Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

We Have to Believe

June 4, 2018 – 10:52 am

I want to be very clear about one thing: Americans remain our partners, friends, and allies. This is not about the American people. We have to believe that at some point their common sense will prevail. But we see no sign of that in this action today by the U.S. administration.

– Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

This week’s featured post is “What is impeachment for?”

This week brought back everything that last week seemed to stop

A week ago, the North Korea summit was off and the trade war was “on hold”. Now they’re both back.

The summit is scheduled for a week from tomorrow in Singapore. Until Trump and Kim actually appear, though, who can say whether it will really happen? Originally, Trump implied that the meeting would signal North Korea’s complete denuclearization, for which he should win a Nobel Peace Prize. Now it’s just supposed to “start a process“.

Back in March, Trump announced tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Then he appeared to back down, temporarily exempting Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. The time limit on that exemption ran out Thursday without Trump getting the concessions he wanted, so the tariffs are back on.

The affected countries are retaliating. Canada seems particularly offended by the pretext for the tariffs: Trump is exercising powers the president has under a national security provision. Essentially he is saying that Canada can’t be trusted to continue selling us metals we need for our defense industries.

Tariffs on Chinese goods were announced Tuesday, to take effect “shortly after” the complete list of goods affected is released on June 15. China also plans to retaliate.

For a guy whose book is called The Art of the Deal, Trump’s negotiating style seems particularly artless: He makes threats and demands concessions. If other countries don’t yield to his demands, he seems to have no Plan B.

and everyone was talking about jobs

The economy added 223K jobs in May. That number was fairly typical of job growth over the last five years, but the accumulation of good job creation over a long period has pushed the unemployment rate down to 3.8%, a number not seen since the end of the Clinton administration, and only briefly then.

and new claims of presidential power

A letter that Trump’s lawyers wrote to Bob Mueller in January got leaked this week. The point of the letter is to argue against Mueller’s need to interview Trump, and along the way it makes an amazing claim: Obstruction of justice laws simply don’t apply to the president, because since he is the highest law-enforcement official “that would amount to obstructing himself”. The President has complete authority to terminate investigations as he sees fit, and to pardon anybody he wants for any reason. The letter recognizes no exception for a president with corrupt intent.

Matt Yglesias draws an obvious conclusion:

Consider that if the memo is correct, there would be nothing wrong with Trump setting up a booth somewhere in Washington, DC, where wealthy individuals could hand checks to him, and in exchange, he would make whatever federal legal trouble they are in go away. You could call it “The Trump Hotel” and maybe bundle a room to stay in along with the legal impunity.

Trump (and his lawyer Rudy Guiliani) is also claiming that he could pardon himself. Strange that Nixon never thought of that.

and Roseanne

Roseanne Barr managed to get her hit sitcom revival Roseanne cancelled by ABC by tweeting a racist insult at former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett.

Barr’s defenders are using one of the standard conservative tactics: stripping away the context of the insult, making a simplistic comparison to things liberals have said, and then claiming a double standard. (How is claiming Jarrett is the child of apes different from, say, Bill Mahr suggesting Donald Trump was fathered by an orangutan?) As always, they are the victims.

Let me go back to the analysis I wrote in 2015: “Slurs, Who Can Say Them, When, and Why“. (This isn’t the Sift’s most-viewed post because it never had a viral moment, but it is the most consistently popular. After three years, it still reliably gets a few hundred hits every week.) Then I was talking about words like nigger and honky, but the same ideas apply to images and metaphors, like comparing people to apes.

If you just look them up in a dictionary you might think they are equivalent: honky is a racial slur directed at whites, nigger at blacks. What’s the difference?

Usage.

Nigger has centuries of usage behind it, and the connotation of that usage is that blacks are a subhuman race. Nigger evokes a detailed stereotype — lazy, stupid, violent, lustful, dangerous — while honky just says you’re a white guy I don’t like. For centuries, niggers weren’t really people. There’s no equivalent word for whites, because whites have always been seen as people.

Whenever you use a word or an image or a metaphor, you’re not just applying a dictionary meaning. You’re invoking the whole history of the usage. For centuries, whites have compared blacks to apes — sometimes literally claiming they are not a fully human species — in order to portray them as a race of unintelligent subhumans. Barr’s tweet evokes this history.

There is no comparable usage-history dehumanizing Trump’s ancestors (Germans) by comparing them to orangutans, and Maher was not plugging into anything of that sort. Instead, he’s applying a more general and much less toxic physical-resemblance-to-animals usage-history, such as when Mitch McConnell is compared to a turtle.

Given the history of black dehumanization, comparing blacks to animals is always tricky, but it can be done. For example, this cartoon of Obama dressed as a Russian bear does not strike me as racist, because bears are not typical dehumanizing symbols. But this photo-shopped image of Barack and Michelle as apes clearly is.

Trump couldn’t leave this controversy alone, but he also couldn’t condemn Barr’s racism, since she and her racism are typical of an important segment of his base. So he portrayed himself and his daughter as the real victims.

About the Samantha Bee/Ivanka Trump thing: A key point in my “Slurs” analysis is that slurs-that-can-be-turned-around-on-the-slurrer are a completely different category than slurs-that-only-go-one-way.

The various disadvantaged communities are all debating whether or not it’s ever OK to use the slurs themselves. Some argue that when black rappers use nigger, they jam the stereotype rather than perpetuate it. Some women believe that saying bitch is liberating, because it shows the word doesn’t scare them. Others disagree, believing that any use of a slur promotes its stereotypes.

I think this: Those issues are for those communities to figure out. In the unlikely event that they ask my advice, I might give it. But until then, my opinion as a white guy doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.

Samanthan Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” falls into this same category. Overwhelmingly, women who have commented on Bee’s use of cunt have condemned it, which is their right. But men like me and Donald Trump should stay out of that discussion. The propriety of a woman saying cunt is not for us to decide.

but now we have a clearer notion of what Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico

According to a study in the current New England Journal of Medicine, Hurricane Maria resulted in about 4600 “excess deaths” in Puerto Rico between landfall (September 20) and December 31. That number includes not just people killed immediately in the storm, but also deaths due to “delays or interruptions in health care” caused by the storm and its subsequent island-wide power failure. It’s also a statistical estimate, not a list of specific deaths. The official death toll is 64, a number which has been criticized by many sources.

Puerto Rican writer and podcast-host Julio Ricardo Varela wasn’t surprised.

We knew. … When funeral directors started telling people that they were burying way more bodies than usual, or when our family members told us about their neighbors dying in still-darkened rooms, or being buried outside their homes, we knew that the official death toll was much higher than the 64 people the government had eventually admitted to. When we heard the stories of people having no refrigeration for their insulin, that dialysis machines weren’t operational or that hospitals were still in the dark but had people on life support, we knew that it wasn’t some small counting error.

This estimate of Maria’s death toll on Puerto Rico is higher than the reported death tolls of 9/11 (2996) and Hurricane Katrina (1833), but it’s not clear to me this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Both of those numbers also might rise in an excess-deaths analysis.

But that’s quibbling: Thousands of American citizens died, many of them because of a slow and inadequate response. Aid was stuck at the port in San Juan, a Navy hospital ship was substantially underused, and about a third of the island’s residents still had no electric power four months after the storm.

And yet, this has not become a scandal or prompted a national soul-searching like Katrina and 9/11 did. There is no blue-ribbon panel preparing a what-went-wrong report. Heads have not rolled in the agencies that bungled the response.

Is there any doubt why this is? Puerto Ricans are Spanish-speaking brown people, not “real Americans” like the Texans affected by Hurricane Harvey and Floridians hit by Hurricane Irma.

There’s a lot of blame to spread around here, from Puerto Rico’s pre-hurricane infrastructure to the local Puerto Rican officials to the federal government. But a big piece of it has to come back to Trump’s inability to admit failure or fix mistakes. At a time when the full scope of the problem was starting to become clear, Trump could only congratulate himself on the low reported death numbers. When criticism began, he was the victim, not the lazy Puerto Ricans who “want everything done for them”.

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump. Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

During the Obama administration, conservatives proclaimed a series of events to be “Obama’s Katrina“. Well, Trump has presided over a natural-disaster screw-up that is arguably worse than Katrina, and no one seems to care.

and you also might be interested in …

A very good Washington Post article about sexual abuse in evangelical churches centers on Rachael Denhollander, who was abused as a child in her church and then became one of the young gymnasts assaulted by Larry Nassar.

Today, Denhollander can see how her church, which has since shut down, failed to protect her. But as a child, all she knew from her parents was that her abuse had made their church mad and that she wasn’t able to play with some of her friends. She blamed herself — and resolved that, if anyone else ever abused her, she wouldn’t mention it.

And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims.

The Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse problems have gotten a lot of attention, but similar forces are at work in evangelical churches:

When congregants believe that their church is the greatest good, they lack the framework to accept that something as awful as sexual abuse could occur within its walls; it is, in the words of Diane Langberg, a psychologist with 35 years of experience working with clergy members and trauma survivors, a “disruption.” In moments of crisis, Christians are forced to reconcile a cognitive dissonance: How can the church — often called “the hope of the world” in evangelical circles — also be an incubator for such evil?

Some good news on prospects for the climate: NetPower is building a small (50 MW) plant in Texas to prove that its revolutionary technology works. The plant will run on natural gas, but emit no air pollution and no waste heat. Carbon capture isn’t an expensive separate unit bolted onto the end of the process; it’s a normal part of the combustion cycle. The plant has achieved first fire, and should be generating power later this year.

Vox’ environmental writer David Roberts is impressed.

So: more efficient power, with zero air pollution, virtually no water consumption, and pipeline-ready carbon dioxide capture built in … for cheaper than today’s best fossil fuel power plants. Quite a bold promise.

It works in an unusual way, which Roberts explains in more detail (and links to even more technical explanations): Natural gas is burned with pure oxygen, and the turbine is driven by supercritical carbon dioxide rather than steam. There’s a pipe and the end of the cycle producing excess CO2, which can be sold or sequestered.

