What is impeachment for?

Before Democrats can talk responsibly about impeaching Trump, we need to state some standards we’d be willing to apply to a Democratic president.

One of the more ridiculous quotes of the Obama era came from Republican Congressman Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan. It was the summer after Obama’s re-election and Bentivolio’s constituents were wondering about impeachment, like you do when you think the wrong guy won the election.

The Congressman responded that “it would be a dream come true” to impeach Obama, and claimed he had challenged lawyers to “tell me how I can impeach the President of the United States.” But the lawyers uncovered a pesky little problem: “Until we have evidence, you’re going to become a laughing stock if you’ve submitted the bill to impeach the president.”

Damn. You need evidence that he did something wrong. There’s always a catch somewhere.

The cheapening of impeachment. The mood was very different in 1973, when the House Judiciary Committee began investigating impeachment against President Nixon. Up to that point, there had been only one serious presidential impeachment case in American history, against Andrew Johnson in 1868. No one had come out of that affair looking good, and it made both sides cautious a century later. [1]

So the Nixon proceedings had an air of solemnity: History was watching, and whatever you did now would be what you were remembered for. Democrats, who held the majority in both houses in spite of Nixon’s 1972 landslide, bent over backwards to give Nixon at least the appearance of a fair hearing; Republicans likewise worked hard to create the impression that they were taking their duties seriously. Ultimately, it was three Republicans — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — who went to the White House to tell Nixon it was time to resign.

A lot of Democrats had hated Nixon for a long time, but nobody crowed about “a dream come true”. Impeachment wasn’t something you started talking about as soon as your side lost. It was a constitutional last resort, and you didn’t break that glass unless it was really an emergency.

Impeachment still required a high bar in 1987, when Congress began investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. Iran-Contra was a big deal: A dozen major figures in the Reagan administration were indicted, including the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser. [2] President Reagan apologized to the American people on national television: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” Congress concluded that Reagan either knew about the wrong-doing or should have known. But he was not impeached.

It was Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998-1999 that changed all the rules. For Nixon, it was thought to be important that the special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, be a political independent who had voted for Nixon; that made it clear the President wasn’t being railroaded. But Clinton’s first prosecutor was a Republican (Robert Fiske), who was replaced mid-investigation by a more partisan Republican (Ken Starr). Starr published a report emphasizing the most salacious aspects of the case in lurid language, and frequently leaked sensational details to the press.

Throughout the process, the votes on impeachment were very close to party-line — which meant that the ultimate result was predetermined: The Republican-controlled House impeached Clinton by majority vote, but conviction in the Senate required a 2/3rds majority, which couldn’t happen without convincing a significant number of Democrats. Clinton served out his full two terms.

George W. Bush could have been impeached over violations of the Convention Against Torture or for deceptions in the process leading to the Iraq War. A resolution was introduced in the House, but it died in committee. The full House never voted on it.

Republicans often talked about impeaching President Obama, but their efforts never passed the laugh test: Like Bentivolio, they failed to come up with a plausible charge, much less assemble evidence to support it.

Standards. It’s easy to be a partisan hypocrite about impeachment. If the question is just “Do I want to get rid of this guy?”, then I’ll want to impeach presidents of the other party and defend presidents of my own. And after the plainly partisan nature of the Clinton impeachment, it’s tempting for Democrats to return tit for tat.

But cheap impeachments are bad for democracy. An election should mean something; it should make a decision that is not easily reversed. On the other hand, the Founders put impeachment into the Constitution for a reason. If Democrats are going to start another one any time soon, we owe it to the Republic to form a clear idea of what impeachment is for, and to state a non-partisan standard we’d be willing to stand by the next time a president from our side is in office.

The standards for impeachment are listed in the Constitution, but the statement is terse:

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.

Treason and bribery we all sort of understand, but it’s the “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” that has been so maddeningly vague over the years.

A prime example is obstruction of justice — what Trump may have done when he fired Jim Comey. Obstruction was an impeachable offense when Nixon did it, so Republicans claimed it as an impeachable offense for Clinton. Democrats thought you needed more context; not all obstructions should count the same: Clinton was accused of inducing Monica Lewinsky to lie about their affair; Nixon was accused of doing a long list of things — conspiring with others, concocting cover stories, destroying evidence, asking the CIA to interfere with the FBI — to block the investigation of a burglary intended to help his re-election campaign. It didn’t seem fair to lump the two in the same category and proceed from there.

Now that it’s a Republican in the dock, expect the parties to switch places: Democrats will insist that obstruction-as-impeachable-offense is now well established; Republicans will want to say, “Wait a minute.”

If we’re not all just going to run to our respective partisan banners, we need think this through from the beginning.

What is impeachment for? The Founders knew that occasionally the voters would screw up. Bad presidents were inevitable, which is why John Adams talked about forming “a government of laws, and not of men“. The Constitutional system created multiple centers of power that could check and balance each other. The hope was that the country would be strong enough to ride out a bad presidency.

So the ordinary way to get rid of a bad president is to wait for his term to expire and elect somebody else. Impeachment is only for cases where that solution just isn’t adequate.

That’s why treason and bribery are specifically mentioned. If a president is just bad at his job, you can usually live with that until the next election. (After all, the country survived eight years of George W. Bush.) But if the power of the office is being controlled by someone else — by a hostile foreign power (treason) or a wealthy special interest (bribery) — then we really can’t wait that long. (That’s even more true today than in the 1700s, because of the immediacy of nuclear weapons.) So I interpret “other high crimes and misdemeanors” as “other offenses too urgent to put off until the next election”.

The most obvious offense that you can’t put off until the next election is anything that subverts the next election. So if a president is using his or her power to alter the political system — like burglarizing the other party’s files or making deals with foreign powers to hack their computer systems — that also should be impeachable. [3] Other things that could be impeachable in the same way are shutting down hostile newspapers, or preventing legal voters from casting their ballots.

Since the separation of powers is what we’re counting on to keep a bad president in line, anything that usurps the power of the other branches has to be impeachable, unless the breach can be repaired some less drastic way. [4]

Along the same lines, the impeachment process itself has to be protected. So obstruction of justice needs to be an impeachable offense, if the obstructed investigation concerns an impeachable offense. [5]

Finally, there are offenses that have no other enforcement mechanism. For example, violations of the Emoluments Clause, which there is a good case Trump is guilty of. Bush-administration ethics lawyer Richard Painter wrote: “The only remedy for a serious violation of the Emoluments Clause is impeachment.” [6]

Application to Trump. Under these standards, it seems obvious to me that the House Judiciary Committee should be investigating impeachment, because there are viable accusations of impeachable offenses: most obviously the emoluments, but possibly more directly dangerous things. Any collusion with Russia to hack the Democrats would be impeachable, as well as obstruction of justice if it was intended to shelter allies who did collude. (Whether Trump was involved directly in the collusion wouldn’t matter; if he later suspected what his associates did and tried to protect them, that would be impeachable.)

At this point, whether I would support an impeachment vote in the House or conviction by the Senate would depend on what those investigations turned up. But there are definitely things to investigate.

[1] Johnson had been the slave-owning Democrat Lincoln put on his ticket in the name of national unity. After the assassination, he was an outsider dealing with Lincoln’s overwhelmingly Republican Congress.

If you’ve ever wondered why vice presidents are such yes-men, Johnson’s example explains why. When the VP has very different views than the president, it’s practically an invitation to assassins. John Wilkes Booth really did succeed in changing the direction of the country.

[2] Both were pardoned by President Bush before they served jail time.

[3] By contrast, Clinton’s extra-marital affair was just embarrassing, not a threat to the Republic. He finished his term, and there was a peaceful transfer of power to the other party after the next election.

[4] Republicans claimed that Obama’s executive orders on immigration usurped the power of Congress. So they sued, won their case, and Obama obeyed the judgment of the courts. But if Obama had instead said, “Screw the judges, I’m going to do what I want.”, then impeachment would have been Congress’ only recourse.

[5] That leaves out the obstruction charge against Clinton, but creates an interesting test scenario: What if the reason Trump wanted to stop Comey’s investigation wasn’t that he himself had done anything wrong, but to prevent Comey from catching his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was guilty of some financial chicanery? I’m leaning towards the idea that Trump should be prosecuted for that after leaving office, but not impeached.

[6] Naturally, if the money the President receives from a foreign government is in return for some favor, then it’s already impeachable as a bribe.

May 22, 2017 – 9:14 am Categories: Articles | Comments (16)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’ve got two featured posts planned this morning, both having something to do with trying to proceed responsibly on the Trump-Russia scandal.

