In the same way that a short note sometimes turns into a long post, this week’s plan for a featured post has turned into the first of a series. Or actually the second: Now that I see the series, I recognize “The Debt Ceiling: a (p)review” as the first.
My motive is that I’m tired and depressed by the low quality of public discussion about deficits and the debt. We throw back and forth talking points about “maxxing out the national credit card” and “refusing to pay our bills” without ever thinking deeply about why we owe $32 trillion, whether a (still growing) debt that size will eventually cause any problems, and (if we decide that it is a problem) what options we have for doing something about it.
I suspect that (pending research I haven’t done yet), I’m not far from where Joe Biden is: He wants to come to some long-term agreement about fiscal policy, rather than keep governing through a series of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills. But he knows he can’t have that conversation while Kevin McCarthy’s finger hovers over the economy’s self-destruct button.
Anyway, today’s featured post was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs about how we accumulated this debt. But the history of the national debt turns out to be an interesting topic in its own right, providing insight into how fiscal policy has intersected with the rest of American history. (I’ll bet you didn’t know the role the San Francisco Earthquake played in the creation of the Federal Reserve.) “How did we get $32 trillion in debt?” still needs some work, so I’ll predict it shows up about 11 EST.
The weekly summary includes a discussion of police reform following Tyre Nichols’ murder (that also threatened to turn into a featured post), the House vote to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee, the ridiculous panic over the Chinese spy balloon, January’s surprisingly strong jobs report, and a few other things. It should show up a little after noon.
I will warn you that this week’s summary is unusually long, being the first one in three weeks. I used the time away from the Sift to focus on public speaking. One talk: “Whatever happened to the citizen journalist?” examines the good and bad ways the internet has changed news, using the history of the Weekly Sift as an example of (what I hope is) good change. I also led a church service, but the YouTube isn’t up yet.
These last three weeks everybody was talking about the new Congress
In an otherwise disappointing set of midterm elections for Republicans, they did manage to eke out a small majority in the House of Representatives. They did that largely by running against inflation and crime, while GOP candidates who focused on election denial and other extreme MAGA issues tended to fail — unless (like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz) they were in districts that any Republican could win.
But now that Kevin McCarthy has secured the speakership, we’re hearing virtually nothing about inflation and crime (probably because Republicans never had a plan to deal with either). Instead, the focus has been on setting up a debt-ceiling crisis to force Democrats to agree to long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare, as well as getting revenge on Democrats and on government officials who investigated the crimes of President Trump.
The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization.
Republicans could have run on cutting Social Security so that billionaires and corporations can keep the benefits of the Trump tax cuts. But they would have gotten clobbered, so they didn’t.
Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) gives the new GOP House majority credit because “We fired 87,000 IRS agents.” I’m glad to see the 87K IRS agents incident come to a successful conclusion. I am reminded of the Khrushchev quote that provides the title for Rick Perlstein’s book The Invisible Bridge:
If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.
If you want to consider what “weaponization of government” really looks like, read the NYT’s look back on the Durham investigation and the Durham/Barr relationship. You can expect Jordan’s committee to serve the same purpose Durham’s investigation did: It will provide plenty of fodder for Fox News hosts to speculate about the horrible crimes and scandals the committee is about to uncover, but it won’t actually uncover anything significant. Afterwards, regular Fox-watchers will believe that it did find something, but they either won’t be able to give you details about whatever it was, or they will recall testimony that in fact never happened.
(Occasionally I still see people wearing t-shirts pledging to remember Benghazi, and I always wonder how much of what they recall is real.)
George Santos has been the comic relief of the new House majority. Every few days has produced either the explosion of some outrageously false claim he made, or evidence of some grift in his past.
So far, the GOP and Speaker McCarthy have been unable or unwilling to remove Santos, partly due to McCarthy’s small majority (which can’t afford to lose Santos’ vote), and partly because grifting is now deep in the party’s identity.
The Nichols video led to protest marches over the weekend, but they seem to have stayed peaceful, with rare exceptions that Fox News naturally highlighted. (The worst they could find was a guy who was arrested in New York for kicking in the windshield of a police cruiser. He and two others were arrested. The police were unharmed.)
I suspect that the reason the protests were peaceful was that Memphis has taken the incident seriously. It fired the five officers quickly, and has now arrested and charged them with second-degree murder. It also has disbanded the unit the officers belonged to. Now we’ll see if the city (and other cities) follows up with police reform.
A point the press sometimes misses is that public anger usually isn’t about the event itself, but about the official response to the event. If the public is confident that the institutional response will be prompt and appropriate, protest isn’t necessary.
The most irresponsible coverage I saw came from Tucker Carlson, who (based on apparently nothing) warned his viewers that Antifa would be organizing riots in major cities.
These riots, of course, did not happen, and it’s not clear that an organization called “Antifa” with the capability of organizing a national string of riots even exists. Tucker did an amazing job of making his lack of any actual facts sound ominous:
Antifa is being organized. By whom? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? To do what? We can’t say right now. But we know for certain that in cities across the country right now, Antifa is mobilizing to commit violence. This is a political militia. So the question is: Who’s benefiting from it? Those are the people you ought to be asking questions of.
Maybe, though, we don’t know much about Antifa because there’s not much to know. Maybe it’s not an organization, but just a label that Fox attaches to certain kinds of events, including a lot of events that don’t happen.
and the Georgia grand jury
Earlier this month, the Georgia grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to reverse Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result submitted its final report. Tuesday, a judge yielded to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ request to keep that report sealed for now, so we don’t know whether the grand jury recommended any indictments for Trump or any of his henchmen. (This was a special grand jury impaneled to investigate, but without the power to indict.)
Willis, however, has seen the report, and her reasons for keeping it sealed implied charges are coming for someone:
Willis argued Tuesday that disclosing the report now could violate the rights of potential defendants and could negatively affect the ability to prosecute those who may be charged with crimes.
The airwaves are full of speculation, but I think we just need to wait and see. Willis said a decision on criminal charges is “imminent”, which could mean days or weeks, but probably not months. That’s the extent of my speculation. If you want more, the Christian Science Monitor does a good job of presenting why Trump might or might not be charged.
and classified documents
Biden’s classified document problem muddied the waters, and now Mike Pence’s similar issue threatens to turn it all into a farce. I stand by what I wrote last week, and extend the argument to cover Pence: While the Trump, Biden, and Pence situations have a surface similarity that makes them politically difficult, they are unrelated legally, and I hope the Justice Department pursues the three investigations separately. Whether or not Trump committed indictable crimes has no bearing on whether Biden or Pence did.
Some writers are trying to turn this into a discussion about overclassification and the bloated system of classified documents. Those are legitimate concerns, but I don’t see the relevance. Whether you have one classified document or a thousand, you should take care of them, even if nothing in them seems all that important.
It’s like stop signs. When you’re driving in the middle of the night, it seems really stupid that there are all these stop signs. But you should stop anyway.
and China’s declining population
One of the odder stories of the last few weeks has to do with China losing population. You’d think this would be a positive development, given how hard China has worked over the years to control its population. A flat or declining population in China could be the harbinger of a flat or declining world population. That would lessen the human strain on the planet’s carrying capacity, and maybe lead to a future of abundance rather than destitution.
The alarms ringing at the NYT include (1) fewer young-adult Chinese could force businesses to move factory work to other countries (like Mexico and Vietnam); and (2) fewer Chinese consumers could shrink the global market for goods. In addition, there’s the internal-to-China problem of elder care, caused by the combination of low birth rates and higher life expectancy.
But I’m having trouble seeing the “cause for alarm”. If more Chinese are, say, living into their 80s, that probably means that many Chinese in their 70s are still pretty spry, and might be able to do some caretaking themselves. And if the world needs less production because there are fewer people consuming stuff, that just doesn’t seem like a problem to me.