Theoretically, the process also would work with coal.

Roberts points out that “Combustion is only one part of the damage done by fossil fuels.”

But it’s best not to be shortsighted here. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, there are going to be hundreds of fossil fuel power plants built across the world in coming years. This is especially true of natural gas plants, which play an important role in “firming” the fluctuations in variable renewable energy (and could potentially be run in the future on renewable biogas).

If we could start right now making all those new coal and natural gas plants air-pollution-free, it would be a public health win of historic proportions, to say nothing of the regulatory and civic battles that could be avoided.

And capturing all that carbon rather than throwing it into the atmosphere might be enough to give the fight against climate change some much-needed breathing room.

While we’re talking about fossil fuels … a longtime Republican talking point has been that the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers, so it shouldn’t subsidize renewable fuels over fossil fuels. I have argued against this (because it makes sense for the government to use taxes and subsidies to balance hidden fossil-fuel costs that the market externalizes, like the cost of cleaning up after hurricanes), but at least it’s a coherent point of view.

But Friday Bloomberg broke the story that Trump is planning to pick winners and losers … and the winners are coal and nuclear.

The Trump administration has been preparing to invoke emergency powers granted under Cold War-era legislation to order regional grid operators to buy electricity from ailing coal and nuclear power plants.

Think about that: Trump insists on wrecking the environment by burning coal, even if the market is against it.

If he genuinely believed the free-market principles he has been promoting for his entire career, Paul Ryan would be moving to stop this. But I’m not holding my breath.

Every congressional district is different. Here’s how a Democrat tries to appeal to farmers as he runs against Iowa Republican Steve King, one of the most unabashed racists in Congress.

Elsewhere, the Southern Poverty Law Center says that eight explicitly white-supremacist and/or anti-Semitic candidates are running for office this year, including one (Arthur Jones) who has already gotten the Republican nomination for Congress in Illinois. (He’s running in a Democratic district that mainstream Republicans didn’t contest. The state GOP has denounced him.) MSNBC’s Morgan Radford (who is part black and part Jewish) went to Illinois to interview Jones and to California to interview Senate candidate Patrick Little, who is running against Diane Feinstein on the slogan “End Jewish Supremacy“. (His primary is tomorrow.)

Illinois voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which was approved by Congress in 1972. The deadline for ratification passed 36 years ago, but there’s some dispute about whether that matters. If it doesn’t, the ERA only needs to be ratified by one more state.

Congress and the Trump administration have been undoing the restrictions on financial companies that were put in place after the collapse of 2008. After the collapse, all the major banks were relying on federal dollars to stay solvent, so the government had enormous leverage, if it chose to use it. There were three basic theories of what to do:

  • The technocratic approach (favored by establishment Democrats and embodied in Dodd-Frank), in which the structure of the banking system remained fundamentally the same, but regulators got better information and more power to stop banks from doing foolish things.
  • The progressive approach, in which too-big-to-fail banks would get broken up into pieces too small to sink the system, and FDIC-insured banking would once again be walled off from riskier investment banking with a 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act.
  • The Republican approach, which would get federal institutions (like Fannie Mae) out of the mortgage business, and instill discipline in the market by making future bank bailouts almost impossible.

Now we’re seeing the weakness of the technocratic approach: The public doesn’t really understand the technical rules Dodd-Frank established, so undoing them doesn’t set off alarm bells with the electorate.

Trump campaigned on some progressive banking proposals like Glass-Steagall, but once in office he has given the big banks whatever they want.

He has, instead, simply appointed industry insider figures to all the key positions and has them steadily working to twist every dial available in a more industry-friendly direction.

And the nature of bank regulation is that even when it’s done really, really poorly, the odds are overwhelming that on any given day, nothing bad is going to happen. As long as the economy is growing and asset prices are generally rising, a poorly supervised banking sector is just as good as a well-supervised one.

But when the music stops, and it always does, a poorly supervised banking sector can turn into a huge disaster. It’s only a question of when.

Everybody knows that old people are conservative, but now there’s a new explanation why: Poor people tend to be liberal, and they die before they get old.

mortality among the poor increases during middle age — which is when citizens generally get more involved in politics. The premature disappearance of the poor, then, occurs precisely at the moment when they would be expected to reach their “participatory peak” in society. But they don’t live long enough to achieve that milestone.

and let’s close with something

A town in Norway celebrates summer solstice each year by making a huge bonfire. The one it built last year holds the record for being the tallest bonfire ever.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

What is impeachment for?

June 4, 2018 – 9:07 am

During Obama’s presidency, Republican standards for impeachment were low and Democratic standards high. Now it’s the reverse. We need American standards that don’t change with the political winds.

Someday — maybe sooner, maybe later — Bob Mueller is going to issue his report on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, whether Trump has been attempting to obstruct justice, and possibly other Trump-related scandals. When that happens, Congress and the American people will have to look at what has been found and decide what to do about it. Is it enough for an impeachment or not?

At that moment, partisans on both sides will adjust their standards to get the conclusion they want. Trumpists will put forward impossibly high standards for impeachment, and anti-Trumpists will drop their standards to match the facts available. Not admiring either of these approaches, I want to set out my general ideas about impeachment now, before we know what the evidence will say.

Previous impeachments. As background, let me start by confessing that I’m old enough to have watched two presidential impeachment processes: Nixon’s and Clinton’s. The two could not have been more different.

At the time of the Nixon impeachment hearings, the United States hadn’t impeached a president in a century. Leaders of both parties in Congress appreciated that they were wielding a fearful and awesome power. They felt the Eye of History watching them. So, while Democrats were in general the prosecutors and Republicans the defenders, both approached their roles with extreme scrupulousness. Both sides were determined to get to the truth of the matter rather than just to win.

The iconic question “What did the President know and when did he know it?” was asked by Republican Senator Howard Baker. The House Judiciary Committee’s decision to subpoena Nixon’s tapes of Oval Office conversations was overwhelmingly bipartisan (33-3). Of the five articles of impeachment considered by the committee, three were supported by some Republicans and three were opposed by some Democrats. In the end, Nixon resigned after a delegation of Republican leaders went to the White House to tell the President that they could no longer defend him.

By contrast, the Clinton impeachment was an entirely partisan exercise from beginning to end. Nixon’s special prosecutor (Leon Jaworski) had been a fellow Republican. But for Clinton, the first Republican special prosecutor hadn’t been rabid enough, so he was replaced with a more partisan one. The focus of the investigation kept shifting, eventually settling on Clinton’s sexual escapades. Even the obstruction of justice charge postulated a private conspiracy (inducing Monica Lewinsky to give false testimony in a civil lawsuit) rather than a misuse of presidential power. None of the 45 Democratic senators voted to convict on any charge.

During the Obama administration, Republicans would occasionally raise the idea of impeachment, but it was clear that their standards had declined even further since the Clinton era. Republican Congressman Kerry Bentivolio told a town hall meeting of impeachment-happy partisans that impeaching Obama would be “a dream come true”, but there was one tiny hurdle he didn’t know how to jump yet: “You’ve got to have evidence.”

Now, of course, Republican standards for impeachment are high again and Democratic standards have lowered. But what we need are American standards that we’re willing to apply to presidents of either party.

The Constitution only helps us up to a point. It lays down the basic process, but (as it so often does) leaves the details to the interpretation of later generations. Perhaps that openness is why the document has lasted this long.

I first formulated my ideas about impeachment during the Clinton process, and I will attempt to apply those theories to Trump, even though Clinton is a Democrat and Trump a Republican.

The bad-president problem. The Founders believed that any legitimate sovereignty had to come from the People, but they understood that the People would make mistakes. It was inevitable that sooner or later the United States would elect a bad president — a demagogue who was unwise, uninformed, and temperamentally unfit for the job.

It’s clear what they saw as the primary remedy for a bad president: Wait for his term to end and elect somebody else. (In the meantime, the other branches of government should use their checks and balances to minimize the harm he could do.) We may not have the same appreciation for the elect-somebody-else solution as the Founders, but you have to bear in mind that they were comparing the presidency to the monarchy of England. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist #69:

The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for FOUR years; the king of Great Britain is a perpetual and HEREDITARY prince.

If England had a bad king, the solution was either to revolt or wait for him to die. But in the US, you could circle a date an a calendar and plan for the bad president to be gone. The Founders saw that as a big improvement.

So what is impeachment for? Impeachment is in the Constitution for those rare cases where the country just can’t wait. You can see that reflected in the clause that establishes it.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

What makes treason and bribery so special that the Constitution names them? Each points to a problem more serious than mere incompetence or wrongheadedness or lax morals or bad temper. Both describe situations where the power of the presidency has been removed from the People and might possibly be used against them. A treasonous president is loyal to a foreign power; a bribed one is loyal to some private interest. The power of the presidency hasn’t just been used unwisely, it has been suborned or usurped. That’s a situation that can’t be allowed to continue.

Treason and bribery should be models for “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. That phrase, I think, is intentionally vague, to give Congress the leeway to do what it thinks it needs to do. But treason and bribery should set the bar: A legitimate impeachment case needs to argue that the Republic is in danger. There must be some reason why waiting for the next election either won’t work or isn’t good enough.

Reasons to impeach. If you buy that general framework, then legitimate reasons to impeach fall into four categories:

  1. The president is not loyal to the People of the United States. Basically, treason or bribery. A third offense, which in the Nixon impeachment was called “abuse of power”, is similar if a bit more vague: Loyalty to self has eclipsed loyalty to the country. The power of the presidency is being used not for the common good, but to enrich the president, to reward the president’s friends, or to punish his or her enemies.
  2. The president’s actions threaten the integrity of the election process. One reason we might not be able to wait for the next election is that the next election has been compromised. This was the heart of the Nixon impeachment: If a president can harass and spy on political rivals with impunity, then the whole election process becomes untrustworthy. You can imagine extreme cases where the president is winning elections by stuffing the ballot box, as happens in many pseudo-democratic countries.
  3. The president’s actions prevent investigations of (1) or (2). Obstruction of justice can be an impeachable offense, but it should only be used if the underlying charge has some can’t-wait significance. Nixon’s attempt to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate burglary had clear implications for the integrity of the election process. But whether or not Clinton obstructed Paula Jones’ civil lawsuit was an issue that could have waited.
  4. Congress has no other way to protect itself or the judiciary from presidential encroachment. This is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Constitution, but constitutional government doesn’t work otherwise. Congress necessarily relies on the executive branch to carry out the laws it passes. Presidents famously find loopholes that allow them to do things they want and avoid doing things they don’t want. But if a president ignores clear laws or disobeys direct court orders, Congress has to have some way to preserve the powers of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Waiting for the next election isn’t good enough, because (once the pattern is established) the next president might usurp power in the same way. Impeachment is the ultimate arrow in Congress’ quiver. If the Iran-Contra scandal had led to impeaching President Reagan, this would have been the justification.

