Freedom can be a bad thing,
if it’s the freedom of the strong to push the weak around.
In American politics, few words have a more positive ring than freedom. We bill ourselves as “the land of the free“. We send troops to bring freedom to other countries. (Our invasion of Afghanistan, for example, was Operation Enduring Freedom.) In the Cold War, our side was the Free World. When France opposed our invasion of Iraq, congressional cafeterias renamed french fries as freedom fries.
Our economic system also claims freedom as one of its top virtues. Milton Friedman’s defense of unfettered capitalism was Free to Choose. The low-tax, small-government, regulation-cutting group in the House calls itself the Freedom Caucus.
The word is so popular that it’s hard to challenge. (Try to imagine someone running as the anti-freedom candidate.) But it needs to be challenged, because often what gets justified by the prestige of freedom are policies that favor the strong over the weak. In particular, certain kinds of freedom have to be restricted in order to establish another good thing, rights.
I first started talking about this more than year ago in a historical context: During Reconstruction, the rights of the newly freed slaves only existed as long as the Army was nearby to restrain their former masters from re-enslaving them. When the Army was withdrawn from the South in 1877, black rights began to vanish until by the turn of the century Jim Crow was fully established. In the rhetoric of that era’s Southern whites, this was a freedom issue: The oppressive federal troops had to leave so that the Southern states could be free to govern themselves as they saw fit.
I drew this conclusion:
Your freedom just needs the government to get out of your way, but your rights require government involvement.
Should President Donald Trump sign S.J. Res. 34 into law, big Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways. They will watch your every action online and create highly personalized and sensitive profiles for the highest bidder. All without your consent. This breaks with the decades long legal tradition that your communications provider is never allowed to monetize your personal information without asking for your permission first.
There has been absolutely no public clamor for this. Nobody has been writing their senators to say, “I wish Comcast could spy on everything I do on the internet, so that they could sell whatever they figure out to people I know nothing about.”
would have required ISPs and phone companies to take “reasonable” steps to protect customers’ information—such as Social Security numbers, financial and health information, and Web browsing data—from theft and data breaches.
Again, how many Americans want ISPs to be careless with their personal data? Or to shrug and say, “shit happens” if it gets stolen by hackers? And again, this was a partisan thing: The rule came from the old Obama-dominated FCC and it was blocked by the new Trump-dominated FCC.
Why? Two things are going on here: First and most obvious, special-interest politics: The big ISPs spend way more on lobbying and campaign contributions than you do, so their desire for profit wins out over your desire for privacy.
But what makes this a partisan issue? Democrats can be bought too, so why isn’t corporate money swaying them as well? The answer is that philosophically proposals like this fit a Republican freedom agenda, but not Democratic rights agenda. Freedom is about getting government out of the way. In essence it restores what Founding-era philosophers used to call “the State of Nature“. The State of Nature includes all kinds of wonderful freedoms, but one of less wonderful ones is that the strong are free to push the weak around.
Rights, on the other hand, are airy-fairy things until there is some institutional mechanism to enforce them, and the State of Nature knows nothing of such institutions. In the State of Nature, for example, you may claim a God-given right to criticize the local strongman. But if he is also free to burn your house down, your right doesn’t amount to much. In practice, the weak have no rights until some institution like government restricts the freedom of the strong.
That’s the issue here: Without meddlesome FCC regulations, your right to privacy on the internet is an airy-fairy thing that the ISPs are free to ignore.
In short, freedom is not always your friend. The more freedom big corporations have, the more you will be under their thumb.
Jared Kushner is a paradigm for success in the Second Gilded Age: He was born rich and married the boss’s daughter.
Underneath conservative rhetoric about opportunity and entrepreneurship are policies that promote an entrenched aristocracy. Proposals to cut the top tax rates and eliminate taxes entirely on dividends, capital gains and large estates mean that once your money starts making money, it should never be taxed again. As John Adams put it, “The snowball will grow as it rolls,” rolling, in this case, down the generations. If your family controls a major corporation, lax anti-trust enforcement will help keep it on top. Gutting public education, maintaining a low minimum wage, keeping college expensive, and saddling those plebians who make it through with unmanageable debt — that all works to grease the pole of success against low-born upstarts. And to keep any of it from changing, eliminate restrictions on money in politics.
We’ve been working towards this vision since Reagan, creating what Paul Krugman has dubbed “the New Gilded Age” and Thomas Piketty calls “patrimonial capitalism”
in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.
If you want a symbol of this new aristocratic reality, you need look no further than Jared Kushner, who was born rich, married the boss’s daughter, and is now (at age 36) one of the most powerful people in the country.
Kushner’s title is Senior Adviser to the President, and his yuuuuge portfolio just keeps growing. For example, he is the administration’s point man on bringing peace to the Middle East. That project might totally absorb someone of lesser dynastic credentials, but he also has been Trump’s channel to China, a nation some distance from the Middle East. The Washington Post describes him as “almost a shadow Secretary of State” and “the primary point of contact for presidents, ministers and ambassadors from more than two dozen countries, helping lay the groundwork for agreements.”
OAI will create task forces to focus on initiatives such as modernizing Government services and information technology, improving services to veterans, creating transformational infrastructure projects, implementing regulatory and process reforms, creating manufacturing jobs, addressing the drug and opioid epidemic, and developing “workforce of the future” programs.
Remember when the emerging Tea Party was getting so upset about Obama appointing “czars” to coordinate various policy areas? Kushner is an UberCzar — virtually an unelected crown prince — but Tea Partiers seem not to have noticed. Maybe the problem wasn’t the job itself, but that Obama’s czars were just too proletarian.
Elizabeth Spiers, who Kushner hired to be editor of New York Observer before she resigned and he reduced that once-great newspaper to a web site, is skeptical of Kushner and the value of his business experience in reinventing government. Government, she suggests, suffers from a pennywise/poundfoolish approach to costs, which leaves some offices still using floppy disks. According to Spiers, Kushner took a similar approach at the Observer, preferring to whittle down costs rather than invest for the future. And then there’s this:
I didn’t think he had a realistic view of his own capabilities since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accoutrements as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view his position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.
But I wonder if it’s Spiers who isn’t being realistic, and is clinging to a pre-Reagan notion of merit. Yes, Kushner may have little in the way of personal accomplishments or evidence of expertise relevant to governing a republic. But if merit is a matter of blood and breeding, and if it is enhanced by an alliance of great houses, then he has merit in spades.
What, you may ask, is the moral of this story? Maybe it’s that parents need to orient their offspring to the true nature of success in this era. Put aside those obsolete lessons about talent, hard work, and becoming excellent in your field. Focus instead on what really matters. True, it may already be too late for your children to be born rich. (That’s your fault, not theirs.) But as long as there are marriageable scions of wealth and power out there, America can still be their land of opportunity.