Wired shares my sanguine attitude. For a variety of reasons, its article explains, countries that fall below 1.5 children per female have a hard time returning to replacement-level fertility. But while that means the population on average gets older, it doesn’t have to become proportionately sicker, more feeble, and less productive.
Fears about population aging are often guided by the false idea that older people are homogeneously ill, dependent, and unproductive. In fact, the average health of people over 60 has improved dramatically over the past decades. … We recently calculated the health-adjusted dependency ratio—the proportion of adults with the same or more aging-related disease burden as the global average 65-year-old—in 188 countries. Using this measure, we could demonstrate that many of the world’s chronologically oldest countries have the same or even lower aging-related burden than many of the world’s chronologically youngest countries. Our work suggests that China can effectively stay younger by investing in the health of its aging population.
In summary:
Measures that improve education, productivity, and health across the lifespan would ease the transition to a world with fewer children. It is possible for China—and the rest of the world—to decline and prosper.
A declining population will require some adjustments. But on the whole, I suspect it presents an easier set of problems than endless growth.
and parents whose children question their gender identities
The NYT had a thought-provoking article “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know“, focusing on parents’ anger at teachers and schools when their kids start “socially transitioning” at school (using a different name, going to a different bathroom, etc.) and no one tells the parents. Columnist Michelle Goldberg followed up with “Trans Kids Deserve Private Lives Too“.
OK, I understand that there’s a lot here I can’t relate to from my own experience: I’ve never struggled with my gender identity and I’ve never been a parent. But there seems to be one point that the complaining parents (both in the article and in the comments) are refusing to grasp: The important communications problem is between them and their kids, not between them and the school.
Again and again, parents cast the school as taking an active role:
But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home.
But the “intervention” here is just respecting the student’s confidence. (Goldberg raises the example of whether teachers should tell Muslim parents that their daughter has stopped wearing a hijab at school.) If a student is talking to a school counselor about gender issues, that’s because the student raised those issues. Counselors are not roaming the halls looking for kids they can convince to change gender.
To me, the idea that a child’s teachers are all agents of the parents sounds horrible. Children of my friends have occasionally shared secrets with me, and I have always kept them. As long as they weren’t planning to commit suicide or harm someone else, I hope I always would. It’s normal for kids to have thoughts they believe their parents wouldn’t approve — I certainly did — and it’s a blessing to have other adults you can talk to.
If parents are concerned about their child’s gender identity, they should talk to their child directly, not expect teachers the child has trusted to betray that trust.
I ran the note above past a friend who is trained to counsel youth on gender issues, and they pointed me to the book Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon, which you can look at here.
Solomon, who is gay, is writing about the challenges of parent/child relationships where the child differs from the parent in some way that the parent finds hard to accept. He introduces the useful distinction between vertical identity (the traits that parents and children share that make identification in both directions easier) and horizontal identity (the ways they differ that make identification harder).
Every child, he proposes, has some of both. So in his model, cis parents of trans children are experiencing a magnified version of a problem that every parent faces. I like this model because it encourages empathy for all concerned. Solomon writes:
There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together, is at best a euphemism to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads.
My friend also pointed out why understanding the wide range of gender identities might be useful to someone who feels uncomfortable in their assigned gender: If all they know is the male/female dichotomy, they may interpret their discomfort to mean that they must be of the opposite gender, rather than something more nuanced. My friend attributed at least some of the examples of detransitioning — undoing a gender transition later in life — to this sort of confusion. (A recent Atlantic article urges us to take the detransition phenomenon seriously, while also not exaggerating its frequency.)
and you also might be interested in …
Trump will soon be back on Facebook, and probably Twitter too. He was banned partly for spreading misinformation, but mostly for fomenting violence on January 6. We’ll see how long he can go before fomenting violence again, and how the platforms will respond when he does.
If you believe, as I do, that his act is getting old even for some people who have supported him in the past, then giving him more exposure might work against him now.
Ukraine will get tanks: American M-1s (eventually), German Leopard IIs, and British Challengers.
At the moment the front line in this war is mostly static, with a slight momentum for the Russians. Both sides are expected to launch offensives when the weather improves. The Economist (behind a paywall) has been generally pro-Ukrainian in its coverage, but recently it sounds like it’s spinning some disturbing facts. In an otherwise upbeat article about Ukrainian prospects, it says:
Ukraine’s edge in battlefield manpower is eroding, now that the Kremlin has mobilised 200,000-300,000 soldiers and may soon call up more. With Russia’s arms factories working triple shifts, Ukraine cannot outmatch it in brute firepower, given the West’s depleting stocks of arms.
I am uncomfortably reminded of the American Civil War. For a moment, put aside your feelings about the morality of either war and just look at the military situation: The North was richer and more populous than the South, so it had tremendous advantages in a war of attrition. The South generally had better leadership and higher morale, so it enjoyed much early success.
The war turned in the North’s favor when General Grant took command and accepted that if the war became a meat grinder, Lee’s army would be ground up first. He made a horrifying decision, but it did lead to victory.
I’ve always liked Schiff, but my unresearched impression is that Katie Porter is something special. It’s early, though, and the campaign may change my mind.
The arrest of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counter-intelligence in the FBI’s New York office, opens up lots of room for speculation about what happened in 2016. Allegedly, McGonigal was being paid by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also the guy who paid Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort millions of dollars.
Timothy Snyder thinks there’s something there, but Marcy Wheeler disagrees. I don’t know enough yet to say. (Snyder’s blog is on Substack, which will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the post even if you don’t.)
The Miami Herald has a report on the teacher-training sessions for teaching the State of Florida’s new civics standards. (It’s paywalled, but you should get one article free.) The training was described by one teacher as “straight-up indoctrination”. Another commented: “It was a bit different than a typical training. [Previously, trainers would] show us how to teach the information. But this time, instead of being shown how to implement the standards, they kind of went the opposite way. They presented this history as if none of us had learned it before.”
Basically, slavery and church/state separation are minimized, originalism is presented as the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution, and the importance of Christianity in founding the US is emphasized. These are supposed to be taught as facts, not as issues knowlegeable people disagree over.
Maybe you’ve seen those billboards claiming that a fetus has a heartbeat 18 days after conception. They’re usually accompanied by a picture of a baby, or maybe a fetus that looks almost fully formed.
I’ve been glad to see recent articles in both The Guardian and the NYT give a more realistic view of what gets removed from a woman during an early-term abortion. At five or six weeks, “the embryo is not typically visible to the naked eye”. What shows up in a post-abortion tissue examination is mostly the gestational sac, which is still tiny and looks nothing like a baby.
The image below is after seven weeks, and the gestational sac is about 3/4 of an inch wide.
Patients may come in for an abortion fearful at this stage, having read through forums or looked at images online. “They’re expecting to see a little fetus with hands – a developed, miniature baby.” Often, she says, “they feel they’ve been deceived.”
On Vox, Ian Milhiser writes about the sudden resurfacing of laws that became irrelevant after the Roe decision, which haven’t been looked at by courts at least since 1973, and possibly a lot longer. Today, many of these laws would probably be considered unconstitutionally vague (like when they use terms like “indecent”). But they’re suddenly applicable again, even though nobody is sure what a court would say they mean. One such law is the 1873 Comstock Act, which says:
Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose … Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.
But current DoJ policy
argues that the Comstock Act should be read narrowly to permit abortion-inducing drugs to be mailed “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” This memo signals that, at least as long as President Joe Biden holds office, the DOJ will not prosecute mifepristone manufacturers and mail-order pharmacies under the Comstock Act — although it remains to be seen what happens if a Republican takes over.
Milhiser summarizes:
So, to summarize, abortion providers face a crush of older and uncertain restrictions, many of which can at least plausibly be read to prohibit them from performing very basic tasks — such as receiving a supply of mifepristone in the mail. State lawmakers have prepped a wide range of bills adding new restrictions to medication abortions. And the federal judiciary and many state courts are dominated by Republican appointees who reasonably can be expected to read abortion restrictions expansively, regardless of what the law actually says.