A fifth condition is urgent in a similar way, but has its own constitutional process: A president who is insane or demented can be removed via the 25th Amendment, if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet believe he or she is unfit.

Reasons that aren’t good enough. Impeachment shouldn’t be seen as a do-over for the voters’ mistakes. No matter how many people change their minds, or how low the president’s popularity sinks, that by itself is not a reason to impeach.

Policy disagreements between the president and Congress aren’t impeachable, as long as the President is respecting Congress’ legitimate powers. Attempts to stretch presidential power into debatable areas — like Obama’s executive orders on immigration — are not impeachable if the president backs down when Congress passes new laws or the courts overturn the orders.

The president becoming an embarrassment to the country is not enough. This, I think, was the mistake at the heart of the Clinton impeachment: Many Americans were embarrassed to hear news reports about oral sex in the Oval Office. That might be a good reason to call for a president’s resignation, but not to impeach.

Loss of faith in the president’s judgment isn’t enough, unless it rises to 25th-amendment levels. If, say, a president were ready to start nuclear war for no reason, the vice president and the cabinet should step in. But if the president just demonstrates bad judgment within the ordinary human range, replacing him or her would be another form of election do-over.

Standards of proof. During the Clinton impeachment, my representative (Charlie Bass) was one of many Republicans who pledged that they would only vote for impeachment if the evidence were beyond reasonable doubt. (He lied, and voted to impeach anyway. It was certainly reasonable to believe that Clinton perjured himself or conspired in Lewinsky’s perjury. Depending on your opinion of Clinton’s character, that may even have been the more likely possibility. But by no stretch of the imagination was the case against Clinton proved beyond reasonable doubt.) I think they made that pledge because they knew that the charges against Clinton were legalistic rather than based on the kind of emergency concerns the Founders envisioned.

But is the criminal-trial standard — beyond reasonable doubt — really the appropriate one? What if members of Congress are only 90% convinced that the president is a traitor? Should they wait for the next election?

Clearly not.

Criminal conviction can take away the freedom we all value and view as our right. But political office, especially a high political office like the presidency, is an honor and a privilege rather than a right. Taking it away just reduces a president to the same level as the rest of us. So the standards of proof required shouldn’t be as high as in a criminal trial. (After a president is removed from office, a criminal indictment might follow. At that trial, the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard would apply. So it would not be unreasonable to remove a president from office via impeachment, and then fail to convict in the subsequent criminal trial. Both outcomes might be appropriate responses to the evidence.)

The House and Senate play different roles in an impeachment, and they should apply different standards. The House is like a grand jury; essentially, it is voting to indict. The Senate is the trial jury; it is deciding whether to convict. I think the House should turn the reasonable-doubt standard upside-down. Voting to impeach should mean two things:

  • The charges are serious enough that they can’t wait until the end of the president’s term, and Congress has no less drastic way to deal with them. If they are true, the president needs to be removed as soon as possible.
  • The evidence could lead reasonable people to believe that the charges are true.

The Senate is making the more serious decision. If the House impeaches, the trial in the Senate will be stressful for the country, but by itself the trial does no real harm. (The country survived the Clinton trial with little damage. The situation when Clinton’s term expired — peace, a budget surplus, low unemployment, low inflation — was arguably better than at any time since.) Improperly removing a duly elected president, though, would be a serious blow to our constitutional system.

The Senate has to weigh the risks on each side: Voting to acquit leaves a possibly dangerous president in office until the end of the term, and tells future presidents that Congress will tolerate the impeached behavior. Voting to convict might damage the presidency and devalue future elections. Which path into the future is better for the country and our system of government?

Application to Trump. It’s possible that Mueller might find the exact wrong-doing that the Constitution specifies: If Trump conspired with the Russian government to gain an advantage in the 2016 election, and if his subsequent favoritism to Russian interests stems from his political debt to Putin, that’s treason. If he has been making foreign-policy decisions based on foreign-government actions that benefit him financially (like the Chinese investment in the MNC Lido City project), that’s bribery. Those would be the slam-dunk cases.

Abuse of power accusations (like his alleged pressure on the postmaster general to raise rates on Amazon to strike back at Jeff Bezos for The Washington Post’s hostile coverage) haven’t gotten as much attention, but would also be serious if they could be proved — not just the fact of pressure, but also the intent. But I would want to see a pattern of such reprisals — like Nixon’s enemies list — rather than just one example.

The offense Mueller is most likely to find is obstruction of justice. The question I would have at that point is whether the obstruction succeeded. (Firing Comey, for example, may have been intended to derail the Russia investigation, but it obviously didn’t.) If Mueller’s conclusion is that Trump’s obstruction prevents us from knowing whether he was part of a treasonous conspiracy, then I would want to impeach him for that. But if Mueller did in fact get to the bottom of the Russia affair, then the impeachment decision should be based on the answer to that question.

One outcome, for example, could be that Trump played no part in the Russia conspiracy, but obstructed justice to cover up crimes committed by his sons or by son-in-law Jared Kushner. If that’s the case, I would indict those people immediately, and prosecute Trump for obstruction after his term ends. It’s a crime, but it’s over now, and waiting does not endanger the country.

I suspect there is considerable evidence that Trump is profiting off his presidency in ways that don’t quite rise to the level of bribery. For example, he could hardly be doing any more to promote Mar-a-Lago than he has been, including spending large quantities of public money there. (Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago have cost the taxpayers more than the entire Mueller investigation. “Probably several times over,” estimates the WaPo’s Philip Bump.) The Trump International Hotel in Washington profits extensively from foreigners attempting to curry the President’s favor. (The Trump Organization donated $151K in foreign-government profits to the Treasury, but has not explained how it came up with that number. I would be amazed if it were a fair accounting.) Michael Cohen has collected millions in what appear to be payments for access to the Trump administration, but we still don’t know if Trump conspired in that, or whether the payments bought any government favors.

However, Congress could crack down on Trump’s profiteering without resorting to impeachment. He (and future presidents) could be required to publish their tax returns. Congress could investigate the Trump Organization and do its own accounting of politically tainted profits, or insist that Trump divest (and let him decide whether he would rather resign). It could refuse to spend public funds on any businesses owned by the President. Conflict-of-interest rules that apply to every government official except the president could be extended.

Congress hasn’t done these things because Republicans don’t want to take any action against Trump. It’s crazy to imagine that impeachment is feasible as long as such common-sense moves haven’t been made. Impeachment is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency last resort; if anything else could fix the problem, it should be tried first.

To be continued … Chances are, not all of the conclusions of the Mueller investigation will be clear-cut. There may be some evidence of collusion with Putin, but not definite proof. It may be impossible to establish whether Trump’s reluctance to sanction Russia was a quid-pro-quo or not. I’ve laid out my general principles on impeachment, but those kinds of judgment calls can’t be made without seeing the specific evidence.

When that evidence comes out, I can only hope that I and the Congress and Americans on both sides of the partisan divide will understand the gravity of the judgment to be made, and that we will all feel the Eye of History watching us.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 4, 2018 – 8:34 am

It’s another week where I have to chose between talking about stuff of substantial importance (like the shocking new estimates of the death toll of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico) and outrageous notions coming out of the White House (like the President’s lawyer making us think about Trump pardoning himself by declaring it “unthinkable”).

Everything that was off last week (the North Korea summit, the trade war with everyone from China to Canada) is on again this week. Does any of it mean anything? Are we witnessing the bumbling of an administration that can’t figure out what it wants? Or is it like the aikido master who makes you react to so many feints and bluffs that you fall over without being touched?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I’ll try to stay on my feet for another week.

White House rhetoric about the Mueller investigation has been building up, and I’m left with the feeling that one side or the other is about to do something major. The White House might be anticipating a move by Mueller: a presidential subpoena, a new set of indictments, a preliminary report. Or it might be laying the groundwork for it’s own bold strike: a wave of pardons, firing Mueller or Rosenstein, naming a second special prosecutor to investigate the investigators. Or maybe the rhetoric is just rhetoric and doesn’t mean anything at all; who can say? It could all be another aikido feint.

I don’t know what I can do about any of that, but I thought I’d get out in front of Mueller’s eventual report by setting down my own general ideas about impeachment. When the report comes out, Trump critics like me will be strongly tempted to adjust our definitions of impeachable offense to match whatever was found. I’d prefer not to do that, so I want to get my basic principles into words now. That post “What is impeachment for?” should be out shortly.

The weekly summary should be out around 11 EDT. It will cover the Hurricane Maria estimates, the on-again trade war, and the bizarre claims Trump’s lawyers make in a recently leaked letter. I’ll use the Roseanne Barr/ Samantha Bee controversy to revisit one of the Sift’s more useful articles “Slurs: Who can say them, when, and why“. And I’ll point to a lot of significant events that haven’t been getting the attention they deserve: the rollback of Dodd/Frank restrictions on the big banks, Illinois’ long-delayed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, Trump’s attempt to force power companies to burn more coal, and a revolutionary new way to generate power with natural gas. And then I’ll close with the world’s tallest bonfire.

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Ritual Sacrifice

May 28, 2018 – 12:57 pm

Every school shooter learned from the history of school shootings, mimicked the strategies, was in a sense acting out a ritual which has become deeply rooted in our culture.

