The Weekly Sift

What better way to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday than to spend several days discussing whether we want to accept immigrants from the “shithole countries” in Africa, or whether we should instead try to attract more Norwegians?

Ordinarily, I try to follow the principle Rachel Maddow laid out at the beginning of the Trump administration, and not waste too much energy on he-said-a-bad-thing stories. He’s been saying bad things from the beginning, everybody knows he says bad things, and even so, enough people voted for him that the Electoral College was able to make him president.

This bad thing, though, is a little different: It sums up a lot of what his administration has been doing, and breaks through his own misleading rhetoric. Too often, Trump and his followers hide behind opposition to illegal immigration. They pretend that the problem has something to do with national security and the rule of law: We just can’t have all these people ignoring our immigration procedures and coming across our borders without filing the proper paperwork and waiting their turn. Who knows what kind of criminals might be coming in?

But the shithole discussion was about legal immigration: How many people do we want to let in from where? The shithole comment puts a theme around a number of Trump actions that have nothing to do with anything illegal: cutting the number of well-screened war-refugees we’ll accept from Syria, sending back refugees from natural disasters in Haiti and El Salvador, and so on. Those people got in legally, and we know exactly who they are. They haven’t been causing any more trouble than our native-born citizens do.

The problem is that they’re not white. Trump’s America is a country for whites, and especially for English-speaking Christian whites. Every black or brown or Muslim or Spanish-speaking person we let in dilutes that America. It’s not that we’re too crowded, it’s that we should be reserving our open space for more Norwegians and other Europeans.

That’s the point of view that motivates the immigration policies of Trump and his base, and yet it rarely gets discussed openly. Maybe now it will. So this week’s featured post will be “The Real Immigration Issue”.

I’m way behind this morning. (I spent most of the week writing the MLK Sunday sermon I gave yesterday. You’ll see the text eventually.) So it probably won’t come out until 11 or so. The weekly summary — DACA, Oprah 2020, the Hawaiian false alarm, gerrymandering, and some other things — might not be out until 1.

If you want something to read in the meantime, look at a post I wrote in 2013 about the real Martin Luther King, the one who had a radical message for America, and wasn’t the why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along guy that we so often hear about today.

For the last few weeks, I’d been treating Roy Moore’s victory as a done deal. Alabama’s mainstream Republicans, I was sure, would bemoan their fate and agonize about their choice, but in the end they’d do what Republicans always do and vote Republican, no matter how reprehensible Moore was. And mostly they did, but there were just enough defectors that a big turnout of black voters could push Doug Jones over the top.

I’m using that upset as a current-events hook for an article I’ve been working on for a while: a discussion of Daniel Ziblatt’s book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. Ziblatt is a historian and his book is about the evolution of democracy in Europe from 1848-1950, but it’s hard not to make the connection to the Trump era in America. Ziblatt claims that countries that developed a healthy conservative party (like Britain) had a smooth evolution towards democracy, while countries without such a party zig-zagged from revolution to counter-revolution (like Germany).

Ziblatt’s focus is the rise of democracy, but it’s an obvious extension to wonder about its decline: We have a very unhealthy conservative party, one that has come unmoored from its traditional stances. The party leadership can’t stand up to outside forces (i.e., big donors and pressure groups like the NRA), while its base has drifted towards being a personality cult.

It’s tempting for Democrats to react with glee when the GOP nominates beatable candidates like Roy Moore, but it’s also an ominous development: Democracy needs a healthy conservative party, and America has a sick one. I’ll examine that idea in more detail in “Should We Care What Happens to the GOP’s Soul?” That should be out around 9 EST.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: not just the nitty-gritty of the Jones/Moore results, but also tax reform, the attacks against the Mueller investigation, the end of net neutrality, seven words Trump won’t let the CDC use, and more. It will be out later than usual, maybe not until after noon.

Some weeks the important things are obvious: the tax reform bill and Mike Flynn.