That’s bad news for anyone who needs a medication abortion.
Rhonna McDaniel won a fourth term as Republican National Committee chair, defeating Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, a Sikh woman, faced what Politico called a “whisper campaign” targeting her faith. She tweeted:
To be very clear, no amount of threats to me or my team, or bigoted attacks on my faith traceable directly to associates of the chair, will deter me from advancing positive change at the RNC, which includes new standards of accountability, transparency, integrity, and decency.
and let’s close by getting out the vote in an important election
Voting is open to name the next set of Minnesota snowplows. My choices: Best in Snow, Han Snowlo, Mighty Morphin Plower Ranger, Sleetwood Mac, Plower to the People, and Alice Scooper.
Not so long ago, Democrats got big majorities in the cities, which Republicans balanced by carrying the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas by narrower margins. More recently, Democrats have continued dominating the cities, but MAGA policies and incivility have made the suburbs more competitive (especially by alienating educated women). Now Republicans make up the gap with big majorities in rural areas and small towns.
The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party are driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Edsall presents Wisconsin as a prime example. Senator Ron Johnson is pro-insurrection, believes climate change is “bullshit”, and wants to make cutting Social Security and Medicare easier by shifting those programs from “mandatory” to “discretionary” spending. If you’re an urban or suburban voter, you might think those positions would make him an easy target. But in fact he narrowly won reelection in 2022 by running up huge margins in rural counties. Clearly, people think differently there.
Edsall cites the book The Politics of Resentment by University of Wisconsin Professor Katherine Cramer, who attributes the rural conservative surge to three factors.
(1) a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, (2) a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources and (3) a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.
So a straightforward approach to winning rural areas back would be for Democrats to stop doing those things. But Paul Krugman points out a serious problem with that strategy: Strictly speaking, none of those three beliefs are true. There are many government policies (farm subsidies, special programs to support rural housing, rural utilities, etc.) that focus on rural areas; the federal government spends far more on rural areas than it gets back in taxes; and the respect gap runs mostly in the other direction: Democratic politicians hardly ever denigrate small towns or denounce rural values the way that Republicans target New York City or San Francisco.
It’s a problem that Democrats face across the board: How do you convince people that you’ve stopped doing things you’ve never actually done? How do you respond to parents upset about public schools teaching critical race theory or grooming children to be gay or trans, when public schools don’t actually do those things? How do you stop discrimination against Christians when in fact there is no discrimination against Christians? (Examples to the contrary are nearly always cases where Christians are not getting the special rights they feel entitled to.)
Given that level of misperception, it’s hard to even approach the problem without thinking in a paternalistic way that any Democratic constituency would resent: Consider about how justifiably upset the Black or Hispanic communities get when White “experts” ignore their policy preferences and instead tell them what they “should” want.
I come from the kind of community Edsall and Krugman are talking about: Illinois’ Adams County voted for Trump nearly 3-to-1 in both 2016 and 2020. It’s in the IL-15 congressional district, where a MAGA congressional candidate tallied 71% last fall.
And in some sense I represent the root problem: I grew up there, got an education, saw no attractive opportunities, and moved away to have a successful career in the suburbs of Boston. At my high-school reunions, the primary divide is between those who left and those who stayed. (It’s no wonder being “left behind” plays such a large role the Evangelical mythology popular in rural areas. The fantasy of being raptured to Heaven while unbelievers suffer the tribulations must be a very satisfying turnabout.)
The problems of rural America are very real and deserve national attention, so it’s completely understandable that rural Americans would channel their discontent into a political party. Sadly, though, they’ve united around a party that wants to feed them myths and flatter them rather than do anything that might help.
I know I overuse Weimar analogies (which come easily to mind as I’ve been binging Babylon Berlin and reading Philip Kerr novels) but it’s hard to ignore the parallels: Germany really had lost a war, its economy suffered badly in the dislocations of the 1920s, and what opportunities still existed were centered in the cosmopolitan cities rather than the nativist countryside. But the defeat-excusing stab-in-the-back myth was not true, Jews and libertine urban culture weren’t the real problems, and fascism was not the answer.
Likewise today, fascism won’t provide an answer to the real challenges rural and small-town America faces. But I’m not sure how to help rural and small-town voters figure that out.
Don’t worry about your Social Security, medical care, or bodily autonomy. Instead, focus your attention on gas stoves, light bulbs, X-boxes, M&Ms, and the Democrats’ quest to achieve “Soviet America”.
After narrowly winning a House majority by running against inflation and crime (and paying the price whenever they ran a candidate focused on election denial and other MAGA issues), the GOP has begun laying out its agenda for the 118th Congress: not inflation and crime. Instead, it’s gearing up to force a debt-ceiling crisis in order to extort long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare out of President Biden and Senate Democrats. In addition, it’s getting revenge on Democrats and on government officials who investigated the crimes of President Trump.
When a party defies public opinion like this, they need to wave around a lot of shiny objects to keep their voters distracted.
Gas stoves do cause some problems. They’ve been linked to increased incidence of asthma, especially in children. (This conclusion is debatable, but I believe it because I started noticing some mild bronchial irritation after I moved to an apartment with a gas stove — which I otherwise like. So for the last few months I’ve been wearing a mask when I cook, running the exhaust fan at higher levels, and making smaller dishes in the electric toaster oven. It seems to help.)
And then there’s climate change. Long term, the best plan for minimizing carbon emissions is to electrify everything and then generate as much electricity as possible without burning fossil fuels. Fortunately, new induction cooktops and ranges have a lot of advantages, so switching from gas to electric doesn’t have to be a hardship. (That said, while I might try out a portable induction burner, I’m not buying new stove any time soon. The path of least resistance is to make do with what’s already here.)
In short, there are good long-term reasons for America as a whole to shift away from gas stoves. But are the Kitchen Police coming to rip your (or my) gas stove out of the wall? No. No one has even been proposing that they should.
What really happened. January 9, in an interview with Bloomberg News (behind a paywall), Richard Trumka Jr, who is one of the commissioners on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, noted the hazards associated with gas stoves and suggested strengthening safety regulations on new stoves.
This is not a new or strange idea. In December, a letter 20 Democratic members of Congress wrote to the CPSC suggested several such regulations, such as mandating range hoods with exhaust fans, and tightening standards on methane leakage when the stove is off. Notably, they did not suggest a ban.
In his Bloomberg interview, Trumka considered the possibility that if yet-to-be-done research proves that yet-to-be-written safety regulations are insufficient, new gas stoves could be taken off the market: “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” In a responsible article, a statement like would be qualified by noting where the CPSC is in its process. Back in December Trumka said CPSC was about to start looking at gas-stove regulations.
Richard Trumka Jr., a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), said during a virtual webinar on Wednesday that the commission will put out a formal request by March for information on hazards associated with gas stoves and possible solutions.
“This public request for information is the first step in what could be a long journey toward regulating gas stoves,” he said.
News that the Biden administration may soon ban gas stoves set off Twitter on Monday.
Manufacturing outrage. Republican politicians were quick to jump into the telephone game. Remember: These aren’t just random internet trolls. These are public officials with staff that could fact-check things if their bosses wanted them to.
“Don’t tread on Florida, and don’t mess with gas stoves!” tweeted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last week in response to comments from a member of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that a ban might one day be possible given health concerns about the stoves.“God. Guns. Gas stoves,” tweeted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) listed banning gas stoves as being among policies that he described as “Democrat authoritarian impulses.”
I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!
And because its viewers presumably weren’t steamed enough yet, Fox informed them that stoves are just the beginning.
“There’s bad news for almost every room in the house,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. … “If advanced appliances make sense for consumers, they would sell themselves without mandates,” Lieberman told Fox News Digital. “I think that’s a good rule of thumb with very, very few exceptions.
That’s because the broader interests of society never conflict with motives on the individual level, at least in the conservative fantasyland.