– Josh Marshall

This week’s featured posts are “Outlines of a Reading Project on Class” and “It’s time to let Israel be a country.”

These last three weeks, we learned a lot about Trump’s corruption and abuse of power

It’s hard to know which revelation to focus on:

  • Trump has begun actively intervening in the Department of Justice to undermine the Mueller investigation and harass his political enemies. He “demanded” a DoJ investigation into his made-up Spygate theory, and forced a meeting between DoJ officials and his allies in Congress in which classified details about the investigation into the Trump campaign were revealed. So far DoJ has been fending off Trump’s demands with minimal (but still inappropriate) concessions, but this is banana-republic stuff. It’s orders of magnitude beyond the improper suggestions Trump’s been making since Day 1.
  • Trump’s public fulminations against Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, have gone beyond just hostile tweets. On several occasions, he has pressured the Postmaster General to raise Amazon’s shipping rates. (So far the PG has been resisting him.) This appears to be an attempt to punish Bezos for The Post publishing stories Trump doesn’t like. Again, this is banana-republic stuff. There is no parallel in any post-Nixon administration of either party.
  • Trump dropped sanctions against a Chinese corporation and backed off of proposed tariffs aimed at China shortly after a Chinese-government-owned corporation invested half a billion dollars in a Trump-related project in Indonesia. There’s no direct proof that this is a bribe, but we’ll never know for sure. That’s why we have the conflict-of-interest rules and norms that Trump has flouted.
  • Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen began selling access to the White House as soon as Trump was elected, collecting millions of dollars from companies seeking favors from the new administration. We don’t know yet whether Cohen was just being opportunistic, or if some of the money passed through him to Trump or other members of the Trump family.
  • Trump fund raiser (and fellow Michael Cohen hush-money client) Elliott Broidy engaged in his own “campaign to alter U.S. policy in the Middle East and reap a fortune for himself”.
  • Jared Kushner’s family company is negotiating a deal in which Brookfield Properties, a company largely funded by Qatari interests, will buy a skyscraper the Kushners paid too much for and were having trouble refinancing. The Kushners had tried to get Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund to invest in the property a year ago; shortly after that deal fell through, Jared played an important role in the Trump administration deciding to support Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries in boycotting Qatar.
  • In addition to the meeting with Russians that we knew about, Donald Jr. held another Trump Tower meeting to discuss his father’s campaign getting help from powerful foreigners: princes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The scoops have been coming so fast and furious that I may have left some out. Looking at several of them also puts a different slant on Trump’s rhetoric about “the Deep State”: Officials like the Postmaster General and the Assistant Attorney General resist Trump’s actions not because they belong to some sinister conspiracy, but because they believe in principles of American governance that he is trying to subvert.

and primaries

There are two theories of how Democrats can win more elections: Move to the center and appeal to the reasonable Republican voters Trump is alienating, or move to the left and raise turnout among people who don’t vote because they have lost faith in both parties. Move-to-the-center has been the conventional political wisdom for a long time, and is still the approach the Democratic Party establishment supports.

I’m neutral in this debate. I can imagine that move-to-the-left could work, but I wish I could point to an example where a progressive Democrat had unseated a Republican in some high-profile race in a red or purple district. Sure, Bernie Sanders can win in a blue state like Vermont, but could a Bernie-ish candidate win in states like Missouri or West Virginia (where centrists like Claire McCaskill and Joe Manchin have won)?

Up until now, the party establishment has gotten its way in nearly all cases, so the only candidates who have made it to the general election in such races have been centrists. Sometimes they win (Doug Jones in Alabama) and sometimes they lose (Jon Ossoff in Georgia), but neither result answers the question of whether a more progressive candidate would have done better or worse.

The May primaries have guaranteed that the move-to-the-left theory will finally be tested in at least two cases: Kara Eastman won the Democratic primary for Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, and Stacey Abrams will be the Democratic candidate to be governor of Georgia. There are also plenty of centrist Democrats running in races of all sorts, so we should finally be able to make some comparisons.

and immigration

Two immigration stories have gotten attention recently:

  • When parents and their children are caught trying to enter the US without papers, the Trump administration has begun routinely separating them. Trump claims that this action is forced by laws that Democrats refuse to change, but that’s simply not true.
  • HHS admitted that it has lost track of 1475 immigrant children that it put in foster homes.

A number of people have been connecting the two stories, implying that the government has lost children it separated from their parents. But so far that seems not to be the case. The 1475 are children who arrived at the border unaccompanied.

Still, there is a point to be made: If the government is going to take kids away from their parents, it had better keep better track of them than it has been keeping of the kids who show up at the border unaccompanied.

and deals about nuclear weapons

From Trump opining about his Nobel Peace Prize to canceling his summit with Kim Jong Un and announcing that there is no deal with North Korea was just 15 days. It turns out that getting a country to give up its nuclear program is really hard. Who knew?

The amazing thing to me is how many people were taken in by this whole charade. Trump’s combination of threats, sanctions, and flattery was praised as masterful on the Right, and even publications that should know better, like The Atlantic, asked “What if Trump’s North Korea bluster actually worked?” The NYT’s David Brooks gave Trump credit for “lizard wisdom” through which he “understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies”.

Matt Yglesias‘ cynical view of Trump — which I will sum up as “Bullshitters gonna bullshit” — has once again proven prescient.

The factors that led to the collapse of the summit were there from the beginning. The only thing that ever seemed remotely promising about it was Trump’s say-so, but Trump’s say-so is meaningless. Not only is he a person who makes factual misstatements and lies, but he’s a person who has gotten ahead in life through extensive use of bullshit, leaving in his wake a trail of broken promises.

There was never any reason to believe that Kim was offering anything close to the complete denuclearization Trump said he was going to get out of this negotiation. That claim was always a castle-in-the-air for Trump’s base to take pride in and give him credit for. Now that it has evaporated, expect a new castle-in-the-air somewhere else.

His supporters never learn, and have been saying “At least he tried.” To which I respond: “He tried to bullshit us, you mean.”

Now he’s at it again, but whether ultimately there is a meeting or not, there’s still no reason to believe anything will come of it. Trump and Kim remain miles apart.

Meanwhile, Trump has undone the hard work the Obama administration did to get Iran’s nuclear program under control. Our European allies have been left in the lurch, trying to balance incompatible demands from Secretary of State Pompeo and Iran’s Supreme Leader. Ordinarily, that choice would be a no-brainer, but Iran has been upholding its commitments to Europe while Trump has been breaking America’s commitments.

“There’s little to no appetite in European capitals for the type of economic sanctions the U.S. is bringing back,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in a telephone interview. “Following Pompeo’s demands there are a lot of eyes rolling and heads fuming.”

The kind of sanctions Trump is talking about are not just against Iran, but against companies in any country that do business with Iran. This is going to put us in direct conflict with Europe. The only country that wins from this is Russia; Putin has long wanted to separate the US from its NATO allies, a mission Trump is carrying out admirably.

With regard to both North Korea and Iran, Trump is betting on his ability to get the rest of the world to go along with economic sanctions so crippling that the regimes will have to either give in or be overthrown by a discontented populace. I think he overestimates his persuasiveness and power while underestimating the willingness of both countries’ citizens to accept suffering.

Probably there are a lot of Iranians and Koreans who dislike their own country’s government and yearn for more American-style rights and openness. But they still have national pride, and will endure a lot of hardship rather than knuckle under to a foreign bully. I suspect the pressure Trump applies will strengthen those governments’ hold on power, not weaken it.

and trade

Something else that collapsed without a trace was Trump’s trade war with China, which I already mentioned above in connection with the possibility that he took a bribe, or maybe that the whole point from the beginning was to extort a bribe.

When Trump announced tariffs in March, he tweeted:

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.

Then there was a back-and-forth of the US and China threatening tariffs against each other’s goods, and China stopped buying US soybeans. Then a week ago Treasury Secretary Mnuchin announced that the trade war was “on hold” pending some nebulous future negotiations.

The joint statement that came out of Mnuchin’s meeting with the Chinese is short and contains vague statements about China buying more American goods to lower the US/China trade deficit. It also mentions protecting intellectual property. (Stealing American technology without working out license agreements is a major complaint that US companies have against China.)

But it includes no specific commitments, (“The United States will send a team to China to work out the details.”) so it’s essentially meaningless. China’s economy continues to grow rapidly, so of course it will “increase purchases of United States goods and services”. And since the Chinese don’t admit that they’re stealing our intellectual property, it’s easy for them to state that they “attach paramount importance to intellectual property protections”.

A generous interpretation is that Trump surrendered on trade in order to get Chinese help dealing with North Korea. But there’s also no progress with North Korea. So it sure looks like Trump backed down on his trade war without getting anything — at least not for the United States.

One of Trump’s chief boasts as a candidate was that he was the consummate deal-maker. He’d make “great deals” with other countries that would benefit both the economy and security of the United States.

So far, that hasn’t happened. He has torn up a number of deals: TPP, the Paris Climate Accords, and the Iran nuclear deal. He is threatening to pull out of NAFTA. In every case, he has promised to negotiate a better deal than the one we already had. But he hasn’t gotten those deals done. Again and again, he makes aggressive demands and other countries say no.

Jackson Diehl concludes:

[T]he past month has taught all sides a lesson about Trump, if they didn’t know it already: He’s not up to serious negotiation. He can’t be expected to seriously weigh costs and benefits, or make complex trade-offs. He’s good at bluster, hype and showy gestures, but little else. In short, he may be the worst presidential deal maker in modern history.

Fred Hiatt explains how to predict the “unpredictable” Trump:

Still, for a man who ran for office saying, “We have to be unpredictable,” Trump is proving not so hard to read. Look at whatever he has believed since the 1980s; ignore any evidence that has emerged since; and you can make a fairly educated guess where he will end up.

