries
Progressive candidates did well in Democratic primaries Tuesday. Three in particular, in very different circumstances:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Rep. Joe Crowley, who was part of the Democratic House leadership. The race drew comparisons to Dave Brat beating Eric Cantor in 2014. Ocasio-Cortez is in New York’s 14th district, which is very blue. She seems very likely to hold the seat.
Ben Jealous won the Democratic nomination for governor of Maryland. The incumbent Republican, Larry Hogan, is very popular even though Maryland is a blue state. The conventional wisdom is that Jealous will lose, but that a centrist Democrat would have lost too.
Dana Balter defeated a candidate backed by the Democratic establishment in NY-24. This is precisely the kind of district Democrats need to win if they’re going to take the House: carried by Hillary Clinton but represented by a Republican. So this is a real test of the electability of progressives.
A major point of my campaign: in the safest blue seats in America, we should have leaders swinging for the most ambitious ideas possible for working-class Americans. You’re largely not going to get gutsy risk-taking from swing-district seats.
This makes perfect sense to me. It’s the flip side of Doug Jones running on middle-of-the-road ideas in Alabama and Joe Manchin having some conservative positions in West Virginia.
and a new kind of mass shooting
Thursday, a gunman rampaged through the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, killing four editors and a member of the advertising staff. Police charged Jarod Ramos, who was captured at the scene and had previously lost a defamation suit against the newspaper. Ramos is an MS-13 gang memberMuslim jihadist angry white guy with a gun. His defamation suit was in regard to a story about his harassment of a former classmate whom he had re-contacted on Facebook.
If I had to pick out one class of people to watch closely for violence, it would be men who have had harassment/domestic violence issues with women. To me, they seem way more dangerous — to the general public, and not just to the women in their lives — than any group defined by race, religion, or country of origin.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
It’s a good thing the American People know not to take this “enemy” stuff literally. That Trump, what a kidder!
and you also might be interested in …
NBC News quotes five anonymous intelligence officers as saying that North Korea is in fact increasing its production of weapons-grade nuclear material.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months. … While the North Koreans have stopped missile and nuclear tests, “there’s no evidence that they are decreasing stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production,” said one U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence. “There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S.”
The scenario that has most worried me since the Trump/Kim summit was announced is that Kim will take advantage of Trump’s tendency to exaggerate his accomplishments and his inability to admit mistakes. Having already taken a victory lap for getting Kim to talk about denuclearization (which North Korea has pledged many times before), Trump will be strongly tempted to deny or explain away any evidence that diminishes his premature claims of historic progress.
Puerto Rico appears to have drawn a conclusion from the federal government’s botching of Hurricane Maria recovery: It needs to be a state.
Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón (R) filed a bill on Wednesday that would pave the way for the island to become a state no later than January 2021. The measure is co-sponsored by 21 Republicans and 14 Democrats and fulfills the promises of González-Colón and Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, who campaigned on a statehood platform and said statehood is a civil rights issue for Puerto Ricans.
I did a calculation as part of my article on minority rule: Puerto Rico has about the same population as Alaska, the Dakotas, Vermont, and Wyoming put together. Puerto Ricans are already American citizens, but they have no voting representatives in Congress. Does anybody doubt that if the island were populated by English-speaking white people, it would have been a state a long time ago?
There’s an ongoing debate about civility, which somehow is supposed to apply to everyone but Trump. I should say more about this eventually, but for now I’ll settle for this:
We’re at the stage of “just say shit and hope your base repeats it”. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says the federal budget deficit is “is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly.” This contradicts figures from the administration itself:
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget says the deficit is rising from $665 billion in 2017 to $832 billion in 2018, and will approach $1 trillion annually in 2019.
We’re at the point in the economic cycle when classic Keynesian theory says the government should be running a surplus, not building towards one of the highest deficits in history. When the next recession hits — and one always does, eventually — tax receipts will fall, automatic payments like unemployment compensation will rise, and the economy will need a stimulus. If you start from a baseline of a trillion-dollar deficit, you might suddenly be looking at $2 trillion or $3 trillion.