This week is an experiment in more-but-shorter posts. I’ve been meaning to run such an experiment for a while, and this week it happened more-or-less naturally: I didn’t have a 2,000-word idea, and several notes from the weekly summary were getting too long.
So anyway, three posts in addition to the summary: “Trump Went to Jared” about the ascendancy of the President’s born-rich son-in-law as a paradigm for how to succeed in the Second Gilded Age; “Freedom (Comcast’s) vs. Rights (Yours)”, which follows up on the freedom vs. rights idea I first noticed when talking about Reconstruction, that the rights of the weak depend on institutions that restrain the freedom of the strong; and “Can We Get Real About Opioids?”, pointing out how we dodge the real issues about drugs, and how Trump’s approach to the opioid problem is still doing it.
They should come out in that order, between 8 and 11 EDT, with the weekly summary (Russia, ongoing congressional dysfunction, climate change, nonbinary gender, and a bunch of other stuff, closing with another reworked classic “The Boy From Mar-a-Lago”) around noon.
I hadn’t planned to do a featured post, but once the rhythm of a poem gets into my head, the only way to get it out is to write it down. So Saturday morning I posted a special edition: “Donnie in the Room“. It’s a poetic retelling of the TrumpCare debacle modeled on “Casey at the Bat”.
This week everybody was talking about the failure of TrumpCare
After scheduling a vote Thursday (to coincide with the seventh anniversary of Congress passing ObamaCare), Speaker Ryan delayed until Friday, and then cancelled it altogether, recognizing that he didn’t have the votes. TrumpCare is dead. ObamaCare will continue — at least until HHS Secretary Price can strangle it with administrative changes. ObamaCare is not in fact “crashing” or “a disaster” as Trump keeps claiming, but it is vulnerable to sabotage from the top.
Still, the demise of TrumpCare is good news, especially if you’re on Medicaid or get a subsidy to buy insurance on an ObamaCare exchange. Your risk of dying in the next few years just went down. (It’s still too soon to draw that conclusion directly from ObamaCare data, but the RomneyCare prototype has been around longer, and is saving lives.)
If Republicans are looking for something to blame, though, I would suggest an attitude rather than a person. For years, they’ve been pushing the idea that compromise is just weakness and corruption, and their voters have picked it up. By now, it should be no surprise that they’re not only unable to compromise with Democrats, but with each other.
What’s striking in the larger context is how quickly Trump is disproving all the arguments his supporters made in the fall.
Almost everybody recognized back then that he wasn’t a detail guy and couldn’t measure up to Hillary on a wonk scale. But that wasn’t supposed to matter, because he’d run the government like a business. (You don’t expect the president of GM to design cars, or the chairman of Exxon-Mobil to be much use on a drilling rig.) Trump didn’t have to know anything in particular, because he’d surround himself with the “best people”, people who had mastered all the stuff he couldn’t be bothered with.
That fell apart as soon as he started naming his cabinet and other top advisors. The headline there is foreign agent Mike Flynn as national security advisor, but up and down the ladder (with only an occasional exception) Trump’s people are unqualified, inexperienced, and often quite ignorant of the segment of the government they’re supposed to be running. (Fox News seriously made the case that Betsy DeVos’ ignorance is a virtue. Apparently, you can reform a system better if you have no idea how it works.)
The other thing Trump supposedly had going was that he was the great deal-maker. He came from outside the usual partisan battle lines, so he could break through the gridlock and get things done. But now, in his first test, he embraced a bunch of stale Republican ideology, made no attempt whatsoever to get Democrats on board, and then couldn’t even hold the Republicans together. It was a great example of The Art of No Deal.
His supporters also liked the idea that he “tells it like it is”. Well, his reaction to his defeat on healthcare was to lie: “I never said repeal it and replace it within 64 days. I have a long time.” Actually, what he said over and over was that he’d repeal and replace immediately. No one listening to his campaign speeches could have imagined that he intended to take “a long time”.
Here’s what we all should have learned from Trump’s business career: He sells people a bill of goods, doesn’t deliver, and then claims he never promised what he promised. (Ask someone from Trump U or from Atlantic City.) That pattern is holding true.
I can’t claim I predicted this exact outcome, but I will take credit for being consistently skeptical of the Republican caucus’ ability to find unity. Back on January 9 I wrote:
the replacement plan doesn’t even exist yet, and it’s not at all clear that Republicans can agree on one, even among themselves. They’ve had seven years to concoct a plan; it’s a mystery why the 8th or 9th year would be the charm.
One last-ditch concession to conservatives was to eliminate the “essential services” requirement that ObamaCare imposed on health insurance policies, many of which specifically affect women. Matt Yglesias annotates a photo originally tweeted by Vice President Pence: “The group proposing to cut breast cancer screening, maternity care, and contraceptive coverage.”
Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann explains how that change would give insurance companies a work-around so that they could avoid covering people with pre-existing conditions, or anybody likely to get sick:
Without any minimum benefit requirements to get in the way, carriers will be free to offer bare-bones plans that don’t cover the needs of your typical 50 or 64-year-old. Carriers wouldn’t reject anybody outright—they would just make sure not to sell health plans that might accidentally appeal to an unprofitable customer. I’d expect to see carriers start offering a whole lot of “insurance” that covers one night in the hospital and some antibiotics with maybe a gym discount thrown in to lure Millennials.
Those are extremely perverse incentives that would warp the insurance market in some very ugly ways. Not only would sick people not be able to find the health plan they need, but relatively healthy and well-off customers looking for more comprehensive care like you’d typically get from an employer might have nothing to choose from but junk coverage designed to scare off the ill, or very expensive plans designed to compensate for the cost of caring for them. If you’re a successful self-employed contractor with a nice roofing business, neither of those options probably sounds too appealing.
The idea that you can lower premiums by eliminating men’s pregnancy coverage or women’s prostate cancer coverage shows an appalling ignorance of how insurance works. Premiums have to be high enough to cover the risks of the entire pool, so if you haven’t changed the number of pregnancies or prostate cancers, you haven’t changed the amount of money the insurance company needs to collect.
So now the administration moves on to tax reform, which it imagines will be simpler. I like this suggestion for the Democratic slogan: “No tax return, no tax reform.” We should at least know how much Trump personally profits from his tax plan before Congress votes on it.
and the ever-growing Trump-Russia scandal
A week seems like a very long time in the Trump administration. Just last Monday, James Comey from the FBI and Mike Rogers from the NSA testified to the House Intelligence Committee. We learned that the FBI had been investigating illegal Russian interference in the 2016 election and the possible collusion of the Trump campaign since July. Also, neither agency had any evidence that could support Trump’s claim that Obama had wiretapped him. The top Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, summarized the circumstantial evidence that leads him to conclude that a broad investigation is necessary. The next day, Schiff claimed that there was “more than circumstantial evidence“, but said he could not spell it out in public.