He operates according to his “gut feelings”, but we know what those are:

What are these predispositions? Allied nations, and especially Japan, play the United States for a chump. Dictators are strong and decisive and therefore to be admired. Immigrants and people of color are suspect. Wealthy people usually know best, while intellectuals are not to be trusted. Trade deficits are the ultimate sign of national weakness, and manufacturing is the linchpin of any economy. Anything Barack Obama did should be undone.

yet another school shooting

This one at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas. Ten people were killed and 13 wounded.

Josh Marshall reacted to MSNBC’s Pete Williams describing the shooting as “a huge mystery” because there had so far been no signs of an extremist ideology that motivated the shooter. Marshall, very astutely in my opinion, says that school shootings have become their own cult; jihadism or white supremacy or rebellion against the Deep State or whatever else the claimed motive might be isn’t a cause so much as a detail about how things play out.

Again, this happens all the time. The motive is pretty clear: angry and alienated young man, a late adolescent consumed with rage and alienation who lives in the United States and thus has become a devotee of the cult, the ideology of the redemptive school shooting atrocity. The ideology is really the cult of the mass shooting, in which the gun, with all its cultural and political omnipotence, plays a central role. Every school shooter learned from the history of school shootings, mimicked the strategies, was in a sense acting out a ritual which has become deeply rooted in our culture. We know the motive. We know the ideology: rage and alienation transmuted through mass gun violence.

Marshall’s point of view was expressed more elaborately and in more detail by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker in 2015. Gladwell interprets school shootings as an unfolding social process: Each one lowers the threshold for the next. He compares it to window-breaking during a riot. The first window is broken by somebody who has been itching to break windows, but eventually ordinary people start doing it.

If that’s true (and the argument seems convincing), stopping the process is going to be more complicated than just gun control or spotting at-risk students.

The biggest obstacle to arming teachers seems to be insurance companies. I’ve written before about the dysfunctional thinking that I see at the root of most NRA arguments: They respond to fantastic scenarios of what could happen rather than to realistic threats. (Sci-fi author William Gibson: “People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.”) So it makes sense that the NRA’s natural enemy would be an industry whose profits depend accurately evaluating risks.

Kansas passed its law arming teachers in 2013, after the mass shooting the previous year in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That immediately led EMC Insurance to announce it would rather exit the school insurance market than cover armed teachers and staff. Republican lawmakers were upset but couldn’t find another insurer willing to take on the policies.

and you also might be interested in …

Memorial Day is a good time to re-read this James Fallows article. “We love the troops,” he writes, “but we’d rather not think about them.” Back in March, USA Today reminded us of all the dangerous places the US has troops. When four US soldiers died in Niger, I suspect the first reaction of most of us was “We have soldiers in Niger?”

The original purpose of Memorial Day was that we not forget the sacrifices made by soldiers in past wars. These days, though, we’re having trouble staying aware of the sacrifices our soldiers are making right now.

Ireland voted overwhelmingly to repeal its constitutional ban on abortion, despite the opposition of the Catholic Church. The vote will allow the government to establish the boundaries of legal abortion, which it has pledged to do by the end of the year. A referendum in 2015 had legalized same-sex marriage, which the Church also opposed.

It’s something of a mystery (at least to me) why Ireland is moving left at the same time that much of the rest of Europe is moving right. Italy, for example, voted for a coalition of populist parties that is anti-immigrant and anti-Europe. Whether they will be able to form a government is still up in the air.

Excessive rains have flooded Ellicott City, Maryland, which is about 15 miles from Baltimore.

Vox takes apart Trump’s baseless “spygate” conspiracy theory. Separately, Republican Senator Marco Rubio explains:

What I have seen so far is an FBI effort to learn more about individuals with a history of bragging about links to Russia that pre-exist the campaign. If those people were operating near my office or my campaign, I’d want them investigated.

The NFL established a new policy about protests during the national anthem: Players can stay in the locker room during the anthem, but if they come out on the field they have to stand respectfully. If they don’t the league will fine the team, which can then decide whether to fine the player.

There are all kinds of problems here: The owners did this on their own, with no player input. Forced reverence for the flag (or any other symbol) is the exact opposite of the freedom the flag is supposed to represent. It’s hard to come up with a protest more respectful than kneeling silently. The original purpose of the protest (against police shootings of unarmed blacks and other examples of racism by public officials) has been entirely lost. Players identified with the protest (Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid) seem to have been blackballed by the NFL; they are unemployed when players of lesser ability have jobs.

As someone who occasionally repurposes poetry himself, I can appreciate “The Incel Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“.

and let’s close with something

If you’re looking for something meditative and beautiful, check out National Geographic’s “5 Breathtaking Time-Lapses that are Perfect for Spring“. Like this one:

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It’s time to let Israel be a country

May 28, 2018 – 10:50 am

The assumptions behind the United States’ Israel policy are obsolete, and many were never realistic. It’s time to go back to Square One and rethink.

Since its founding seventy years ago, Israel has consistently been more of a symbol or a fantasy to Americans than a real place. I can’t pretend to grasp the full significance it has for American Jews, but for the rest of us Israel has meant the Holy Land, a way to make right the collective guilt we felt for doing so little to avert the Holocaust, the heroic Sabras of Leon Uris’ Exodus, a demonstration of the West’s superiority to the decaying Orient, a Cold War destination for talented Jews abandoning the Soviet Union, a David-and-Goliath story of one tiny country standing up to larger ones, and many other things that have been (at best) tangentially related to a real country of real people.

For Evangelical Christians, the founding of Israel started a prophetic clock ticking down to the End Times, when all the Jews who don’t convert will be sadly wiped out, but the rest of us will get to live in Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom. Socialists have idealized the kibbutzim. The alt-Right sees Israel simultaneously as the place they will someday deport American Jews to, and as a model for the ethno-religious state white Christians could make here and in Europe. For globalists, the peace we will someday broker among Israel, its indigenous Palestinians, and its Arab neighbors will prove the righteousness of American power in a unipolar world. For neo-cons, Israel represents a no-nonsense approach to the terrorist threat, unclouded by the hazy illusions of political correctness.

All these constructions are built on a foundation of stereotypes, both positive and negative, about Jews. They are God’s chosen people, the invisible and infinitely manipulative Elders of Zion, both the relatives and the accusers of Jesus, the fast talkers who can sell anything, the source of inexplicably many of the West’s foundational thinkers, or the bankers who always win because they have backed both sides. You can hear echoes of these ancient, quasi-supernatural Jewish powers whenever a conversation turns to Mossad or AIPAC or the Rothschilds or that nebulous collection of “Jews who control the media”. Ordinary notions of possibility and impossibility melt away; they’re Jews, who knows what they can do?

From the beginning, Israel has been both the beneficiary and the victim of the fantasies we project onto them. The benefits have been tangible: billions in American aid every year, American military technology, and the protection of both the American nuclear umbrella and the US veto in the UN Security Council. But our illusions have also been freighted with expectations: Israel should be better than other countries, and should be condemned and even punished when it isn’t.

During the 1948 war that established Israel as a country, Arabs terrified by both real and imagined Jewish atrocities fled the war zone, creating a refugee population that under international law has a right to return home. Since the 1967 war created the Occupied Territories, Israel has ruled a subject population that it treats badly.

But lots of countries are in violation of some international law or another, and lots have subject populations that they treat badly. (Some countries treat all their people badly.) Try being Shia in a Sunni country like Saudi Arabia, or Sunni in a Shia country like Iraq. Hindus and Muslims oppress each other in India and Pakistan. In Myanmar, the Buddhist majority is pushing Muslim Rohingya out of the country, even though they have nowhere to go. Americans, if we bother to inform ourselves about these situations at all, wring our hands helplessly. We don’t organize boycotts or insist that our church or university’s endowment divest holdings tainted by association.

In recent years, Israel’s internal politics have taken a disturbing rightward turn, with growing intolerance and disregard for abstract principles of justice. But so have Hungary’s and Poland’s and (let’s be honest) our own. What fault can you find in Netanyahu that isn’t also present in Trump?

Recent events have been hard to square with American illusions about Israel. Two weeks ago, the United States dedicated a new embassy in Jerusalem, abandoning a long-held bipartisan policy that such a move should wait for a peace treaty putting the status of Jerusalem on a firm international foundation. While this was happening, Palestinian protesters rushed the fence that keeps them trapped in Gaza, and Israeli snipers shot them down by the dozens.

Viewed through one lens, the shooting was entirely justified: The protesters — all hostile, some armed, all attempting to cross an international border — constituted an invading army, or at least an invading mob. Viewed through another, it was a gross overreaction: The Israelis had ample warning and held all the cards; surely they could have devised some less lethal method of crowd control without endangering their soldiers or citizens. Gazan lives, it seems, don’t matter.

For decades, the United States has tried to restrain Israel’s more extreme tendencies. We have discouraged building settlements on disputed territory, pushed for cease-fires, and sometimes even brokered treaties like the Camp David Accords. We have styled ourselves as the holders of the vision of peace, and so we have consistently urged Israel not to do things that can never be undone.

We don’t do that any more. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was full-throated supporter of the Israeli snipers. “No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has,” she told the Security Council. If the Trump administration believes this, it is chilling. It suggests that’s Trump’s wall might someday be manned by snipers indiscriminately gunning down Mexicans because some of them might be MS-13 gangsters.

Increasingly, it is clear that there isn’t going to be a negotiated peace. Gaza is the new model of resolution: Israel will dictate terms. It will set boundaries for zones of Palestinian autonomy, and will decide what that autonomy consists of. Like the reservations the US created for Native Americans, the Palestinian zones will not be economically viable, at least not for the number of people assigned to live there. The best land and the water rights will be reserved for Israeli settlements. As with the Native American reservations, non-viability will be a feature. America hoped its Indians would eventually assimilate into second-class citizenship in white society; Israel hopes that Palestinians will self-deport to Jordan or Egypt or anywhere Israel doesn’t have to deal with them.

All of these developments should raise a question: What is the US role going forward? For decades, Americans have believed that our aid gave us leverage, which we could use to nudge all parties towards a peace agreement. But if we’re not nudging and there isn’t going to be an agreement, what is our aid for? What are we buying? What are we supporting? Why?