The Clinton impeachment in the late 90s was what hardened me as a Democrat. Before that I’d been a mostly left-leaning independent, but I had voted for a number of moderate Republicans over the years, and I went through a real decision process on every election. But when Republicans in Congress misused the impeachment power so badly — and virtually none of them dissented from that effort — their whole party became dead to me. It seemed obvious that having an extra-marital affair and then lying about it wasn’t what the Founders had in mind as an impeachable offense.

Now, as impeachment talk starts to swirl around Donald Trump, but we don’t yet know the full extent of what he did, I think it’s important to examine myself for hypocrisy, and do what I can to guard against a similar partisanship. So this week I set myself a challenge: Can I spell out a vision of impeachment that I’m both willing to apply to Trump and prepared to live by the next time there are accusations against a Democratic president?

My answer to that question is in the article “What is impeachment for?”, which should be out between around 9 EDT.

A second post comes out of a question a commenter raised last week: How will we know if we’ve gone off the rails on Trump conspiracy theories the same way that Republicans did on Benghazi conspiracy theories? My first response was that it’s way too early to be making those comparisons. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Republicans — not the puppet-master types, but the rank and file who are still genuinely enraged about Benghazi and really believe that Clinton and/or Obama got away with murder — made their key mistakes early in the process, right about where we are now with Trump/Russia.

So I wrote “Step Around the Benghazi Trap”, which still needs some work, but should be out by 11.

The weekly summary is more focused on the immediate news: the special counsel, the Russia leak, what Trump’s Saudi-Arabia speech tells us about policy changes, Roger Ailes died and Bill O’Reilly might be coming back, and some other stuff, before closing with a caption contest for that weird-glowing-orb photo. I’ll predict it for noon.

May 22, 2017 – 7:46 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

The Pitch President

Whoever touches pitch will be defiled, and whoever associates with a proud man will become like him.

– Sirach 13:1

Until two days ago, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, had an enviable reputation as a straight-shooting law-enforcement official respected by members of both parties. Then he decided that he was willing to help President Trump tamper with an investigation into his presidential campaign. Now Rosenstein’s reputation is permanently damaged, as it deserves to be. In that damage is a lesson for other subordinates and allies of Trump.

– David Leonhart, “Rod Rosenstein Fails His Ethics Test”
The New York Times, May 10

This week’s featured post is “Are Congressional Republicans Patriotic or Not?”

This week everybody was talking about Jim Comey and the Russia investigation

I cover one aspect of this in the featured post. Initially, Trump spokespeople claimed Comey wasn’t fired because of the investigation, but then Trump more-or-less said he was. That’s obstruction of justice, which was an impeachable offense when Congress thought Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon might be doing it. This Congress, though, doesn’t seem inclined to defend our system of government against a president of its own party.

This is a good time to review exactly what there is to investigate. Obstruction of justice is a fourth question which arose during investigation of these original three:

  • How can we prevent Russia (or other powers) from interfering in future elections the way Russia interfered in 2016? This is the plainly bipartisan part of the investigation. Republicans and Democrats alike should worry about hostile foreign powers having a thumb on the scale of our elections.
  • Was Putin simply an outside force acting for his own interests, or was the Trump campaign cooperating with its Russian allies? This is where the bizarrely dense network of connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives — and the Trump people’s repeated lying about meetings with Russians — becomes relevant. It’s not a crime to know somebody or even talk to them, but why lie about it?
  • Beyond any natural affinity between Trump and Putin, do they have some deal that Trump is now obligated to complete? This is the nightmare scenario, the Manchurian Candidate come to life. So far, I haven’t heard or seen anything that makes this seem likely, but it doesn’t have to be likely to be scary. Anything that points in this direction needs to be thoroughly checked out. In particular: Does Putin have something on Trump? This is why the Trump Organization’s long-standing relationships with Russian oligarchs need to be investigated.

Trump and his defenders argue that there is (as yet) no publicly available evidence proving anything about the second or third questions, so there’s “no there there”. But here is a minimal list of things that need to be done before the investigation can be over.

  • Every Trump associate who has lied about meeting with Russians or about an ongoing relationship with Russians — so far I count Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, and Carter Page, at a minimum — must testify in public under oath, and give an account of both the substance of their interactions and why they lied.
  • The Trump administration needs to give a credible account of how they vetted Michael Flynn, why they hired him, and why they sat on evidence against him (letting him continue in the highly sensitive position of National Security Adviser) until that evidence leaked to the press. Would they ever have fired him if not for the leaks?
  • Paul Manafort needs to come clean about how much he was paid by Russia, Russian puppet governments like the former regime in Ukraine, and Russian oligarchs closely associated with Putin. What did he do for them? When, if ever, did his relationship with them end? In particular, was he still working for them when he was managing Trump’s campaign?
  • Similar questions for Michael Flynn.
  • During the campaign, how did Roger Stone know that something concerning John Podesta was about to come out? Did the Trump campaign get other heads-up alerts before Russia/WikiLeaks released new material hacked from the Democrats?
  • The public needs to know how much money has passed back and forth between Russian oligarchs and the Trump Organization, Trump himself, and members of the Trump family over the last 20 years or so. Did all transactions happen at market rates?
  • Is there some reason why the firing of Jim Comey was not the obstruction of justice it appears to be? If it was, should Trump be impeached for it?

In the course of covering those six issues, other issues are likely to arise as well. Those must also be pursued to their conclusion.

but we should all be paying more attention to Trump’s voter suppression task force

Thursday, Trump signed an executive order creating a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. It is chaired by Vice President Pence, and vice-chaired by Kris Kobach, who has a long history of drumming up phony voter-fraud issues to justify voter-suppression tactics.

Ever since he lost the popular vote by 2.8 million, Trump has been soothing his wounded ego with the fantasy that “millions” of illegal votes were cast. And unlike any other demographic group, all of the illegal voters picked Clinton.

In fact, it’s much more likely that Trump owes his Electoral College victory to voter suppression. The Nation reports:

A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes.

Voter suppression was also an issue in Republican-controlled swing states like North Carolina and Florida. In other words: If all the legal voters who wanted to vote had succeeded in doing so, Trump might not be president.

So voter suppression — making it harder to vote in hopes that many people won’t jump through all the hoops — is close to this president’s heart. The excuse for voter suppression is voter fraud, the belief that large numbers of votes are cast illegally, either by people who shouldn’t be voting at all (like noncitizens) or by people who vote multiple times by either registering in many places or by impersonating someone else.

Study after study shows that voter fraud is a negligible phenomenon: It happens, but the numbers nationwide are tiny, far smaller than the number of legitimate voters who are discouraged or turned away by laws that make voting harder.

538’s Maggie Koerth-Baker tells the full story of the report that is the basis for Trump’s claim that “millions” of noncitizens voted illegally in the 2016 election. It’s a fascinating narrative about an obscure kind of statistical error and the perverse ways that scientific research gets lodged in the public mind and influences public policy. In other words: the article is way too long and wonky for most people to read all the way through, so it’s not going to change the public debate.

Which is sort of the point. Understanding what really happens requires patience and an ability to deal with ambiguity. It’s much more satisfying to respond to a clickbait headline like “Millions of Immigrants Vote Illegally!” and forward it to all your friends.

The statistical error in this case happens when you’re studying a small subset of people in a larger survey: The legitimate responses can get swamped by erroneous responses from the larger group. So some small percentage of citizen voters will check the wrong box on the citizen/noncitizen question, but because the number of citizen voters is so much larger, that small percentage can still swamp the actual sample of noncitizen voters.

Luks, Schaffner and Ansolabehere [i.e., researchers critiquing the original paper] found evidence that, in this case, small was still significant. In particular, they noted multiple cases of people who marked themselves as citizens in 2010 but, on the 2012 edition of the survey, marked themselves as noncitizens, and vice versa. Moreover, this rate of error that we do know exists between 2010 and 2012 — just 0.1 percent — turned out, by itself, to be enough to account for all the noncitizen voters in Richman and Chattha’s 2010 sample. In other words, there might not have been any noncitizen voters that year.

I like to illustrate statistical concepts with sports examples, so here’s an analogy: no-hitters in baseball. A no-hitter (a game where the opposition gets no hits) is a great pitching achievement, so we think of it as something a great pitcher might do. But there is also a lot of luck involved; no-hitters typically include a number of near-hits that are saved by some great fielding play or because a well-hit ball happens to go right at somebody. So there are two ways to get a no-hitter: You can be really, really good, or you can be an ordinary pitcher who for one night gets really, really lucky. An ordinary pitcher is unlikely to get that lucky, but because there are so many more ordinary pitchers than great ones, in fact fewer no-hitters are thrown by all-time greats (like Sandy Koufax) than by folks who are otherwise lost to history (like Bo Belinsky). An unlikely occurrence in a large group can still happen more often than a likely occurrence in a small group.

