This week the separating-families-at-the-border issue blew up, with even Republicans trying to distance themselves from it. Hostage-taking has been part of the Republican toolbox at least since the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, but it has never been done this nakedly before. Trump is terrorizing young children, and promises to keep doing it until his demands are met. He wants a wall, changes in immigration laws, and safe passage to a country of his choice. (OK, I made that last one up.)
More significant reports were issued this week than I was able to read. There was the NY attorney general’s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, the Supreme Court’s OK of Ohio’s voter suppression plan, and the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation. I’ll have to rely on other people’s opinions on most of that.
Oh, and North Korea. Remember North Korea? That’s so last week, but people have been making up their minds about the outcome of the Trump/Kim summit. My opinion is that we’ll be lucky if it turns out to have been just a big photo op. A far worse outcome is that Trump makes a bad deal and then can’t admit it, so to protect his own ego he winds up covering for Kim’s misbehavior (in much the same way that he has been covering for Putin).
What I like to do with the Sift is mention and link to the important stories of the week, but also take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This week’s big-picture view de-wonkifies a Paul Krugman column that explains something important: There’s a reason why the big corporate tax cut passed in December is never going to trickle down to workers, and it has to do with the difference between an information economy and an industrial economy. We all sort of know that things are different now, but still a lot of our economic intuitions come from the age of Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. That article “The corporate tax cut will never trickle down” should be out before 9 EDT.
Another long-view question I want to raise is whether Trumpism is turning into a religion. As the majority of evangelicals continue to support him (in defiance of just about everything Jesus ever said) and the anti-Trump minority begins to peel off, more and more people are starting to use religion as a metaphor for Trumpism. But what if it isn’t a metaphor? What if Trumpism is really, literally becoming a new American religion? I still haven’t decided whether that’s its own article or just a paragraph or two in the weekly summary.
There’s still a lot to do on the summary, so I’ll be lucky to get it out by noon.
This week everybody was talking about summit meetings
For the G-7 meeting in Quebec, Trump arrived late and left early, skipping sessions on trivialities like climate change. After leaving, he tweeted a denunciation of the host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and instructed the remaining US representatives not to sign the meeting-concluding joint communique that he had previously agreed to. (That is so Trump: For all his apparent bluster, he can’t handle face-to-face confrontation. He’ll leave and then tweet something nasty from the road.)
Trump described the US as “the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing”, and threatened to cut off trade with the other G-7 countries entirely:
It’s going to stop. Or we’ll stop trading with them. And that’s a very profitable answer, if we have to do it.
There is so much wrong with this. First, remember who we’re talking about here. These are our most trusted allies: Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Japan. If we want to solve any of our real trade problems (like getting China to respect our intellectual property), we’ll need them on our side.
And second, Trump continues to display a child’s understanding of international trade: If the US has a trade deficit with a country, he imagines that cutting off trade with them results in a “profit”, as if everything stays the same except that we now have back all the money we would have spent in the other country.
According to [the theory espoused by Trump’s economic advisors], if the United States made it illegal to import oil, thus wiping $180 billion off the trade deficit, our GDP would rise by $180 billion. With labor constituting 44 percent of GDP, that would mean about $80 billion worth of higher wages for American workers. So why doesn’t Congress take this simple, easy step to boost growth and create jobs?
Well, because it’s ridiculous.
What would actually happen is that gasoline would become much more expensive, consumers would need to cut back spending on non-gasoline items, businesses would face a higher cost structure, and the overall economy would slow down with inflation-adjusted incomes falling.
Third, Trump has no power to cut off trade with other countries, and Congress isn’t going to give it to him. Foreign leaders know that he’s just blustering. To re-purpose a John Kelly insult: Empty barrels make the most noise.
To our allies: bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization & supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values. Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.
He didn’t put America first; Russia first would be a better description. And he didn’t demand drastic policy changes from our allies; he demanded that they stop doing bad things they aren’t doing. This wasn’t a tough stance on behalf of American interests, it was a declaration of ignorance and policy insanity.
… Was there any strategy behind Trump’s behavior? Well, it was pretty much exactly what he would have done if he really is Putin’s puppet: yelling at friendly nations about sins they aren’t committing won’t bring back American jobs, but it’s exactly what someone who does want to break up the Western alliance would like to see.
BTW: Trump’s proposal to let Putin back into the G-7 isn’t just servile, it makes no sense (as Krugman points out): The G-7 is an economic forum of democratic countries. Russia is an autocracy and its economy is tiny; it never belonged in this group. If the G-7 wants to expand, Brazil and India are much better candidates. And if nobody cares about democracy any more, China should be there.
In a different column, Krugman points out something important: The more Trump insults other democratic countries and acts like he has the whip hand over them, the less those countries’ leaders can offer him.
Real countries have real politics; they have pride; and their electorates really, really don’t like Trump. This means that even if their leaders might want to make concessions, their voters probably won’t allow it.
You can see this most clearly in Mexico: Trump is poison in Mexico. Any leader who refused to stand up to him would be committing political suicide.
Trump’s tough talk, then, is purely for the consumption of his base. If he were really trying to negotiate something that would help American workers, he’d “speak softly and carry a big stick” when he dealt with other democratic leaders.
Trump is also spreading joy and happiness in Germany, where his new ambassador has said that he wants to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe”. Diplomats typically do not visibly interfere in the politics of their host countries. The ambassador doubled down in the face of criticism: “I stand by my comments that we are experiencing an awakening from the silent majority – those who reject the elites & their bubble. Led by Trump.” In Germany, the “elites” include Angela Merkel and her government.
Trump is on to Singapore, where he is scheduled to meet with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un tomorrow morning.
and immigrant children
Since May 7, the Trump administration has been routinely separating children from their parents when they arrive at our southern border. Vox has a good article describing what’s new about this and what isn’t. The big thing that’s new is that we’re not even trying to claim that we’re doing this for the children’s own good. The policy is purely punitive; it’s meant to discourage people from coming to America without a visa.
It’s worth pointing out that people who come here seeking asylum are not breaking the law if they present themselves at an official border crossing. Trump has characterized our asylum laws, which require some kind of due process for asylum seekers, as a “loophole”.
To me, it’s the government that seems to be taking advantage of loopholes.
So now they can deport her. Back to a country where said rebels now run the government.
I cover the legal side of the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision in a featured post.
I wanted that article to have a tone that is opinionated, but not abrasive. But here I want to get more argumentative: I think the media as a whole, and liberals in particular, have been way too soft on special-rights-seeking people who claim to be motivated by Christianity. We’ve been way too willing to grant their claims that their actions have something to do with Jesus, and are motivated by sincere religious faith rather than simple bigotry.
I want to assert a few things:
Wedding cakes do not have, and have never had, religious significance in the Christian tradition. For the wedding at Cana, Jesus did not turn water into cake. Or into flowers or photographs or catering. It is ridiculous to treat cakes for same-sex wedding receptions as if they were communion wafers for a Satanic black mass. (Gorsuch really does invoke a comparison to “sacramental bread”.)
From the beginning of the Republic, civil marriage has been a separate institution from religious marriage. If your Christian religion says that people the state regards as married are not married in the eyes of God, you have the freedom to believe and proclaim that view. But you don’t get to decide whether or not they’re married in the eyes of the state, because that has nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion. And if a couple wants to hold a party to celebrate becoming married in the eyes of the state, that also has nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion.
In the Bible, marriage is not “between one man and one woman”. Often it’s between one man and several women. Example: Jacob and Leah and Rachel and their two handmaidens. If you don’t support that kind of marriage today, then you don’t believe in “Biblical” marriage. You also don’t believe that an unchanging institution of marriage was established by God once and forever. (Justice Kennedy quotes the baker: “God’s intention for marriage from the beginning of history is that it is and should be the union of one man and one woman.” The baker should tell that to whoever wrote Genesis.)
Most of the self-described Christians who refuse to serve same-sex couples are not acting out of sincere religious conviction; they’re acting out of spite. Their side lost the same-sex marriage debate, they’re pissed about it, and they want to take it out on somebody. There is nothing Christ-like about this set of motives. The New Testament does not record any examples of Jesus being a sore loser.
and healthcare
If you’re an insurance company that doesn’t want to cover people with pre-existing conditions, the Trump administration has your back.
Led by Texas, twenty Republican-dominated states are participating in a lawsuit asserting that the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act (i.e., ObamaCare) will become unconstitutional in 2019, when the tax penalty that enforces it goes away. (That was part of last year’s big tax cut bill.) That may sound harmless — who cares if the courts eliminate something that was unpopular to begin with and isn’t going to be enforced any more anyway? — but there’s a kicker: The suit claims that the whole ACA is inseparable from the individual mandate, so it all has to be struck down, including the popular parts like the guarantee of insurance to people with pre-existing conditions.
In other words: If you’re a cancer survivor (like my wife), or have something else in your medical history that makes you a bad risk, you may not be able to get health insurance at all, and if you do it will be exorbitantly expensive.
This suit has been considered a long shot, but its shot got a little less long Thursday when the Justice Department announced that it won’t defend the case in court. (Typically, the Justice Department defends the constitutionality of laws when they are challenged. But on rare occasions, an administration decides that a law is indefensible. That’s what’s happening here and what happened when the Obama Justice Department refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.) Democratic-controlled states like California are expected to step into the breech and lead the defense.
The brief filed by the Justice Department doesn’t agree with Texas that the whole ACA is unconstitutional, but it does agree that two other parts of the ACA are inseparable from the individual mandate and so have to be struck down: guaranteed issue (insurance companies that offer coverage in an area have to offer it to everybody) and community rating (which says that all individuals of the same age in the same community have to be offered the same rate). Those are exactly the parts that protect people with pre-existing conditions.