Many Democrats, plus Republicans like John McCain, said that Nunes’ actions cast doubt on the impartiality of the committee’s investigation, and called for a special committee or independent commission to investigate the Trump/Russia issue.
Another development: It has been known for a long time that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort lobbied for the pro-Putin former government of Ukraine. This week we found out that Manafort had a $10 million contract with a Russian billionaire closely tied to Putin, and had offered a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government”.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer has been trying to distance Trump from Manafort, claiming that the man who was campaign chair for several months leading up to the Republican Convention “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time”. He has also described Trump’s disgraced National Security Advisor Mike Flynn as a “volunteer” on the campaign. I’m not sure who this is supposed to fool.
and the Gorsuch hearings
In a normal administration, the pending Supreme Court nomination would be dominating national politics, but I found it hard to watch much of the Senate Judicial Committee’s questioning of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. It seems beside the main point, which ought to be: Why are we having this discussion at all? We’re having it because Senate Republicans stole this seat from President Obama and delivered it to President I-lost-the-popular-vote.
The conversation I want to hear is how we’re going to repair the damage this whole process has done to our democratic norms and to the credibility of our judiciary. Skipping that conversation to discuss Gorsuch’s judicial philosophy or character or previous decisions just doesn’t interest me.
I assume that Gorsuch (or someone indistinguishable from him) will eventually be approved somehow, either because Democrats allow it or because Republicans change the rules to break a filibuster. And at that point, whatever his personal virtues and vices might be, his presence will taint the Supreme Court and its decisions for decades.
but I don’t know how serious a development the protests in Russia are
Thousands of people joined rallies nationwide, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev over corruption allegations.
At least 500 other protesters were detained in the capital and across the country.
Most of the marches were organised without official permission.
TV pictures showed demonstrators chanting “Down with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin!”, “Russia without Putin!” and “Putin is a thief!”.
Does it go somewhere from here, or get suppressed?
and you might also be interested in
Thursday, the GSA’s Kevin Terry ruled in favor of his boss: The Trump Organization is not in violation of its lease of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., which it has turned into the Trump International Hotel. The lease says:
No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom
According to the GSA, the Trump organization wrote an amendment saying that all revenues from the hotel will stay with the hotel — and not flow to the president’s trust company.
Trump still remains the owner of the hotel. The hotel profits will accrue to Trump’s benefit as the owner of the hotel and thus “benefits” will accrue to Trump in violation of the provisions of the lease.
The GSA ruling is nonsense.
It’s like claiming that Microsoft didn’t benefit Bill Gates until it started paying dividends to stockholders in 2003. He benefited because the corporation he owned became more valuable, even if it wasn’t paying out profits to him yet.
I tried to give the GSA the benefit of the doubt by reading its 8-page ruling, but all it does is flesh out the details of Democracy 21’s description, listing the names of the various Trump-family trusts that own the hotel and giving the history of the back-and-forth between the Trump Organization and the GSA.
It also makes the case that the lease as a whole is working out well for the government, turning a wasting asset into a rent-producing property. Even if that is true, it’s not relevant to the issue at hand. Even if it was a good idea for the government to let a private developer do something with the Old Post Office, that doesn’t excuse violating the conditions on the lease, or explain why it’s a good idea for the President’s net worth to be tied to a government contract he himself ultimately oversees.
In short, this looks like corruption to me. It is disturbing to see the GSA get enmeshed in the Trump family’s self-dealing.
The Toronto school system and Girl Guides of Canada have both started avoiding trips to the United States. Because of Trump’s proposed travel ban and various other problems Canadians with the “wrong” racial or religious profile have experienced at the border, the Guides say “While the United States is a frequent destination for Guiding trips, the ability of all our members to equally enter this country is currently uncertain.” And Toronto’s Board of Education echoes: “We strongly believe that our students should not be placed into these situations of potentially being turned away at the border.”
Last week I talked about the too-much-news phenomenon that causes all of us to miss stuff. One thing I missed last week was the Confederate flag protest outside the NCAA basketball tournament in Greenville, South Carolina: People who take pride in that symbol of racism and slavery flew the stars-and-bars from a parking garage that was visible to everyone who entered the arena.
I wrote about the flag in detail in 2015 after the Charleston church shooting drew attention to violent white supremacists who see the Confederate flag as their symbol. But I’ll restate that article’s thesis briefly: Sometimes symbols develop an objective meaning, independent of your desire to express something else with them.
Theoretically, a German-American like me might fly a swastika to express pride in German culture. You know: Goethe and Kant, or the scientific tradition of Leibniz and Heisenberg, or maybe the millions of brave German soldiers who weren’t Nazis, but fought heroically under that flag to defend their homes and families. (I’ve never checked, but I’m sure there must have been Muders among them.) But whatever I might intend my swastika to mean, everyone who saw it would read it differently, as expressing pride in anti-Semitism and genocide. And because I’m rightfully ashamed of that part of my German heritage, I don’t even consider flying a swastika.
So if you’re a Southerner who is justifiably proud of the South’s outstanding literary tradition, or the role Southerners played in founding the American republic, or country music, or cornbread and molasses, or the beauty of the Southern countryside — that’s wonderful; I would never want to take that away from you. But the Confederate flag says racism and slavery, and your wish that it say something else is futile. Whatever you intend when you display it, what it represents is shameful.
On the other hand, if you do take pride in the South’s tradition of racism and slavery, carry on. You have freedom of speech, so why not say something despicable?
The White House denies reports that Trump gave Chancellor Angela Merkel a bill for the $374 billion he claims Germany “owes” for not meeting NATO guidelines on defense spending. The Times of London had attributed the story to anonymous sources in the German government.
But this is where the administration pays a price for its constant lying about not just serious matters, but trivialities like the inauguration crowd: Do the White House denials carry any weight? When even The Wall Street Journal is so fed up with Trump’s lack of “respect for the truth” that it compares him to a drunk clinging to an empty gin bottle, and warns he might become “a fake president”, couldn’t anybody claim anything about the Trump administration now?
A chunk of this week’s Sift is already up: “Donnie in the Room“, a poetic retelling of the TrumpCare debacle modeled on “Casey at the Bat“. It seemed more likely to find readers if it came out quickly, so I posted it Saturday morning, and then added an afterword about “Casey” Sunday afternoon. (Also, whenever I get such a crazy idea in my head, I am possessed by the notion that everyone must have thought of this, so I have to be sure to get mine out first.)
By the way, if you find yourself in an inter-generational conversation, an interesting topic is to compare notes on the poems you remember from school. “Casey”, for example, was ubiquitous in my day, but seems to be taught only rarely now. Young people do seem familiar with Poe’s “The Raven“, and I forgot to ask about “The Man Who Wasn’t There“. (Mysteriously, I can’t find anyone of any age who remembers Oliver Wendell Holmes’ clever “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay“. That’s Holmes senior, the judge’s father, who in the 19th century was one of the best-known poets in America.)