There’s no point trying to sugarcoat it: This was an ugly week.
The biggest disappointments came from the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority does not seem to grasp the challenge Trump — and the larger pattern of minority rule I described in the previous post — pose to American democracy. It also has more or less abandoned one of the core principles of American jurisprudence: stare decisis, the doctrine that the current Court must work within the precedents of past Courts, unless and until they prove to be unworkable. This Court will do whatever it wants, regardless of precedent.
The Court’s spring term always ends in late June with a flurry of decisions, which are usually a mixed bag of good and bad. This batch was uniformly bad. The Court ruled that:
Trump’s ban on accepting visitors or immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries deserves the benefit of the Court’s doubt, and should not be interpreted in light of the unconstitutional Muslim Ban he campaigned on and sought to implement in two previous executive orders. Neither should the Court examine too closely the flimsy national-security justifications the administration offers. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent reviews Trump’s anti-Islam statements both before and after taking office, and concludes: “In sum, none of the features of the Proclamation highlighted by the majority supports the Government’s claim that the Proclamation is genuinely and primarily rooted in a legitimate national-security interest. What the unrebutted evidence actually shows is that a reasonable observer would conclude, quite easily, that the primary purpose and function of the Proclamation is to disfavor Islam by banning Muslims from entering our country.” She contrasts the Court’s unwillingness to consider Trump’s anti-Islam statements with the seriousness it ascribed to Colorado officials’ lack of respect for the baker’s Christian beliefs in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. But those were Christians and these are Muslims. As I have pointed out many times in the past, this Court grants Christians special rights.
Public-sector unions (which account for nearly half of the total union membership in the US) can’t insist that the workers they represent pay dues, as had been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1977. A worker who wants the benefits of the union-negotiated contract without contributing anything to the union is now free to make that choice. How unions of teachers and firefighters will survive is now an open question. Justice Kagan’s dissent points out that nothing (other than the personal beliefs of the justices) has changed to make the 1977 decision unworkable. “The majority … has overruled Abood because it wanted to.” This decision follows another in May that sharply limits the ability of workers to file class-action suits against their employers.
The Texas legislature’s gerrymander to maximize white power will stand, except for one state-legislature district. Justice Sotomayor dissents: “This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy. It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process.” This decision follows a ruling earlier in June upholding Ohio’s voter-suppression scheme.
A California law requiring licensed family-planning centers to inform patients about their abortion options and unlicensed facilities to state clearly that they are unlicensed is likely unconstitutional, so an injunction against enforcing the law is warranted while court challenges proceed. The Court’s conservative majority finds that such a disclosure law violates the free-speech rights of centers that oppose abortion, but stands by previous opinions that centers performing abortions are obligated to inform patients about their adoption options. Justice Breyer’s dissent notes the implicit contradiction, and claims that the foggy reasoning necessary to justify it casts doubt on all public-disclosure laws.
But that bad news was topped by the subsequent announcement that Justice Kennedy is retiring, allowing Trump to replace the swing vote on the Court. Many of us had hoped that Kennedy would look at Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch and realize that retiring now would undermine his entire legal legacy. But apparently not. Adding another Gorsuch to the Court will undoubtedly lead to the reversal of Roe v Wade and undermine same-sex couples right to marry. But Kennedy appears not to care.
It was, of course, foolish to hope that Mitch McConnell would follow the principles he laid out in 2016 and refuse to hold hearings on such an important appointment without letting the voters weigh in. McConnell isn’t about principle, he’s about power. In 2016 he could claim power for his side by refusing to hold hearings or vote on Obama’s nominee; now he can claim power by approving Trump’s nominee as quickly as possible. He is, in this respect, perfectly consistent. Trump is expected to name his choice next Monday, and McConnell predicts approval in time for the Court to begin its fall term in October.
Quite likely, then, Trump is picking someone who will rule on his own legal issues: whether he can be subpoenaed or indicted, what payments the Constitution’s emolument clause forbids, whether he can pardon himself, when a pattern of self-serving pardons or other presidential prerogatives constitutes obstruction of justice, and so on.