It’s worth pointing out the reason we’re in this situation: Back in 2012, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to require individuals to buy health insurance. This would have sunk the ACA then and there, but Justice Roberts reinterpreted the individual mandate as a tax. That allowed him to flip and vote for the constitutionality of the ACA, which survived 5-4.
But here’s the interesting part: The idea that an individual mandate exceeded the range of the Commerce Clause was invented from whole cloth to create a pretext for striking down the ACA. Until it became part of the ACA, the mandate — which was originally the brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s — had never been considered constitutionally questionable.
So one conservative long-shot legal argument leads to another, and the upshot is that millions of Americans may lose their health insurance.
The former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee was arrested Thursday on charges of lying to federal investigators probing a leak of information involving a former campaign aide to President Trump.
In the course of the investigation, the government seized several years worth of emails belonging to the staffer’s girlfriend, who is a New York Times reporter. The case is making journalists nervous about how far the government is now willing to go to track down leaks.
and the NFL
Last Monday, the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles were disinvited from the White House visit scheduled for the next day, because not enough of them were going to show up to suit Trump. Instead he held a patriotic rally that seems to have been attended mainly by White House staffers and interns. During the ceremony, Trump appeared not to know the words to “God Bless America”.
Trump has decided that portraying black football players as unpatriotic is a winning issue for him, so he’s going to keep doing it. This has got to be a disappointment to the NFL owners, who changed their policy specifically to try to mollify the President. Under the new rules, players can stay in the locker room during the national anthem if they want, but if they come onto the field they have to stand at attention. Kneeling — no matter how silently and respectfully it is done — will result in a fine for the team, which may decide to pass that fine on to the player.
But Trump is not having that. “No escaping to locker rooms” he tweeted. Previously he had said:
You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. Or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.
the E.P.A. has in most cases decided to exclude from its calculations any potential exposure caused by the substances’ presence in the air, the ground or water, according to more than 1,500 pages of documents released last week by the agency.
Instead, the agency will focus on possible harm caused by direct contact with a chemical in the workplace or elsewhere. The approach means that the improper disposal of chemicals — leading to the contamination of drinking water, for instance — will often not be a factor in deciding whether to restrict or ban them.
The big winner here is the chemical industry. The big losers are anybody who breathes air or drinks water and was hoping not to get cancer.
Former Fox News military analyst Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters (retired): As a former military officer of the United States, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And I saw, in my view, Fox — particularly their prime time hosts — attacking our constitutional order, the rule of law, the Justice Department, the FBI, Robert Mueller, and (oh, by the way) the intelligence agencies. And they’re doing it for ratings and profit, and they’re doing it knowingly — in my view, doing a grave, grave disservice to our country.
Anderson Cooper: Do you think, some of the hosts in prime time, do they believe the stuff they’re saying about the Deep State, what they’re saying about the Department of Justice, about the FBI?
Lt. Colonel Peters: I suspect Sean Hannity really believes it. The others are smarter. They know what they’re doing.
When somebody from the White House says some awful thing, it’s hard to know whether to take the bait. If we ignore it, we normalize it. (“Oh yeah, public officials say shit like that. It’s no big deal.”) If we pay attention, we’ve let ourselves be distracted from the ongoing destruction of the environment, the decay of the rule of law, the plight of the Puerto Ricans, the alienation of America’s allies, the mistreatment of families who come here looking for asylum under our laws, the opening of a misguided trade war, and lots of other more immediately consequential stuff.
But OK, Rudy Giuliani, I’m taking the bait this time.
In Israel, Giuliani went on to criticize Daniels’ credibility and allegation she had an affair with Trump because she is a porn star. “Look at his three wives. Beautiful women. Classy women. Women of great substance. Stormy Daniels?” Giuliani said while shaking his head. “I’m sorry I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.” …
On Thursday, Giuliani was asked to explain his comments. “So the point I made about her industry is, it’s an industry in which you sell looks at your body for money. That’s demeaning to women, the way I was brought up and the way I always believed the feminist movement has,” Giuliani said.
During the campaign, I objected to Trump critics trying to make an issue of Melania’s nude photos, because they’re irrelevant to how America is governed and “because I believe all of us have the right to display or not display our bodies as we see fit”. But if the president’s lawyer is going to claim there’s some difference-of-kind between Melania and Stormy Daniels because Daniels sells looks at her body for money, I have to call him on it. (And point out that Trump himself has appeared in three porn films, though he was clothed at the time.)
And as for who is credible, based on their previous actions, let me point out a few things Stormy Daniels hasn’t done:
I imagine a lot of people have fantasized about being Anthony Bourdain, the star of CNN’s Peabody-winning “Parts Unknown” series, in which he traveled the world eating exotic food and meeting the people who made it. That was probably the most enviable job on television.
Bourdain’s suicide, coming so soon after that of fashion designer Kate Spade, has sparked a lot of discussion about depression. (I’m not sure we really know that either was depressed at the time, but it’s a plausible assumption.) Here’s my contribution to that conversation.
No one close to me has committed suicide, but I have watched both parents and at least one close friend deal with depression. I’ve also skirted the borderlands of depression myself on occasion. In my view, the most insidious thing about it is that it first attacks the faculties that you will need to fight it off. (That’s why all the “snap out of it” advice never works. The command center that could have received and acted on that message has already fallen.) You may not even notice what’s happening until the depression has you encircled.
That’s why I think everyone needs to set alarms at the border, so that you notice the slide while you still have the resources to turn things around. In my case, I’ve flagged two thought patterns. Whenever either of them shows up, I’m in danger and need to implement high standards of mental hygiene:
I can’t lean on my friends because they aren’t really my friends. Secretly, it would give them satisfaction to know that I’m doing badly.
I can still imagine things that would make me happy, but feel like they’re not worth the bother. Whether or not I enjoy my life is really not that important.
Those are mine; you may have other typical borderland thoughts. Try to identify them and notice when they start showing up.
So what are “high standards of mental hygiene”? Obvious stuff, mostly: Eat right, sleep well, get exercise, drop unrewarding responsibilities that cause unnecessary stress, indulge any creativity or playfulness you happen to notice in yourself (even if it seems silly), spend time with people who love you (and trust that they really do), expose yourself to whatever kind of beauty moves you. If you know any children who aren’t your responsibility, they tend to make good companions: They are naturally playful, and it’s hard to believe that they are devious enough to fake caring about you.
None of that cures a depression after you’re in it. But if you’re not quite there yet, maybe you don’t have to go.
Technically, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the baker. But it didn’t endorse any of the larger points he raised. What, if anything, does this mean for future cases?
You’ve probably already heard the basics of the case: In 2012, before same-sex marriage was legal in their state, Charlie Craig and David Mullins were planning to get married in Massachusetts, and then have a wedding reception back home in Colorado. They went to Masterpiece Cakeshop to order a custom-designed wedding cake, but the owner, Jack Phillips, refused to discuss it with them. Attributing his position to his Christian faith, he said he couldn’t be involved in celebrating a same-sex marriage. Craig and Mullins sued under Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, and they won at every level. So Phillips appealed to the Supreme Court.
What everybody expected. The case was supposed to be a 5-4 decision, as all nearly all the same-sex marriage decisions have been. Four conservatives (Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Gorsuch) would line up with Phillips and four liberals (Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan) with Craig and Mullins, with Justice Kennedy casting the deciding vote, as he usually does.
Nobody was too sure what he would do. He has authored (badly, in my opinion) most of the landmark gay-rights decisions of recent years, but (as part of the 5-4 majority in Hobby Lobby) he also was also known to be sympathetic to the kinds of religious-liberty arguments Phillips was making.
However this case came out, though, we were all sure it would have sweeping consequences: Either the Court would affirm that gays and lesbians have to be treated like everyone else, or it would establish “sincere religious belief” as a permanent loophole in our discrimination laws. [1]That’s not what happened.
Instead, the Court decided 7-2 that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission hadn’t handled this particular case with proper respect for Phillips’ religious views, and so the Court threw out the decision against him. Essentially, we’re back to Square One: It’s as if Craig and Mullins had never filed their complaint.
Here’s how limited the decision is: If tomorrow another same-sex couple goes to Masterpiece Cakeshop asking for a wedding cake and Phillips turns them down, nobody knows what will happen next.
This is how that 7-2 breaks down:
Thomas. Justice Thomas went whole-heartedly for the baker’s argument: Phillips is an artist, and the government cannot command him to create a message he finds abhorrent. Quoting previous free-speech cases, he says:
Forcing Phillips to make custom wedding cakes for same-sex marriages requires him to, at the very least, acknowledge that same- sex weddings are “weddings” and suggest that they should be celebrated—the precise message he believes his faith forbids. The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from requiring Phillips to “bear witness to [these] fact[s],” or to “affir[m] . . . a belief with which [he] disagrees.”
Gorsuch and Alito. Justices Gorsuch and Alito (with Gorsuch writing for both of them) believe that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission has itself discriminated against Phillips because of its hostility to his religious views. They see Phillips’ case as being equivalent to that of William Jack, who intentionally tried to create such a comparison.
[Jack] approached three bakers and asked them to prepare cakes with messages disapproving same-sex marriage on religious grounds. All three bakers refused Mr. Jack’s request, stating that they found his request offensive to their secular convictions. But the Division declined to find a violation, reasoning that the bakers didn’t deny Mr. Jack service because of his religious faith but because the cakes he sought were offensive to their own moral convictions.