Anyway, go read “Donnie” if you haven’t already; I’m pleased with it. This was another week of too-much-news, so even with a featured post out already, it will take me until 11 or so to post the weekly summary.
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for Republicans that day.
They’d promised for six years that they’d repeal the ACA.
But when the caucus gathered, and they looked from man to man
They knew that not a one of them had ever had a plan.
“I’d counted on a veto,” said a rep from Tennessee.
“The blame Obama always took would fall on Hillary.
Then Pennsylvania went for Trump, and Michigan the same.
And now we run the government, we can’t just play a game.”
A colleague from Wyoming was equally concerned.
Shaking his head sadly, he stated what he’d learned.
“My hopes from the beginning always had one little flaw.
I’d pictured making speeches, never thought I’d write a law.”
Neither had the others, though they often said they would.
They knew what programs shouldn’t do, but not the things they should.
Then said a man from Texas, “We’ll never have success.
We got so used to saying No, we’ll never get to Yes.”
“I know,” said Ryan hopefully, “that’s sometimes how it feels.
But Donnie wrote the book about the art of making deals.
I know agreement’s hard to find, and deadlines closely loom.
But we can still succeed if we get Donnie in the room.”
Oh Donnie! Clever Donnie! How everyone agreed.
The plan that he campaigned on was just the one they’d need.
It ended it all the mandates! It set the markets free!
And still it covered everyone, from sea to shining sea!
“It offers better treatment,” noted one committee chair.
“And cheaper,” said another, “I know cause I was there.
You should have heard the cheering. I thought the roof would fall.
And Mexico will pay for it! No, wait, that was the wall.”
But just how would he do it? That wasn’t in their notes.
It wasn’t in the speeches that he made while seeking votes.
It wasn’t on his website, and they recognized with gloom.
They’d never reproduce it without Donnie in the room.
So Ryan checked the White House, but Donnie was away.
He wasn’t in Trump Tower, and he hadn’t been all day.
Ivanka took his message, “Call me when you can.
We can’t repeal ObamaCare without your TrumpCare plan.”
When the President returned his call, he sounded tired and mean,
As he contemplated bogey from the bunker on fifteen.
“Write whatever bill you want. I really couldn’t tell.
Content doesn’t matter, Paul. It’s all in how you sell.”
“But what about the plan you had, the one in the campaign?”
“I only planned to have a plan, that’s no cause to complain.
Grasp this opportunity, and you’ll know what to do.
I sold all the voters, now you get to come through!”
So Ryan then picked up his pen, and wrote a plan so good
It didn’t do a single thing that Donnie said it would.
And as the caucus read it, they all wanted to vote No,
Both from the left, and from the right, and from the CBO.
The Speaker counted noses, and he always came up short.
And for the ones who criticized, he had no good retort.
But Ryan still was smiling as he sorted hateful mail.
For Donnie, clever Donnie, would soon complete the sale.
Trump was back in Washington with all his awesome charm.
He flattered and he compromised and twisted by the arm.
“Those whip counts are fake news,” he said, “we’ve got the votes and more.
Everyone will back me when we take it to the floor.”
Oh, somewhere in a favored land, the people get their way,
And illness leads to treatment, even if you cannot pay.
And somewhere leaders pass the law that makes their promise real.
But there’s mourning in the caucus, Donnie could not close the deal.
Afterward: Why Casey? In my generation of Americans (I’m 60) it was hard to get through school without at some point running into the poem “Casey at the Bat” written in 1888 by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Casey, then, is iconic American figure. Carried away by his own myth and the adulation of his fans, he sets up a dramatic situation in which he can’t deliver the appropriate conclusion. (Rather than hit the game-winning home run that the poem seems to be leading up to, he strikes out.) The parallel to Trump the Great Negotiator seemed obvious to me, which is why I used the cadence and a few phrases from “Casey at the Bat” in this poem.
It’s fitting that we gather here each year to celebrate St. Patrick and his legacy. He, too, was an immigrant. And even though he is, of course, the patron saint of Ireland, for many people around the globe, he is also the symbol of — indeed, the patron of — immigrants.
Here in America, in your great country, 35 million people claim Irish heritage, and the Irish have contributed to the economic, social, political, and cultural life of this great country over the last 200 years. Ireland came to America because, deprived of liberty, deprived of opportunity, of safety, of even food itself, the Irish believed.
And four decades before Lady Liberty lifted her lamp, we were the wretched refuse on the teeming shore. We believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America. We came and we became Americans. We lived the words of John F. Kennedy long before he uttered them: We asked not what America can do for us, but what we could do for America. And we still do.
This week’s featured post is “Still a Muslim Ban, Still Blocked“. Next Sunday at 11 a.m. I’ll be speaking at First Parish in Billerica on the topic “The Born-Again Unitarian Universalist”. But I’m not canceling next week’s Sift. I plan to put out a weekly summary without a featured post.
This week had too much news
You kind of expect a flurry of news when a new administration takes office, but we’re two months in, and it’s not dying down. This week and next both include way too much for the average American to keep track of:
The CBO reported that the proposed TrumpCare bill would cause millions to lose their health insurance: 14 million next year and 24 million in ten years. The House is going ahead with the bill and plans to vote Thursday.
The first glimpse at a Trump budget for FY2018 (beginning in October) was announced. It maintains the same $487 billion deficit that Obama had projected, but balances an extra $54 billion to the military with “steep cuts to education, environmental protection, health and human services, and foreign aid”. The implications of these cuts are still being worked out.
Britain is about to trigger Article 50, which sets a two-year clock running on a Brexit agreement to leave the EU. It may also trigger a vote on Scottish independence.
The FBI’s Jim Comey and NSA’s Mike Rogers will testify before the House Intelligence Committee today. They’ll face questions about the Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and the connections between Russia and the Trump campaign.
I’m reminded of the late 80s when the Soviet Union was falling apart. One afternoon I heard a radio announcer say, without the slightest touch of irony, “In other news, today the Parliament of the Ukraine declared its complete independence.”
Friday, Rachel Maddow had another way of bringing this point home: She covered a juicy Navy bribery scandal that includes “prostitutes, $2,000 bottles of wine, fancy cigars, and lavish meals”, but can’t break through to the front pages because there’s too much else going on.
It’s like when college students pile into a car and head to their favorite restaurant. During the drive, they can picture the piles of great food they’re going to order. Only after the waitress distributes menus do they have to ask each other: “Does anybody have any money?”
As I said above, Trump’s budget does nothing about the deficit. During the campaign, he considered our $20 trillion national debt to be threat to national survival, but now not so much.
The overall shape of the deficit looks like this: Obama inherited a large deficit from Bush, increased it to deal with the Great Recession, and then shrank it until 2015, when it started to grow again. You may or may not consider the debt to be a serious problem. (I think it’s a symptom of problems rather than a problem in itself.) But you can’t seriously claim it’s an existential crisis that magically goes away as soon as a Republican takes office.