I am not proposing answers to those questions. But I am urging all Americans, whether you think of yourself as pro-Israel or anti-Israel or neutral, to rethink your view from first principles. What if we all stopped thinking about Israel in mythic or symbolic terms and instead just thought of it as a country like any other country? In some ways it is like us and in some ways not. In some ways we share its interests and in other ways we don’t. It does things that deserve our support and things that deserve our condemnation.

Like any other country.

When we let go of all the fears and fantasies that we have projected onto Israel, what is left? How should we respond to the reality of Israel as country like any other country?

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Outlines of a Reading Project on Class

May 28, 2018 – 9:06 am

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the class divide in America — a topic that has been on my mind for several years, but has acquired a new significance in the Trump Era. Probably all this research will eventually result in a long article where I try to find some deeper insight, but in the meantime I’ll just summarize what I’ve been reading, in case you want to read along with me.

A great place to start is “The 9.9% is the New American Aristocracy” by Matthew Stewart in The Atlantic. Wealth, as many authors have shown, is increasingly accumulating in the top tenth of a percent. But beneath that layer of plutocrats is the rest of the top 10%, which mostly consists of educated professionals with a decent amount of economic security, who have pleasant homes in safe neighborhoods with good schools, read magazines like The Atlantic, and do physical labor only to the extent they want to. (I wasn’t born into this class, but that’s where I am now. I suspect most — but not all — of my readers are 9.9-percenters also.)

Collectively, we control more than half of American’s wealth, a percentage that has held fairly steady for decades. The gains of the top .1% mostly haven’t come from us, but at the expense of the bottom 90%. Stewart says:

By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into.

What we’ve morphed into is a hereditary aristocracy; it’s increasingly hard for people not born into this class to join. On its surface, the system looks like a meritocracy, but we’ve gamed it. Winning the race requires the kind of preparation that only aristocratic kids are in a position to get. Like Jane Austen’s aristocrats, we have a strong tendency to intermarry, closing off that point of entry. We also feel very little guilt about leaving the classes below us in the dust: In the Game of Life, we tell ourselves, they just didn’t measure up. (Chris Hayes made a similar point several years ago in The Twilight of the Elites.)

The middle-working class — let’s leave the boundaries of that vague for now — consists of people who didn’t make it into the aristocracy, but have what Joan Williams in her book White Working Class calls “settled lives”: They aren’t college educated, but they are consistently employed and have stable homes with (mostly) solid families. They typically have jobs rather than careers, and they get their identities from family and community (often a church community) rather than from their professions. (Even if you have lucrative lifelong employment as a plumber or electrician, it’s what you do, not who you are.)

Members of this class take a lot of pride in the disagreeable things they’ve had to do to stay out of poverty — the long hours of unrewarding work, the desires they’ve had to suppress, the dreams they’ve had to defer, etc. — and they picture poor people as lacking the same moral stamina. (That’s why it aggravates them when government programs let the undeserving poor enjoy some of the same rewards they take pride in earning. Liberals, they feel, are trying to erode the significance of their moral achievement.) They have different cultural values than the aristocrats and are annoyed by our belief that they tried to be us, but just failed. They don’t actually want to be us, but they envy our generational stability, because (as the kinds of jobs that underwrite settled lives go away) they see no guarantees that their children won’t be poor.

They also resent the hell out of us, much more than they resent the .1%. The plutocrats are like distant kings, but working-class folks have to deal with aristocrats every day. We’re their bosses and the doctors who talk down to them. We’re their hard-to-please clients, the consultants who come in to tell them that they’re doing it all wrong, and the experts who observe and interview them in hopes of replacing them with machines. We’re the talking heads on TV who use big words and insist that they’d agree with us if only they had read enough books to know what they’re talking about.

Trump made it to the White House by playing on that resentment. (Historically, the 9.9% has been split between the parties or even leaned Republican. But many never-Trump conservatives are 9.9 percenters, and congressional seats in professional-class suburbs are viewed by Democrats as pick-up opportunities.) Since taking office he has done virtually nothing to help the working class — not even the white working class. But he remains popular among them because he gives voice to their resentment of the 9.9%.

Williams’ point is that we aristocrats should try harder to understand and show respect to the working class, which is true as far as it goes. But The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman points out a disagreeable truth: Professional-class liberals — or even just reality-based anti-Trump conservatives — are kidding themselves if they think respect is some kind of “magic key that Democrats can use to unlock the hearts of white people who vote Republican”. No matter how respectful a candidate or a set of policies might be, that message will never get through the filter of “an entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them.”

If you doubt this, I’d encourage you to tune in to Fox News or listen to conservative talk radio for a week. When you do, you’ll find that again and again you’re told stories of some excess of campus political correctness, some obscure liberal professor who said something offensive, some liberal celebrity who said something crude about rednecks or some Democratic politician who displayed a lack of knowledge of a conservative cultural marker. The message is pounded home over and over: They hate you and everything you stand for.

Essentially, conservative media is like the community gossip who constantly starts conversations with “Did you hear what so-and-so just said about you?” No matter how respectful the bulk of us may eventually learn to be, somebody somewhere is always going to be dissing working-class whites, and Fox News will make sure that they hear about it.

Even when that disrespect is absent, it is easily manufactured. Waldman points out how out-of-context quotes were used to skewer Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows that Clinton thinks working-class Trump voters are “deplorable”, and Obama believes they are “clinging to guns and religion”.

Finally, the consequences of this class divide are discussed in Ganesh Sitaraman’s book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. Unlike previous republics, the United States didn’t write the class struggle into its constitution: Rome, for example, balanced an aristocratic Senate against the veto-wielding Tribunes of the People. Britain separated the House of Commons from the House of Lords. America didn’t do anything like that.

Instead, the Founders counted on relative equality of wealth and the presence of a large middle class to maintain a balanced society. Those are the conditions our system of government is designed for, and at various key points in American history (the homestead era, the Progressive Era, the New Deal) the government made deliberate choices that preserved the middle class and prevented either plutocratic domination or a revolution of the dispossessed.

Now we’re in an era of increased concentration of wealth and power by the .1%. Now more than ever, if we’re going to preserve our system of government, we need the 9.9% and the working class to band together against the domination of the super-rich. But how is that going to happen?

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 28, 2018 – 8:17 am

OK, I’m back. I’ve been off leading a Sunday service about “Why Be a Congregation?” and watching my nephew graduate from law school. (Yay, Mike!)

Did I miss anything?

Well, the whole Korea negotiation saga, the fizzling of the US/China trade war, a long string of scoops detailing the corruption of the Trump regime, more aggressive attempts to derail the Mueller investigation, some primaries that set up interesting races for the fall, another school shooting, and maybe a few other things.

I’ll get to those in the weekly summary, which I’m aiming to have come out between noon and 1, EDT. But there are also two featured posts.

Part of what I’ve been doing while traveling is a bunch of background reading about class and inequality. Eventually I suspect that’s going to lead to a long article where I try to reach some deeper insight, but for now I’ll just outline what I’m reading in case you want to read along. That will be “Outlines of a Reading Project on Class”, and it should come out between 9 and 10.

The other news event that happened these last three weeks was an opening ceremony for the new US embassy in Jerusalem. That pageantry happened simultaneously with the lethal Israeli response to protesters trying to cross the Gaza border. To me, the whole tableau symbolized that the assumptions underlying US policy towards Israel are obsolete now. Many were never realistic, but were based on a variety of positive and negative mythic roles that Americans have assigned to Israel and/or the Jews. So whatever your position on Israel, I suggest it’s time to go back to first principles and rethink, as if Israel were just a nation with no more mythic significance than any other nation has. That article is “It’s time to let Israel be a country”, and I aim to get it out before 11.

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Not All Appearances are Deceiving

May 7, 2018 – 12:25 pm

No Sift the next two weeks. New articles will appear May 28.

The bottom line — which will remain true no matter how much the Kochs spend trying to convince you otherwise — is that what looks like a big giveaway to wealthy investors is, in fact, a big giveaway to wealthy investors.

– Paul Krugman “Apple and the Fruits of Tax Cuts” (5-3-2018)

This week’s featured post is “Speaking in Code: two phrases that no longer mean what they used to“.

This week everybody was talking about lies

From the beginning I have resisted paying too much attention to the Stormy Daniels story — or publishing pictures of her in low-cut tops — because to the extent that it’s about sex I just don’t care. People who cared about Bill Clinton’s affairs should have to explain why they don’t care about Trump’s. But I don’t care about either one.

Increasingly, though, the Stormy story has come to exemplify other disturbing features of Trump and his administration: financial corner-cutting, and an approach towards lying that doesn’t even seek deceive so much as destroy the idea of a knowable truth.

This week, Rudy Giulani began giving interviews in his role as Trump’s new lawyer. He soon offered a new story of Trump’s role in the $130K hush money Daniels was given by Michael Cohen, and then a new story after that, only to have Trump say that Giuliani didn’t have his facts straight. By Sunday’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Giuliani was treating the simplest questions as deep philosophical mysteries. When did Trump know about the payment? Apparently the question is unfathomable.

It could have been recently, it could have been awhile back. Those are the facts that we’re still working on and that, you know, may be in a little bit of dispute. This is more rumor than anything else.

Remember: Giuliani is not a reporter dealing with a hostile source; he’s a lawyer representing a client.

In general, it’s getting harder and harder to get a straight story from anybody in the administration about much of anything. Vox compiled a timeline of the different things we’ve been told about the Daniels payoff: It didn’t happen (January 12); Cohen paid it using his own money (February 13); Trump knew nothing about it (April 5); Cohen was representing Trump when he made the payment (April 26); Trump repaid Cohen (May 2). Since then we’ve heard that Trump repaid Cohen, but by paying a $35K monthly retainer without knowing what it was for. Or maybe he did know.

The latest version suggests that Cohen might have been running a deniable slush fund for the Trump campaign.