If you’re having a awfukkitt reaction, I hear you. This democracy thing just doesn’t seem to be working out. You vote, you demonstrate, you give money, you campaign, and what does it get you? Not only haven’t we made things better, we haven’t even stopped them from getting worse. Looking ahead, they’re likely to keep on getting worse at least until we get a new Congress, and who knows if we’ll even be able to do that? (See the previous post for more details.)
I don’t want to stop people who feel beaten down from taking care of themselves. If you need to take a step back to regain your sanity, if you feel your urge to engage coming from a shrill, wounded place that has never led you to do anything healthy or anything that turned out well, then by all means do what you need to do. Rest, re-center, get back in touch with your best self, and return to the fray stronger somewhere down the road.
But there’s also another awfukkitt reaction that I can see in myself and I want to speak out against: one that is rooted in my sense of privilege and seeks to protect my fragile sense of self-importance.
One of the speakers at the Keep-Families-Together rally I went to Saturday (in Nashua, NH, about a mile from where I live) was a minister who described himself as “the least discriminated-against person in America”. I could probably challenge him for that title: I’m white, male, educated, native-born, English-speaking, financially secure, straight, married, comfortable in the gender society assigned to me, free of any obvious disabilities, and so on.
People like me are not used to the idea of injustice. It isn’t something we run into every day. Life doesn’t force it on us. We volunteer for the fight against injustice, and we can’t help knowing at some level that we could always un-volunteer and go home to our un-discriminated-against lives.
Detective-novel fans know that there are two major types: the British detective novel (think Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple) where a puzzle needs to be solved, but once the truth is known things will turn out right, and the American detective novel (think Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade) where lots of people have known the truth for a long time, and the problem is getting them to do anything about it.
People like me live in a British-detective-novel world. We think that if we have a good case and tell enough people about it, of course the right thing will be done eventually. We are accustomed to being listened to. We expect our concerns to be taken seriously. It shocks us to confront the American-detective-novel world, where injustice has been around for a long time and could be around a lot longer. Making people see it isn’t the problem; making them do something about it is.
Our lives have not trained us for the situation we are in now. We usually don’t need moral stamina; we just need to understand what’s wrong and explain it to the right people. Then, taking care of it will be somebody’s else’s job. We’re weekend athletes. The first mile of the marathon was really energizing, but shouldn’t it be over by now? My side hurts. Can’t I quit?
And the scary thing is: Yes, yes I could. Nobody is going to break up my family. Nobody’s looking for some ancient infraction that will let them pull my green card. They’re not combing through my citizenship application from decades ago, looking for an error that will let them deport me. They’re not making it harder for me to vote. They’re not forcing a gender on me, or making me hide some important part of my identity. I don’t have to flinch when I see police. They don’t look at me like a criminal; they’re not going to be threatened if put my hand in my pocket; they’re not going to gun me down and ask questions later.
My health care might get more expensive, but I’ll manage. I don’t count on the minimum wage. Social security will be nice, but I won’t have to eat cat food if it goes away. Deregulation means I deal with more monopolies; corporations are more arrogant and probably their monopoly power costs me money, but I’m getting by. It’s a shame kids in Flint and a bunch of other places are getting lead poisoning, but I’m not.
I can’t un-know all that stuff. The temptation to be a “good German” and let the fascists do their thing will always be with me.
But I also can’t let myself rationalize what it means. There’s a moral death in that direction. Once you start not looking, not seeing, not worrying about things that don’t affect you, the part of the world you have to ignore keeps growing. Eventually, you have to start ignoring more or less everything.
So I don’t get to shrug and say, “Well, I tried. It just didn’t work.” The world is full of countries in much worse shape politically than the United States. The United States is full of people in much less hopeful positions than I am. Should they all give up too?
They can’t, because injustice doesn’t wait for them to notice it and decide they care about it. It gets in their faces and won’t leave them alone.
So OK: I explained the problem and nobody listened to me. I voted, I marched, I contributed, and things still got worse. That’s an unusual experience for me. My life hasn’t trained me for stamina. I’m used to races that are over by now. A voice in my head is saying, “This isn’t fair. I don’t want to play this game any more. Things shouldn’t be this way.”