So far, the increased defense spending doesn’t come with any new strategy, and nobody’s too sure exactly what the money will be spent on. It’s as if dollars could go out and defend the country without manifesting as equipment or soldiers.
Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering just how much the U.S. already spends on its military. This chart comes from 2015.
Of those seven countries, four are our allies: Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, France, and Japan. India is more-or-less neutral towards us, and only China and Russia are rivals or potential enemies.
As for the cuts, it’s going to take a while to work out exactly who will be hurt by them. At this stage, we’re mostly seeing totals that will go to various departments and program offices, and can’t be sure exactly how those cuts will be distributed. But what the administration is admitting to is outrageous enough. Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said:
Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward. We’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.
About after-school programs generally: They’re supposed to be educational programs, right? That’s what they’re supposed to do; they’re supposed to help kids who don’t get fed at home get fed so they do better in school. Guess what? There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually doing that. No demonstrable evidence they’re actually helping results, they’re helping kids do better in school.
On the one hand, there’s just the hypocrisy angle here: When did the Trump administration become evidence-based? What evidence is there that increased defense spending will make us safer, or that charter schools improve education, or that anything else they want to spend money on works?
But then there’s just the disconnect from any sense of morality. What are we doing here? Feeding poor kids stuff that is reasonably nutritious and not very expensive. What’s the downside of that? At worst, maybe we’re also feeding some not-as-poor kids whose parents could afford to feed them without our help. Does that seriously bother anybody? As Mother Jones points out, there’s plenty of general research connecting nutrition to performance. If we don’t have specific proof that this particular program is boosting grades — and I’m just taking Mulvaney’s word here — how big a problem is that? If at-risk kids are getting fed, isn’t that result enough?
In general, the Trump budget points out something I’ve been harping on for years: Conservatives portray the federal government as this sinkhole that your money flows into without doing anyone any good. But when they start trying to cut the budget — and we’re not even talking about the kinds of cuts that would be needed to balance the budget or start paying down the debt — they can’t do it without taking away people’s food and healthcare.
The budget continues the pattern of the ObamaCare replacement bill: Trump screwing the people who elected him. I wonder how the voters of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin feel about the 97% cut in the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, or what West Virginians think about eliminating the Appalachian Regional Commission. If you’re old and trying to stay in your home, you may suffer from elimination of the Community Block Grant program, which (among other things) helps fund Meals on Wheels.
Transportation to rural areas is going to be hit: The budget cuts the Essential Air Service program that keeps rural airports open. My hometown of Quincy, Illinois (which voted 3-to-1 for Trump) sits at the very end of a twice-a-day Amtrak route to Chicago; I’ve got to wonder if that will survive.
I’ve also got to wonder how the rural areas that Trump called “forgotten” are going to attract new employers if they become more isolated. Imagine being a small-town mayor making a pitch to a major corporation. How do you spin losing your airport and rail connection?
“Who’s going to pay for the Wall?” Trump used to ask his crowds, who would yell back “Mexico!” The whole time he was probably thinking: “You are, suckers.”
Ezra Klein discusses not just what the CBO said, but what Paul Ryan then replied. His own summary: “The more help you need, the less help you get.”
and the President’s unhinged ranting
I’ve been trying to ignore Trump’s claim that Obama had wiretapped him. It’s not that I’m unwilling to believe anything bad about Obama, but I need some bit of evidence first, and Trump’s tweets are not evidence. I think the mainstream media is way too easily distracted by Trump’s ridiculous tweets.
But he is the president, and he stuck with his accusation, so Congress felt obligated to check it out. Wednesday, Devan Nunes, the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee stated his conclusion:
Are you going to take the tweets literally? And if you are, then clearly the president was wrong.
The next day, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a joint statement:
Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016.
This is noteworthy, because it’s the first indication that some Republicans in Congress hold their duty to the country higher than their loyalty to the President. May this hopeful sign blossom and bear fruit.
Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer compounded the problem by expanding the accusation to include GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the NSA. This, he said, quoting Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano, is why there might be “no American fingerprints” on the taps. GCHQ rejected this as “utterly ridiculous”. Rick Ledgett, second in command at the NSA called it “arrant nonsense” and told the BBC: “Of course they wouldn’t do it. It would be epically stupid.” Not even Fox News would stand by the claim. Fox anchor Shepard Smith reported:
Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napolitano’s commentary. Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-president of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way. Full stop.
Intelligence sources had earlier told The Telegraph that both Mr Spicer and General McMaster, the US National Security Adviser, have apologised over the claims. “The apology came direct from them,” a source said.
James Slack, [Prime Minister Theresa] May’s spokesman, said Friday that the White House has promised not to repeat the line. He added that the British government told the U.S. the claim was “ridiculous” and should be ignored.
We said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. You shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.
Think about what this means: Trump is denying that either he or his spokespeople have any responsibility to know what they’re talking about, or to verify that what they claim is true.
For me, then, this story has turned a corner. It is no longer about anything Obama did or did not do. It’s about our President’s mental condition, and whether anything he says can be relied on. I agree with Josh Marshall:
If someone says aliens landed in their backyard and has a similar lack of any evidence whatsoever, we call that person a liar or a crazy person. We say it’s not true. Full stop.
I find myself thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy spoke to the American people, to our allies, and to the rest of the world, telling them that because of intelligence sources not publicly available, he had come to certain conclusions and was taking action that could lead to nuclear war. Many Americans were frightened by that speech, but I imagine few thought, “He’s making all that up.”
If Trump were to make a similar speech today, about, say, North Korea, how could we not wonder if he was making it all up? How could our allies not wonder? That inherent lack of credibility in the White House makes us all less safe.
but the best news of the week came from Europe
In the Netherlands, many thought Geert Wilders would continue the nationalist/xenophobic winning streak of Brexit/Trump. But it didn’t work out that way. Current Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s party won 33 seats in the Dutch Parliament, with Wilders’ party second with only 20 seats.
Wilders’ positions are actually quite a bit more extreme than Trump’s were here. He wants to ban the Quran, close mosques, and completely stop immigration from Muslim countries.
Angela Merkel was in town this week for an awkward meeting with Trump. Afterwards he tweeted:
Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!
As The Washington Post points out, this is nonsense. There is no proposal for Germany or any other country to pay protection money to the United States, and Germany has never agreed to such a thing.
and you might also be interested in
The quote at the top comes from this video of Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny at the White House. How is it that the leader of Ireland understands American values so much better than the leader of America?
Vox tells you way more about CAFE standards (Corporate Average Fuel Economy, the rules that make gas mileage on new cars keep going up) than you probably wanted to know. Very short version: Obama set high fuel-economy standards and Trump wants to lower them, but Obama’s standards are pretty well locked in until 2022. The 2022-2025 standards would be easier to lower, but even that gets really complicated because there are three entities involved: the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the State of California, which has a waiver that allows it to create its own standards (which other states could adopt) if the federal ones seem too lax. Trump could try to cancel California’s waiver, but that is an arcane process of its own.