The takeaway should be that noncitizens do sometimes register and vote; there are anecdotal reports, usually featuring immigrants who don’t understand voting laws and don’t realize they’re doing anything wrong. But the number of noncitizen voters nationwide is more likely to be measured in dozens than in millions.

Another bogus argument supporting the voter fraud myth is that voter registration rolls have millions of errors: People who die or move aren’t promptly taken off the rolls, so in theory someone could cast votes under those registrations.

But like every other kind of voter fraud, there’s no evidence that this is actually happening in more than a handful of cases. I examined a typical dead-people-are-voting story in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“: A computer search turned up hundreds of “dead voters” in South Carolina in the 2010 election, leading to many alarming headlines and garnering face-time on national TV for the South Carolina attorney general who initiated the search. But when election boards and the state police got involved, they found innocent explanations (like clerical errors or similar names) for all but three of those votes, and doubted that even those three were fraudulent. No one was prosecuted.

As for living people with multiple registrations, one of them is Trump’s daughter Tiffany. Steve Bannon was registered in both New York and Florida. It can easily happen without any intent to commit voter fraud, and if people were actually voting in more than one place, that would be a matter of public record. (Who you vote for is secret, but the fact that you voted is public.) So this kind of fraud would be easy to prove, and yet nobody is proving it. You have to wonder why.

Samantha Bee discusses a kind of voter suppression that happens in plain sight: In a few states like Florida, anyone convicted of a felony loses voting rights permanently. When you hear that, you might picture murderers and rapists and not feel too bad about them not voting. But when you realize we’re talking about 10% of the whole voting-age population and 1/4th of voting-age blacks, you realize “felons” must include more than just Trump’s “bad hombres”. “You might lose your right to vote over something as simple as driving with a suspended license.”

In country with mass incarceration, particularly mass incarceration of black men, this makes for a serious distortion of democracy.

Two former felons are gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to change the law, restoring felon voting rights after they complete their sentences and any subsequent probations. If you’re a Florida voter, sign their petition.

and whatever is going on at the Census Bureau

You might think that the Census Bureau has a boring job: Every ten years, it tries to count everyone in America. But in a large country where people move around so much, and so many are suspicious of why somebody from the government is asking them questions, it turns out to be quite difficult.

What’s more, the answers matter. They determine how many representatives each state gets in Congress; how federal money is distributed to care for the poor, the elderly, military veterans, the disabled, etc; whether people from various ethnic or religious groups manage to vote in the numbers you’d ordinarily expect; and so on.

There’s currently a leadership crisis at the Census Bureau: Its director just quit, with rumors that his boss, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, was unhappy with his work. There’s also currently no deputy director, and the Commerce under-secretary who is supposed to sit between the bureau and Ross hasn’t been appointed.

The Bureau is also between a rock and a hard place: Congress wants to cut its funding, but also disapproves of using cheaper statistical methods to cut costs, rather than sending people out to talk to everybody. There is also a partisan divide: Conservatives don’t like that the census collects so much data on ethnic subgroups like blacks or Hispanics, representing us as “a nation of groups” as National Review puts it.

If the census winds up poorly led and underfunded, the groups most likely to be undercounted are the poor and young adults, particularly people who are temporarily or permanently sleeping on somebody else’s couch. That will have consequences.

and you might also be interested in

Republican word-guru Frank Luntz shows a real lack of understanding of Mothers Day, tweeting:

Twitter 2017: Where even gets turned into partisan politics

Leah Greenberg parodies his attitude:

“If only women could shut up and let us honor them without actually talking about the issues that affect their lives”

A little history: Mothers Day was originally about politics. It was Mothers Day for Peace, and was intended to give voice to the women who lost sons in the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe wrote:

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Speaking of peace, the Pentagon is pushing to expand the Afghan War effort again. Trump will hear their recommendations this week.

During the campaign, one of the most insightful articles about Trump was David Roberts’ “The question of what Trump ‘really believes’ has no answer“. Friday, he followed up with “We overanalyze Trump: He is what he appears to be“.

[B]ecause we are relentless pattern seekers, we are constantly developing theories of people, seeking to explain what they do through reference to their beliefs and plans.

This has badly misled us with Trump. Much of the dialogue around him, the journalism and analysis, even the statements of his own surrogates, amounts to a desperate attempt to construct a Theory of Trump, to explain what he does and says through some story about his long-term goals and beliefs.

We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him. It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next.

But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?

In short, what if Trump is exactly as he appears: a hopeless narcissist with the attention span of a fruit fly, unable to maintain consistent beliefs or commitments from moment to moment, acting on base instinct, entirely situationally, to bolster his terrifyingly fragile ego.

We’re not really prepared to deal with that.

As New Orleans continues to fight over its Confederate monuments, University of Richmond philosopher Gary Shapiro writes a thoughtful column about the statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, and the ambiguity about whether they are monuments or memorials.

If they are monuments, then Richmond is celebrating the Confederacy and the slavery-based society it was created to preserve. If Richmond no longer feels like celebrating that society, the monuments should be removed.

But if they are memorials, then removing them would deny Richmond’s past. However,

Much could be added: plaques concerning the war itself, disputes over slavery, Richmond’s and Virginia’s roles in the Confederacy, Reconstruction (and its abrupt termination following the 1876 election deal), African-American disenfranchisement, the blatant racism surrounding the statues’ planning and dedication.

New statues (like, say, Nat Turner or John Brown) might be erected to remember Virginians who fought against slavery or the extension of white supremacy in 20th-century Jim Crow laws.

What Shapiro rejects is the position of those who defend Monument Avenue as it stands:

The contested works, originally built in a monumental spirit, are now defended as memorials. The figures honored cannot be acknowledged as predecessors who inspired Jim Crow, but as reminders of an old conflict, a fallen capital and hazily articulated ideas about “states’ rights.”

Richmond, Shapiro believes, should not be trying to forget or hide its history as the capital of the Confederacy. But contemporary citizens — including black citizens, who are now the majority — deserve a voice in how that history should be remembered.

and let’s close with something off the wall

What do you get if you cross Star Wars with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? This!

May 15, 2017 – 10:54 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (30)

Are Congressional Republicans Patriotic or Not?

Trump obstructs justice, and his fellow Republicans still stand behind him. At what point, if ever, will Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell begin defending the Republic?

We’ve already been through a number of explanations for why Jim Comey was fired on Tuesday, beginning with the improbable story that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was so incensed by Comey’s unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton (“we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation”) that he wrote a memo that led to Comey’s firing; Trump and Attorney General Sessions took no initiative, they simply rubberstamped Rosenstein’s recommendation.

But by Thursday that narrative had crumbled, and Trump was telling NBC’s Lester Holt he had intended to fire Comey “regardless of recommendation” (making liars out of all his own spokespeople, including Vice President Pence). He went on to describe a very odd and disturbing scene: A week after the inauguration, he had dinner with Comey; Trump saw this as Comey asking to stay on as FBI director. (That in itself would be odd; FBI directors have 10-year terms and only one has ever been fired — an exception that was truly exceptional. In general, FBI directors just stay on after administrations change; they do not need to ask.) During that dinner, Trump asked if he was under investigation and Comey assured him he was “in the clear”.

This came along with other unforced admissions that Lawfare’s Bob Bauer analyzes like this:

The picture that Mr. Trump has managed to create so far consists of the following:

  • The admission that he sought repeated assurances about his legal exposure in an ongoing criminal investigation

  • The pursuit of those reassurances at a time when he was quite actively holding open the possibility that Mr. Comey might not hold onto his job. (Apparently one of these conversations took place over dinner—as it was being served, was the President making it clear that Mr. Comey might have “to sing for his supper”?)

  • The admission that in firing Mr. Comey, he was moved decisively by his frustration over the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe investigation.

  • The President’s repeated very public statements, heard by all, including those charged with investigating the matter, that he views the Russia probe as having no merit.  Responsible for the faithful execution of the laws and the integrity of the system of justice, Mr. Trump has chosen to actively dispute the basis for an ongoing FBI investigation that affects his interests.

  • The repeated adjustments to the story the White House originally told about the circumstances surrounding the decision to dismiss Mr. Comey. As noted in the earlier posting, it is not advantageous to somebody under suspicion to be altering his story—or, in this case, changing it in every material detail.

So that’s not what his enemies accuse him of, that’s what he himself has admitted to. Law professor Laurence Tribe comments:

To say that this does not in itself rise to the level of “obstruction of justice” is to empty that concept of all meaning.

Bauer’s only argument that this behavior might not constitute obstruction is based on Trump’s ignorance of and disrespect for the ordinary limits of a president’s authority:

The President may have landed himself in these difficulties simply because of his insensitivity to the requirements for safeguarding the integrity of the legal process. That is to say, he may not have intended to commit anything like obstruction, or any other crime, but has instead blundered into this position because he does not recognize or respect norms and does not appreciate legal process or institutional boundaries.