But they are this way. I may not have trained for this race, but it’s the race I find myself in. I need to keep going.
When I did my annual end-of-the-year review in 2013, “the biggest single theme” I picked out was Minority Rule:
Republicans have given up on the idea of persuading a majority to agree with them. Instead, conservatives plan to rule from the minority.
I listed a number of the tactics they had been using: voter suppression, gerrymandering, and judicial activism among them. I didn’t expect these tactics to work nearly so well as they have. Consider:
In 2016, Mitch McConnell led a Senate majority that represented far fewer Americans than the Democratic minority. [1]
He used that minority-rule majority to radically change the way the Senate considers presidential appointments, blocking President Obama (who had defeated Mitt Romney 51%-47% in the 2012 election) from appointing a new swing vote on the Supreme Court. Instead, McConnell delivered that appointment to Donald Trump (who, even with the assistance of a hostile foreign power, lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton 46%-48%).
Trump’s appointee, Neil Gorsuch, was approved by the Senate 53-46. The senators voting for him represented far fewer Americans than the senators voting against him. [2]
Thanks largely to gerrymandering, Republicans in the House have a larger majority of seats than they have of voters. In 2012, Republicans won a 33-seat majority even while losing the popular vote. This year, as Democrats run considerably ahead in generic-ballot polls, political scientists argue over how big the Democratic voting margin needs to be to take control of the House. Is 5% enough? Seven percent? Eleven? One very likely outcome from this fall’s elections is that Democrats win a clear majority of voters, while Republicans win a clear majority of seats.
At the state level, things are often worse. Last year in Virginia, Democrats failed to gain a majority in the House of Delegates, despite a landslide 53%-44% victory in the popular vote. In North Carolina, the population is split relatively evenly between the two parties; Trump won the state with just under 50% of the vote compared to Clinton’s 46%, but the Democratic candidate won the governor’s race 49.0%-48.8%, despite one of the country’s most outrageous attempts at voter suppression. Meanwhile, gerrymandering gives the Republicans a 74-46 supermajority in the General Assembly, making Governor Cooper (and hence, the voters who elected him) virtually powerless.
Gorsuch was also the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision allowing purges of the voting roles in a manner than is likely to disenfranchise many legitimate voters while preventing virtually zero illegal votes.
In summary, minority rulers in Congress, the White House, and state capitals keep changing the rules to make it possible to rule with ever-smaller minorities. And a minority-appointed Supreme Court is fine with that.
A certain amount of minority rule was built into the Constitution in institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College, but I don’t think the Founders envisioned even those mechanisms becoming as skewed as they are today. [3] The Founders hoped the United States could avoid splitting into political parties, so they certainly never envisioned the vicious cycle of minority-rule entrenchment we’re seeing now: A political party centered in the small states that the Constitution favors (and representing the interests of the very rich) has used that extra boost of power to make the system increasingly more anti-democratic, giving themselves legislative and executive sway well beyond their voting numbers, making it increasingly difficult for the majority to vote them out, disenfranchising many citizens who might vote against them in the future, tearing down any limits on the use of money in politics, and packing the courts with judges who will rubber-stamp their power-grab.
With Justice Kennedy’s retirement, the minority-rule president and minority-rule Senate have a chance to appoint another Supreme Court justice, tipping the Court’s balance further in their favor for many years to come. Jonathan Chait notes:
Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent.
We can expect this new justice to make it virtually impossible for the Court to limit or mitigate the techniques of minority rule. [4]
Increasingly, that minority-appointed and minority-approved Court majority has become nakedly partisan. Justice Kennedy’s opinion-of-the-Court in Citizens United is a flight of fantasy in which unlimited corporate money improves the public debate prior to an election, because money (even money from profit-making corporations seeking government favors) is speech, and “There is no such thing as too much speech.” Chief Justice Roberts’ gutting of the Voting Right Act contains very little legal reasoning beyond his vague assertion that “things have changed dramatically” since the first version of the VRA in 1965.