… The facts show that the two cases share all legally salient features. In both cases, the effect on the customer was the same: bakers refused service to persons who bore a statutorily protected trait (religious faith or sexual orientation). But in both cases the bakers refused service intending only to honor a personal conviction. To be sure, the bakers knew their conduct promised the effect of leaving a customer in a protected class unserved. But there’s no indication the bakers actually intended to refuse service because of a customer’s protected characteristic. We know this because all of the bakers explained without contradiction that they would not sell the requested cakes to anyone, while they would sell other cakes to members of the protected class (as well as to anyone else).
… Only one way forward now remains. Having failed to afford Mr. Phillips’s religious objections neutral consideration and without any compelling reason for its failure, the Commission must afford him the same result it afforded the bakers in Mr. Jack’s case.
So that’s three votes for the baker’s case on the merits. Two more votes and Phillips would get the kind of result he (and the Alliance for Defending Freedom, the Christian-religious-liberty organization arguing his case) had been hoping for: At least in Colorado, bakeries (and presumably florists and caterers and all kinds of other businesses) would be free to deny their services to same-sex couples.
Kagan and Breyer. But you may have noticed a problem in the Gorsuch-Alito reasoning. How could they say Phillips “would not sell the requested cakes to anyone”, when he happily makes wedding cakes for opposite-sex couples? That’s because in their reasoning, a gay wedding cake is a thing. Phillips also wouldn’t sell a “cake celebrating same-sex marriage” to Craig’s mother, who is straight, so he’s not just refusing to sell to gays.
Justices Kagan and Breyer (Kagan writing) found this ridiculous. There is no such thing as a gay wedding cake. The product is just a wedding cake, and the fact that the cake will find its way to either a same-sex or opposite-sex wedding reception does not make it a different product.
And that’s the difference between the Phillips case and the Jack case: The anti-gay message in the Jack case was on the cake. (One cake would have said “God hates sin. Psalm 45:7” on one side and “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2” on the other. Another Jack cake would have put a red X over an image of two groomsmen holding hands.) In the Phillips case the only problem was in the use of the cake and who was using it. Phillips might legally have refused to put overt pro-gay symbols or messages on the cake (say, a rainbow flag). But refusing to make any wedding cake, even one identical to one he would make for an opposite-sex couple, was discrimination.
However, Kagan and Breyer found that the Civil Rights Commission didn’t make that argument properly, and instead some of the commissioners made statements hostile to Phillips religion. This created the impression that the commissioners were responding to their personal beliefs rather than legal principles: They found Jack’s message offensive, but not the Craig-Mullin wedding cake. In short: The CRC could have justified the findings it made, but it didn’t, so its decision in this particular case should be thrown out.
Ginsburg and Sotomayor. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor (Ginsburg writing) spelled out in more detail the difference between the Jack and Phillips cases:
Phillips declined to make a cake he found offensive where the offensiveness of the product was determined solely by the identity of the customer requesting it. The three other bakeries declined to make cakes where their objection to the product was due to the demeaning message the requested product would literally display.
Ginsburg and Sotomayor scoff at Gorsuch’s notion that the product was a “cake celebrating same-sex marriage”.
When a couple contacts a bakery for a wedding cake, the product they are seeking is a cake celebrating their wedding—not a cake celebrating heterosexual weddings or same-sex weddings—and that is the service Craig and Mullins were denied.
The merits of the case matter more than any procedural errors the Commission may have made.
I see no reason why the comments of one or two Commissioners should be taken to overcome Phillips’ refusal to sell a wedding cake to Craig and Mullins. The proceedings involved several layers of independent decisionmaking, of which the Commission was but one.
The Colorado Court of Appeals, Ginsburg notes, “considered the case de novo“. (In other words: It started over, and considered the case on its merits rather than on the basis of what the Commission had done.)
What prejudice infected the determinations of the adjudicators in the case before and after the Commission? The Court does not say.
In a footnote, Ginsburg-Sotomayor also tear up Thomas’ free-speech argument: A message may be in Phillips’ mind, but it isn’t in the cake unless other people can see it there.
The record in this case is replete with Jack Phillips’ own views on the messages he believes his cakes convey. But Phillips submitted no evidence showing that an objective observer understands a wedding cake to convey a message, much less that the observer understands the message to be the baker’s, rather than the marrying couple’s.
It comes down to Kennedy and Roberts. So three justices agree with the baker on the merits and four don’t. But two of the four also find procedural problems in the rulings against the baker. So it’s already clear that the baker will win the case: The judgment against him will be thrown out. The question for the remaining two justices — Kennedy and Roberts — to decide is whether the Court will create a precedent that similar cases can appeal to.
Roberts’ thinking is usually subtle and often hidden. He will, at times, rule in a way that technically upholds a precedent, while re-interpreting it in a way that will ultimately undo it in subsequent cases. (In a current case that I’ll discuss in the weekly summary, his decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in 2012 is now the basis for a new case claiming it is unconstitutional. He does that kind of thing.)
Roberts is happiest when he is changing society in a conservative, pro-wealth, or pro-business direction, but doing it behind the scenes. He doesn’t want the Court to make the kind of waves that could result in a major political backlash. (So, for example, he will write a decision that celebrates the principles behind the Voting Rights Act, while gutting the provisions that enforce it.)
This case is not Roberts’ style. He doesn’t want to author a sweeping takedown of anti-discrimination laws, and Kennedy isn’t going to go for that anyway. Also, he knows that the wind is blowing against him here. More and more, society accepts gay rights. The kind of sweeping decision Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito want won’t look good in five or ten years.
So on this case he will keep his powder dry, uphold his (mostly false) image as a moderate, and go with what Kennedy wants.
Kennedy wants this case to go away. The decisions leading up to the full legalization of same-sex marriage (in Obergfell) are his legacy. When he eventually dies, that’s what his obituary will be about. He doesn’t want that record tarnished, least of all by his own decision.
But Kennedy is an empathy-based judge rather than a principles-based judge. [2] In this case, he seems to empathize with both sides: Craig and Mullin just wanted to have the same kind of wedding reception anybody else might have. Phillips didn’t want to be forced to act against what he saw as his religious convictions.
So the deciding Kennedy-Roberts opinion lets the baker off the hook on the narrowest possible grounds, without giving future courts anything to work with in similar cases.
When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission considered this case, it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires. Given all these considerations, it is proper to hold that whatever the outcome of some future controversy involving facts similar to these, the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause; and its order must be set aside.
So the baker wins. But Kennedy leaves the larger issues open.
Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth. For that reason the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights. The exercise of their freedom on terms equal to others must be given great weight and respect by the courts. At the same time, the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression. [3]
I find myself sharing the concern Sarah Posner expressed in The Nation: “how assiduously Justice Kennedy labored to find government ‘hostility’ to Phillips’s religion”. If a judge searches the record hard enough, with hyper-sensitivity to a hostility that he has pre-decided must be there, won’t he always be able to find some evidence of anti-religious bias somewhere?
What will be the evidence of such supposed animus in the next case? A question from a judge at oral arguments? Deposition questions by government attorneys? That is the crucial open question from Masterpiece—not whether the next case will be more winnable for a gay couple without Masterpiece’s specific facts, but how hard opponents of LGBTQ rights will work to convince the courts that similar specific facts exist in that case, too.
What next? Neither side can take comfort in the numbers. Seven justices looks like a solid majority for the conservative side, but four of the seven are only citing procedural reasons for objecting to the Commission’s ruling, and not saying they should have ruled in the baker’s favor.
Similarly, six justices reaffirm that anti-discrimination laws can apply to gay couples, whose “dignity and worth” is not inferior to opposite-sex couples. But Roberts cannot be trusted. If he could have formed a conservative majority on the other side, he quite likely would have.
So here’s where I think we are: Roberts is stalling, with the hope of getting another conservative appointment out of Trump before the Court has to make a definitive ruling. If he gets that extra conservative justice, then the Court will rule decisively to gut anti-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians, using “sincere religious belief” as the loophole.
In the meantime, look for a series of cases like this one, decided on the narrowest possible terms, and usually in favor of the conservative side.
[1] Phillips’ defenders argue that discrimination against gays is special in some way, but it’s hard to see how. When inter-racial marriage was controversial, the arguments against it were also framed in religious terms. Slavery, segregation, discrimination against women — pretty much every kind of bigotry roots itself in religion when other supports start to fail. If “sincere religious belief” allows discrimination against Craig and Mullins, it’s hard to see how any discrimination law stands up.
BTW: Notice what I didn’t say there. I didn’t say that Christianity or any other religion is inherently bigoted. I’m saying that bigots will cloak themselves in religion, and will cherry-pick sacred texts to justify their bigotry. If courts let them get away with this dodge, anti-discrimination laws will be toothless.
[2] That is what has driven me nuts in his previous rulings. He consistently fails to enunciate principles that lower-court judges can apply, instead making what are essentially political arguments that one side or the other deserves to prevail. That is why same-sex marriage cases kept going to the Supreme Court. Kennedy’s opinions were murky, and lower-court judges disagreed about what they meant. Eventually each new case had to come back to Kennedy so that he could interpret himself.
[3] This kind of writing also drives social conservatives nuts. “Our society has come to the recognition …” What kind of legal principle is that?
Kennedy consistently acts the part of the stereotypic liberal-activist-judge who projects his own moral convictions onto the law. Ginsburg is much more liberal than Kennedy, but you’ll never find that kind of mushiness in her opinions. She defines terms, cites precedents, and enunciates principles that lower-court judges can apply with confidence.
Trump is in Singapore, awaiting his meeting with Kim Jong Un. He just left the G-7 summit in Quebec with all our allies mad at us and a trade war brewing, so mission accomplished there. (It takes real talent to piss off the Canadians; most politicians couldn’t manage it.) The main debate about his G-7 performance is whether he’s destroying the alliance of western democracies intentionally or through incompetence. Presumably, this week he will find the company of an absolute dictator more congenial.