Helen Klein Murillo reviews the legal standards for obstruction and concludes not that Trump is innocent, but that he would be hard to prosecute.

Even if [Trump or Attorney General Sessions] had other reasons or goals—including perfectly lawful ones, such as concerns about the public’s perception of the FBI and the Director—if obstructing or impeding the Russia investigation was a goal, that would constitute obstruction of justice. Therefore, inquiries as to whether Trump’s conduct amount to obstruction will center on his motives.

However, the statutory bar is exceedingly high.

Murillo concludes that there is really only one body that can handle this case: Congress, as an impeachment hearing. Tribe agrees.

Some are arguing that we’re not at the point of impeachment yet, because the damage done by Comey’s firing will be minimal if Trump just appoints a replacement with unassailable integrity. Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican who sometimes seems open to questioning Trump, says: “Let’s see who he nominates to replace Comey.”

But Matt Yglesias believes that no replacement can undo the damage already done:

For Senate Republicans, the idea of the Good Comey Replacement serves a critical psychological and political role. It allows them to acknowledge that there was something alarming and suspicious about Comey’s dismissal without committing them to a fight with the Trump administration. They simply need to convince the White House to nominate someone well-qualified and then move on to cutting taxes.

But the Comey firing bell can’t be unrung. The independence of the FBI is now inherently compromised. And faced with a White House that’s willing to violate the norms governing presidential involvement in the investigative process, either there will be the forceful pushback from the legislative branch that most Republicans want to avoid or else oversight of the Trump administration will be woefully lacking. There’s no middle path.

If Congress just OKs a new director — whoever it may be — and moves on, then we are in a new reality: A president can fire anyone who investigates him without any real consequence. That’s never been true in America before, and it would be a big step towards turning us into a Potemkin Republic, like Putin’s Russia, where we maintain all the facades of democracy and the rule of law, but in reality the leader simply does whatever he wants. This goes along with other new realities we’ve seen Congress accept since January 20, like this one: A president no longer bears any responsibility to prove to the public that he is not corrupt, but can openly profit off his presidency — perhaps even taking money directly from foreign governments — while keeping the full extent of that profit secret.

Encroachments like this will continue until Congress draws a line. At root, Trump is a bully, and that is how bullies behave: They stop when someone stops them, not before.

Recall that during the campaign Trump said: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” At the time, that sounded like hyperbole — a joke. A year from now it might not. Because that’s also how bullies behave: They joke about things — and then they do them.

Unfortunately, Congress is controlled by Republicans, who have shown no interest in standing up to Trump no matter what he does. Occasionally a few will shake their heads, or express “concern”. (Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr describes himself as “troubled” by the Comey firing. Senator Ben Sasse is “disappointed” by the timing of it.) But they will not demand Trump’s tax returns, or question the legal basis of his attack on Syria, or call for an independent special prosecutor, or do anything else that has the potential to call Trump to account.

We all imagine that there is a line somewhere, a boundary between what will be tolerated and what won’t. But then Trump crosses what we thought was a line, nothing happens, and we start imagining a new line. Nicholas Kristoff writes:

For months, as I’ve reported on the multiple investigations into Trump-Russia connections, I’ve heard that the F.B.I. investigation is by far the most important one, incomparably ahead of the congressional inquiries. I then usually asked: So will Trump fire Comey? And the response would be: Hard to imagine. The uproar would be staggering. Even Republicans would never stand for that.

Alas, my contacts underestimated the myopic partisanship of too many Republicans. Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, spoke for many of his colleagues when he scoffed at the furor by saying, “Suck it up and move on.”

Will it be different if Trump defies court orders? If he starts a war against North Korea without consulting Congress? If Jared and Ivanka lead a takeover some major defense contractor? If critical journalists like David Fahrenthold start disappearing or mysteriously dropping dead? If Trump cancels future elections and declares himself President for Life?

You’d like to think there’s a line, a point at which elected Republicans will start to defend the Republic. But is there? Another former Justice Department official who appears to have been fired while investigating the Trump administration, Preet Bharara, writes in today’s Washington Post:

History will judge this moment. It’s not too late to get it right, and justice demands it.

But it’s not at all clear that justice’s demands will be satisfied. By now, I think we have to start questioning the patriotism of people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. Max Boot, who says he recently left the Republican Party “after a lifetime as a loyal member”, sums it up like this:

Like other conservatives, I care about tax cuts and military spending increases. But I care even more about the rule of law — the only thing that prevents our country from going the way of Venezuela, Russia or Zimbabwe. … While the president has the authority to fire the F.B.I. director, to do so under these circumstances and for these reasons is a gross violation of the trust citizens place in the president to ensure that the laws “be faithfully executed.” If this is not a prima facie case of obstruction of justice — an impeachable offense — it’s hard to know what is. Republicans would understand this and say so if these actions were taken by President Hillary Clinton. But when it comes to President Trump, they have checked their principles at the Oval Office door.

Recalling the three Republican leaders who went to the White House to tell President Nixon it was over, Boot wonders:

Are there even three principled Republicans left who will put their devotion to the Republic above their fealty to the Republican Party?

I fear the answer to that question.

Nicholas Kristof sounds a similar note:

[T]his is the moment of truth for G.O.P. moderates like Senators Susan Collins, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, who may hold decisive power. Will they align with George Washington’s vision of presidents as servants of the people or with Trump’s specter of His Sacred Majesty, the Big Man of America? Will they stand for justice, or for obstruction of it?

I suspect they will make noises about justice, but in the end not stand up for it, at least not this time. And then, after Trump does something even worse in a month or two, there will be another moment of truth, and then one after that.

At some point will the damage to the Republic be too much for Congressional Republicans to rationalize and ignore? We can only hope they reach that point before Trump starts shooting people on 5th Avenue, and before he gets bold enough to simply ignore Congress altogether.

May 15, 2017 – 8:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (23)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Just about the only thing pundits have been talking about this week is the firing of Jim Comey on Tuesday. Initially, the Trump administration claimed the firing had nothing to do with the FBI’s Russia investigation. But their story kept changing, until by Thursday’s interview with Lester Holt, Trump’s attitude seemed more like: Yeah, I obstructed justice. So what?

So what? is a question for Congress, which so far seems unwilling to answer it, as it has been unwilling to confront Trump about any of his other assaults on our nation’s small-R republican traditions. I think we’re at the point where this has stopped being an issue of partisanship and has become an issue of patriotism: As Trump, in typical bully fashion, keeps pushing towards a Putin-style authoritarian kleptocracy, is Congress ever going to start defending the Republic? Is there a line somewhere that Ryan and McConnell won’t let Trump cross? Where might it be, and will Congress itself still have any power by the time we get there?

I think it’s time to stop being polite about these questions, so that’s what I’ll do in this week’s featured post: “Are Congressional Republicans Patriotic or Not?” That should be out between 8 and 9 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll list questions that I think the Russia investigation still needs to answer, call your attention to the voter-suppression task force Trump just created (that may yet split out into its own article), note that something strange is going on at the Census Bureau, discuss an insightful column about Confederate monuments, and cover a bunch of other stuff, before closing with the answer to a question no one was asking: What do you get when you cross Stars Wars with Sgt. Pepper?

May 15, 2017 – 7:26 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

If Only

Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.

– Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho)

This week’s featured posts are “Climate of Propaganda” and “Much Ado About Religious Liberty“.

This week everybody was talking about the French election

The centrist globalist, Emmanuel Macron, won a decisive victory over neo-fascist Marine Le Pen. Following up the Dutch election in March, where a similar neo-fascist did much worse than expected, I wonder if Josh Marshall is right: “Perhaps Trump victory saved Europe.” I don’t think other countries look at our right-wing populist leader and say, “We should have one of those here.”

As they did in the U.S., Russian intelligence operatives favored the right-wing candidate by various means, including promoting fake news stories and hacking the Macron campaign’s computers.

and ObamaCare repeal

To my great surprise, House Republicans passed a bill, 217-213, with all Democrats voting no. It looks like a very bad bill, which is probably why they passed it before the Congressional Budget Office had a chance to analyze it. That analysis will probably come out next week, and then we’ll know just how many millions of people have to lose their insurance so that the rich can get another tax cut.

Trump and the House Republicans staged a celebration in the Rose Garden, as if something major had already been achieved just by moving the bill on to the Senate. (Did you ever see so many aging white guys in suits? If you study the photo really hard, you can find a woman on the lower right. I haven’t spotted any non-whites.)