Then someone found a 2020 photo of Jill Biden sauteing spinach over a gas stove. Hypocrisy! (Because the Bidens should have remodeled their kitchen in anticipation of CPSC starting to look into regulating new gas stoves 2 1/2 years later.)
The Washington Free Beacon then found eight additional Democrats who have “used a kitchen appliance they want to ban you from owning”. (When they get to John Fetterman, they note that “Exposure to carbon monoxide can put otherwise healthy adults at an increased risk of stroke”. So, you know, he had it coming.)
“Rules for me but not for thee,” Ted Cruz tweeted. He probably cribbed that line from Ron DeSantis’ communications aide Christina Pushaw, who had tweeted the same photo a few hours earlier:
Biden will ban gas stoves for normal people. Not for elites. This is Soviet America: Rules for thee, not for me.
So this is how far ahead of the facts Republicans got: Still unformulated safety regulations for new gas stoves became a looming ban on all gas stoves (plus other appliances), which will be implemented unfairly. Because — you know — Democrats are like that.
Setting the record straight is “caving”. Biden administration officials (including Biden himself) then clarified: There isn’t (and never was) a proposal to ban gas stoves. The CSPC chair issued a statement denying a ban was in the works and reiterating the timetable for starting the regulatory process:
Research indicates that emissions from gas stoves can be hazardous, and the CPSC is looking for ways to reduce related indoor air quality hazards. But to be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so. … [L]ater this spring, we will be asking the public to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.
In typical fashion, Fox News could not possibly admit that it had gotten its viewers outraged about nothing, so instead it framed the clarification by saying that the Biden administration had “reversed course” and “caved” to public outrage.
It’s kind of like when dogs bark at passing cars, and then feel good about themselves for chasing the cars away.
Subsequent outrages. You know what else conservatives are upset about? X-boxes. Microsoft is making them “the first carbon-aware consoles“, via software updates that would allow users to schedule future updates at times when the most sustainable electricity is available, or to change settings to use less energy in general. Fox News Radio host Jimmy Failla explained Microsoft’s sinister motive:
We understand what this is. It’s not that it’s actually going to offset emissions, okay—the level of reduction is infinitesimal. But they’re trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age; make them climate conscious now.
And Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt agreed. “You’re right. They’re going after the children.”
But it isn’t all outrage at Fox. There is at least some cause for celebration: Tucker Carlson has won his war against the M&M spokescandies. The Mars Wrigley Corporation announced its surrender last Monday.
The freedom narrative. The Hill explains the larger Republican strategy:
“It’s your stove, it’s your lightbulb, and those are consumer issues and economic issues, they’re also culture war issues,” said Republican strategist Doug Heye, referring to another flashpoint in incandescent versus LED bulbs.
“It’s part of how Republicans feel that Democrats are targeting parts of Americans’ everyday lives,” Heye added. …
[Republican strategist Keith Naughton] said he doesn’t think any individual issue is “Earth-shaking,” but pieced together they can form a larger narrative, namely that Democrats are “never going to stop until there’s somebody in your home monitoring everything you do.”
But Amanda Marcotte points out that the freedom/control narrative may work better if you reverse the parties.
Republicans do face a real conundrum. On one hand, conservatism is fundamentally a puritanical ideology. On the other hand, being a bunch of joy-killers tends to be unpopular. So they’re always looking for chances to flip the script, to pretend that it’s the left that is out to destroy your good time. So we get these fake culture war controversies in which the right pretends to be under assault by a “nanny state.”
Of course, when you look past all the hand-waving about “freedom,” it becomes clear that very little of what they wish to protect is actually fun at all. Indoor smoking, being a Nazi on Twitter, and dying of COVID-19 because you wouldn’t get vaccinated are all technically freedoms, but only in the most pathetic sense. They don’t resemble the actual freedoms most people want, such as the right to read what you want or have sex the way you like, which are under assault from Republicans.
So if you want your child to get advanced-placement credit in African-American studies, too bad for you: The content of the course violates the official ideology of Commissar DeSantis, so the “Free State of Florida” won’t allow it. Ditto for wanting to encourage your kid to read: In order to comply with new state laws, Manatee County has ordered teachers to remove all books from their classrooms until they can be “vetted” for compliance. (Compliance doesn’t sound like a freedom-word to me.) Because, as we all know, unvetted books are dangerous. Better ten children should grow up illiterate than one child read about the existence of gay people, or that Black people have not always been treated well in America. And if you’re a corporation or baseball team that wants to take a position contrary to the DeSantis regime, well, you better watch out.
In another free state, Oklahoma, you are free to run over protesters with your car, but if you want to be free to protest without getting run over, that’s dicier. (The law says nobody can run over you intentionally, but in practice intent is hard to prove.)
The Thomas More Society, a conservative legal organization, is drafting model legislation for state lawmakers that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of a state that has banned abortion from terminating a pregnancy outside of that state. The draft language will borrow from the novel legal strategy behind a Texas abortion ban enacted last year in which private citizens were empowered to enforce the law through civil litigation.
In short, which party represents “freedom” to you very much depends on the kinds of things you want to do.
The debunking dilemma. When the point of raising an issue is distraction, it’s hard to know how to respond. If you take time to debunk the nonsense (as I just did and tempted you into spending time on), aren’t you just taking the bait?
It’s a conundrum. President Trump may have been a dim bulb in a lot of ways, but he was brilliant at manipulating public attention. One of his favorite tricks, whenever the news cycle was turning against him, was to pick a fight with some Black celebrity like LeBron James. (Legendary NBA coach Gregg Popovich was actually a much more outspoken Trump critic. But he’s White, so arguing with him wouldn’t serve Trump’s purposes.) The more outrageous and/or racist he got, the better at seizing attention and directing it back to the Trump-against-uppity-Black-people frame that plays well to his base.
Ron DeSantis’s AP African American Studies ban is basically the same trick. It puts him back in the headlines and fills the airwaves with Black people criticizing him. In some sense it barely matters that he deserves the criticism: Arguing with Black (or gay or trans) people is a good look for him as he seeks the Republican nomination in 2024.
So how do you cover that? Call attention to it, which DeSantis wants, or ignore it and let an injustice pass without comment?
My compromise, as you can deduce from this post, is to dip into these dark wells occasionally without letting them dominate my attention. And when I do, I try not to lose sight of what I’m being distracted from.
It’s been three weeks since the last weekly summary, so today I’ll be going a bit wild. I guess that’s a good sign: Time off is supposed to be rejuvenating.
There are two featured posts this week (and two other ideas that I pushed off to next week, not to mention a couple fairly long notes in the summary). One is about the Biden-is-coming-for-your-gas-stove panic on the right, which I’m using as an example of a larger phenomenon: When your legislative agenda flies in the face of public opinion, you need phony issues to keep people distracted.
And if gas stoves don’t grab you, what about Microsoft’s new X-box software “recruiting” your child into climate awareness? Or the sinister implications of the personalities chosen for M&M’s spokescandies (who have now been shelved)? That’s all much more important than protecting Social Security or the credit rating of the United States, not to mention issues like voting rights, abortion rights, or climate change.
The article should post a little after 9 EST.
The second featured post looks at Democrats’ problems in rural and small-town America, spinning off of an article about rural rage by Thomas Edsell, and incorporating some subsequent comments by Paul Krugman. It boils down to: What do you do when people have genuine problems, but the way they frame those problems is based in myths? Debunking those myths seems essential to addressing the real problems, but in the meantime you frame yourself as an enemy.
Let’s predict that for around 11.
Then there’s the summary, which has three weeks of backlogged news. There’s all the craziness of the new House majority, all the disturbing video we’ve been exposed to lately (Tyre Nichols’ murder, the Paul Pelosi attack, …), waiting for the Georgia grand jury report and/or indictments of Trump and his henchmen, Pence joining the classified-documents bru-ha-ha, China’s population decline, Ukraine getting tanks, a Trump-connected Russian oligarch paying off a key FBI agent, gender identity in public schools, the DeSantis regime’s propaganda efforts, and a bunch more stuff.