Thursday afternoon, when the Joint Committee on Taxation report removed the last possibility of arguing with a straight face that the tax cut wouldn’t blow up the deficit, or that middle-class families would be major beneficiaries, I didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that the bill was dead. But I thought some kind of retreat would happen, because the gist of the whole thing had become pretty clear: “We’re going to borrow a bunch of money and hand it out to the very rich.” I didn’t see how they could go forward with that.

They did. I admit it; I was stunned. I’m still kind of amazed. So that’s the subject of this week’s featured post, “The Brazen Cynicism of the Tax-Reform Vote”. It should be out around 9 EST.

The weekly summary covers Flynn up to a point, but I’m trying to let events unfold without obsessing over speculation. I also mention the week’s other depressing development (after tax reform): Without any new development in his favor, Roy Moore’s popularity seems to be rebounding. There’s a new short film putting the Stone Mountain Confederate monument into perspective, and a few other things have been happening. I’ll close with a card-trick video I can’t explain.

It was a big relief to me when Ralph Northam won the Virginia governor’s race by a wide margin. His opponent had been making a Trumpish white-identity-politics push, running against sanctuary cities (which Virginia doesn’t have) and Hispanic gangs, and in favor of continuing to celebrate the Confederacy. Some polls indicated that it was working, which said something I didn’t want to believe about Virginia and America and democracy in general. If Ed Gillespie had won, we’d see similarly ugly campaigns across the country in 2018, and maybe they’d work too.

It didn’t work. Northam won by a clear 9%, and Democrats held a similar margin in elections for Virginia’s lower house — though gerrymandering might allow Republicans to maintain control anyway. I’ll do a post mortem of the campaign and the exit polls in the featured post “What Did Virginia Teach Us?” That should be out by 10 EST.

The week’s other big story was Roy Moore. I still haven’t decided whether to leave my Moore observations in the weekly summary or pull them out into their own post. Then there was Senate Republicans’ tax-reform bill, which — even though they plan to pass it by Christmas — still isn’t a serious proposal, because it doesn’t fulfill the reconciliation rules they’ll need to get it through. They’re continuing to set up a replay of ObamaCare repeal, where no one will know what the bill really says until it’s time to vote. Then there were Trump’s comments siding with Putin over the “political hacks” who run the U.S. intelligence services, the sexual abuse scandals that continue to erupt everywhere you look, and some really bad theology. The summary will cover all that before closing with an animoji version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. That should be out by noon.

The big news event today will probably happen a few seconds after I get done posting: Robert Mueller will announce his first indictment(s). I’m rooting for Michael Flynn to get the go-to-jail-free card, but it’s a credit to the investigation that nobody really knows. There’s a chance it’ll be somebody whose significance will only become apparent later.

But even without that story, it’s been a pretty eventful week: Jeff Flake denounced Trump on the Senate floor, and then announced he wasn’t running for re-election. Congress passed a budget resolution that sets up tax reform. Trump gave his opioid speech. We found out more about the Steele dossier and Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russians. The Puerto Rico crisis continued. There were a series of the-swamp-is-not-draining stories, beginning with Congress shielding the big banks from class-action lawsuits. The Catalonia-independence story got more contentious.

This week’s featured article will be about tax reform, sort of. I decided to take a step back and consider the larger question of: Why does every major bill the Republican majority tries to pass go through this weird process? You know what I mean: They are rush-rush about everything except writing the bill.

We saw it over and over again with the various versions of ObamaCare repeal — one of the Senate bills was a mystery until the day they voted on it — and now it’s happening again with tax reform. They have an ambitious schedule to pass tax reform by Thanksgiving, but they still don’t have a bill to pass. (By contrast, the first ObamaCare bill was introduced eight months before a later version passed.)

It’s not like the process worked so well with healthcare that they want to do it again, but they’re doing it again. Why? I’ll discuss that in “The Real Reason Republicans Can’t Pass Major Legislation”. That should be out before 10 EDT. The weekly summary should follow by 11 or 12.