But domestic news doesn’t slow down just because the President is making foreign mischief. The Justice Department has just signed onto a case that would declare the pre-existing-condition parts of ObamaCare unconstitutional. We’re running out of space to store all the immigrant children we’re taking away from their parents. A leak case against a Senate committee staffer is invading the workspace of a NYT reporter in new ways, setting up some First Amendment issues. The Supreme Court issued a murky ruling on the case of the anti-gay baker. The EPA gave a major win to the makers of toxic chemicals.
Plus, there’s stuff that stirs up public debate and discussion, even if it doesn’t have major policy consequences. Trump insulted and lied about the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. Anthony Bourdain, the guy who arguably had the best job on TV, committed suicide. Rudy Giuliani slut-shamed Stormy Daniels.
So here’s how I’m going to handle this week: The featured post will take apart the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, and what the divergent opinions mean for future cases. That should be out by 10 EDT.
The rest of it I’ll discuss in the weekly summary. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
I want to be very clear about one thing: Americans remain our partners, friends, and allies. This is not about the American people. We have to believe that at some point their common sense will prevail. But we see no sign of that in this action today by the U.S. administration.
This week brought back everything that last week seemed to stop
A week ago, the North Korea summit was off and the trade war was “on hold”. Now they’re both back.
The summit is scheduled for a week from tomorrow in Singapore. Until Trump and Kim actually appear, though, who can say whether it will really happen? Originally, Trump implied that the meeting would signal North Korea’s complete denuclearization, for which he should win a Nobel Peace Prize. Now it’s just supposed to “start a process“.
Back in March, Trump announced tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Then he appeared to back down, temporarily exempting Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. The time limit on that exemption ran out Thursday without Trump getting the concessions he wanted, so the tariffs are back on.
The affected countries are retaliating. Canada seems particularly offended by the pretext for the tariffs: Trump is exercising powers the president has under a national security provision. Essentially he is saying that Canada can’t be trusted to continue selling us metals we need for our defense industries.
Tariffs on Chinese goods were announced Tuesday, to take effect “shortly after” the complete list of goods affected is released on June 15. China also plans to retaliate.
For a guy whose book is called The Art of the Deal, Trump’s negotiating style seems particularly artless: He makes threats and demands concessions. If other countries don’t yield to his demands, he seems to have no Plan B.
and everyone was talking about jobs
The economy added 223K jobs in May. That number was fairly typical of job growth over the last five years, but the accumulation of good job creation over a long period has pushed the unemployment rate down to 3.8%, a number not seen since the end of the Clinton administration, and only briefly then.
and new claims of presidential power
A letter that Trump’s lawyers wrote to Bob Mueller in January got leaked this week. The point of the letter is to argue against Mueller’s need to interview Trump, and along the way it makes an amazing claim: Obstruction of justice laws simply don’t apply to the president, because since he is the highest law-enforcement official “that would amount to obstructing himself”. The President has complete authority to terminate investigations as he sees fit, and to pardon anybody he wants for any reason. The letter recognizes no exception for a president with corrupt intent.
Consider that if the memo is correct, there would be nothing wrong with Trump setting up a booth somewhere in Washington, DC, where wealthy individuals could hand checks to him, and in exchange, he would make whatever federal legal trouble they are in go away. You could call it “The Trump Hotel” and maybe bundle a room to stay in along with the legal impunity.
Trump (and his lawyer Rudy Guiliani) is also claiming that he could pardon himself. Strange that Nixon never thought of that.
and Roseanne
Roseanne Barr managed to get her hit sitcom revival Roseanne cancelled by ABC by tweeting a racist insult at former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett.
Barr’s defenders are using one of the standard conservative tactics: stripping away the context of the insult, making a simplistic comparison to things liberals have said, and then claiming a double standard. (How is claiming Jarrett is the child of apes different from, say, Bill Mahr suggesting Donald Trump was fathered by an orangutan?) As always, they are the victims.
Let me go back to the analysis I wrote in 2015: “Slurs, Who Can Say Them, When, and Why“. (This isn’t the Sift’s most-viewed post because it never had a viral moment, but it is the most consistently popular. After three years, it still reliably gets a few hundred hits every week.) Then I was talking about words like nigger and honky, but the same ideas apply to images and metaphors, like comparing people to apes.
If you just look them up in a dictionary you might think they are equivalent: honky is a racial slur directed at whites, nigger at blacks. What’s the difference?
Usage.
Nigger has centuries of usage behind it, and the connotation of that usage is that blacks are a subhuman race. Nigger evokes a detailed stereotype — lazy, stupid, violent, lustful, dangerous — while honky just says you’re a white guy I don’t like. For centuries, niggers weren’t really people. There’s no equivalent word for whites, because whites have always been seen as people.
Whenever you use a word or an image or a metaphor, you’re not just applying a dictionary meaning. You’re invoking the whole history of the usage. For centuries, whites have compared blacks to apes — sometimes literally claiming they are not a fully human species — in order to portray them as a race of unintelligent subhumans. Barr’s tweet evokes this history.
Given the history of black dehumanization, comparing blacks to animals is always tricky, but it can be done. For example, this cartoon of Obama dressed as a Russian bear does not strike me as racist, because bears are not typical dehumanizing symbols. But this photo-shopped image of Barack and Michelle as apes clearly is.
Trump couldn’t leave this controversy alone, but he also couldn’t condemn Barr’s racism, since she and her racism are typical of an important segment of his base. So he portrayed himself and his daughter as the real victims.
About the Samantha Bee/Ivanka Trump thing: A key point in my “Slurs” analysis is that slurs-that-can-be-turned-around-on-the-slurrer are a completely different category than slurs-that-only-go-one-way.
The various disadvantaged communities are all debating whether or not it’s ever OK to use the slurs themselves. Some argue that when black rappers use nigger, they jam the stereotype rather than perpetuate it. Some women believe that saying bitch is liberating, because it shows the word doesn’t scare them. Others disagree, believing that any use of a slur promotes its stereotypes.
I think this: Those issues are for those communities to figure out. In the unlikely event that they ask my advice, I might give it. But until then, my opinion as a white guy doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.
Samanthan Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” falls into this same category. Overwhelmingly, women who have commented on Bee’s use of cunt have condemned it, which is their right. But men like me and Donald Trump should stay out of that discussion. The propriety of a woman saying cunt is not for us to decide.
but now we have a clearer notion of what Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico
According to a study in the current New England Journal of Medicine, Hurricane Maria resulted in about 4600 “excess deaths” in Puerto Rico between landfall (September 20) and December 31. That number includes not just people killed immediately in the storm, but also deaths due to “delays or interruptions in health care” caused by the storm and its subsequent island-wide power failure. It’s also a statistical estimate, not a list of specific deaths. The official death toll is 64, a number which has been criticized by many sources.
We knew. … When funeral directors started telling people that they were burying way more bodies than usual, or when our family members told us about their neighbors dying in still-darkened rooms, or being buried outside their homes, we knew that the official death toll was much higher than the 64 people the government had eventually admitted to. When we heard the stories of people having no refrigeration for their insulin, that dialysis machines weren’t operational or that hospitals were still in the dark but had people on life support, we knew that it wasn’t some small counting error.
This estimate of Maria’s death toll on Puerto Rico is higher than the reported death tolls of 9/11 (2996) and Hurricane Katrina (1833), but it’s not clear to me this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Both of those numbers also might rise in an excess-deaths analysis.
And yet, this has not become a scandal or prompted a national soul-searching like Katrina and 9/11 did. There is no blue-ribbon panel preparing a what-went-wrong report. Heads have not rolled in the agencies that bungled the response.
There’s a lot of blame to spread around here, from Puerto Rico’s pre-hurricane infrastructure to the local Puerto Rican officials to the federal government. But a big piece of it has to come back to Trump’s inability to admit failure or fix mistakes. At a time when the full scope of the problem was starting to become clear, Trump could only congratulate himself on the low reported death numbers. When criticism began, he was the victim, not the lazy Puerto Ricans who “want everything done for them”.
The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump. Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
Today, Denhollander can see how her church, which has since shut down, failed to protect her. But as a child, all she knew from her parents was that her abuse had made their church mad and that she wasn’t able to play with some of her friends. She blamed herself — and resolved that, if anyone else ever abused her, she wouldn’t mention it.
And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims.
The Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse problems have gotten a lot of attention, but similar forces are at work in evangelical churches:
When congregants believe that their church is the greatest good, they lack the framework to accept that something as awful as sexual abuse could occur within its walls; it is, in the words of Diane Langberg, a psychologist with 35 years of experience working with clergy members and trauma survivors, a “disruption.” In moments of crisis, Christians are forced to reconcile a cognitive dissonance: How can the church — often called “the hope of the world” in evangelical circles — also be an incubator for such evil?
Some good news on prospects for the climate: NetPower is building a small (50 MW) plant in Texas to prove that its revolutionary technology works. The plant will run on natural gas, but emit no air pollution and no waste heat. Carbon capture isn’t an expensive separate unit bolted onto the end of the process; it’s a normal part of the combustion cycle. The plant has achieved first fire, and should be generating power later this year.
So: more efficient power, with zero air pollution, virtually no water consumption, and pipeline-ready carbon dioxide capture built in … for cheaper than today’s best fossil fuel power plants. Quite a bold promise.
It works in an unusual way, which Roberts explains in more detail (and links to even more technical explanations): Natural gas is burned with pure oxygen, and the turbine is driven by supercritical carbon dioxide rather than steam. There’s a pipe and the end of the cycle producing excess CO2, which can be sold or sequestered.
Theoretically, the process also would work with coal.