It is no longer necessary to understand the laws or the Constitution to guess which side the Court will favor: Whatever improves Republican chances in the next election is good law. The Constitution’s guarantee of “a republican form of government” increasingly leans on the word form; if the formal process of an election is carried out, it doesn’t matter whether the sovereignty of the People is respected.
We know where this process can go: The end result is plainly apparent in Putin’s Russia, where Potemkin elections are held on a regular basis. The path is laid out by authoritarian “democracies” in Hungary and Poland, whose rulers have not yet achieved Putin’s level of security against the People, but are on their way.
None of that is inevitable, but it gets harder to turn things around the further we go. If the Supreme Court won’t protect democracy, then we will have to count on elected officials to do it. If it takes a 7% margin to control the House, we need to get that 7% margin. If winning the popular vote by three million votes isn’t enough to elect a president, then we need to win by four million votes. Gerrymander-ending laws that can’t get through gerrymandered legislatures need to be passed by referendum.
If a majority ever regains power, it shouldn’t be shy about using it: We need a constitutional amendment that controls corporate political spending. Voting rights need protection, and gerrymandering has to be stopped — by legislation if the Supreme Court will allow it, and by amendment if it won’t. The Electoral College has to be abolished. Citizens without representation in Congress need to get it: Puerto Rico needs to be offered statehood, and the District of Columbia needs representation. Breaking up the big states needs to be on the table.
The sovereignty of the People is a principle that runs deep in the DNA of American voters, even those who might favor conservative social policies. We need to make them understand the trade-off they’ve been making: An American Putin would do many things they’d like, but is it worth surrendering the Republic?
If we’re going to pull this out, we need to have all hands on deck. Apathetic citizens need to be convinced to care and to vote. The canards that “it doesn’t really matter” and “both sides are the same” need to be rejected. For the next few cycles, and maybe for the rest of our lifetimes, democracy itself is going to be the most important thing on the ballot. It’s going to be on the ballot in every election from president to school board. It needs to win.
[1] I couldn’t find a source to reference, so I calculated for myself. (You can check me if you want.) From a list of the senators by state, I determined that in 2016, 20 states had two Republican senators and 16 states had two Democratic senators (counting Bernie Sanders and Angus King as Democrats), accounting for an 8-seat Republican majority (54-46). I then went to the 2010 census and added up: The 20 two-Republican states had a total population of 99,576,045 and the 16 two-Democrat states totaled 126,215,202. I had not expected the margin to be quite so wide.
[2] By the same methods as above, 22 states had two senators voting for Gorsuch and one (Georgia) had one for and one not voting, so I’ll count Georgia’s population for Gorsuch. Those states total 108,613,347. Eighteen states totaling 135,574,383 people had two senators voting against Gorsuch. The other states had one senator for and one against, which I’ll regard as canceling out.
[3] The first census, in 1790, showed that the most populous state was Virginia, with 454,983 free inhabitants. The least populated state was Delaware, with 50,207, a ratio of about 9-to-1. In the 2010 census, California had over 37 million people and Wyoming 568,300, a 66-to-1 ratio. If you combine the populations of the seven states with less than a million people — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — you have 5.3 million people represented by 14 senators. That’s 1/7th the population of California with 7 times the senators.
The situation gets worse when you consider the Americans not represented in the Senate at all: 3.4 million in Puerto Rico and 700K in the District of Columbia. Puerto Rico’s population almost exactly matches that of Alaska, the Dakotas, Vermont, and Wyoming put together; those states have 10 senators.
The situation is somewhat better in the Electoral College, but still considerably less fair than in 1790. The first census gave Virginia 21 electoral votes and Delaware 3; 9 times the population produced 7 times the electoral votes. But today California has 55 electoral votes to Wyoming’s 3; 66 times the population produces 18 times the electoral votes.
It’s also clear what the Founders’ solution would be: Break up large states. In their time, Kentucky was created from land claimed by Virginia, and Vermont from land New Hampshire and New York were arguing over.