What never seems to happen, though, is that a person with knowledge walks us through the story from beginning to end, and takes responsibility for that story hanging together for the long haul.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended previously telling the press corps that Trump didn’t know about the payment by saying “We’re giving you the best information that we’re going to have. Obviously the press team’s not going to be as read-in, maybe, as some other elements, at a given moment, on a variety of topics. But we relay the best and most accurate information that we have.” Translation: Trump lied to her too.

My growing impression is that in TrumpWorld the concepts of truth and lie are meaningless. We are all told whatever will best placate us at the moment, by people who may not know any more than we do. If at some future moment we become agitated again, we’ll be told something else.

Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky compared what Trump told the NRA Friday to what he told the Parkland families soon after the shooting.

If he’s in front of families, he might say something in support of common sense gun reform. But then when he’s at the NRA, he’ll say something to get a big cheer.

Vox’ Dara Lind recalls numerous moments when the press reported that Trump was considering some action — changing his legal team, firing Rex Tillerson, firing H. R. McMaster — Trump vociferously denounced the report as fake news, and then shortly thereafter he did the thing he had denied considering.

With their actions, Trump and his White House have forfeited the right to have any influence on which stories about the president should or should not be believed. If they have no scruples about when and about what to lie, the only responsible alternative is to assume, always, that their statements have no relationship whatsoever to the truth.

Then we get to the strange story of Trump’s former doctor, Harold Bornstein, the one who signed a letter claiming that “If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

He now tells us that Trump dictated that letter himself, and that Bornstein just signed it.

A few weeks after the inauguration, Bornstein claims, Trump sent a lawyer and his bodyguard to his office to take Trump’s medical records by force, in what he characterized as a “raid” and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called “standard operating procedure“. The BBC quotes Dr. Arthur Caplan, a professor of bio-ethics at NYU:

In the US, medical records are joint property. They do belong to the patient who can have a copy, but the doctor keeps one too because if an issue comes up about malpractice, they have to have the record. You can’t just come in and take away everything.

The big question we’re left with is: Do we actually know anything trustworthy about Trump’s health? The report from his White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, also included an unprofessional level of flattery. (“He has incredibly good genes. … If he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years he might live to be 200”.) Jackson was then rewarded with a cabinet nomination, though he later had to withdraw.

and impeachment

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote an op-ed in the NYT Friday urging Democrats not to “take the bait” on impeachment. He points out that impeachment is both a legal and a political process, and requires both a legal and a political justification:

while that political standard cannot be easily or uniformly defined, I think in the present context it means the following: Was the president’s conduct so incompatible with the office he holds that Democratic and Republican members of Congress can make the case to their constituents that they were obligated to remove him? … This is a very high bar, and it should be.

If I were a Democrat running for Congress, I’d be talking about checks and balances rather than speculating about impeachment. The problem with the Republican Congress is that it doesn’t want to know what Trump did or is doing. It tolerates Trump’s blatant attempts to influence the Justice Department. It winks and nods at the various ways Trump is making money off the presidency. The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation — now concluded — was more interested in harassing whistleblowers and intimidating investigators than in finding out whether anyone in the Trump campaign committed treason, or if Putin has some illicit hold on Trump himself.

At the same time, the evidence publicly available at this moment is more smoke than fire. It raises questions but does not by itself constitute proof of high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment. The Mueller investigation may or may not have such evidence; that remains to be seen. But any Democrat who says, “Vote for me and I’ll vote to impeach Trump” is going too far.

With regard to Trump, my recommended message would be: “Trump is not trustworthy, so we need a Democratic Congress to keep an eye on him and to make sure he fulfills his constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute the laws. We’ll insist that he produce his tax returns, as every other recent president has. We’ll investigate whether he’s violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. We’ll protect the Mueller investigation from improper interference until it can produce a full report.”

“Will that lead to impeachment? That will depend on facts we don’t know yet. But if you ever want to know the facts, you have to elect a Democratic Congress, because Republicans have proved already that they are more loyal to Trump than they are to America. A Republican Congress will continue to cover for him and make excuses for him, rather than be the kind of watchdog the Founders intended Congress to be.”

and the role of parties in primaries

At the end of April, The Intercept published an article about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official Democratic group responsible for winning House elections. It is chaired by Minority Leader Steny Hoyer, who ranks just behind Nancy Pelosi among House Democrats.

The article centers on a tape of Hoyer trying to convince a progressive candidate to drop out of the race, clearing the primary for a moderate Democrat that Hoyer believes has a better chance to win the general election.

The article itself has a tone that suggests there is something illegitimate about this kind of pre-primary interference, that the national party ought to stay neutral and let the local voters decide for themselves. Some of the social media discussion this article provoked made that case more explicitly: The national party shouldn’t be trying to “rig the primaries” by helping one candidate over another.

The contrary viewpoint was expressed by author Elaine Kamarck in Thursday’s NYT. In her view, national parties in America are far less controlling than those in other democratic countries, and are already virtually abdicating their responsibility.

This is not to say that there is no role for primaries. But the pendulum between the party’s leaders choosing its candidates and primary voters choosing them has swung so far in the direction of the voters that even the smallest, most modest efforts to intervene in nomination races are deemed illegitimate.

Personally, I have trouble getting excited about this issue for a simple reason: If Steny Hoyer and a little money can stop you, then you’re not the revolutionary grass-roots candidate you claim to be. Look at what has happened on the Republican side: Trump-style populists like Roy Moore have repeatedly routed the more mainstream candidates Mitch McConnell tries to pre-select, to the point that it’s not clear whether Mitch’s endorsement helps more than it hurts.

Speaking of primaries and parties, Republicans are facing some strange dynamics.

Tomorrow is the West Virginia primary, where establishment Republicans are increasingly worried that coal baron Don Blankenship will win the Republican nomination for the Senate.

Blankenship’s corner-cutting on safety regulations was the primary cause of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, which killed 29 people in 2010. Blankenship escaped conviction on the biggest charges against him and spent a mere one year in prison, so he’s ready for the Senate.

The Onion has it about right:

I’m Don Blankenship, and I’m proud to say that my vision and leadership created countless new job opportunities in the fields of search and rescue, emergency surgery, funeral services, and many more. From trauma specialists and morticians all the way down to the manufacturers of vigil candles, gravestones, and sympathy cards, I’m committed to putting West Virginians to work. I’ve even created 29 new coal mining jobs. Can Mitch McConnell say the same?

In California, Diane Feinstein may end up running against an explicit anti-Semite.

Aghast at the possibility of being represented by a Senate candidate whose platform calls for “limiting representation of Jews in the government” and making it U.S. policy that the Holocaust “is a Jewish war atrocity propaganda hoax that never happened,” California Republican leaders were quick to denounce Little.

“Mr. Little has never been an active member of our party. I do not know Mr. Little and I am not familiar with his positions,” Matt Fleming, a California Republican Party spokesman, said in a statement. “But in the strongest terms possible, we condemn anti-Semitism and any other form of religious bigotry, just as we do with racism, sexism or anything else that can be construed as a hateful point of view.”

Should they be rigging the primary like that?

but you should read this hard-to-pigeonhole article

“The Spy Who Came Home” in The New Yorker. Patrick Skinner was a CIA operative in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then he came home to be a beat cop in Savannah.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

“We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”

and you also might be interested in …

The videos coming out of Hawaii are amazing.

The deadline for re-affirming the Iran nuclear deal is Saturday. In the Boston Globe, Harvard Kennedy School professor Matthew Bunn offers suggestions for building new agreements on top of the existing one, but presents this warning about simply walking away from the existing agreement.

if Trump walks out of the deal on May 12, the United States will be isolated. Few others will join the US sanctions, diluting the pressure that could be brought to bear on Iran. And in Iran’s internal debates, the advocates for engagement with the West would be discredited, probably making any new or better deal impossible for years to come. Iran would be freed from the deal’s nuclear limits and could begin building up its capability to produce nuclear bomb material. That could leave Trump with few choices between accepting an Iran on the edge of nuclear weapons or launching yet another war in the Middle East.

The NYT warns that verifying compliance of any North Korean nuclear deal will be even harder than verifying the Iran deal.

The nomination of Gina Haspel to be CIA director will reach the Senate floor soon. The nomination is controversial because of the still-not-fully-explained role she played in torturing detainees and/or covering up that torture. Here’s how Trump is framing that:

My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror.

Think about that: She’s under fire because of suspicion that she broke the law against torture, putting the US in violation of the Convention Against Torture that President Reagan signed and the Senate ratified. But in Trump’s book, breaking the law is fine if you break it over the heads of the right people.

The Krugman quote at the top concerns Apple’s announcement that it will buy back $100 billion of its own stock. This will benefit Apple’s shareholders, but do virtually nothing to create jobs or grow the US economy.

This is turning out to be typical of how corporations are spending the windfall they got from the Trump tax cut. The political hype was that companies with big offshore profits would now bring that money back to the US to build new factories, hire more workers, and pay them higher wages. Several companies made happy headlines by announcing $1000 worker bonuses immediately after the tax bill passed. But such actions represent only a tiny fraction of the corporate tax-cut windfall.

Unemployment went below 4% last month, a number not seen since the end of the Clinton administration. Basically, the unimpressive but steady job growth that started under Obama has continued under Trump. Unemployment peaked at over 10% in October, 2009, and has been headed down since then. Looking at the Fed’s graph, it’s hard to spot the Obama/Trump changeover.

Iowa just passed a law banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. That threshold is usually crossed at around 6 weeks, when many women do not even realize they are pregnant. So for most practical purposes abortion will have been banned in Iowa when the law takes effect on July 1.

Abortion-rights groups will ask courts to block the bill, but that seems to be the point: generating a legal case that will give the Supreme Court an opportunity to reverse Roe v Wade.

Liberals are often urged not to poke the bear with proposals that are unlikely to become law, but will validate conservative fears: sweeping gun bans, for example. For some reason, conservatives don’t operate under the same restrictions.

The NYT’s conservative columnist Bret Stephens makes the case for the US continuing as the world policeman.

The world learned on Sept. 1, 1939, where the mentality of every-country-for-itself leads. Our willful and politically wounded president is leading us there again. A warning to countries that have relied too long and lazily on the promises of Pax Americana: The policeman has checked out. You’re on your own again.