Roberts points out that “Combustion is only one part of the damage done by fossil fuels.”
But it’s best not to be shortsighted here. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, there are going to be hundreds of fossil fuel power plants built across the world in coming years. This is especially true of natural gas plants, which play an important role in “firming” the fluctuations in variable renewable energy (and could potentially be run in the future on renewable biogas).
If we could start right now making all those new coal and natural gas plants air-pollution-free, it would be a public health win of historic proportions, to say nothing of the regulatory and civic battles that could be avoided.
And capturing all that carbon rather than throwing it into the atmosphere might be enough to give the fight against climate change some much-needed breathing room.
While we’re talking about fossil fuels … a longtime Republican talking point has been that the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers, so it shouldn’t subsidize renewable fuels over fossil fuels. I have argued against this (because it makes sense for the government to use taxes and subsidies to balance hidden fossil-fuel costs that the market externalizes, like the cost of cleaning up after hurricanes), but at least it’s a coherent point of view.
The Trump administration has been preparing to invoke emergency powers granted under Cold War-era legislation to order regional grid operators to buy electricity from ailing coal and nuclear power plants.
Think about that: Trump insists on wrecking the environment by burning coal, even if the market is against it.
If he genuinely believed the free-market principles he has been promoting for his entire career, Paul Ryan would be moving to stop this. But I’m not holding my breath.
Every congressional district is different. Here’s how a Democrat tries to appeal to farmers as he runs against Iowa Republican Steve King, one of the most unabashed racists in Congress.
Elsewhere, the Southern Poverty Law Center says that eight explicitly white-supremacist and/or anti-Semitic candidates are running for office this year, including one (Arthur Jones) who has already gotten the Republican nomination for Congress in Illinois. (He’s running in a Democratic district that mainstream Republicans didn’t contest. The state GOP has denounced him.) MSNBC’s Morgan Radford (who is part black and part Jewish) went to Illinois to interview Jones and to California to interview Senate candidate Patrick Little, who is running against Diane Feinstein on the slogan “End Jewish Supremacy“. (His primary is tomorrow.)
Illinois voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which was approved by Congress in 1972. The deadline for ratification passed 36 years ago, but there’s some dispute about whether that matters. If it doesn’t, the ERA only needs to be ratified by one more state.
The technocratic approach (favored by establishment Democrats and embodied in Dodd-Frank), in which the structure of the banking system remained fundamentally the same, but regulators got better information and more power to stop banks from doing foolish things.
The progressive approach, in which too-big-to-fail banks would get broken up into pieces too small to sink the system, and FDIC-insured banking would once again be walled off from riskier investment banking with a 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act.
The Republican approach, which would get federal institutions (like Fannie Mae) out of the mortgage business, and instill discipline in the market by making future bank bailouts almost impossible.
Now we’re seeing the weakness of the technocratic approach: The public doesn’t really understand the technical rules Dodd-Frank established, so undoing them doesn’t set off alarm bells with the electorate.
Trump campaigned on some progressive banking proposals like Glass-Steagall, but once in office he has given the big banks whatever they want.
He has, instead, simply appointed industry insider figures to all the key positions and has them steadily working to twist every dial available in a more industry-friendly direction.
And the nature of bank regulation is that even when it’s done really, really poorly, the odds are overwhelming that on any given day, nothing bad is going to happen. As long as the economy is growing and asset prices are generally rising, a poorly supervised banking sector is just as good as a well-supervised one.
But when the music stops, and it always does, a poorly supervised banking sector can turn into a huge disaster. It’s only a question of when.
Everybody knows that old people are conservative, but now there’s a new explanation why: Poor people tend to be liberal, and they die before they get old.
mortality among the poor increases during middle age — which is when citizens generally get more involved in politics. The premature disappearance of the poor, then, occurs precisely at the moment when they would be expected to reach their “participatory peak” in society. But they don’t live long enough to achieve that milestone.
and let’s close with something
A town in Norway celebrates summer solstice each year by making a huge bonfire. The one it built last year holds the record for being the tallest bonfire ever.
During Obama’s presidency, Republican standards for impeachment were low and Democratic standards high. Now it’s the reverse. We need American standards that don’t change with the political winds.
Someday — maybe sooner, maybe later — Bob Mueller is going to issue his report on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, whether Trump has been attempting to obstruct justice, and possibly other Trump-related scandals. When that happens, Congress and the American people will have to look at what has been found and decide what to do about it. Is it enough for an impeachment or not?
At that moment, partisans on both sides will adjust their standards to get the conclusion they want. Trumpists will put forward impossibly high standards for impeachment, and anti-Trumpists will drop their standards to match the facts available. Not admiring either of these approaches, I want to set out my general ideas about impeachment now, before we know what the evidence will say.
Previous impeachments. As background, let me start by confessing that I’m old enough to have watched two presidential impeachment processes: Nixon’s and Clinton’s. The two could not have been more different.
At the time of the Nixon impeachment hearings, the United States hadn’t impeached a president in a century. Leaders of both parties in Congress appreciated that they were wielding a fearful and awesome power. They felt the Eye of History watching them. So, while Democrats were in general the prosecutors and Republicans the defenders, both approached their roles with extreme scrupulousness. Both sides were determined to get to the truth of the matter rather than just to win.
The iconic question “What did the President know and when did he know it?” was asked by Republican Senator Howard Baker. The House Judiciary Committee’s decision to subpoena Nixon’s tapes of Oval Office conversations was overwhelmingly bipartisan (33-3). Of the five articles of impeachment considered by the committee, three were supported by some Republicans and three were opposed by some Democrats. In the end, Nixon resigned after a delegation of Republican leaders went to the White House to tell the President that they could no longer defend him.
By contrast, the Clinton impeachment was an entirely partisan exercise from beginning to end. Nixon’s special prosecutor (Leon Jaworski) had been a fellow Republican. But for Clinton, the first Republican special prosecutor hadn’t been rabid enough, so he was replaced with a more partisan one. The focus of the investigation kept shifting, eventually settling on Clinton’s sexual escapades. Even the obstruction of justice charge postulated a private conspiracy (inducing Monica Lewinsky to give false testimony in a civil lawsuit) rather than a misuse of presidential power. None of the 45 Democratic senators voted to convict on any charge.
During the Obama administration, Republicans would occasionally raise the idea of impeachment, but it was clear that their standards had declined even further since the Clinton era. Republican Congressman Kerry Bentivolio told a town hall meeting of impeachment-happy partisans that impeaching Obama would be “a dream come true”, but there was one tiny hurdle he didn’t know how to jump yet: “You’ve got to have evidence.”
Now, of course, Republican standards for impeachment are high again and Democratic standards have lowered. But what we need are American standards that we’re willing to apply to presidents of either party.
The Constitution only helps us up to a point. It lays down the basic process, but (as it so often does) leaves the details to the interpretation of later generations. Perhaps that openness is why the document has lasted this long.
I first formulated my ideas about impeachment during the Clinton process, and I will attempt to apply those theories to Trump, even though Clinton is a Democrat and Trump a Republican.
The bad-president problem. The Founders believed that any legitimate sovereignty had to come from the People, but they understood that the People would make mistakes. It was inevitable that sooner or later the United States would elect a bad president — a demagogue who was unwise, uninformed, and temperamentally unfit for the job.
It’s clear what they saw as the primary remedy for a bad president: Wait for his term to end and elect somebody else. (In the meantime, the other branches of government should use their checks and balances to minimize the harm he could do.) We may not have the same appreciation for the elect-somebody-else solution as the Founders, but you have to bear in mind that they were comparing the presidency to the monarchy of England. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist #69:
The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for FOUR years; the king of Great Britain is a perpetual and HEREDITARY prince.
If England had a bad king, the solution was either to revolt or wait for him to die. But in the US, you could circle a date an a calendar and plan for the bad president to be gone. The Founders saw that as a big improvement.
So what is impeachment for? Impeachment is in the Constitution for those rare cases where the country just can’t wait. You can see that reflected in the clause that establishes it.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
What makes treason and bribery so special that the Constitution names them? Each points to a problem more serious than mere incompetence or wrongheadedness or lax morals or bad temper. Both describe situations where the power of the presidency has been removed from the People and might possibly be used against them. A treasonous president is loyal to a foreign power; a bribed one is loyal to some private interest. The power of the presidency hasn’t just been used unwisely, it has been suborned or usurped. That’s a situation that can’t be allowed to continue.
Treason and bribery should be models for “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. That phrase, I think, is intentionally vague, to give Congress the leeway to do what it thinks it needs to do. But treason and bribery should set the bar: A legitimate impeachment case needs to argue that the Republic is in danger. There must be some reason why waiting for the next election either won’t work or isn’t good enough.
Reasons to impeach. If you buy that general framework, then legitimate reasons to impeach fall into four categories:
The president is not loyal to the People of the United States. Basically, treason or bribery. A third offense, which in the Nixon impeachment was called “abuse of power”, is similar if a bit more vague: Loyalty to self has eclipsed loyalty to the country. The power of the presidency is being used not for the common good, but to enrich the president, to reward the president’s friends, or to punish his or her enemies.
The president’s actions threaten the integrity of the election process. One reason we might not be able to wait for the next election is that the next election has been compromised. This was the heart of the Nixon impeachment: If a president can harass and spy on political rivals with impunity, then the whole election process becomes untrustworthy. You can imagine extreme cases where the president is winning elections by stuffing the ballot box, as happens in many pseudo-democratic countries.
The president’s actions prevent investigations of (1) or (2). Obstruction of justice can be an impeachable offense, but it should only be used if the underlying charge has some can’t-wait significance. Nixon’s attempt to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate burglary had clear implications for the integrity of the election process. But whether or not Clinton obstructed Paula Jones’ civil lawsuit was an issue that could have waited.