[4] Trump’s legal situation creates yet another problem: Probably, the Supreme Court is going to have to make some serious rulings about whether the president can be subpoenaed, when a corrupt pattern of pardons constitutes obstruction of justice, and even whether the president can pardon himself. Trump may well be deciding those issues himself right now, by choosing a justice who will rule in his favor.
OK, this was not our best week. If you went to one of the keep-families-together demonstrations on Saturday, you might have gotten energized by that. But overall, the news was pretty depressing.
As I warned last week, that sense of victory we felt when Trump appeared to reverse the family-separation policy was premature. It’s still uncertain whether or not the policy will come back or what will replace it. In the meantime, about 2,000 kids are still separated from their parents, and the government is either unwilling or unable to reunite them. We’re now seeing the spectacle of kids too young to know which country they came from facing an immigration hearing.
And then there was the Supreme Court. Every year, there’s a flurry of decisions at the end of the term in June, and usually there’s a little something for everybody. You’re happy about this, sad about that, you hoped for more here, and so on. This year, the news was uniformly bad. The Muslim ban, voting rights, gerrymandering, unions, gay rights … it all came out wrong. Some of the decisions were merely disappointing, while others were horrible.
And then, guess what? We found out that it’s going to get worse. Justice Kennedy is retiring. Unless a miracle happens, Trump will replace him with a clone of Gorsuch, making Roberts the new swing vote. Since Roberts is already Chief Justice, he’ll be the most powerful American jurist in a long, long time. If you know anything about him, that’s seriously bad news.
Personally, I bounce back and forth between being depressed and being energized, so I wrote two featured posts this week. The depressing one is “Minority Rule Snowballs”. Back in 2013, I outlined what I saw as the new Republican strategy: They were going to stop trying to appeal to a majority of the American people, and instead see if they could rule from the minority. That’s been way more successful than I thought was possible, and this post will describe how. It should be out shortly.
Then there’s a post about not giving up — actually, the depressing post ends with a riff on not giving up too — that I haven’t titled yet. When I look at the aw-fuck-it temptation in my own heart, it’s uncomfortably rooted in my sense of privilege. That’s why I wasn’t prepared for a decades-long struggle against fascism: Once people like me get mobilized, what we want is supposed to happen pretty quickly. And it’s also why I imagine that giving up is an option: If the worst happens, I could easily melt into the population of “good Germans” who get along relatively well. Aw-fuck-it-we’re-going-to-lose-anyway is a much too easy way out. If the Gandhis and Kings and Mandelas had gone that way, the world would be a much worse place.
So let’s call that for 11 EDT and the weekly summary for noon or so.
The important thing to understand is that the atrocities our nation is now committing at the border don’t represent an overreaction or poorly implemented response to some actual problem that needs solving. There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime. No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done.
This week everybody was still talking about immigration
At times it was hard to remember that anything else was going on. On the other hand, when your country starts talking about opening concentration camps, maybe that deserves some public attention. Jesse Hawken pointed out how the national conversation has evolved since the 2016 campaign:
2016: “Come on, you’re talking like Trump’s going to put people in concentration camps”
2018: “First of all, I think it’s offensive that you refer to them as ‘concentration camps'”
Anyway, the “Family Separations” post deals directly with the immigration issue, and “You can’t compromise with bullshit” was largely inspired by it.
and two cracks in the Republican wall
All along, the question facing anti-Trump Republicans has been: “Yes, but are you going to do anything?” So far, their responses have mostly been disappointing: A few congressional Republicans will tut-tut a little, and then back Trump when their votes are needed, including backing him in his effort to discredit the Mueller investigation. During the election, conservative columnists groused about their situation, but most ultimately called for an anti-Hillary vote, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump.
But this week, two well-known anti-Trump Republicans, George Will and Steve Schmidt, both renounced their party and called for voters to elect Democrats this fall.
In an article titled “Vote against the GOP this November“, veteran Washington Post columnist George Will castigated the Republican majorities in Congress for failing to put any checks on President Trump.
The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers.
In particular, he denounced Paul Ryan, who has “traded his political soul for … a tax cut. … Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles.”