I apologize for the length — I’m stretching the idea of “summary” this week — and remind you that you are free to skip around.
But don’t forget to vote for your favorite Minnesota snowplow names.
We don’t know anything all that bad yet. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Let’s wait and see.
So far, I’ve seen very few people frame this story properly. The popular choices seem to be: it’s a nothingburger, or it’s just like Trump’s documents scandal. In my mind, the proper framing is that we don’t know how bad this is yet, but it’s being investigated, and before long we will know.
Obviously, there are major differences between Biden’s document problem and Trump’s. The main one is that Biden’s people immediately turned the documents in and seem to have cooperated with the investigation in every way. Probably Biden never would have been caught otherwise. Trump, on the other hand, has done everything he could to deny and obstruct, including having his lawyer sign a false statement of subpoena compliance affirming that all classified material had been turned over, when in fact it hadn’t been.
Here the facts-as-we-know-them so far: Something like 20-30 classified documents have been found in two locations: the office Biden used during the Trump administration at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy in D.C., and Biden’s home in Delaware. The Penn documents were found on November 2, and the ones at the Biden home on various days between December 2 and January 20. The original documents were found by Biden’s own people, and the most recent ones were found by an FBI search that Biden agreed to voluntarily. Assuming the FBI search was thorough, they’ve probably recovered all the documents now.
The response of Biden and his people suggests the mishandling of documents is due to innocent carelessness, but there’s still a lot we (and the special prosecutor) don’t know:
how the documents got there,
whether Biden himself mishandled the documents or people working for him did,
what’s in the documents,
whether the mishandling resulted in classified information leaking to enemies of the United States,
whether any pattern in the documents suggests that Biden kept them intentionally.
Nothing we know so far suggests that these questions have sinister answers, but we don’t know for sure yet. They should be investigated, and they are being investigated.
The general public has a poor understanding of the rules about handling classified documents and how violations are typically handled. (This became an issue during the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which I wrote about at length at the time. Everything I said then has held up pretty well.)
I’ll pass along my experience from working at a defense contractor and having a top-secret clearance back in the 80s and early 90s. First, the government and the contractors do take this stuff very seriously, but given that millions of people are handling millions of classified documents, violations are happening all the time. Most of them are simple and harmless, like somebody leaving a secret document in a desk drawer overnight rather than locking it up in a safe, like you’re supposed to do.
Not every violation is a federal case. I was never cited for a violation myself, but I heard about people who were. Typically, a careless violation would get you an unpleasant meeting with your boss and somebody from the security department, as well as a note in your file that would speak badly the next time you were considered for a promotion or a raise.
A series of careless violations might get you fired — nobody I knew personally ever was — but people would only be charged with a crime if they were intentionally stealing documents. (That’s why the apparent differences in the Trump and Biden situations matter.)
The Trump and Biden incidents may be linked politically, but they are not at all linked legally. Assuming the Biden investigation doesn’t turn up anything more than carelessness (which, I emphasize again, we don’t know yet) it would be completely reasonable if Trump gets charged with multiple crimes and Biden doesn’t.
Let me make an analogy: Suppose an object in my apartment turns out to have been taken in some burglary. I might have gotten this item innocently; maybe I bought it at a second-hand store. Or I might have some level of guilt; maybe I bought from somebody I knew was shady, or maybe I was involved in the burglary myself. Police should investigate and charge or not charge me accordingly.
Meanwhile, police in a different state find something from an unrelated burglary in somebody else’s home. They also will investigate and charge or not charge the other guy. But those charging decisions are not linked in any way.
That’s how it should be here. The two special prosecutors should do their jobs independently, and the decisions they make should depend on the facts they find in their own particular investigations, without reference to the other investigation. That’s what the rule of law demands, and what I will expect until I get some indication otherwise.
People who assume that this will not happen — say, that Trump can’t be charged now that Biden has an incident with a surface similarity — are implicitly buying Trump’s claim that the investigations into his possible crimes are fundamentally political. Personally, I don’t buy that claim, and I think that reporters and pundits who do base their analysis on such an assumption should say so openly.
There is one important sense in which the cases are not similarly politically: Biden is a politician, while Trump is the leader of a personality cult.
That’s why I can be so calm about a special prosecutor investigating Biden: If he did something wrong, he should face appropriate consequences. I’m fine with that. If the special prosecutor does does unexpectedly turn up something sinister, I’m sure Kamala Harris will be a fine president.
For a large number of Republicans, on the other hand, Trump is not just someone they voted for. He’s their lord and savior, and seeing him in jail would be an unimaginable horror.
Finally, the press coverage of Biden’s documents has been abysmal. In his “Breaking the News” blog (which I subscribe to, but I think you’ll be able to follow the link even if you don’t), James Fallows talks about a variety of recent framing issues, including the Biden documents.
But as a matter of journalistic practice, I think our colleagues need to recognize our enormous responsibility and “agency” about what becomes an issue or controversy. “Raises questions,” “suggests a narrative,” “creates obstacles”—these aren’t like tornados or wildfires, things that occur on their own and we just report on. They are judgments reporters and editors make, “frames” they choose to present. And can choose not to.
I wasn’t going to do a Sift today, but I was jotting down some notes about the Biden document controversy and realized they had turned into a more-or-less complete set of thoughts. So I’ll be posting that soon rather than saving it for next week.
But there won’t be a weekly summary this week.
Another thing I think I’ll put out there is a link to what I did with my time off: I gave a Zoom talk in the lecture series at Pennswood Village, a Quaker-inspired retirement home in Newtown, PA.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, the talk provides a certain amount of Weekly Sift philosophy and history that doesn’t come up week-to-week, including the fact that in April I’ll mark the 20th anniversary of the first political article I posted online.
This morning I’m wondering what’s happening in Brazil
Yesterday afternoon, supporters of Brazil’s defeated former president Jair Bolsonaro occupied the National Congress, Planalto Palace, and Supreme Court in Brazilia. Congress and the Court are not in session and President Lula was elsewhere, so there is no hostage crisis.
This morning, I’m seeing claims that government forces have restored order and that government offices will open. Hundreds of rioters have been arrested. (As in our January 6 riot, the rioters were taking selfies and posting video, so they should be pretty easy to find and convict.)
Ever since Bolsonaro lost the a runoff election October 30, his supporters have been urging the Army to intervene, which it hasn’t done. Lula took office on January 1. This attack appears to be a more extreme plea to the Army, which is still not responding to it. I’m seeing claims that some police or other officials may have helped the rioters.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the immediate suspension of the governor of Brasília for 90 days, accusing him and the district’s head of public security of abetting the unprecedented attack on the country’s capital.
Bolsonaro himself is in Florida, where he went instead of attending Lula’s inauguration. Like Trump, he claims that his defeat was not a fair election. It looks like Bolsonaro’s most extreme supporters were victims of the same kind of reality distortion that QAnon brought to January 6. BBC quotes a Brazilian teacher of history and sociology:
They just get information from WhatsApp and Bolsonaro’s social media, so they are really disconnected from reality.
They believed that Bolsonaro would win the election easily, it did not happen, and then when Lula was elected, they believed that it would happen militarily, a coup d’etat, and Bolsonaro would become dictator of Brazil.
This is still breaking news, which I don’t have the resources to cover. Among the major news services, BBC seems to me to have the best coverage. If you want to sort through unvetted reports, search social media for #Brazil.
meanwhile, everybody has been talking about the Speaker election
It took all week and 15 ballots, but Kevin McCarthy is finally Speaker of the House. The 15th ballot wasn’t complete until early Saturday morning, and then the newly elected congresspeople could finally be sworn in.
This afternoon we’ll see whether McCarthy has the votes to pass his rules package, which includes the concessions he made to the MAGA holdouts.
Democrat Katie Porter brought a good book for the occasion.