What mainly seems to have been accomplished, though, is shifting the blame in case of failure: Conservative House Republicans can go back to their districts and say “We fulfilled our promise to repeal ObamaCare. It’s not our fault the Senate killed it.” Republicans from moderate districts, though, are left holding the bag: They’re responsible for the bill they voted for, whether it becomes law or not.

That’s why The Cook Political Report immediately shifted its projection on 20 congressional races, judging that conditions in all of them have gotten more favorable for Democrats.

Republicans’ 217-213 passage of the American Health Care Act on Thursday guarantees Democrats will have at least one major on-the-record vote to exploit in the next elections. Although it’s the first of potentially many explosive votes, House Republicans’ willingness to spend political capital on a proposal that garnered the support of just 17 percent of the public in a March Quinnipiac poll is consistent with past scenarios that have generated a midterm wave.

… Of the 23 Republicans sitting in districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, 14 voted for the repeal and replace measure. … [S]everal of the 20 Republicans who voted against AHCA could end up being blamed anyway, much as 17 of the 30 Democrats who took a pass on the ACA and then ran for reelection ended up losing in 2010. For others, tough votes could make the prospect of retirement more appealing.

Emphasizing the point a little: The bill passed the House because Republican “moderates” caved to the Freedom Caucus, as they so often do. The number who caved were exactly as many as were needed to pass the bill, plus one. More might have surrendered their principles had their votes been necessary.

Remember this whenever you’re tempted to vote for your local Republican candidates because (individually) they sound like reasonable people. Maybe they are, but that doesn’t mean they have the courage to stand up to their party’s majority, which is not at all reasonable.

Indications are that Senate Republicans will want to do something different. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also passed something that repealed ObamaCare, even if it is very different from what the House passed. And that’s when things start to get real: Can the House and Senate compromise on a bill that they can both pass?

I remain skeptical. From a certain point of view, having two irreconcilable bills is the best possible solution: Nothing actually changes, so no victims will haunt Republican candidates in 2018. And each house can say that it did its job, while the other one was unreasonable.

Here are 50 organizations opposing TrumpCare: AARP, AMA, the Catholic Health Association of the United States, and 47 others.

and Trump’s empty “religious liberty” executive order

I covered this in one of the featured posts.

but it’s worth considering whether ObamaCare saves lives

The quote at the top of the page raises an interesting issue. Do Americans die for lack of health insurance, or did they prior to ObamaCare?

Anecdotally, the answer is clearly Yes. It’s not hard at all to find accounts by people who believe their dead loved ones could have been saved by better insurance, or people saying “ObamaCare saved my life.”

In a common-sense discussion, the answer is also clearly Yes. Republicans will tell you about emergency rooms, and how nobody who needs emergency help is turned away. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But life-saving health care is more than just emergency care. Where you’d expect to see universal health insurance save lives is by identifying common chronic problems like high blood pressure, ones that don’t have the kind of obvious symptoms that would motivate you to go to an ER. If you’re getting regular check-ups, your doctor spots that stuff early and gets it under control. Years later, you don’t have a stroke.

Statistically, the question is trickier. A lot of pre-ObamaCare statistics indicated that Americans suffered from a lack of health care. MinnPost wrote in 2012:

The United States has a higher rate of “amenable deaths” — deaths that could have been avoided if individuals had received timely and effective medical care — than France, Germany or the U.K, according to a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs.

The study also found that most of the Americans who are dying as a result of this higher rate are under the age of 65. In other words, people who are not eligible for Medicare. In France, Germany, and the U.K., affordable, universal health-care coverage is available to everybody, regardless of age.

More recently, a study looked at the effect of RomneyCare in Massachusetts and concluded that covering 830 more people results in one less death each year. These kinds of stats are responsible for most of the articles about the tens of thousands of people who will die from TrumpCare.

However, RomneyCare expanded private insurance coverage, and most of ObamaCare’s effect comes from expanding Medicaid, so that they’re not precisely comparable. And an experiment in Oregon on expanding Medicaid didn’t show a major effect. It concluded:

This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.

Possibly a longer-term experiment would show a life-saving effect, but that’s more guesswork than science.

So: Pre-ObamaCare America had lots and lots of unnecessary deaths, so the people who say it was “the best healthcare system in the world” are full of it. It’s not scientifically provable that ObamaCare is fixing that problem, but repealing it and throwing millions of people out of the health insurance system won’t fix it either.

In short, there’s room to criticize ObamaCare. But doing so still leaves you with a question: How do we get American health care up to the level of, say, France?

and you may also be interested in

The Russia investigation is still perking along. James Comey testified again, and Sally Yates testifies today. (Comey’s explanation of why it was appropriate to discuss the Clinton investigation right before the election but not the Trump investigation still doesn’t satisfy me. Nate Silver concludes that his decision probably swayed the election.)

At times it may look like nothing is happening, but we gray-haired folks recall that Watergate was like this too. The mills grind slowly. The Watergate break-in happened in July of 1972, and Nixon resigned in August of 1974.

The Wikipedia people are getting into daily journalism. It will be based on subscriptions rather than ads.

Josh Marshall wasn’t intending to talk about WikiTribune, but his comments are relevant: Because the costs of digital publishing are so low, there will always be a glut of online news outlets chasing a finite pool of ad dollars. The golden age of American journalism worked because one or two newspapers in each major city monopolized the local ad market. That model isn’t coming back.

Another model that doesn’t work any more: the regional shopping mall. I’m trying to guess when the next recession will start and why, because we’re getting close to the normal life span of an economic expansion (6-8 years, usually). A collapse of retail jobs could be the spark.

New Orleans is still arguing about whether to remove some of its Confederate statues. I don’t mind so much the ones in parks, but to me all the Confederate soldiers outside of city halls and court houses look like white sentinels warning blacks not to come here for justice or to register to vote. Also, I’d like to see statues of the Southerners whose Civil War experiences seem much more heroic to me: slaves who escaped to join the Union Army, and came back to free their fellow slaves. Where are their monuments?

The Atlantic points out an unsurprising coincidence:

A timeline of the genesis of the Confederate sites shows two notable spikes. One comes around the turn of the 20th century, just after Plessy v. Ferguson, and just as many Southern states were establishing repressive race laws. The second runs from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s—the peak of the civil-rights movement. In other words, the erection of Confederate monuments has been a way to perform cultural resistance to black equality.

and let’s close with an amusing image

May 8, 2017 – 10:56 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Much Ado About Religious Liberty

When you back a conman, eventually you get conned.

Long-time readers already know how I feel about the corruption of the terms religious freedom and religious liberty in recent years, which I put bluntly in 2013 in “Religious Freedom means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination“. In 2015, I explained that bigotry in America has always hidden behind religious justifications in “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to be a Bigot“. So if you think your religious reasons to discriminate against people because of their sexuality or their gender identity are substantively different from the reasons people gave to support slavery or Jim Crow, you need to study history more closely.

That’s why I’ve never been moved by the plight of conservative Christian pharmacists forced to provide contraception they disapprove of, or Christian florists who get sued for discriminating against same-sex couples, or Christian employers whose workers might use their health insurance in ways forbidden by the employer’s doctrine.

Non-Christians, or even Christians from unpopular denominations, bump up against this kind of difficulty all the time — and get no sympathy from Baptists or Catholics: The Hindu steakhouse waitress can quit, but she can’t insist on keeping her job without serving cow flesh. A Jehovah’s Witness EMT can’t refuse to give blood transfusions, and a Christian Scientist nurse can’t get away with just praying for her patients.

People from less popular faiths routinely pay taxes to support things they disapprove of: Pacifist Quakers finance wars, vegetarians pay meat inspectors, orthodox Jews provide food stamps so that people can buy bacon, and so on. The most extreme case is that of atheists, who are forced to carry around (and even distribute to others) pieces of paper saying “In God We Trust”. Imagine the outcry if Christians had to use money that proclaimed “God is dead”.

In short, Christian conservatives imagine that they’re persecuted, but in fact they want special rights. They think that the law should give their moral quandaries unique consideration while ignoring everyone else’s comparable concerns. And it’s even OK if their special rights come at the expense of people who don’t share their beliefs: Employees should have to pay for their own contraception, and if they have to search for a drug store that will supply it, too bad for them. Gays shouldn’t be able to participate in the economy like anybody else, but should always have to check whether their business is welcome. Women who have been getting publicly-funded mammograms or Pap smears at a convenient local clinic should have to go somewhere else; not because they have moral objections to Planned Parenthood, but because someone else does — someone whose beliefs get more respect under the law.

So you can imagine how I was dreading the ceremony at the White House Thursday, when Trump would unveil his “Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty“. But in spite of previously leaked versions, the final order was surprisingly lightweight. Paul Waldman says it well:

But when the final order was written, it turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. Instead of creating broad exemptions from laws and regulations for conservative Christians who want to discriminate against LGBT people or not follow the law on providing contraception benefits in employee health plans, it merely instructed various departments to enforce current law or issue guidance to other departments.