One standard feature of conservative health-care plans (at least for the conservatives who even bother to have a plan any more) is high-deductible insurance. The idea is that Americans will be less wasteful with their use of the healthcare system if they have what Paul Ryan calls “skin in the game”.

High deductibles do decrease Americans’ use of healthcare. However, sometimes the result is that people who need care forego it.

Women who had just learned they had breast cancer were more likely to delay getting care if their deductibles were high, the study showed. A review of several years of medical claims exposed a pattern: Women confronting such immediate expenses put off getting diagnostic imaging and biopsies, postponing treatment.

And they delayed beginning chemotherapy by an average of seven months, said Dr. J. Frank Wharam, a Harvard researcher and one of the authors of the study, published earlier this year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The NYT article gives anecdotes of patients facing financial choices, but doesn’t say whether the study documented the effect of income. I have to suspect that the delayed or neglected care centered mainly on poorer households.

While high-deductible plans are meant to encourage people to think twice about whether a test or treatment is necessary and if it can be done at a lower price, “it’s also frankly to impede their use of these services,” said Dr. Peter Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Shortly after he took office, Trump issued a drain-the-swamp executive order that was supposed to prevent people who leave the administration from going straight into lobbying. ProPublica studied how well that is working. It looks like there are ways around the order, but that it’s not totally useless either. Somebody who took Trump at his word will likely be disappointed, but since I thought the executive order was complete BS, I’m surprised in a mildly pleasant way.

Jared Kushner is still fixing errors in his financial disclosure forms.

and let’s close with a song parody

No, not one of mine this time. It’s “Confounds the Science” to the tune of “Sounds of Silence”.

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Speaking in Code: Two phrases that no longer mean what they used to

May 7, 2018 – 10:16 am

To liberals, a lot of what conservatives say and do looks like hypocrisy. And some of it really is, like the pro-life congressman who urged his mistress to get an abortion, or the long list of people who denounced Bill Clinton’s illicit affairs while they were carrying on some of their own. That’s hypocrisy: piously announcing strict rules for other people while living by a looser set yourself.

But some things that look like hypocrisy to liberals are actually something else: Conservatives have repurposed phrases that used to mean one thing to express some other idea entirely. Both the speaker and his target audience know exactly what he means, and there’s no inconsistency between that meaning and his actions. It’s just that liberals never got the memo.

So let me catch you up on what two phrases you’ve known and loved in the past mean now when conservatives say them.

Religious liberty or religious freedom means special rights for Christians. Thursday, the Republican National Committee asked everyone on Twitter to thank Donald Trump “for his commitment to religious freedom”. One commenter expressed skepticism about Trump’s commitment to religious freedom by adding “unless you happen to be Muslim”.

I’m sure many people thought that commenter had launched a devastating barb, exposing a blatant example of Republican hypocrisy. Because we all know what religious freedom used to mean: Even if your religious community is small and powerless, no one can stop you from meeting. The government can’t tax you to support the views of other sects, or use the public schools to indoctrinate your children in the majority faith. In any legal proceeding, your religion does not count against you.

In the old sense, there is no more powerful opponent of religious freedom in America than Donald Trump, who ran on the promise to keep Muslims out of the United States, and who has signed numerous executive orders trying to work around the clear unconstitutionality of that idea.

But in conservative circles, that’s not what religious freedom means any more. Here’s what it means now: People who root their misbehavior in the teachings (or even just the common prejudices) of popular Christian sects can get away with things that no one else can.

Today, religious freedom means that you can violate anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT people, if you claim that your bias against them is the historical bias of your popular Christian sect. (You can’t exempt yourself from racial discrimination laws, though, because Christian sects that believe in racial discrimination aren’t popular any more.) You can refuse to do your job as a pharmacist, if the drugs your customer wants are implicated in behaviors your popular Christian sect disapproves of. You can limit the healthcare choices of your employees, if those choices would be sins according to your popular Christian beliefs.

None of these rights can be claimed by non-Christians, or even by members of unpopular Christian sects, except by happy accident. (Zoroastrians might be able to claim special rights in situations where their teachings happen to agree with Baptists or Catholics.) Imagine, if you can, pacifist Quakers trying to claim the same distance from war that Baptists want from abortion — not simply that they not have to do the killing themselves, but that they be kept clear from any connection to it. Imagine Hindus insisting that the FDA not inspect beef, because their tax dollars should not contribute to the killing of cattle. Such “rights” are ridiculous; they would be laughed at if anyone dared to claim them.

Special rights properly belong only to members of popular Christian sects. Everyone knows this. Some are even open about it, like Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, who offers this interpretation of the First Amendment:

By “religion,” the founders were thinking of Christianity. So the purpose was to protect the free exercise of the Christian faith. It wasn’t about protecting anything else.

The rule of law means getting undocumented Hispanics out of the country by any means necessary. Tuesday, Vice President Pence was the headliner for a rally in Tempe, Arizona organized by the pro-Trump group America First Policies. As headliners often do at political events, he gave a shout-out to some of the local politicians in the audience, including former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio probably would be in jail now if Trump hadn’t pardoned him, but instead he is running for the Senate.

A great friend of this president, a tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law — Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I’m honored to have you here.

For centuries, the rule of law meant that laws applied equally to everyone, and were not subject to the whims of whoever happened to be in power. It was related to the longer phrase a government of laws and not of men.

Arpaio’s career as sheriff is the paradigm for out-of-control law enforcement that is the exact opposite of the rule of law in its traditional sense. His legitimate job as county sheriff had nothing to do with border enforcement, but he squandered his office’s resources on that issue, harassing countless law-abiding Hispanic-American citizens (as well as Arpaio’s political enemies) along the way, and compiling a dismal record dealing with the crimes that were actually within his jurisdiction. His shoddy care for and outright cruelty towards his prisoners showed a similar lack of respect for his duties under the law, and resulted in the county paying tens of millions of dollars in settlements to mistreated prisoners (or their surviving family members). For details, see “The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio” and several other articles I collected after Trump pardoned Arpaio.

Arpaio is a “champion of the rule of law” only in one sense: He wants undocumented Hispanics out of the country.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a defender of the rule of law in a similar sense: His attempts to punish sanctuary cities may themselves be illegal, but they serve the goal of pushing undocumented Hispanics out of the country. Much of what ICE is doing now is also of questionable legality, but its actions are directed against undocumented Hispanics, so it is defending the rule of law.

The Newspeak problem. The problem with assigning new meanings to words and phrases is that the old meanings might still be important. (I’d hate to be a high school history teacher trying to cover “The Gay 90s“.) If the neologism takes, it may drive out the original meaning, making the issues related to that concept difficult or even impossible to discuss.

To a large extent, that is the point of Newspeak: to win arguments by making the opposing position inexpressible, or to avoid dissent entirely by keeping possible objections out of mind.

The rule of law is still being fought over, and rightfully so. In this era, when Trump is trying to claim the Justice Department as his own rather than the country’s, and is pressuring law enforcement officials to stop investigating him and start investigating his political enemies (or investigate again if they didn’t find anything the first time), it’s very important to have a term that captures the original meaning of the rule of law. We desperately need judges and prosecutors and law-enforcement officers who are loyal to the laws of the United States rather than to the President. Anything that makes that issue harder to talk about is a threat to American democracy.

But sadly, the old meaning of religious freedom and religious liberty is all but lost in popular discourse. There is still some small overlap, when Christians are genuinely persecuted in other countries, but many Americans, particularly conservatives, are just confused when atheists don’t want their children pressured to pray in public settings, or Muslims are denied the right to build a mosque somewhere. They don’t see how religious freedom can even apply to someone who isn’t Christian. To them, a religious freedom issue is whether the Christian clerk who refuses to process same-sex marriage licenses gets to keep her job, not whether a Muslim woman can wear her hijab to the airport without fear of being profiled as a terrorist.

To fight back, I think we must constantly retranslate the new usages back into older terms, and refuse to recognize them as legitimate. The Masterpiece Cakeshop case, for example, has nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom; it’s about Christians claiming the special right to break discrimination laws. Denying federal funds to sanctuary cities does not defend the rule of law, it tears down the rule of law.

You know what would have defended the rule of law? Letting Joe Arpaio go to jail for his crimes rather than pardoning him.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 7, 2018 – 8:43 am

I’m on the road again, relying on the hotel WiFi, so this morning’s Sift may experience unexpected delays.

This week I ran across two statements that, according the way I use language, were so outrageous as to be almost humorous: The RNC praised Donald Trump’s “commitment to religious freedom”, and Mike Pence called Joe Arpaio “a champion of the rule of law”. Neither, however, was trying to be amusing or shocking. Both were saying things that seemed true to them.

Puzzling over that led me to a larger theme: Both religious freedom and the rule of law are centuries-old phrases that conservatives have repurposed to mean something new. People who know the new usages say things to each other that appear ridiculous to those who don’t. To us, it may look like Pence and the RNC are being dishonest or hypocritical, but actually they’re just misappropriating words. If you’re going to argue with them, you need to know what they’re really saying.

That’s the topic of this week’s featured post, “Speaking in Code: two phrases that no longer mean what they used to”. It should be out before 10 EDT, hotel WiFi willing.

The weekly summary has to cover the barrage of lies and contradictions that came out of the administration this week, particularly from Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. More and more, I’m thinking of the administration as running a new kind of disinformation campaign. Previous administrations have presented a spin on the truth, possibly bolstering weak points in their defenses with lies (or, more likely, statements that deceive while being technically true). But the Trump administration seems to be doing away with truth completely. Often they have no version of events, but simply label somebody else’s version as “fake news”. Rather than present a narrative, they just say things, and tomorrow they may say different things without acknowledgement or apology.

In addition, I’ll discuss Adam Schiff’s warning against “taking the bait” of impeachment, the debate over what role party establishments should play in primaries, the bizarre candidates who might be emerging from those primaries, the problems caused by high-deductible health insurance, how the economy is doing, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

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