One benefit of listening to the various speaker-nomination speeches is getting to hear what the parties (or factions with the GOP) think their best talking points are. I was struck by two of McCarthy’s nominators — Steve Scalise and Kat Cammack — mentioning fentanyl overdoses as if this were a partisan issue. I mean, are Democrats for fentanyl overdoses?
Well, no. In a nutshell, Republicans try to turn every issue into the southern border. Crime is a border issue because immigrants are criminals. (They’re not, other than the one possible offense of crossing the border illegally.) Disease is a border issue because immigrants carry disease. (They don’t.) Fentanyl addiction is a border issue in the same way: It’s an excuse to militarize the border and maybe build Trump’s wall. Beyond that, it’s not clear Republicans have any interest in the problem, which is fundamentally a public-health issue, not a border-control issue.
Some Republicans go full-conspiracy-theory on the subject. Here’s J. D. Vance last April:
If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl? And, man, it does look intentional.
He starts playing with the alphabet subtly at around the 8 minute mark, envisioning a country that “Provides for the Poor, Works for Working families …”. Around 13 minutes he pledges to the new Republican majority that Democrats will “try to find common ground whenever and wherever possible on behalf of the American people”. But he also pledges that Democrats “will never compromise our principles”.
What principles? That’s where the alphabetic litany starts: “House Democrats will always put American values over Autocracy, Benevolence over Bigotry, the Constitution over the Cult” … all the way to “Zealous representation over Zero-sum confrontation”.
If we let everybody in the boat, if we row in the same cadence together, there is no obstacle this body can overcome for this nation.
I think your speechwriter wrote “can’t”, Kevin. But in this House, your version is probably more accurate.
Imagine Biden making that gaffe. Fox would spend the next week citing it as evidence of dementia.
McCarthy also repeated a promise he often made during the fall campaign:
Our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents. You see, we believe government should be to help you, not go after you.
I’m afraid this first bill really will set the tone for McCarthy’s House, because it’s based on a lie: There is no funding to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, and the new resources the Inflation Reduction Act does send to the IRS don’t target middle-class Americans.
I’ve criticized the decision to release Trump’s tax returns to the public — he should do that, not Congress — but I do have to admit that nothing better illustrates the IRS’s need for more funding. Wealthy tax cheats like Trump know that if they make a big enough tangle of their finances, the IRS won’t be able to put enough auditors on the case to sort it out.
And that’s why McCarthy wants the funding repealed: If he represents anybody, he represents wealthy people who cheat on their taxes. That’s his base.
Michelle Goldberg commented on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s exasperation at the far-right Republicans who wouldn’t get in line behind McCarthy:
It was the embodiment of the Twitter meme: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
Conservative commentator Noah Rothman argues that the chaotic nature of the speaker-election process and the insurgent demands for a weaker speakership is evidence against the charge that the GOP — and especially its MAGA/Freedom Caucus wing — is the “authoritarian” party.
He’s missing a key point: Fascists love weak governance when they are out of power. Any power center they don’t control should have its powers severely limited … until they do control it. Then, the sky’s the limit.
Case in point: Under Biden or Obama, presidential executive orders are tyranny, and presidential emergency powers are the worst tyranny of all. But in 2019, Andy Biggs urged President Trump to fund his border wall by declaring an emergency, usurping Congress’ power of the purse. (Trump did so.) Unchecked presidential power is wonderful if it’s his president.
Ditto for the Supreme Court. Judicial activism was horrible when the Court’s majority was liberal. But now that the Court is firmly in conservative hands, right-wing leaders no longer make “principled” denunciations of judicial activism.
Same thing here. Biggs was the first Republican to challenge McCarthy’s bid for speakership, and is a key member of the group trying to limit the speaker’s power. But that’s only because his faction represents a small percentage of the Republican caucus and has no chance to elect one of its own as speaker. If the tables ever turn, though, they’ll be looking for a very strong speaker indeed.
The lesson here is that authoritarians are not all the same, and in particular that fascists are not monarchists. Monarchists seek order; they believe that somebody needs to be in charge, and so they tend to fall in line behind the new king, whoever it turns out to be. But fascists seek power; they believe they should be in charge. So they’re for chaos when they’re out of power and order after they gain power. Any power center they can’t control should be weak. But power centers they do control should be strong.
and the debt ceiling
The featured post discusses the debt-ceiling standoff that is coming in the summer, and what the speaker election portends for it.
and the second anniversary of the insurrection
Friday, President Biden marked the second anniversary of the 1-6 insurrection by giving medals to 14 people who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
The group included law enforcement officers, current and former politicians and election workers who were targeted with threats following the 2020 presidential contest. Three of the medals were awarded posthumously to officers who had defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and died afterward by injuries or by suicide.
I heard one commentator (I believe after a conversation with Nancy Pelosi) point out that if this were a presidential inauguration year, a January 6 riot wouldn’t be necessary. Because the House still had no speaker on January 6, it would have been incapable of counting electoral votes. What would happen next is anybody’s guess.
The Fulton County special grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election in Georgia has completed its work. Apparently, that means it has written a report that either does or doesn’t recommend indictments. The grand jury had no authority to indict on its own.
At the moment I don’t know whether any indictments have been recommended. This is breaking news this morning, so consult other sources.
and the pandemic
Covid appears to having another surge. Case numbers are mostly flat and hard to interpret, but everything else is increasing. Deaths are now over 500 per day again, after dipping into the 200s in early December. Hospitalizations and ICU cases are also up.
A scary article from BBC: An official in China’s Henan province says that 90% of the population — about 88.5 million people — have had Covid.
Mr Kan did not specify a timeline for when all the infections happened – but as China’s previous zero-Covid policy kept cases to a minimum, it’s likely the vast majority of Henan’s infections occurred in the past few weeks.
It’s hard to know how to interpret economic statistics during a time when the Fed is trying to fight inflation. Usually, it’s great news that the economy is creating jobs and wages are rising — which is what Friday’s jobs report showed: The economy added 223K jobs in December and unemployment matched its pre-pandemic low of 3.5%.
But the Fed’s inflation-fighting policy is to slow the economy with higher interest rates, so more jobs just means they’ll increase rates further until the slowdown takes effect.
and you also might be interested in …
Jim Jordan will chair the new House select committee to investigate “the weaponization of the federal government”, i.e. the investigation of Trump and his co-conspirators, like Jim Jordan.
This follows in the footsteps of the failed Durham investigation, and will probably proceed in much the same way: with great fanfare about the devastating evidence it is about to uncover, which will be greatly underwhelming when it appears.
Other than giving Fox News something to talk about, the main point of the Jordan committee will be to harass anyone who has had the effrontery to investigate Republicans, and to intimidate anyone who might do so in the future. A second goal will be to screw up any Trump prosecution.
It will be interesting to see if members of the January 6 Committee (now dissolved) will cooperate with Jordan. After all, Jordan defied a subpoena from them; why should they testify for him?
It’s also worth pointing out that Democrats don’t do this. Nobody was ever punished for all those bogus Benghazi investigations.
Police killings in the US were up in 2022. At least 1176 Americans were killed by police, up from 1145 in 2021. The 2022 total is a new record, according to Mapping Police Violence, which began keeping track of police killings in 2013.
On TV, police kill violent criminals in self defense or to keep them from killing someone else. But that’s not the typical case.
In 2022, 132 killings (11%) were cases in which no offense was alleged; 104 cases (9%) were mental health or welfare checks; 98 (8%) involved traffic violations; and 207 (18%) involved other allegations of nonviolent offenses. There were also 93 cases (8%) involving claims of a domestic disturbance and 128 (11%) where the person was allegedly seen with a weapon. Only 370 (31%) involved a potentially more serious situation, with an alleged violent crime.
I looked for something to compare these numbers to. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, Australia set a record with 16 police shooting deaths. The US has about 13 times Australia’s population, so the Australian number looks comparable to 208 American deaths, or less than 1/5 of our total. Canadian police killed 36 people in 2020, which would be comparable to 312 Americans, or less than 1/3 our total.