Waldman finds this to be typical of Trump’s over-hyped executive orders (at least the ones unrelated to immigration):

Over and over, the White House takes some issue that Trump has promised to aggressively act on, and then issues an executive order that studies it, examines it or investigates it but doesn’t actually do anything about it.

If you want to know just how vacuous the order was, consider this: The ACLU decided it’s not worth suing over.

“Today’s executive order signing was an elaborate photo-op with no discernible policy outcome,” ACLU director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “After careful review of the order’s text we have determined that the order does not meaningfully alter the ability of religious institutions or individuals to intervene in the political process.”

And in spite of the smiling faces at the White House, a lot of Trump’s supporters noticed the bait-and-switch he had played on them. National Review called the order “dangerous nothingness“. The Alliance Defending Freedom said the order “recalls” Trump’s campaign promises “but leaves them unfulfilled”.

Strange how that works: When you back a conman, sometimes you get conned. The Little Sisters of the Poor give Trump a great photo op, and he gives them … what, exactly?

Right after the election, I listed a number of things I’d be watching for in a Trump administration. One of them was “taking credit for averting dangers that never existed”. That’s what this is: Maybe you’ve been imagining that Christian preachers are afraid to express their political views because they live in fear of over-zealous persecution by the IRS. (I can barely imagine what Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson have been holding back.) Well, you can stop now, because this order puts an end to that non-existent practice.

Not that I think Trump’s evangelical supporters should have gotten more. They want unfair advantages over the rest of us, so I’m not crying that they didn’t get any on Thursday.

But conservative Christians might well ask what I want out of them. It’s a fair question, and the answer is simple: I want them to state a definition of religious freedom that is not tied to their specific doctrines or issues (like same-sex marriage or abortion); that applies equally to everyone; and that they would be willing to defend not just as it applies to Christians they agree with, but also to Christians they think are heretics, to Muslims, Hindus, New Agers, atheists, and everyone else.

Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” That’s the attitude I’m looking for: Don’t just tell me the rights you want for yourself, tell me what rights you are willing to defend for others.

May 8, 2017 – 9:03 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

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Climate of Propaganda

Bret Stephens’ climate column serves one very important purpose: It illustrates Jason Stanley’s model of propaganda.

Few issues in American politics are as frustrating as climate change. It’s a real concern with potentially catastrophic consequences. The basic scientific description of the problem — burning fossil fuels increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which warms the planet by blocking infrared radiation from escaping into space — is solid and hasn’t changed for decades. Every few years, the public seems to be getting energized about the problem, and it looks like we might finally get serious about taking action. But then we don’t.

At the moment we’re in one of our hopeless phases, where science-deniers are in power and we have to focus on preserving what little progress we’ve made rather than building on it. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up every year. That’s not a conjecture or the result of some complicated computer model, it’s a measurement that gets made regularly by a NOAA laboratory on a mountaintop in Hawaii.

If the overall situation is frustrating in one way, attempting to change people’s minds about climate change is frustrating in a different way. You can go into an argument feeling that you have facts and logic on your side, and feel the same way afterwards, but at the same time realize that you didn’t convince anybody. Too often, environmentalists come out of a debate with a feeling of “What just happened?”

A good case in point was the discussion sparked ten days ago by Bret Stephens’ introductory NYT column “Climate of Complete Certainty“, which raised the specter of “overweening scientism” — radical environmentalists who claim 100% certainty for their predictions of global catastrophe and are “censoriously asserting [their] moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables”. The problem, in Stephens’ presentation, isn’t the scientists doing honest research on the climate, it’s the people pushing “ever harder to pass climate legislation” and “demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy”.

In many ways, the column was just another page from the science-denial playbook written in the 1970s by the tobacco industry: Emphasize the uncertainty of scientific findings, and from there argue that any action would be too hasty. We shouldn’t ban tobacco products, or restrict where smokers can light up, or put excessive taxes on cigarettes, or hold tobacco companies liable for public health problems, or even change our own individual smoking habits, because there’s still doubt. Of course we should take action once it’s been proven that tobacco causes cancer, but until the evidence is so conclusive that even the Tobacco Institute is convinced — which it never will be — we should wait and see. [1]

So Stephens isn’t anti-climate-research, he’s just criticizing the people who want to take action based on that research.

Or is he? There’s a puzzling vagueness to the column that made it very hard to argue against. Stephens didn’t name any of the “overweening” people who claim total certainty for uncertain things, or even identify what those claims are. The only specific example in the piece is a lengthy analogy that has no direct connection to the climate: the data-driven managers of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, who believed they were coasting to victory. They were wrong, so maybe the data-driven predictions of unnamed environmentalists are wrong too.

In other words, Stephens’ column is a very good example of that what-just-happened phenomenon. When I first read it, it seemed to be making some larger point that cried out for refutation. But the objectionable point had a vaporous quality; it didn’t seem to be contained in any particular sentence that I could quote and refute. Take this one for example:

Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future.

Like a number of other critics, I might argue with the characterization of 1.5 degrees in 130 years as “modest” — until humanity started affecting in the climate, a change like that usually took millennia rather than decades — but overall, the statement is correct: It’s indisputable that we’re changing the climate, but it’s a lot iffier to predict exactly how fast that change will play out or which catastrophic events will happen when. For example, the land-borne ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica might trickle slowly into the oceans and raise sea level over centuries, or one or more of them might suddenly slide into the water like an ice cube dropped into a glass of Coke. Nobody really knows.

Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter that Stephens quotes admiringly (but who believes that “uncertainty, informed and bounded by science, is actionable knowledge” [2]), notes that changes in rainfall patterns are hard to predict: Some models show droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, while others foresee rainfall increasing.

I don’t have any trouble acknowledging that kind of uncertainty, and neither do most of the environmental writers I follow. So why do I feel like something Stephens’ column demands an argument?

What we’re seeing here is a masterful example of propaganda, as described in Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works, which I reviewed in 2015.

If your target audience has a flawed ideology, then your propaganda doesn’t have to lie to them. The lie, in some sense, has already been embedded and only needs to be activated.

What’s being activated in Stephens’ column is a stereotype that Fox News, talk radio, and other conservative media has been drilling into its audience for years: Liberals don’t respect you. They look down on you, they think you’re stupid, and because they’re educated they think they can fool you with technical mumbo-jumbo that isn’t true.

That’s the point of talking about the Clintons and using words like deplorable. By doing so, Stephens invokes a previously successful application of the stereotype. You know the way you resent and distrust Hillary? You should feel that way about anybody who wants action on climate change.

It’s also the point of offering no other examples, and no examples at all from the environmental movement. Who does the stereotype apply to? Whoever you need it to apply to. If listening to Bill Nye or Bill McKibben makes you feel stupid, apply it to them. Al Gore, sure. Your niece who just got back from college, or that know-it-all at work, absolutely. Even real climate researchers like Jim Hansen and Michael Mann — the kind of scientists Stephens’ column seems explicitly not to criticize — can be lumped in if you need to.

If Stephens actually made a case against any of those people, that attack could be fact-checked and refuted. If he specified some particular prediction as over-the-top doomsaying, that prediction could either be defended or it could be demonstrated that the real leaders of the environmental movement do acknowledge the uncertainties involved. But a charge made with complete vagueness, one left hanging for its target audience to apply as it sees fit, can’t be answered in any logical way.

That’s how propaganda works. And in particular, that’s the way you will see propaganda appear in conservative columns in respectable mainstream outlets like The New York Times, or in public speeches by supposedly respectable politicians. The real dirty work has been done elsewhere. The lies and stereotypes have already been planted: Immigrants are criminals who endanger your family. Muslims want to take over America, not assimilate into it; and they all support terrorism whether they admit it or not. The poor are too lazy to work, but want you to support them anyway. Blacks are inferior and can’t really compete with whites, so they want the government to take your job and give it to them.

Anyone who wants to take advantage of such notions doesn’t have to state them in places where critics might demand evidence or poke holes in the argument. Like Bret Stephens, the propagandist just has to allude to them vaguely. The target audience will receive the message, and will enjoy the spectacle of opponents flailing vainly to refute what was never really said.

[1] The tobacco playbook and how it has been used in all sorts of controversies over the last half century has been described in two books I’ve reviewed here in the past: Merchants of Doubt and Doubt is Their Product.

[2] I wish he’d stated that in less complicated language, because it’s a point that needs more emphasis in the national debate, and doesn’t require any difficult scientific analysis.