Congress has no other way to protect itself or the judiciary from presidential encroachment. This is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Constitution, but constitutional government doesn’t work otherwise. Congress necessarily relies on the executive branch to carry out the laws it passes. Presidents famously find loopholes that allow them to do things they want and avoid doing things they don’t want. But if a president ignores clear laws or disobeys direct court orders, Congress has to have some way to preserve the powers of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Waiting for the next election isn’t good enough, because (once the pattern is established) the next president might usurp power in the same way. Impeachment is the ultimate arrow in Congress’ quiver. If the Iran-Contra scandal had led to impeaching President Reagan, this would have been the justification.
A fifth condition is urgent in a similar way, but has its own constitutional process: A president who is insane or demented can be removed via the 25th Amendment, if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet believe he or she is unfit.
Reasons that aren’t good enough. Impeachment shouldn’t be seen as a do-over for the voters’ mistakes. No matter how many people change their minds, or how low the president’s popularity sinks, that by itself is not a reason to impeach.
Policy disagreements between the president and Congress aren’t impeachable, as long as the President is respecting Congress’ legitimate powers. Attempts to stretch presidential power into debatable areas — like Obama’s executive orders on immigration — are not impeachable if the president backs down when Congress passes new laws or the courts overturn the orders.
The president becoming an embarrassment to the country is not enough. This, I think, was the mistake at the heart of the Clinton impeachment: Many Americans were embarrassed to hear news reports about oral sex in the Oval Office. That might be a good reason to call for a president’s resignation, but not to impeach.
Loss of faith in the president’s judgment isn’t enough, unless it rises to 25th-amendment levels. If, say, a president were ready to start nuclear war for no reason, the vice president and the cabinet should step in. But if the president just demonstrates bad judgment within the ordinary human range, replacing him or her would be another form of election do-over.
Standards of proof. During the Clinton impeachment, my representative (Charlie Bass) was one of many Republicans who pledged that they would only vote for impeachment if the evidence were beyond reasonable doubt. (He lied, and voted to impeach anyway. It was certainly reasonable to believe that Clinton perjured himself or conspired in Lewinsky’s perjury. Depending on your opinion of Clinton’s character, that may even have been the more likely possibility. But by no stretch of the imagination was the case against Clinton proved beyond reasonable doubt.) I think they made that pledge because they knew that the charges against Clinton were legalistic rather than based on the kind of emergency concerns the Founders envisioned.
But is the criminal-trial standard — beyond reasonable doubt — really the appropriate one? What if members of Congress are only 90% convinced that the president is a traitor? Should they wait for the next election?
Clearly not.
Criminal conviction can take away the freedom we all value and view as our right. But political office, especially a high political office like the presidency, is an honor and a privilege rather than a right. Taking it away just reduces a president to the same level as the rest of us. So the standards of proof required shouldn’t be as high as in a criminal trial. (After a president is removed from office, a criminal indictment might follow. At that trial, the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard would apply. So it would not be unreasonable to remove a president from office via impeachment, and then fail to convict in the subsequent criminal trial. Both outcomes might be appropriate responses to the evidence.)
The House and Senate play different roles in an impeachment, and they should apply different standards. The House is like a grand jury; essentially, it is voting to indict. The Senate is the trial jury; it is deciding whether to convict. I think the House should turn the reasonable-doubt standard upside-down. Voting to impeach should mean two things:
The charges are serious enough that they can’t wait until the end of the president’s term, and Congress has no less drastic way to deal with them. If they are true, the president needs to be removed as soon as possible.
The evidence could lead reasonable people to believe that the charges are true.
The Senate is making the more serious decision. If the House impeaches, the trial in the Senate will be stressful for the country, but by itself the trial does no real harm. (The country survived the Clinton trial with little damage. The situation when Clinton’s term expired — peace, a budget surplus, low unemployment, low inflation — was arguably better than at any time since.) Improperly removing a duly elected president, though, would be a serious blow to our constitutional system.
The Senate has to weigh the risks on each side: Voting to acquit leaves a possibly dangerous president in office until the end of the term, and tells future presidents that Congress will tolerate the impeached behavior. Voting to convict might damage the presidency and devalue future elections. Which path into the future is better for the country and our system of government?
Application to Trump. It’s possible that Mueller might find the exact wrong-doing that the Constitution specifies: If Trump conspired with the Russian government to gain an advantage in the 2016 election, and if his subsequent favoritism to Russian interests stems from his political debt to Putin, that’s treason. If he has been making foreign-policy decisions based on foreign-government actions that benefit him financially (like the Chinese investment in the MNC Lido City project), that’s bribery. Those would be the slam-dunk cases.
Abuse of power accusations (like his alleged pressure on the postmaster general to raise rates on Amazon to strike back at Jeff Bezos for The Washington Post’s hostile coverage) haven’t gotten as much attention, but would also be serious if they could be proved — not just the fact of pressure, but also the intent. But I would want to see a pattern of such reprisals — like Nixon’s enemies list — rather than just one example.
The offense Mueller is most likely to find is obstruction of justice. The question I would have at that point is whether the obstruction succeeded. (Firing Comey, for example, may have been intended to derail the Russia investigation, but it obviously didn’t.) If Mueller’s conclusion is that Trump’s obstruction prevents us from knowing whether he was part of a treasonous conspiracy, then I would want to impeach him for that. But if Mueller did in fact get to the bottom of the Russia affair, then the impeachment decision should be based on the answer to that question.
One outcome, for example, could be that Trump played no part in the Russia conspiracy, but obstructed justice to cover up crimes committed by his sons or by son-in-law Jared Kushner. If that’s the case, I would indict those people immediately, and prosecute Trump for obstruction after his term ends. It’s a crime, but it’s over now, and waiting does not endanger the country.
I suspect there is considerable evidence that Trump is profiting off his presidency in ways that don’t quite rise to the level of bribery. For example, he could hardly be doing any more to promote Mar-a-Lago than he has been, including spending large quantities of public money there. (Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago have cost the taxpayers more than the entire Mueller investigation. “Probably several times over,” estimates the WaPo’s Philip Bump.) The Trump International Hotel in Washington profits extensively from foreigners attempting to curry the President’s favor. (The Trump Organization donated $151K in foreign-government profits to the Treasury, but has not explained how it came up with that number. I would be amazed if it were a fair accounting.) Michael Cohen has collected millions in what appear to be payments for access to the Trump administration, but we still don’t know if Trump conspired in that, or whether the payments bought any government favors.
However, Congress could crack down on Trump’s profiteering without resorting to impeachment. He (and future presidents) could be required to publish their tax returns. Congress could investigate the Trump Organization and do its own accounting of politically tainted profits, or insist that Trump divest (and let him decide whether he would rather resign). It could refuse to spend public funds on any businesses owned by the President. Conflict-of-interest rules that apply to every government official except the president could be extended.
Congress hasn’t done these things because Republicans don’t want to take any action against Trump. It’s crazy to imagine that impeachment is feasible as long as such common-sense moves haven’t been made. Impeachment is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency last resort; if anything else could fix the problem, it should be tried first.
To be continued … Chances are, not all of the conclusions of the Mueller investigation will be clear-cut. There may be some evidence of collusion with Putin, but not definite proof. It may be impossible to establish whether Trump’s reluctance to sanction Russia was a quid-pro-quo or not. I’ve laid out my general principles on impeachment, but those kinds of judgment calls can’t be made without seeing the specific evidence.
When that evidence comes out, I can only hope that I and the Congress and Americans on both sides of the partisan divide will understand the gravity of the judgment to be made, and that we will all feel the Eye of History watching us.
It’s another week where I have to chose between talking about stuff of substantial importance (like the shocking new estimates of the death toll of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico) and outrageous notions coming out of the White House (like the President’s lawyer making us think about Trump pardoning himself by declaring it “unthinkable”).
Everything that was off last week (the North Korea summit, the trade war with everyone from China to Canada) is on again this week. Does any of it mean anything? Are we witnessing the bumbling of an administration that can’t figure out what it wants? Or is it like the aikido master who makes you react to so many feints and bluffs that you fall over without being touched?
I don’t have an answer to that question, but I’ll try to stay on my feet for another week.
White House rhetoric about the Mueller investigation has been building up, and I’m left with the feeling that one side or the other is about to do something major. The White House might be anticipating a move by Mueller: a presidential subpoena, a new set of indictments, a preliminary report. Or it might be laying the groundwork for it’s own bold strike: a wave of pardons, firing Mueller or Rosenstein, naming a second special prosecutor to investigate the investigators. Or maybe the rhetoric is just rhetoric and doesn’t mean anything at all; who can say? It could all be another aikido feint.
I don’t know what I can do about any of that, but I thought I’d get out in front of Mueller’s eventual report by setting down my own general ideas about impeachment. When the report comes out, Trump critics like me will be strongly tempted to adjust our definitions of impeachable offense to match whatever was found. I’d prefer not to do that, so I want to get my basic principles into words now. That post “What is impeachment for?” should be out shortly.
The weekly summary should be out around 11 EDT. It will cover the Hurricane Maria estimates, the on-again trade war, and the bizarre claims Trump’s lawyers make in a recently leaked letter. I’ll use the Roseanne Barr/ Samantha Bee controversy to revisit one of the Sift’s more useful articles “Slurs: Who can say them, when, and why“. And I’ll point to a lot of significant events that haven’t been getting the attention they deserve: the rollback of Dodd/Frank restrictions on the big banks, Illinois’ long-delayed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, Trump’s attempt to force power companies to burn more coal, and a revolutionary new way to generate power with natural gas. And then I’ll close with the world’s tallest bonfire.