Iceland — a bit larger than 1/1000th the size of the US — has had only one police killing in its history, which happened in 2013. At the US rate it would have about one a year.
I typically hear two explanations for the US’s high rate of police killings: American police are trained to have a “warrior mindset” (most other countries’ police aren’t), and American police are responding to a more dangerous environment, i.e. anyone they encounter might have a gun. In other words: An increased risk of being killed by police is one of the prices we pay for America’s high level of gun ownership.
For police, the huge number of guns in America also means that every single call is treated as if someone involved could be armed — and that an otherwise nonviolent wellness check, mental health call, or traffic stop could turn into a deadly encounter. US law generally allows police to use force because they merely perceive a threat, and the many firearms in civilian hands give police officers a reason to believe they’re in danger.
Bump stocks are devices that allow a semi-automatic weapon to function like an automatic one, shooting a series of bullets on one trigger-pull. They were banned by the Trump administration after one was used in a mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people.
Jackson, Mississippi is having another water crisis. The Guardian attributes the problems to “an aging and underfunded system that routinely fails to withstand extreme cold”. All 33 of Jackson’s public schools stayed closed Thursday and Friday (when they were supposed to return from Christmas break) due to low water pressure.
One of my first graders lost his mom 2 years ago as did I. On Wednesday he gave me a handwritten card saying both of our moms are angels together. Through tears, I tell him I’m having trouble reading it. He says to me, “Just sound it out.”
The chaos surrounding the Speaker vote may be a preview of a far more consequential vote this summer.
As the House of Representatives endured round after round of voting for a new speaker, most of America probably didn’t take the turmoil all that seriously. It was just Congress being dysfunctional again, and we knew already that the next speaker would be a Republican. Obviously, Kevin McCarthy cared which Republican it would be. But why should we care?
The answer to that question is simple: The battle for the speakership probably doesn’t matter much in itself, but it’s a preview of future votes that will matter. Electing a speaker was the first of a handful of must-do items every Congress faces. The others — appropriating money to keep the government functioning and giving the Treasury permission to borrow money to pay the country’s bills — have very real consequences.
If the speakership was this difficult to decide, what’s going to happen when the other must-do items come up?
In each of those cases, the House is one of the three powers that need to agree; the Senate and the President are the others. So over the next two years, Kevin McCarthy, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden will occasionally have to go into a room and come out with an agreement they all support. That agreement will then need to get majorities in both the House and Senate.
Otherwise bad things will happen.
McCarthy’s precarious hold on the speakership makes him a difficult negotiating partner: If he recognizes that he represents only 1/3 of the power in the room and makes realistic compromises, he might well be deposed when he takes that agreement back to the Republican caucus that elected him. And whatever he agrees to, he may not be able to deliver the votes to pass it.
The upshot is that the other must-do items on Congress’ agenda may not get done, or may face lengthy delays. The two possible consequences of that inaction are a government shutdown and a debt-ceiling crisis.
Government shutdowns are a nuisance. Hitting the debt ceiling would be a disaster. There have been a number of government shutdowns over the years, including a 35-day shutdown just four years ago (when President Trump backed out of an agreement that didn’t include funding for his border wall). So most Americans have at least a vague understanding of what happens: The mail still gets delivered and Social Security checks go out, but hundreds of thousands of other government workers go home, creating work-backlogs that ultimately cost billions to resolve.
It’s a nuisance and a waste, but the country survives it.
But Americans have a much shakier understanding of a debt-ceiling violation, which has never happened. Twice — in 2011 and 2013 — a Republican Congress played chicken with President Obama over the debt ceiling, but disaster was avoided both times. (The debt ceiling was increased three times under President Trump, including once in 2019 after Democrats took control of the House.)
The main thing you need to understand about hitting the debt ceiling is that it would be a much bigger deal than a government shutdown, and would create havoc in both the US and the world economy.
What the debt ceiling is. The debt ceiling (or debt limit) is a legal cap on the amount of money the United States can borrow. It was established in 1917, and is a relic from an era when Congress didn’t have a budgeting process anything like the current one.
The current process is that Congress passes a budget with spending and revenue targets, and then passes individual appropriation bills within that framework. You might think that passing a budget with a deficit would automatically authorize borrowing to fill the gap, but it doesn’t. Having passed those bills, Congress can then refuse to raise the debt limit, creating a contradiction in the laws.
Other countries don’t do this. Only the US and Denmark have a debt ceiling, and Denmark’s political parties never play chicken with it.
Fundamentally, the US debt limit is just a dumb idea. Remember the various Star Trek episodes where the Enterprise’s self-destruct option played a role? The captain (and maybe some other officers) would have to go through a detailed authorization process to start the clock counting down. Our debt ceiling is like a self-destruct process that works the other way: Self-destruct will engage automatically unless the officers regularly go through some complicated process to stop it.
Arguably, Democrats should have abolished the debt limit while they had control of Congress, or at least raised it far enough to keep the issue at bay for another two years. The recent omnibus spending bill would have been the place to do it, but it was hard enough getting Mitch McConnell’s cooperation as it was.
The politics of the debt ceiling. For almost a century, debt ceiling debates were political theater without any real drama. It was an opportunity for the party out of power to bemoan the country’s fiscal health, and members of each house would cast symbolic votes against raising the ceiling. (Senator Barack Obama made such a speech and cast such a vote in 2006.) But everybody knew the bill had to pass, and it always did.
Occasionally other measures would get tacked onto a bill to raise the debt ceiling. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of reforms to Congress’ budgeting process were added, like the Budget Reform Act of 1990. These were process bills (with bipartisan support) that made it more difficult to pass unbalanced budgets in the future. They did not directly raise taxes or cut spending.
That changed after the Tea Party wave election of 2010. In both 2011 and 2013, Republicans used the threat of breaching the debt ceiling to try to extort severe spending cuts out of President Obama.
Where is the debt ceiling now? The current ceiling (set in December, 2021) is a little less than $31.4 trillion, and the current debt is getting close to that number. There are certain accounting games (which I don’t understand) that the Treasury can play around the margins, but the best guesses are that if nothing is done, the limit will be reached sometime this summer.
What that means is that the Treasury will only be able to sell new bonds as old bonds come due. It will not be legal to sell bonds to pay for the government’s new financial obligations, like interest payments or salaries or Social Security benefits.
Recent annual deficits have been running at around $1 trillion (after peaking at $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2020, the last full year of the Trump administration). So assuming the economy perked along nicely in every other way, a post-debt-ceiling government would have to find $80-100 billion in cuts every month — and probably a lot more than that, because the economy would NOT perk along nicely, resulting in decreased revenues and increased obligations.
Think about the position that would put the Biden administration in: US law limits the revenue it can collect and obligates it to make certain payments (like Social Security benefits, salaries for our soldiers, and interest payments to bond holders). But if those numbers don’t balance and it is forbidden to borrow, there is no legal path for the administration to take. The laws contradict each other, so whatever he does, President Biden will be violating his constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.
The US Treasury will be like a family that has to decide which bills to pay after they cash a paycheck. (“Is the WalMart payroll tax payment in yet? Oh, good, we can reimburse a few of those hospitals that have been taking care of Medicare patients.”)
The main effect on the world economy would result from no one knowing what US Treasury bonds are really worth. (Will the interest be paid? What happens when the principal comes due?) Banks around the world keep their reserves in US bonds, so many of them could become insolvent, starting a banking crisis. No one can predict how far that effect would snowball, as a bankruptcy here makes somebody else insolvent, leading to a new bankruptcy there.
Would Biden have any legal options? Maybe. Many possibilities were discussed in 2011 and 2013, but they’re all of the play-stupid-games, win-stupid-prizes variety. (Paul Krugman expressed this sentiment in more sophisticated Princeton-professor terms: “Outrageous behavior demands extraordinary responses.”)