In everyday life, we deal with uncertainty in two very different ways, depending on the circumstances. When we don’t know what might happen, sometimes we freeze until we do know. If, for example, you have a peanut allergy and you don’t know whether the salad the waitress brought you includes some peanut-derived ingredient, you don’t just eat it and hope you don’t wind up in the ER. You send the waitress to talk to the chef, and you don’t do anything until she gets back.

But in other situations, we respond to uncertainty by preparing for all plausible outcomes. When your child is born, you have no idea whether she’ll want to go to college or what college will cost in 18 years. But you don’t wait 16 or 17 years until you have a clearer idea of what she’ll need; if you do, it’ll already be too late to start saving. The prudent thing is to start that college fund as soon as you can, even though you can’t be 100% certain it’s necessary.

If you’re not sure whether you left the oven on, you don’t start preparing for the possibility that your house might be about to burn down; you stop everything and go home to check, or have someone else check. But if you’re not sure whether your department is about to have a round of lay-offs, you don’t freeze until you know for sure; you start getting your resume in order and checking the temperature of the job market, just in case.

This isn’t fancy research-scientist talk; this is how ordinary people live. Sometimes uncertainty freezes you; sometimes it springs you into action.

We’ve let the fossil-fuel lobby get away with the argument that on climate change, uncertainty should freeze us. (Nobody can tell us exactly when Miami will be underwater, so let’s not do anything.) But this point didn’t make sense when the tobacco industry used it — you can’t be sure cigarettes will give you cancer, so keep puffing away — and it doesn’t make sense now. Certainly that’s not how the Pentagon or the insurance industry is thinking about climate change; they’re planning to live in the future however it turns out, so they’re preparing for the possibilities.

That’s just common sense. Rising oceans, more violent weather, changes in rainfall patterns — these are more like your daughter’s college fund or the possible lay-off than like the salad dressing that might contain peanut oil: Even if they’re uncertain, they’re significant possibilities that we need to be preparing against. If there were some quick way to find out for sure what’s going to happen — asking the chef, checking the oven — maybe it would make sense to freeze and wait; but nobody’s come up with a way to do that, so our preparations have to move forward without that certainty.

May 8, 2017 – 7:55 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m back home again in the eastern time zone, operating on my usual schedule.

Last week I linked to some other people’s responses to the Bret Stephens’ NYT column “Climate of Complete Certainty“, in which he denounced environmental activists for making claims beyond what the underlying science justifies, but oddly named no environmental activists and specified no unjustified claims. That left his critics in the odd position of feeling like they needed to argue, but not really knowing what to argue against.

This week it dawned on me how to understand that column: as an illustration of Jason Stanley’s model of propaganda. The best propaganda, Stanley argues, doesn’t lie; it just activates false ideas that are already sitting in the minds of its target audience. I reviewed Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works a couple years ago, but his ideas are worth looking at again now that we have such an excellent current example. So the featured post this week will be “Climate of Propaganda” and should be out before 8 EDT.

A second post is a short note that outgrew its space, on the odd ceremony at the White House Thursday celebrating Trump’s executive order defending “religious liberty”, i.e., the one that is supposed to end the persecution of Christians by the IRS and other federal agencies. Since that persecution doesn’t exist, and since the order stopped well short of the unconstitutional things Trump had promised (like ending enforcement of LGBT rights), the religious leaders attending Trump’s ceremony were actually celebrating the fact that the conman they support has conned them. I’ll describe that scene in “Much Ado About Religious Liberty”, which should appear around 9.

The weekly summary has some important news to cover: France decided not to go fascist, raising the possibility that the Trump election was the peak of the global fascist momentum. The House passed TrumpCare, and House Republicans celebrated at the White House as if it had become law. One House Republican told a town hall meeting “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” I think we’ll hear that line a lot in the 2018 campaign, so I’ll examine the evidence against it. New Orleans is having a divisive and potentially violent argument about removing Confederate statues. There’s some other stuff, and I’m still looking for a closing. So that probably appears between 11 and 12.

May 8, 2017 – 7:16 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

100 Days of Stuff

Every report on [Trump’s] ‘flip-flopping’ suffers by the implication that he had some sort of position in the first place. Nope. He said stuff.

– Jay Rosen

This week’s featured post is “Why cutting rich people’s taxes doesn’t create jobs“.

This week everybody was still talking about Trump’s 100 Days

Matt Yglesias disputes the conventional wisdom that Trump’s first hundred days have been a failure. It all depends on what you think he’s trying to achieve. If he’s trying to make a lot of money, he’s doing very well.

It’s certainly true that Paul Ryan’s speakership of the House is failing, arguable that Mitch McConnell’s tenure as majority leader of the Senate is failing, and indisputably true that the Koch brothers’ drive to infuse hardcore libertarian ideological zeal into the GOP is failing.

But Trump isn’t failing. He and his family appear to be making money hand over fist. It’s a spectacle the likes of which we’ve never seen in the United States, and while it may end in disaster for the Trumps someday, for now it shows no real sign of failure.

He goes on to outline the ways Trump is known to be profiting from his presidency, right down to the $35,000 the Secret Service has spent renting golf carts from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club so that they can follow him around the golf course.

The Jay Rosen tweetstorm I pulled the opening quote from is a good summary of the problems the press has faced in these hundred days.

Forced to choose between inventing a language for a presidency without precedent and distorting the picture by relying on normal terms, newswriters have frequently chosen inaccuracy by means of a received language, even though they know there’s nothing normal here.

So they’ve referred to a one-page memo as a “tax plan” for lack of anything else to call it. And they speculate about the success or failure of Trump’s “foreign policy” when it’s not clear he has any policies. To say that he faces a “steep learning curve” assumes that he is learning, or even trying to learn.

The Guardian‘s Lawrence Douglas expresses my view on Trump’s first hundred days: The institutions of American democracy held up under the initial assault. That doesn’t mean the danger is over, but it is a good time to take note of

  • our own accomplishments as protesters,
  • the independence of our judges,
  • the good work done by our embattled journalists,
  • and the commitment of government employees to the missions of their organizations rather than the whims of a flighty new president.

Finally, some credit must go to Trump himself.

In his sheer incompetence and inconstancy, Trump has emerged as our best bulwark against Trump. … [His] very craving for adulation, the need to chalk up successes, the deep, even cynical, pragmatism also predicted that Trump would have no stomach for Bannon’s reign of terror. The banishing of Bannon from the innermost precincts of power can only be viewed as a good.

Along those same lines, I recently devoted a couple hours to watching Leni Riefenstahl’s classic of Nazi propaganda, The Triumph of the Will, which was released in 1935, near the beginning of the Nazi regime. One of the things I learned is that Hitler was much better at this kind of thing than Trump has been. Hitler channeled the German people’s pride, and reflected it back to them. In the scenes we see, he wastes no time telling Germans how great he is; other people do that. Hitler accepts the crowd’s adulation and tells them how great Germany is, how great the German people are.

Trump’s make-America-great-again campaign theme played to many of those same emotions. Like 1930s Germany (but to a lesser degree), a large chunk of the American public feels humiliated by the course of recent decades, and longs to feel national pride again. But Trump is too weak and too needy to get his ego out of the way and just make himself a mirror for the nation’s self-admiration. Even when he’s surrounded by adoring fans, he has to keep talking about himself and his own wonderfulness.

So Trump has character flaws that keep him from achieving the full authoritarian potential of the moment. Thank God for that.

Quantifying the unquantifiable: The WaPo fact-checkers have identified 488 false or misleading statements made by President Trump, or just under five per day.

the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up. The president’s speeches and interviews are so chock full of false and misleading claims that The Fact Checker often must resort to roundups that offer a brief summary of the facts that the president has gotten wrong.

I’ve long been a fan of cognitive scientist George Lakoff. Here’s an instructive graphic from him.

and his self-serving one-page tax “plan”

Remember back when that black guy was president and the size of the federal debt was an existential threat to the country? Deficits were going to turn us into Greece or something?

Oh, never mind. Let’s cut taxes.

Describing a single-page memo as a “tax plan” is a bit of a stretch, but the administration wanted to get a proposal in under the 100-day window, and this was the best it could do. For example, it suggests lowering the number of tax brackets from seven to three (10%, 25%, and 35%), but doesn’t specify the income ranges those brackets apply to. So there’s no way to know exactly what the effect will be on any particular person’s taxes, like yours.

One person who clearly will pay less tax, though, is Donald Trump. He claims the opposite, because of course he would claim that. (I no longer think of Trump’s falsehoods as lies. I think he simply says whatever sounds good, and any positive or negative correlation with reality is purely incidental.) And no one can conclusively prove otherwise, because he won’t release his tax returns. But everything we know about the Trump Organization matches up well with the cuts he’s proposing on things like pass-through corporations.