Every school shooter learned from the history of school shootings, mimicked the strategies, was in a sense acting out a ritual which has become deeply rooted in our culture.
These last three weeks, we learned a lot about Trump’s corruption and abuse of power
It’s hard to know which revelation to focus on:
Trump has begun actively intervening in the Department of Justice to undermine the Mueller investigation and harass his political enemies. He “demanded” a DoJ investigation into his made-up Spygate theory, and forced a meeting between DoJ officials and his allies in Congress in which classified details about the investigation into the Trump campaign were revealed. So far DoJ has been fending off Trump’s demands with minimal (but still inappropriate) concessions, but this is banana-republic stuff. It’s orders of magnitude beyond the improper suggestions Trump’s been making since Day 1.
Trump’s public fulminations against Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, have gone beyond just hostile tweets. On several occasions, he has pressured the Postmaster General to raise Amazon’s shipping rates. (So far the PG has been resisting him.) This appears to be an attempt to punish Bezos for The Post publishing stories Trump doesn’t like. Again, this is banana-republic stuff. There is no parallel in any post-Nixon administration of either party.
Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen began selling access to the White House as soon as Trump was elected, collecting millions of dollars from companies seeking favors from the new administration. We don’t know yet whether Cohen was just being opportunistic, or if some of the money passed through him to Trump or other members of the Trump family.
Trump fund raiser (and fellow Michael Cohen hush-money client) Elliott Broidy engaged in his own “campaign to alter U.S. policy in the Middle East and reap a fortune for himself”.
Jared Kushner’s family company is negotiating a deal in which Brookfield Properties, a company largely funded by Qatari interests, will buy a skyscraper the Kushners paid too much for and were having trouble refinancing. The Kushners had tried to get Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund to invest in the property a year ago; shortly after that deal fell through, Jared played an important role in the Trump administration deciding to support Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries in boycotting Qatar.
In addition to the meeting with Russians that we knew about, Donald Jr. held another Trump Tower meeting to discuss his father’s campaign getting help from powerful foreigners: princes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The scoops have been coming so fast and furious that I may have left some out. Looking at several of them also puts a different slant on Trump’s rhetoric about “the Deep State”: Officials like the Postmaster General and the Assistant Attorney General resist Trump’s actions not because they belong to some sinister conspiracy, but because they believe in principles of American governance that he is trying to subvert.
and primaries
There are two theories of how Democrats can win more elections: Move to the center and appeal to the reasonable Republican voters Trump is alienating, or move to the left and raise turnout among people who don’t vote because they have lost faith in both parties. Move-to-the-center has been the conventional political wisdom for a long time, and is still the approach the Democratic Party establishment supports.
I’m neutral in this debate. I can imagine that move-to-the-left could work, but I wish I could point to an example where a progressive Democrat had unseated a Republican in some high-profile race in a red or purple district. Sure, Bernie Sanders can win in a blue state like Vermont, but could a Bernie-ish candidate win in states like Missouri or West Virginia (where centrists like Claire McCaskill and Joe Manchin have won)?
Up until now, the party establishment has gotten its way in nearly all cases, so the only candidates who have made it to the general election in such races have been centrists. Sometimes they win (Doug Jones in Alabama) and sometimes they lose (Jon Ossoff in Georgia), but neither result answers the question of whether a more progressive candidate would have done better or worse.
The May primaries have guaranteed that the move-to-the-left theory will finally be tested in at least two cases: Kara Eastman won the Democratic primary for Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, and Stacey Abrams will be the Democratic candidate to be governor of Georgia. There are also plenty of centrist Democrats running in races of all sorts, so we should finally be able to make some comparisons.
and immigration
Two immigration stories have gotten attention recently:
When parents and their children are caught trying to enter the US without papers, the Trump administration has begun routinely separating them. Trump claims that this action is forced by laws that Democrats refuse to change, but that’s simply not true.
A number of people have been connecting the two stories, implying that the government has lost children it separated from their parents. But so far that seems not to be the case. The 1475 are children who arrived at the border unaccompanied.
Still, there is a point to be made: If the government is going to take kids away from their parents, it had better keep better track of them than it has been keeping of the kids who show up at the border unaccompanied.
The amazing thing to me is how many people were taken in by this whole charade. Trump’s combination of threats, sanctions, and flattery was praised as masterful on the Right, and even publications that should know better, like The Atlantic, asked “What if Trump’s North Korea bluster actually worked?” The NYT’s David Brooks gave Trump credit for “lizard wisdom” through which he “understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies”.
Matt Yglesias‘ cynical view of Trump — which I will sum up as “Bullshitters gonna bullshit” — has once again proven prescient.
The factors that led to the collapse of the summit were there from the beginning. The only thing that ever seemed remotely promising about it was Trump’s say-so, but Trump’s say-so is meaningless. Not only is he a person who makes factual misstatements and lies, but he’s a person who has gotten ahead in life through extensive use of bullshit, leaving in his wake a trail of broken promises.
There was never any reason to believe that Kim was offering anything close to the complete denuclearization Trump said he was going to get out of this negotiation. That claim was always a castle-in-the-air for Trump’s base to take pride in and give him credit for. Now that it has evaporated, expect a new castle-in-the-air somewhere else.
His supporters never learn, and have been saying “At least he tried.” To which I respond: “He tried to bullshit us, you mean.”
Now he’s at it again, but whether ultimately there is a meeting or not, there’s still no reason to believe anything will come of it. Trump and Kim remain miles apart.
“There’s little to no appetite in European capitals for the type of economic sanctions the U.S. is bringing back,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in a telephone interview. “Following Pompeo’s demands there are a lot of eyes rolling and heads fuming.”
The kind of sanctions Trump is talking about are not just against Iran, but against companies in any country that do business with Iran. This is going to put us in direct conflict with Europe. The only country that wins from this is Russia; Putin has long wanted to separate the US from its NATO allies, a mission Trump is carrying out admirably.
With regard to both North Korea and Iran, Trump is betting on his ability to get the rest of the world to go along with economic sanctions so crippling that the regimes will have to either give in or be overthrown by a discontented populace. I think he overestimates his persuasiveness and power while underestimating the willingness of both countries’ citizens to accept suffering.
Probably there are a lot of Iranians and Koreans who dislike their own country’s government and yearn for more American-style rights and openness. But they still have national pride, and will endure a lot of hardship rather than knuckle under to a foreign bully. I suspect the pressure Trump applies will strengthen those governments’ hold on power, not weaken it.
and trade
Something else that collapsed without a trace was Trump’s trade war with China, which I already mentioned above in connection with the possibility that he took a bribe, or maybe that the whole point from the beginning was to extort a bribe.
When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.
Then there was a back-and-forth of the US and China threatening tariffs against each other’s goods, and China stopped buying US soybeans. Then a week ago Treasury Secretary Mnuchin announced that the trade war was “on hold” pending some nebulous future negotiations.
The joint statement that came out of Mnuchin’s meeting with the Chinese is short and contains vague statements about China buying more American goods to lower the US/China trade deficit. It also mentions protecting intellectual property. (Stealing American technology without working out license agreements is a major complaint that US companies have against China.)
But it includes no specific commitments, (“The United States will send a team to China to work out the details.”) so it’s essentially meaningless. China’s economy continues to grow rapidly, so of course it will “increase purchases of United States goods and services”. And since the Chinese don’t admit that they’re stealing our intellectual property, it’s easy for them to state that they “attach paramount importance to intellectual property protections”.
A generous interpretation is that Trump surrendered on trade in order to get Chinese help dealing with North Korea. But there’s also no progress with North Korea. So it sure looks like Trump backed down on his trade war without getting anything — at least not for the United States.
One of Trump’s chief boasts as a candidate was that he was the consummate deal-maker. He’d make “great deals” with other countries that would benefit both the economy and security of the United States.
So far, that hasn’t happened. He has torn up a number of deals: TPP, the Paris Climate Accords, and the Iran nuclear deal. He is threatening to pull out of NAFTA. In every case, he has promised to negotiate a better deal than the one we already had. But he hasn’t gotten those deals done. Again and again, he makes aggressive demands and other countries say no.
[T]he past month has taught all sides a lesson about Trump, if they didn’t know it already: He’s not up to serious negotiation. He can’t be expected to seriously weigh costs and benefits, or make complex trade-offs. He’s good at bluster, hype and showy gestures, but little else. In short, he may be the worst presidential deal maker in modern history.
Fred Hiatt explains how to predict the “unpredictable” Trump:
Still, for a man who ran for office saying, “We have to be unpredictable,” Trump is proving not so hard to read. Look at whatever he has believed since the 1980s; ignore any evidence that has emerged since; and you can make a fairly educated guess where he will end up.
He operates according to his “gut feelings”, but we know what those are:
What are these predispositions? Allied nations, and especially Japan, play the United States for a chump. Dictators are strong and decisive and therefore to be admired. Immigrants and people of color are suspect. Wealthy people usually know best, while intellectuals are not to be trusted. Trade deficits are the ultimate sign of national weakness, and manufacturing is the linchpin of any economy. Anything Barack Obama did should be undone.
Josh Marshall reacted to MSNBC’s Pete Williams describing the shooting as “a huge mystery” because there had so far been no signs of an extremist ideology that motivated the shooter. Marshall, very astutely in my opinion, says that school shootings have become their own cult; jihadism or white supremacy or rebellion against the Deep State or whatever else the claimed motive might be isn’t a cause so much as a detail about how things play out.