One proposal that sounds like a joke, but was seriously discussed in 2013 was the trillion-dollar-coin. Apparently, a loophole in the law allows the Treasury to create platinum coins of any value.
The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.
The intent was to allow the Treasury to make occasional commemorative coins for collectors. But desperate times …
So in this scenario, the Treasury mints a single trillion-dollar coin, which it then takes to a Federal Reserve bank and deposits in the government’s account. Presto! There is now money to meet the government’s obligations.
The general opinion of both the Obama and Biden administrations was/is that such a scheme is beneath the dignity of the United States. But you never know.
“But if that’s what it takes …” There’s a school of thought that says hitting the debt ceiling is the lesser evil: Our steadily increasing debt is unsustainable, and if a crash into the debt ceiling forces the government to only spend what it takes in, that’s all to the good.
The reason a balanced budget doesn’t happen is that the voters don’t really want it to. Balanced budget is a phrase that polls well, but when you get down to the details, people don’t want to pay higher taxes or give up their health insurance to make it happen. And while it’s not hard to find the occasional $600 hammer or bridge-to-nowhere in the federal budget, you’re not going to find a trillion dollars of that stuff, year after year.
Also, it’s hard to take Republican deficit hawks seriously when they ignored the deficit completely during the Trump years, and instead passed a budget-busting tax cut for corporations and the rich. (One thing I can guarantee you: If there’s a debt-ceiling or government-shutdown crisis sometime in the next two years, Republicans will say that tax increases are off the table.)
But suppose you are the rare good-faith Republican deficit hawk who is not just trying to create an artificial crisis for a Democratic president. What should you do? Convince the voters. You should try to build a popular majority around the idea of a balanced budget — a real balanced budget, with numbers backed by actual taxing and spending policies, and not just the words “balanced budget”. Then your popular majority could elect a House, Senate, and president to implement your balanced budget (which Republicans definitely did not do the last time they controlled all the levers of power).
What you shouldn’t do is stand over the self-destruct button and threaten to press it unless you get your way. That’s not democracy. That’s hostage-taking. It’s terrorism.
Hostage-taking? Terrorism? Really?Hostage-taking and terrorism are pejorative terms that are nothing more than insults if they’re not defined. So here’s what I mean by them: hostage-taking is a negotiating tactic based on threats rather than positive offers; in particular, the hostage-taker threatens to do something that does not benefit him or her, and usually claims that s/he does not want to do it.
So when a kidnapper asks for ransom to give your daughter back, at some level that looks like a trade: money for your daughter. But it’s not a positive offer, because the kidnapper is only offering to restore what he took away. The proposed final deal is that the kidnapper gets money, and (at best) you get back to square one, minus the money.
The alternative to the ransom is that the kidnapper will kill your daughter, which he claims he doesn’t want to do. (“I’m not a monster. I don’t enjoy killing little girls.”) So neither of you wants the kill-the-girl option, but the kidnapper is counting on the fact that you are so desperate to avoid it that you’ll do anything else instead.
Terrorism is a political tactic: the attempt to gain a political advantage through threats of destruction.
In the case of the debt ceiling, it’s instructive to read Republican speeches from previous debt-ceiling crises. In 2013, for example, John Boehner acknowledged that the US was on the path to defaulting on its debt if the ceiling wasn’t raised, and acknowledged on another occasion that “Yes, allowing America to default would be irresponsible.” But Republicans didn’t frame this looming disaster as a common peril that they and President Obama should work together to avoid. Instead, Obama should pay for their cooperation by making concessions without getting anything in return. According to Ted Cruz:
Republicans were looking for three things before raising the debt ceiling: a significant structural plan to reduce government spending, no new taxes, and measures to “mitigate the harm from Obamacare.”
So Obama should scrap his signature program while agreeing to spending cuts Republicans wanted, with no indication of any priority Republicans might compromise on. The upshot was just: “Do what we want, or the country gets it.”
Next summer’s crisis. A new hostage-taking crisis was in the background of this week’s speaker election. Nearly all the 20 Republican holdouts who blocked Kevin McCarthy’s election for 14 ballots were also supporters of the January 6 insurrection, and are now gearing up for debt-ceiling battle. They were terrorists two years ago, and they’re terrorists now.
McCarthy critic Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said he wanted McCarthy to devise a debt-limit deal suitable to fiscal conservatives. “Is he willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling? That’s a non-negotiable item.”
We can only hope that Norman and other Republican congressmen understand the difference between a government shutdown and a debt default, or that they will pay attention when someone explains it to them.
CNN reported being told by anti-McCarthy holdout Scott Perry that he had gotten a promise from McCarthy that he would oppose a clean debt-ceiling increase, i.e., one with no ransom demands. The procedural concessions McCarthy has made mean that he can be recalled as speaker if he doesn’t negotiate a high enough ransom. Jonathan Chait doubts that any amount of ransom will be enough.
Imagine a Republican Speaker — any Republican Speaker — figuring out a ransom that almost the entire caucus could agree on. The intraparty dynamics virtually guarantee that anything a Republican leader could agree to would immediately be seen on the far right as too little. All is to say that even if you think Biden ought to negotiate a debt-ceiling-ransom demand, it’s now a practical impossibility.
What the government spends money on. Like balanced budget, the phrase spending cuts tends to poll well in the abstract. There’s a widespread feeling — especially on the right, but also in the electorate at large — that the government spends too much money.
The problem is that most people who feel that way don’t have a clear notion of what the government spends money on. They imagine a budget full of foreign aid, welfare payments to people who don’t want to work, and boondoggle projects that don’t serve any purpose.
If you look at where the money actually goes, though, it’s clear that you can’t make a sizeable dent in federal spending without cutting health care, pensions, or defense. As the population ages, an ever-increasing amount of money will get spent on Social Security and Medicare.
When you understand the reality of federal spending, you see that any serious balance-the-budget deal that doesn’t include major tax increases will have to make significant cuts in Social Security and Medicare. And the Republicans have never run on that platform. “Cut Social Security and Medicare so that the rich can keep the Trump tax cuts” is an absolutely suicidal political platform. That’s why the only way to implement it is through terrorism. They’ll never get there through the democratic process.
The best-case scenario. The main power of the Speaker is to control what comes up for a vote in the House. But there is a way around it: a discharge petition. If a majority of the House members sign a petition to bring a bill to the floor, the Speaker has to allow a vote on it.
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick suggested that a discharge petition might be how the debt ceiling gets raised. It would only take five Republicans and all the Democrats to make that happen.
The problem, though, is similar to the problem of impeaching Trump a few years ago: The Republicans who signed such a petition would be marked for primary challenges and probably voted out.
Are there still five Republicans in Congress with that kind of courage? We may find out.
So Brazil is having its own January 6. I don’t do breaking news on this blog, so you might want to check BBC or some other news source to see what’s happening.
The news this week was dominated by the House failing to elect a speaker for 14 ballots before Kevin McCarthy finally got through on the 15th. That was all very dramatic and historic, but not of any direct significance to the typical American.
The importance of that battle is more what it portends about future must-pass legislation. The House allowed itself to be frozen in place for four days. Fortunately, no crisis arose that required it to take action. (What if this had happened in 2021, when the House needed to join the Senate in counting electoral votes?)
The same people who blocked McCarthy for 14 ballots also want to block any increase in the debt ceiling, which needs to happen by this summer. It’s not clear yet what deals McCarthy made with them, but the signs all point to another debt-ceiling crisis like we had in 2011 and 2013. In case you’ve forgotten what that all entails, I’ll be posting “The Debt Ceiling: a (p)review”. It should be out before 10 EST.
I haven’t decided yet whether the various aspects of the speaker battle belong in a second featured post or will be incorporated in the weekly summary. If there is a separate post, it should be out 11ish. The summary will also include the January 6 anniversary, Biden’s trip to the border, the December jobs report, a pandemic update, a new water crisis in Jackson, a new record for police killings, and a few other things. It should be out between noon and 1.
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The Weekly Sift 