He proposes eliminating most tax deductions, but keeping the deduction on mortgage interest. This also has self-serving benefits: Without that deduction, the price the Trump Organization could charge for the condos it has for sale would drop considerably.

Plus, we have two pages of Trump taxes from 2005.

That return also implied that without the alternative minimum tax, which Trump wants to repeal, he would have paid less than 3.5 percent of his income in federal income taxes. Cutting the pass-through rate while repealing the AMT would probably reduce his tax burden to roughly half that level. Instead of paying $38 million, he could’ve paid less than $3 million.

So if we apply his proposal retroactively to his 2005 taxes, Trump would pay less than a tenth of what he paid before, and save himself $35 million.

Has any previous president ever proposed legislation that would make himself richer at the rate of $35 million a year? I doubt it.

One reason we’re talking about a one-page memo rather than an actual piece of legislation Congress might vote on is that Trump has yet to appoint the person responsible for writing that bill.

For 470 of 556 key positions that require Senate confirmation, Trump has yet to announce a nominee at all, according to a tracker maintained by the Partnership for Public Service and Washington Post. In nearly half the cases where he has announced a nominee, the White House hasn’t formally sent the nominations to the Senate, awaiting clearance from the Office of Government Ethics and an FBI background check.

One of those 470 empty slots is the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy.

I may argue with his arithmetic, but I’ll give CNBC’s Jake Novak credit for saying openly what other conservatives believe silently:

Unless Social Security, Medicare, and defense are significantly reformed and cut, not even a 100-percent tax increase will get us out of debt. And the myth that the public will not tolerate changes and cuts to those programs at all is just that — a myth.

So our budget problem, according to Novak, isn’t that so many billionaires and giant corporations pay zero tax; or that the ones that do often pay a lower rate than secretaries; our problem is that not enough old people are eating cat food or dying in the street.

And for the sake of argument, let’s say he’s right: Suppose that in the long run we really do have to cut entitlement programs. That’s no excuse for ignoring the revenue side of the equation: We’d have to cut entitlements less if the rich were paying more tax.

and Obama getting paid to speak

In September, Barack Obama is scheduled to speak at a conference on health care sponsored by Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. He’ll receive a $400,000 speaking fee.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, liberals could really use a saint about now, and Obama would make a good one. I would love it if he spent the rest of his life living humbly, saying wise things, and inspiring a new generation of social justice warriors.

On the other hand, I’m always skeptical when we raise standards just in time for them to apply to the black guy. Ex-presidents command large fees on the speaking circuit, and have done so at least since Ronald Reagan’s $2 million tour of Japan. They also sell a lot of books (that goes back to Ulysses S. Grant) and make big bucks that way. Most of them haven’t really needed the money (Grant did), so foregoing these big paydays doesn’t seem like that much to ask. But why start with Obama?

Any big cash conduit could be used for bribery, so we ought to stay alert for that. But while $400K would be a huge amount of money to all but the richest Americans, it seems to be the going rate for the small number of speakers who have Obama’s level of star power. (BTW: This was also my opinion of Hillary Clinton’s speeches. Getting her on your speaking list put your conference or lecture series on the map. That was worth the price to a lot of organizations, without any assumption that they’d get favorable treatment in some future administration.)

One way conservatives like to tie liberals in knots is by building purity traps. Isn’t it hypocritical that Al Gore has a big home that uses a lot of electricity, or that Bill McKibben flies, or that Warren Buffett tries to minimize his company’s tax bill, or that all of us who claim to care about the homeless aren’t living in cardboard boxes ourselves?

We need to stop cooperating with this kind of stuff. There is no limit to how pure you could possibly be, and no one who lives inside an unjust system can be entirely untainted by that injustice. If Obama decides to go for sainthood, I’ll cheer him on. But I think that should be his decision.

but I wish I understood the infighting among Democrats and other liberals

The most important issue I haven’t been writing about is the continuing struggle between so-called “establishment” Democrats (who mostly supported Hillary in the primaries) and so-called “progressives” (who mostly supported Bernie). I haven’t written about it for a very specific reason: I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to compound the ambient cluelessness by adding my voice to it.

At a point in our political history where anyone to the left of John Kasich ought to be uniting to protect American democratic traditions against Trump, an incredible amount of vitriol is going back and forth between people who are all some distance from that line.

From the Left, Cornell West is writing:

Even as we forge a united front against Trump’s neofascist efforts, we must admit the Democratic party has failed us and we have to move on. Where? To what? When brother Nick Brana, a former Bernie campaign staffer, told me about the emerging progressive populist or social democratic party – the People’s party – that builds on the ruins of a dying Democratic party and creates new constituencies in this moment of transition and liquidation, I said count me in.

Bernie himself is on a muddled “unity tour” with newly elected DNC chair Tom Perez, in which he denies being a Democrat.

Meanwhile, Bernie is facing criticism for supporting a candidate who’s squishy on abortion rights, and for not bridging the gap that kept blacks and Hispanics from supporting him in 2016.

With the diverse Democratic base in the southern states being a major reason why Sanders lost, you’d think that his movement would make a major effort to reach out to Black voters and find a way to meet them on the issues that they care about.

Nope. Instead, we are seeing a doubling down on a focus of the white working class and hostility to identity politics.

I’m hoping to understand all this better and write something useful about it before long. But here’s where I’m starting: Everybody is talking about “the Democratic Party” is if it were a much more solid entity than it really is. The Democratic Party is nothing more or less than the sum total of the people who vote in Democratic primaries. If a unified movement of people — whether from the left or the center (or even from the far right, if they could somehow manage it) — can win those primaries, then the party is theirs.

That’s the test: Run candidates. Turn people out to vote for them. And if you lose, don’t blame other factions for running their own candidates and turning out people to vote for them. That’s just how democracy works.

and you might also be interested in

Congress has a deal to keep the government open for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends September 30. It will be voted on this week.

If you’ve read any John le Carré Cold War spy novels, you’re familiar with the subtle ways intelligence agencies set each other up: Leak this document, let that defector escape to tell some particular story, arrest somebody who otherwise would be in a position to debunk that story, and so on. One side leaves a trail of bread crumbs that they know someone on the other side will follow to a predictable result, which he will then believe because of the effort he had to invest to put all the pieces together.

In “Pathology of a Fake News Story“, Leon Derczynski claims those tactics are now being used on journalists and even on ordinary people who try to get to the bottom of things.

Imagine this. You’re an educated person with a bit of time, and you visit the doctor with a long-standing non-threatening complaint. They suggest a medicine you’ve tried before, or perhaps you’d like to try a new one. Prudently, you check out the suggested drug. You read a few articles about it, but they look like the typical marketing literature. You find four or five academic papers on the drug; most of the trials look good, with a benefit in the majority of cases. There’s one that’s inconclusive, but it’s in a less major journal, with a small sample size. You then go and check out a few review sites; most of the reviews are positive — the drug’s no panacea, but it’s better. A few of the reviews are very negative, but seem to be from people who are a little bit crazy, not using the drug right, have many other conditions, and so on. So you conclude, it looks legitimate; none of the stories look controlled, and everywhere you look, you see what you’d expect to see from a decent drug. Except it’s not. Everything you’ve read — all the end-user comments, all the peer-reviewed articles, are shills, put there by the pharma corporation to make their drug look good, and make it look good in a way that “smells” legitimate.

This astroturfing practice is well-studied; Sharyl Attkisson has a talk on it that’s worth checking out. The central idea is to place stories, evidence and so on in the locations that a knowledgeable, [skeptical] person would search, and give them the imperfections and angle that we all expect to see in genuine evidence.

The next step seems kind of clear: if you want to control the media, you can do so by astroturfing for journalists. Where will they look? What does good, genuine evidence look like for them?

The implications of this seem terribly nihilistic to me. The future looks like a place where, no matter how careful you are, you can’t believe anything about anything, because a disinformation AI might always be one step ahead of you. How can I be sure that Leon Derczynski even exists? How can you be sure that I do?

To no one’s great surprise, there still is no ObamaCare repeal coming out of the House.

The New York Times needs to accept that there’s no way to include a far-right columnist in its stable without becoming a conduit for disinformation. That was the lesson from Bret Stephens first NYT column “Climate of Complete Certainty“, which fits nicely into the fossil-fuel industry’s doubt-raising agenda on climate change: Don’t just sponsor outright denial, also put reasonable-sounding people out there to raise enough doubt to prevent action.

The column is full of strawman arguments against radical environmentalists who are pushing scare scenarios beyond the scientific evidence. But strangely, Stephens offers no specific examples. He raises the stereotype; that’s enough.

For a more detailed response, see Brian Kahn.

and let’s close with some cartoons

Polish cartoonist Paweł Kuczyński creates many striking images, like this one:

May 1, 2017 – 12:22 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (13)