Schmidt, manager of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, withdrew “my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.” In a lengthy tweet-storm, he called for Democratic majorities in Congress.
Our country is in trouble. Our politics are badly broken. The first step to a season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities. I do not say this as an advocate of a progressive agenda. I say it as someone who retains belief in DEMOCRACY and decency.
The current scandal of separating refugee families seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
[President Reagan] would be ashamed of McConnell and Ryan and all the rest while this corrupt government establishes internment camps for babies. Every one of these complicit leaders will carry this shame through history. … Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and values. This Independent voter will be aligned with the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous to our Republic, objective truth, the rule of law and our Allies. That party is the Democratic Party.
I doubt that either man has a large following in today’s Republican Party. Their statements are important, though, as cover for long-time Republican voters who see no place for themselves in the corrupt and heartless Party of Trump, but still aren’t comfortable voting for Democrats. They need to understand that they will never get back the Republican Party they have loved unless Trump and his “poodles” lose.
I’ve seen a few reactions like “It took you long enough” or blaming Schmidt for putting us on this road by elevating Sarah Palin, and so on. None of that is false, but this isn’t the way to greet defectors. The more defectors, the better. Pressure should be on the most anti-Trump Republican who hasn’t called for a Democratic victory yet, not on the one who just did.
The leaders of Republican Majority for Choice also announced that they were leaving the party. This is a little less shocking, because it is so overdue. Susan Bevan and Susan Cullman seem to be the last people to realize that the GOP has no place for pro-choice activists.
but I got something wrong last week
Last week I falsely attributed a white supremacist quote by Richard Spencer to White House Advisor Stephen Miller. It was an honest, sloppy mistake: The Vanity Fair article I linked to was about Miller, but it quoted Spencer, attributing the quote to “he”. I was reading too quickly and thought “he” referred to Miller, which it obviously didn’t on closer examination. (No fault to VF.) Thanks to commenter Mark Flaherty for catching the misattribution. I removed the quote as soon as I realized my error.
and you also might be interested in …
Turkey, our NATO ally, took another step towards authoritarianism. President Erdogan won Sunday’s election, in spite of some polls that indicated he might be in trouble. So far, I’m not seeing accusations of fraud.
As I’ve been predicting, Republicans are responding to the budget deficit their tax cut created by calling for cuts in Medicare. They want you to pay more for medical care when you get old, so that rich people and multinational corporations and Donald Trump can pay lower taxes. It’s a more-or-less direct transfer of wealth from you to them.
Josh Marshall’s critique of Trump’s negotiating style is worth a read. Basically, he is building on a point made several other places, including the NYT and the Calculated Risk economics blog: You have to negotiate differently when you’re going to face the same players in future deals. In one-time deals, like on a used-car lot, you can get an advantage through bluffing, lying, and threats (like the threat to walk away). But situations where you are bound to the other party in some way (union/management, or any firm with its major clients and suppliers) call for a whole different toolkit, because you’re not just trying to grind the other party into the dust, you need to build trust, and work towards mutually beneficial agreements that continue into the future.
If you’re going to be dealing with the same players again and again, using threats or bad faith to make a one-sided deal really isn’t necessarily in your longterm interest. Because you’re going to have to deal with that cheated player again.
When we deal with allies like Canada or Germany, or even with rivals like China or Russia, the point isn’t to make a one-time “great deal” and walk away with the profit. Because unless we conquer the world, we’ll have to keep going back to these same players and making new deals.
The U.S. position regarding China would be stronger if Beijing faced a united front that also included Europe, Japan, Mexico and Canada. As it is, Mr. Trump is threatening them with large tariffs as well, driving them to explore closer relations with Beijing.
and let’s close with something spiritual
I think I’ve linked to this meditation video before, but repetition is part of any good spiritual practice. This seems like a particularly good week for this practice.
For the second straight week, I start with a Paul Krugman column. This time it’s “Return of the Blood Libel” from Thursday. The key observation concerns the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, the one that has obsessed the country for the least two weeks.
What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.