Judges have traditionally assumed that the executive branch is best equipped to deal with national security and foreign affairs, and so courts should defer to the judgment of the President in those areas. But what if the President is acting in bad faith?
Last week I characterized the second version of Trump’s Muslim ban like this:
the revised ban is more orderly than the original, and won’t produce the same kind of drama … but the essence is the same: It’s still a Muslim ban.
The new ban avoided the chaos and obvious due-process violations that made the original so easy for the courts to strike down. So the next round of cases would have to go to the heart of the matter: Does the order arise out of an unconstitutional intent to discriminate on the basis of religion?
The three-judge appellate panel that upheld the temporary restraining order against the original ban had reserved judgment on the religious-discrimination claim, reasoning that the due-process violations already justified a TRO. I suspect it did this to preserve the unanimity of its ruling, which made a stronger statement than a 2-1 decision. (In the face of that unanimity, Trump decided to revise that ban rather than appeal to the Supreme Court.)
To justify a religious-discrimination finding (i.e., one based on the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government establishing a religion, known as the Establishment Clause), a judge would have to reach outside the text of Trump’s executive order and connect it both to the previous attempt at a Muslim ban, and to the anti-Muslim bigotry in Trump’s campaign. I wondered if judges would have the guts to do that.
This week, two did: one in Hawaii and the other in Maryland. The new order was supposed to take effect at midnight Thursday morning, but Wednesday evening a federal judge in Hawaii issued a temporary restraining order blocking it nationwide. “Temporary” means until his court has a chance to hold more complete hearings on the case, and quite likely until all appeals are resolved. Judge Derrick Watson wrote:
Because a reasonable, objective observer — enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance — would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion, in spite of its stated, religiously-neutral purpose, the Court finds that Plaintiffs, and Dr. Elshikh in particular, are likely to succeed on the merits of their Establishment Clause claim.
Because it’s the second time around, some issues are easier, like standing: Who is sufficiently harmed by the executive order that they have grounds to sue? In this case, the State of Hawaii sued, claiming the same standing that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had already recognized the State of Washington having: The state operates a state university system, which recruits both students and faculty from the banned countries. Since Hawaii falls within the 9th Circuit, that doesn’t have to be argued again. (But there is a wrinkle: The new ban contains a more detailed process for obtaining waivers, so if this is the basis of standing, it can be argued that the case is not yet “ripe”: Perhaps the states need to wait and see how their recruited students and faculty fare in the waiver process. Judge Watson does not appear to consider this argument.)
Judge Watson also recognized the standing of Dr. Ismail Elshikh, a Muslim-American of Egyptian descent who lives in Hawaii and is the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii. Dr. Elshikh claims that his Syrian mother-in-law will be hindered from visiting his family in Hawaii, and also that he, his family, and his organization will suffer from the stigma that the order casts on Muslims in general.
In order not to violate the Establishment Clause, a government action must satisfy three criteria, collectively known as the Lemon Test. Judge Watson concluded that the Muslim Ban failed the first test: having “a primary secular purpose”. (Here’s an example of secular purpose that passes muster: It’s OK for Medicaid funding to pass through Catholic hospitals, because the government’s primary purpose is to pay for medical care, not to promote Catholicism.)
Watson acknowledges that the text of the new executive order is “religiously neutral”. In other words, it does not mention Islam or any other religion by name. It applies equally to all residents of the six targeted countries, and does not apply to the majority of the world’s Muslims, who live in other countries. But he quoted the 9th Circuit’s opinion on the original ban:
It is well established that evidence of purpose beyond the face of the challenged law may be considered in evaluating Establishment and Equal Protection Clause claims.
and says that
The Supreme Court has been even more emphatic: courts may not “turn a blind eye to the context in which [a] policy arose.” … A review of the historical background here makes plain why the Government wishes to focus on the Executive Order’s text, rather than its context. The record before this Court is unique. It includes significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor.
Judge Watson traces the history of Trump’s explicit call for a Muslim ban, including his admission that his subsequent policy of “extreme vetting” was the Muslim ban in a new form.
Mr. Trump replied: “The Muslim ban is something that in some form has morphed into a[n] extreme vetting from certain areas of the world.” When asked to clarify whether “the Muslim ban still stands,” Mr. Trump said, “It’s called extreme vetting.”
Watson acknowledges the Trump administration’s point that judges should not look too hard for “veiled” and “secret” motives that make an action by the political branches of government unconstitutional. But he argues that there is nothing veiled or secret going on: The anti-Muslim motive has been front and center from the beginning, and the path from Trump’s original goal of a “Muslim ban” to the current order has likewise played out in public, in what he describes as “plain words”. Therefore:
Any reasonable, objective observer would conclude, as does the Court for purposes of the instant Motion for TRO, that the stated secular purpose of the Executive Order is, at the very least, “secondary to a religious objective” of temporarily suspending the entry of Muslims.
The Maryland ruling by Judge Theodor Chuang lays out similar logic. He cites many of the same public statements, and also the process by which the orders have been written:
the history of public statements continues to provide a convincing case that the purpose of the Second Executive Order remains the realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban.
… In this highly unique case, the record provides strong indications that the national security purpose is not the primary purpose for the travel ban. First, the core concept of the travel ban was adopted in the First Executive Order, without the interagency consultation process typically followed on such matters. … The fact that the White House took the highly irregular step of first introducing the travel ban without receiving the input and judgment of the relevant national security agencies strongly suggests that the religious purpose was primary, and the national security purpose, even if legitimate, is a secondary post hoc rationale.
Second, the fact that the national security rationale was offered only after courts issued injunctions against the First Executive Order suggests that the religious purpose has been, and remains, primary.
Both opinions cite McCready County v ACLU, a 2005 Supreme Court ruling. Every time a court banned the Ten Commandments displays in McCready County’s schools and courthouses, they’d install new ones that supposedly fixed the problems the courts had cited. The case is a paradigm of a particular kind of denseness: when officials think they can achieve an unconstitutional purpose if they just get the details right.
McCready County and its religious-right fans kept reading judicial rejections as blueprints for designing the next attempt in the series, but eventually the series itself became evidence of an intent to endorse Christianity. The County argued that only the latest display mattered, and the Court shouldn’t consider the history of how they came up with it. Justice Souter disagreed:
But the world is not made brand new every morning, and the Counties are simply asking us to ignore perfectly probative evidence; they want an absentminded objective observer, not one presumed to be familiar with the history of the government’s actions and competent to learn what history has to show.
I think of McCready County’s religious displays (and the Muslim ban) like the carousing husband who believes his wife should be happy because he’s cleaned up all the telltale signs that have made her mad in the past: “I brushed the long hair off my suit, I cleaned the lipstick off my collar, I used mints to cover the alcohol on my breath … what do you want from me?”