Again, this happens all the time. The motive is pretty clear: angry and alienated young man, a late adolescent consumed with rage and alienation who lives in the United States and thus has become a devotee of the cult, the ideology of the redemptive school shooting atrocity. The ideology is really the cult of the mass shooting, in which the gun, with all its cultural and political omnipotence, plays a central role. Every school shooter learned from the history of school shootings, mimicked the strategies, was in a sense acting out a ritual which has become deeply rooted in our culture. We know the motive. We know the ideology: rage and alienation transmuted through mass gun violence.
Marshall’s point of view was expressed more elaborately and in more detail by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker in 2015. Gladwell interprets school shootings as an unfolding social process: Each one lowers the threshold for the next. He compares it to window-breaking during a riot. The first window is broken by somebody who has been itching to break windows, but eventually ordinary people start doing it.
If that’s true (and the argument seems convincing), stopping the process is going to be more complicated than just gun control or spotting at-risk students.
The biggest obstacle to arming teachers seems to be insurance companies. I’ve written before about the dysfunctional thinking that I see at the root of most NRA arguments: They respond to fantastic scenarios of what could happen rather than to realistic threats. (Sci-fi author William Gibson: “People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.”) So it makes sense that the NRA’s natural enemy would be an industry whose profits depend accurately evaluating risks.
Kansas passed its law arming teachers in 2013, after the mass shooting the previous year in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That immediately led EMC Insurance to announce it would rather exit the school insurance market than cover armed teachers and staff. Republican lawmakers were upset but couldn’t find another insurer willing to take on the policies.
and you also might be interested in …
Memorial Day is a good time to re-read this James Fallows article. “We love the troops,” he writes, “but we’d rather not think about them.” Back in March, USA Today reminded us of all the dangerous places the US has troops. When four US soldiers died in Niger, I suspect the first reaction of most of us was “We have soldiers in Niger?”
The original purpose of Memorial Day was that we not forget the sacrifices made by soldiers in past wars. These days, though, we’re having trouble staying aware of the sacrifices our soldiers are making right now.
Ireland voted overwhelmingly to repeal its constitutional ban on abortion, despite the opposition of the Catholic Church. The vote will allow the government to establish the boundaries of legal abortion, which it has pledged to do by the end of the year. A referendum in 2015 had legalized same-sex marriage, which the Church also opposed.
It’s something of a mystery (at least to me) why Ireland is moving left at the same time that much of the rest of Europe is moving right. Italy, for example, voted for a coalition of populist parties that is anti-immigrant and anti-Europe. Whether they will be able to form a government is still up in the air.
What I have seen so far is an FBI effort to learn more about individuals with a history of bragging about links to Russia that pre-exist the campaign. If those people were operating near my office or my campaign, I’d want them investigated.
The NFL established a new policy about protests during the national anthem: Players can stay in the locker room during the anthem, but if they come out on the field they have to stand respectfully. If they don’t the league will fine the team, which can then decide whether to fine the player.
There are all kinds of problems here: The owners did this on their own, with no player input. Forced reverence for the flag (or any other symbol) is the exact opposite of the freedom the flag is supposed to represent. It’s hard to come up with a protest more respectful than kneeling silently. The original purpose of the protest (against police shootings of unarmed blacks and other examples of racism by public officials) has been entirely lost. Players identified with the protest (Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid) seem to have been blackballed by the NFL; they are unemployed when players of lesser ability have jobs.
The assumptions behind the United States’ Israel policy are obsolete, and many were never realistic. It’s time to go back to Square One and rethink.
Since its founding seventy years ago, Israel has consistently been more of a symbol or a fantasy to Americans than a real place. I can’t pretend to grasp the full significance it has for American Jews, but for the rest of us Israel has meant the Holy Land, a way to make right the collective guilt we felt for doing so little to avert the Holocaust, the heroic Sabras of Leon Uris’ Exodus, a demonstration of the West’s superiority to the decaying Orient, a Cold War destination for talented Jews abandoning the Soviet Union, a David-and-Goliath story of one tiny country standing up to larger ones, and many other things that have been (at best) tangentially related to a real country of real people.
For Evangelical Christians, the founding of Israel started a prophetic clock ticking down to the End Times, when all the Jews who don’t convert will be sadly wiped out, but the rest of us will get to live in Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom. Socialists have idealized the kibbutzim. The alt-Right sees Israel simultaneously as the place they will someday deport American Jews to, and as a model for the ethno-religious state white Christians could make here and in Europe. For globalists, the peace we will someday broker among Israel, its indigenous Palestinians, and its Arab neighbors will prove the righteousness of American power in a unipolar world. For neo-cons, Israel represents a no-nonsense approach to the terrorist threat, unclouded by the hazy illusions of political correctness.
All these constructions are built on a foundation of stereotypes, both positive and negative, about Jews. They are God’s chosen people, the invisible and infinitely manipulative Elders of Zion, both the relatives and the accusers of Jesus, the fast talkers who can sell anything, the source of inexplicably many of the West’s foundational thinkers, or the bankers who always win because they have backed both sides. You can hear echoes of these ancient, quasi-supernatural Jewish powers whenever a conversation turns to Mossad or AIPAC or the Rothschilds or that nebulous collection of “Jews who control the media”. Ordinary notions of possibility and impossibility melt away; they’re Jews, who knows what they can do?
From the beginning, Israel has been both the beneficiary and the victim of the fantasies we project onto them. The benefits have been tangible: billions in American aid every year, American military technology, and the protection of both the American nuclear umbrella and the US veto in the UN Security Council. But our illusions have also been freighted with expectations: Israel should be better than other countries, and should be condemned and even punished when it isn’t.
During the 1948 war that established Israel as a country, Arabs terrified by both real and imagined Jewish atrocities fled the war zone, creating a refugee population that under international law has a right to return home. Since the 1967 war created the Occupied Territories, Israel has ruled a subject population that it treats badly.
But lots of countries are in violation of some international law or another, and lots have subject populations that they treat badly. (Some countries treat all their people badly.) Try being Shia in a Sunni country like Saudi Arabia, or Sunni in a Shia country like Iraq. Hindus and Muslims oppress each other in India and Pakistan. In Myanmar, the Buddhist majority is pushing Muslim Rohingya out of the country, even though they have nowhere to go. Americans, if we bother to inform ourselves about these situations at all, wring our hands helplessly. We don’t organize boycotts or insist that our church or university’s endowment divest holdings tainted by association.
In recent years, Israel’s internal politics have taken a disturbing rightward turn, with growing intolerance and disregard for abstract principles of justice. But so have Hungary’s and Poland’s and (let’s be honest) our own. What fault can you find in Netanyahu that isn’t also present in Trump?
Recent events have been hard to square with American illusions about Israel. Two weeks ago, the United States dedicated a new embassy in Jerusalem, abandoning a long-held bipartisan policy that such a move should wait for a peace treaty putting the status of Jerusalem on a firm international foundation. While this was happening, Palestinian protesters rushed the fence that keeps them trapped in Gaza, and Israeli snipers shot them down by the dozens.
Viewed through one lens, the shooting was entirely justified: The protesters — all hostile, some armed, all attempting to cross an international border — constituted an invading army, or at least an invading mob. Viewed through another, it was a gross overreaction: The Israelis had ample warning and held all the cards; surely they could have devised some less lethal method of crowd control without endangering their soldiers or citizens. Gazan lives, it seems, don’t matter.
For decades, the United States has tried to restrain Israel’s more extreme tendencies. We have discouraged building settlements on disputed territory, pushed for cease-fires, and sometimes even brokered treaties like the Camp David Accords. We have styled ourselves as the holders of the vision of peace, and so we have consistently urged Israel not to do things that can never be undone.
We don’t do that any more. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was full-throated supporter of the Israeli snipers. “No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has,” she told the Security Council. If the Trump administration believes this, it is chilling. It suggests that’s Trump’s wall might someday be manned by snipers indiscriminately gunning down Mexicans because some of them might be MS-13 gangsters.
Increasingly, it is clear that there isn’t going to be a negotiated peace. Gaza is the new model of resolution: Israel will dictate terms. It will set boundaries for zones of Palestinian autonomy, and will decide what that autonomy consists of. Like the reservations the US created for Native Americans, the Palestinian zones will not be economically viable, at least not for the number of people assigned to live there. The best land and the water rights will be reserved for Israeli settlements. As with the Native American reservations, non-viability will be a feature. America hoped its Indians would eventually assimilate into second-class citizenship in white society; Israel hopes that Palestinians will self-deport to Jordan or Egypt or anywhere Israel doesn’t have to deal with them.
All of these developments should raise a question: What is the US role going forward? For decades, Americans have believed that our aid gave us leverage, which we could use to nudge all parties towards a peace agreement. But if we’re not nudging and there isn’t going to be an agreement, what is our aid for? What are we buying? What are we supporting? Why?
I am not proposing answers to those questions. But I am urging all Americans, whether you think of yourself as pro-Israel or anti-Israel or neutral, to rethink your view from first principles. What if we all stopped thinking about Israel in mythic or symbolic terms and instead just thought of it as a country like any other country? In some ways it is like us and in some ways not. In some ways we share its interests and in other ways we don’t. It does things that deserve our support and things that deserve our condemnation.
Like any other country.
When we let go of all the fears and fantasies that we have projected onto Israel, what is left? How should we respond to the reality of Israel as country like any other country?
I imagine a lot of people have fantasized about being Anthony Bourdain, the star of CNN’s Peabody-winning “Parts Unknown” series, in which he traveled the world eating exotic food and meeting the people who made it. That was probably the most enviable job on television.
Someday — maybe sooner, maybe later — Bob Mueller is going to issue his report on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, whether Trump has been attempting to obstruct justice, and possibly other Trump-related scandals. When that happens, Congress and the American people will have to look at what has been found and decide what to do about it. Is it enough for an impeachment or not?
The Weekly Sift 