This observation isn’t new, and Krugman isn’t the first to point it out. Trump started his campaign by talking about Mexican rapists. His acceptance speech at the Republican Convention warned that “illegal immigrant families … are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.” His inaugural address painted a picture of “American carnage” which he promised “stops right here and stops right now”. Yesterday he tweeted: “Strong Borders, No Crime!”, as if America had no indigenous criminals, but suffered only from rampaging gangsters that cross our borders.
And from the beginning, it’s all been bullshit. Violent crime is on a long-term downward trend in America, and very little of the remaining murder and mayhem is carried out by undocumented immigrants. If the US isn’t safe enough for you yet, neither the Muslim Ban nor the mistreatment of refugees from Central America going to make you safer. And if you ignore the nationwide stats and focus on a border town like Brownsville, Texas? “We’re doing fine,” says the mayor.
[Commenters have been confused by the “per 100,000 population”, so I’ll clarify. The question is: Is that per 100K of the state’s entire population, or per 100K of the named group? If it were the former, then the apparent pro-immigrant point is lost; there are more native-born people than immigrants, so of course they commit more crimes. But if you click through to the WaPo article I got the chart from, and then keep clicking until you get to their source, you wind up at a report from the Cato Institute, where the charts are labelled less ambiguously: “per 100,000 in each subpopulation”. So the chart is saying that immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans.]
Lots of writers have making comparisons to the Nazis as they see the mindless cruelty of the family-separation policy, or the concentration camps that will be needed to hold all those waiting for immigration hearings, if they have to be held. (They don’t have to be held.) But Krugman points back to an even earlier era of anti-Semitism: the centuries of random riots and organized pogroms incited by the Blood Libel — the myth that secret Jewish Passover rituals required the sacrifice of Christian children. All it took was for a child to go missing at the wrong time, and mobs would descend on the local Jewish ghetto, seeking revenge for an imaginary horror.
Picture for a moment the helplessness you would feel if you were either a Jew or a sympathetic Christian hoping to prevent the upcoming Passover from ending in tragedy. You can’t get the Jews to stop sacrificing Christian children, because they were never doing that in the first place. The underlying cause of the looming riot is in a mythological realm you can’t access.
Same thing here. Both Presidents Bush and Obama imagined that they might be able to compromise with anti-immigration hardliners by strengthening enforcement. And so over the last 20 years we’ve had more and more fence built, more and more agents manning the border, more and more deportations. And what they’ve gotten in exchange is exactly nothing, because the border that matters, the one that murderers and rapists and drug mules are streaming across at will, isn’t in the real world at all. When the problem that motivates someone is imaginary, there’s nothing anybody else can do about it.
Some people, Andrew Sullivan for example, appear not to have learned this lesson. Just one more real-world effort, they think, and Trump’s irrationally fearful supporters will be satisfied:
So give him his fucking wall. He won the election. He is owed this. It may never be completed; it may not work, as hoped. But it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control, and the only way to make any progress under this president. And until the white working and middle classes are reassured, we will get nowhere.
But why will they be reassured by a wall that doesn’t get completed and won’t work? Why will they be reassured by anything that happens in the real world? Won’t there still be examples of whites who get killed by undocumented immigrants? Won’t there still be unemployed whites who blame Hispanics with jobs? Won’t demagogues still tell them that subhuman vermin are streaming by the millions across our open borders? Build the wall, open concentration camps, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight — what changes?
You can’t compromise with bullshit. It isn’t just that it’s not smart; it simply doesn’t work.
When claims are based on nothing, they can go on being based on nothing, no matter what you do to mollify the people who make those claims.
You can sympathize with people, even if they vote against you. And when they point to actual problems in the real world, you can offer them solutions, or at least concessions.
But the Jews of Prague and Warsaw had nothing to offer Christian parents who worried about their children being sacrificed and their blood baked into matzah. Their fear was quite real, but their problem lived in a mythic realm beyond any Jew’s influence.
Similarly, there is nothing we can offer those who worry about “American carnage” or the persecution of Christians or unfair Canadian trade.
Real-world solutions can’t touch imaginary problems. You can’t compromise with bullshit.
The Weekly Sift 