Meanwhile, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as a whole decided not to reconsider the decision of the three-judge panel of its members who blocked the original executive order. But five of the 25 active judges signed an opinion denouncing that ruling. The opinion was written by Jay Bybee, who you may remember from his previous job: As Deputy Assistant Attorney General under George W. Bush, he signed the famous “torture memos” that OK’d waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques. (We’re never going to forget that, Jay. If you live to be 100, the headline on your obituary will still read: “Signer of Torture Memos Dies”.)
Perhaps everything Blackman and Margulies and Bybee are saying is right as a matter of law in the regular order, but there’s an unexpressed legal principle functionally at work here: That President Trump is a crazy person whose oath of office large numbers of judges simply don’t trust and to whom, therefore, a whole lot of normal rules of judicial conduct do not apply.
In this scenario, the underlying law is not actually moving much, or moving or at all, but the normal rules of deference and presumption of regularity in presidential conduct—the rules that underlie norms like not looking behind a facially valid purpose for a visa issuance decision—simply don’t apply to Trump. As we’ve argued, these norms are a function of the president’s oath of office and the working assumption that the President is bound by the Take Care Clause. If the judiciary doesn’t trust the sincerity of the president’s oath and doesn’t have any presumption that the president will take care that the laws are faithfully executed, why on earth would it assume that a facially valid purpose of the executive is its actual purpose?
And finally, speaking of crazy people, Mike Huckabee thinks Trump should just ignore the court orders, like Andrew Jackson did when he expelled the Cherokee nation from Georgia.
One measure of how far wrong things have gone is the number of shameful episodes in American history that are being cited as precedents. Here: the Trail of Tears. Previously, the Japanese internment as justification for a national Muslim registry.
I still am still trying to figure out how to deal with the higher volume of news since Trump took office. At first I thought it was just a new-administration thing. Presidents always have a bunch of stuff they promised to do “on Day 1”, but eventually things settle down to the administration making one big push at a time and its enemies trying to gin up one big scandal.
But now we’re two months in, and it’s not settling down. In the Trump administration, there are literally a dozen possible scandals brewing, any one of which might turn into something major. The many conflicts of interest don’t even seem to be scandals any more; they’re just events. Trump and his people are also trying to reform healthcare, pushing a budget whose outrages I still have not fully grasped, and trying to break the tie on the Supreme Court. They’re battling the courts over their Muslim ban. They’re running a continuous disinformation campaign against the media. And then from time to time Trump starts some totally unnecessary drama, like his baseless claim that Obama wiretapped him, which has somehow morphed into an international incident.
Beyond just keeping up with the day-to-day, we need to understand the deeper currents that push events along, like the white-nationalist influence on both Trump and his base, the combination of ambition and distrust that characterizes Trump’s relationship with the old Republican establishment and conservative ideologues, the efforts of Democrats and other liberals to organize the grass-roots resistance, and the long-term effect on democracy of a degradation of public discourse.
It defies condensing. I regularly blow past the word-count I aim for each week, while simultaneously feeling like I have left out too much.
So, this week I mainly focused on the courts: I’d been wondering whether judges would be willing to block Trump’s Muslim ban on establishment-of-religion grounds, now that the new version has cleaned up the obvious due-process violations. Two did, and that should start a new round of appeals. The featured post looks at the arguments they made in “Still a Muslim Ban, Still Blocked”. That should be out before 9 EDT.
The weekly summary will futilely attempt to cover everything else: budget, ObamaCare repeal attempt, the Dutch rejecting their own Islamophobic fascist, the wiretap claim, and all the other stuff that would dominate the news cycle in a normal week, but is slipping my mind for the moment. It should come out sometime between 11 and noon.
The GOP’s real problem, in terms of passing legislation, isn’t that the party can’t agree on specifics, or that legislators need to bargain their way toward a compromise that gives everyone something they want. It’s that they don’t agree on, or in some cases even have, basic goals when it comes to health policy.
So there finally is a TrumpCare bill. Unfortunately, the promised unicorns and fairy princesses are not in it.
The Congressional Budget Office analysis is supposed to come out today, and it is widely expected to show that many millions of people will lose their coverage. Millions of others who continue to have “health insurance” of some sort will find that it costs them more and doesn’t cover as much as an ObamaCare policy did.
I could spend my entire weekly word budget telling you what’s wrong with this bill, but other people already have. Not only don’t liberals like it, but neither do conservatives, doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance companies, neutral experts, the AARP, or just about anybody else. If you’re rich, your taxes will go down. If you’re young, healthy, and middle-class, your net insurance costs (after government subsidies and tax credits) will probably be lower than under ObamaCare. But if you’re anybody else, you’re going to be worse off.
It’s all summed up in a great graphic from the NYT’s Upshot blog. The people who lose the most voted for Trump over Clinton 58%-39%.
It will be interesting to see if these voters face reality and admit what has happened. During the Clinton impeachment, I remember saying that Bill had never lied to me about anything I cared about. (I never cared whether he had sex with “that woman”.) I imagine many Trump voters feel the same way about their guy: Sure, he lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, and releasing his tax returns, and maybe some other stuff, but they never cared about any of that.
This, they should care about. But will they?
Ezra Klein does a good job of analyzing how the bill got to be so bad.
The biggest problem this bill has, the more I read it, is that it’s not clear why it exists, what it’s trying to achieve, what it makes better. In reality, what I think we’re seeing here is that Republicans have lost sight of what they were trying to achieve in the first place. They are trying so desperately to come up with something that would allow them to say they’ve repealed and replaced ObamaCare, that they’ve let repeal and replace become not just a political slogan, but a goal.
Criticizing ObamaCare has been easy these last eight years, particularly if you make things up (like Death Panels). But forming a consensus view of the government’s proper role in healthcare, and figuring out how to translate that vision into a piece of legislation — that’s hard. So for eight years, Republicans have been skipping that part. And now it shows.
“It says our health insurance is being replaced by a series of tweets calling us losers.”
So the message going out to congressional Republicans now isn’t “This is good, and here’s how you explain its goodness to your constituents.” It’s “This is what we might be able to pass, and if we can’t pass something we’re all screwed.” No one is enthusiastic about this bill (other than the billionaires with their tax cut), but Ryan, Trump, et al are counting on desperation to make even the most recalcitrant Republicans hold their noses and stay in line.
That could work, but here’s the most likely failure path: Conservatives in the House force the bill to be even more draconian, so that when it reaches the Senate, Republicans from blue or purple states have enough cover to vote against it. The bill’s margin for error is slight: Since it offers no concessions to liberal values, congressional Democrats are likely to remain united against it. So 21 Republican defections in the House or 3 in the Senate are enough to sink it.
I doubt they will, but this would be a good time for Democrats to propose the changes they would like to see in ObamaCare. Such a bill wouldn’t pass, of course, but it would put a stake in the ground for 2018.
Here’s a thought: The various legitimate problems ObamaCare is having — like regions where only one or two insurers offer policies, so it’s easy for them to raise premiums — couldn’t all that be fixed by sticking a public option back into the program? You could even set it up so that a public option would only be triggered in places with insufficient competition.
and the revised Muslim ban
A week ago, Trump signed an executive order replacing his Muslim ban, which had been blocked by the courts. The Guardian summarizes what is the same and different, and lets you read the 23-page text if you’re so inclined.
In general, the revised ban is more orderly than the original, and won’t produce the same kind of drama:
It stops new visas from being issued to people from six (not seven) Muslim-majority countries, but honors existing visas. So the conflicts happen in distant offices, not in American airports where demonstrators can congregate.
Green-card holders are unaffected this time, so people who already have perfectly legal jobs and lives in America will be able to cross the border.
Iraq isn’t one of the listed countries any more, so victims won’t include people who worked with our soldiers there.
It takes effect on March 16, rather than immediately when published, so the federal employees who have to enforce it will have time to figure out how it works rather than getting briefed quickly in the middle of the night.
So the rough edges are gone, but the essence is the same: It’s still a Muslim ban. And that’s going to make for an interesting court case, because it will hang on how willing judges are to examine the intent behind the order. The administration will argue that the order’s specific provisions fall within the legal powers of the president, and the ban’s opponents will have to argue that its intent and effect is to discriminate based on religion.
Trump campaigned on banning Muslims from entering the country, which would be an unconstitutional establishment of religion. His first order was an poor attempt to disguise the Muslim ban, and the second order smooths out problems in the first. But the original purpose is still there. His supporters can claim that this is just a small subset of Muslim countries, but the intent from the beginning has been to establish a precedent that can be expanded: If a six-country ban is OK, what about nine? Fifteen?
The non-religious justifications for the order have always been paper-thin. But intent is always a difficult thing to establish, and it will take guts for a court to say openly that the President of the United States is bullshitting. A judge would always rather find a procedural flaw, as judges did with the original ban. But Hawaii has set the ball rolling by filing suit. claiming that a Muslim ban is a Muslim ban.
The central issue for the Trump base has always been nostalgia for an America clearly dominated by straight white Christians. That’s why they want a wall and that’s why they want a Muslim ban. If there were no terrorist threat, they would still want a Muslim ban.
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.
and the U.S. Attorney firings
Friday, Attorney General Sessions asked for the resignations of all the U.S. attorneys who were held over from the Obama administration, including one that Trump had specifically said could stay on. In some circles this is being covered as if it were scandalous, but at this point it’s not quite at that level. U.S. attorneys are political appointees, and usually do get replaced by a new administration. The Clinton administration replaced all 92 at once in 1993, but usually a number of them stick around to handle ongoing cases before they resign. About half of the Obama USAs were already gone, and the Trump administration had seemed content to let them drift out at their own pace. (No one, for example, has yet been nominated for the jobs of any of the 46 just asked to resign.) So the abrupt change of course is a cause for speculation, but is not in itself extraordinary.
and corruption
Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone admitted to being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, which is believed to be responsible for hacking the DNC emails and “is believed by the U.S. intelligence community to be a cover identity for Russian intelligence operatives.” Stone described the contact as “innocuous”.
The lies continue to unravel. This week, fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn retroactively filed as a foreign agent, having received more than half a million dollars to represent the government of Turkey while he was advising the Trump campaign. Worse, the transition team that OK’d Flynn’s appointment had been told about this possibility both by Flynn’s lawyers and by Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings.
Vice President Pence was the head of the transition team, and yet he told Fox News’ Brett Baier Thursday “Hearing that story today was the first I had heard of it.” That can’t be true, and yet (like Attorney General Sessions’ lie to the Senate) he volunteered it without being asked.
Where did that money from Turkey go? Some of it paid a retainer to the retired FBI agent who started one of the Clinton-scandal stories three weeks before the election. Why Turkey would care about torpedoing Hillary Clinton’s campaign is still a mystery.
The WaPo published two maps that illustrate one way congressional districts could be simpler and more natural.
The economy continues on its recent path of good-not-spectacuar growth, adding 235K jobs in February. The unemployment rate returned to the 4.7% low it hit in December.
When asked about Candidate Trump’s claims that Obama’s low unemployment numbers were “phony” and “fiction”, Sean Spicer replied:
I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.
Both Spicer and the roomful of reporters laughed, because the President tacitly admitting that he has repeatedly lied is so hilarious.
Mike the Mad Biologist commented on the constant lying that so many now just accept as a normal feature of the Trump administration:
What happens in a crisis where people need to trust Il Trumpe? Suppose a nasty strain of influenza were to hit or some other immediate public health crisis were to occur? If he says, you need to do X, will people trust him? While politicians have always stretched the truth, Trump’s lies are constant and ongoing. How could we possibly believe what he is saying?
I thought I covered this when it happened, but Google says otherwise: In mid-February, the Washington Supreme Court considered the appeal of a self-described Christian florist who was sued for refusing to sell flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding, and ruled 9-0 against the florist. The ruling is a good lesson on where the law currently stands on these so-called “religious freedom” cases, i.e., the ones where someone is claiming religion as a legitimate basis for discrimination.
Cases like these revolve around two claims: (1) The refused service constitutes “speech” of some sort, and so this refusal to speak is protected by the First Amendment. (2) The discrimination is not against gays per se; it’s against their action in attempting to get married.
On the first, the Court wrote:
The Supreme Court has protected conduct as speech if two conditions are met: “[(1)] [a]n intent to convey a particularized message was present, and [(2)] in the surrounding circumstances the likelihood was great that the message would be understood by those who viewed it.”
So it’s not enough that in the florist’s own mind her refusal was intended to avoid making a statement she didn’t believe. The Court was not convinced that people who saw the floral arrangements would interpret them as the florist’s endorsement of same-sex marriage.
On the second, it ruled that “some conduct is so linked to a particular group of people that targeting it can readily be interpreted as an attempt to disfavor that group”, and quoted a Supreme Court opinion that “[a] tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews”.
The latest right-wing conspiracy theory is that leaks, protests, and other opposition to Trump is being organized by an Obama-led “shadow government”.
My response to this idea is like the response economist John Maynard Keynes had during the Depression to the notion of an international bankers’ conspiracy: “If only there were one.”
Freedom can be a bad thing,
But what makes this a partisan issue? Democrats can be bought too, so why isn’t corporate money swaying them as well? The answer is that philosophically proposals like this fit a Republican freedom agenda, but not Democratic rights agenda. Freedom is about getting government out of the way. In essence it restores what Founding-era philosophers used to call “the State of Nature“. The State of Nature includes all kinds of wonderful freedoms, but one of less wonderful ones is that the strong are free to push the weak around.
I 
The Weekly Sift 