For decades, the GOP has been killing off its demagogue-detecting and bullshit-rejecting antibodies. Now it’s helpless.
As Donald Trump moves ever closer to their party’s nomination for president, many Republicans are trying to understand or explain what has happened. Various metaphors have been thrown around: It’s a “hostile takeover“, or a “class war“, or a “populist uprising“.
Here’s a more accurate comparison: Trump is like the opportunistic infections that attack people whose immune systems have been compromised. A healthy political party could have thrown off Trump’s candidacy with barely a sniffle, but today’s GOP is in grave danger.
Over the last few decades, the Republican Party has been systematically destroying all the habits and mores and traditions and standards that keep a political party stable and allow it to play a constructive role in governing a great republic like the United States. Those things function like antibodies: They may be invisible to the naked eye, but they head off outbreaks of all sorts of destructive nonsense.
Now they’re gone, and Donald Trump is running wild.
Rather than change its own plutocratic policies, the GOP has scapegoated undocumented immigrants for working-class impoverishment. (If you’ve been losing at poker and wonder if someone’s been cheating you, don’t accuse the Mexican who’s been sweeping the floor. Look at the guy with all the chips.) It has pushed self-serving economic fantasies like “tax cuts pay for themselves” and biological fantasies like the female body “shutting down” to make pregnancy-by-rape impossible. It has looked the other way while hucksters and con-men fleeced its faithful. It has struck down any traditional notions of fair play; beating Obama has been the important thing, and only wimps appeal to gentlemanly traditions and rules of decorum. (If it’s OK to yell “You lie!” during the State of the Union, what’s wrong with endorsing a shout-out that Ted Cruz is a pussy?)
In short, the GOP has devolved from the Party of Lincoln — or more recently the Party of Eisenhower — to the Party of Truthiness. (Truthiness, coined by Stephen Colbert, is the seductive notion that what your gut wants to believe must be true, independent of any facts or science or expert opinion.) The result is that the party’s base has no immune system that would reject a candidate like Trump.
With all the legitimate arguments of political discourse unavailable, other candidates were left to fight each other and wait for Trump to go away. And when Marco Rubio recently decided he finally had to take Trump on, the only weapon at hand was to tease him like a third-grader, suggesting that he wet his pants during a debate.
While many “establishment” Republicans fruitlessly look for a miracle drug to cure Trump fever without also taking down Cruz, Rubio, and half their Senate candidates, others are beginning to surrender. It’s just one election; maybe it won’t be so bad.
But this is where the compromised-immune-system analogy has something to teach: People whose immune systems have been crippled by AIDS or chemo-therapy seldom catch just one disease. Even if some massive dose of political antibiotics could flush Trump out of the Republican system, the underlying problem is still there: The Republican base cannot detect and reject hucksters. It cannot tell fact from fantasy. It values posturing and bombast over the skills necessary to govern a republic. It seeks scapegoats rather than solutions. It winks and nods at racism and white entitlement.
As long as that remains true, new Trumps will arise in 2020 and 2024, and any qualified Republican candidate offering real solutions will be defenseless against them. The Republican Party doesn’t just need to find a way to deal with Donald Trump. It needs rebuild its immune system.
This week, big victories by Trump in Nevada and Clinton in South Carolina set the stage for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday primaries, and have pundits speculating about whether the nomination races are over or not.
But while those sound like similar situations, the possibility that it may be too late to stop Trump is causing far more anguish among Republicans than anything Democrats might be feeling (or would be feeling if Sanders were threatening to sew up the nomination).
All sorts of metaphors are floating around about what Trump represents to the Republican Party. (“hostile takeover” seems to be one of the most popular.) In this week’s featured post I suggest one I find more accurate: “Trump is an opportunistic infection”, the kind that only people with compromised immune systems are vulnerable to. Mainstream Republican candidates can’t get any traction against Trump because over the last few decades the Party has systematically de-legitimized all the fact-checking and expert opinion and separation-of-reality-from-fantasy necessary to take him down. So the GOP’s problem is not just one guy: Unless and until they figure out a way to restore the immune system of their base, they’ll be vulnerable to Trump-like infections in all future elections as well. That post is pretty much done, so it should appear shortly.
In the weekly summary, I’ll examine whether the shift in pundit opinion is justified: Is it all over but the shouting? Is it likely to be over tomorrow? (Probably not, I think, though Trump and Clinton are on the verge of building significant leads.) I’ll also discuss an interesting poll demonstrating the variability of people’s opinions about single-payer health care, and what that means for the viability of Sanders’ signature proposal. Also, Nate Silver’s crew discusses the polls showing disturbing levels of racism among Trump supporters, Obama floats a strange Supreme Court trial balloon, and we’ll close with a Game of Thrones mash-up. Expect that around 11 EST or so.
This week everybody was talking about how to replace Justice Scalia
I look (skeptically) at the arguments for delaying until after the election in “Replacing Scalia (or not)“. One argument I left out of that post: the idea that the voters should decide more directly, by making the nomination an issue in the presidential election.
That’s a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest is that if the Founders had wanted the voters to elect Supreme Court justices, they would have written the Constitution that way. In fact, the Founders wanted to insulate the Court from politics as much as was practical in a government of the people. That was the reason for lifetime appointments, as Hamilton explained in Federalist #78.
Matt Yglesias outlines four approaches Obama could take in choosing a nominee, from “olive branch” to “declaration of war”.
Last week I talked about my personal reaction to Scalia’s death, and in particular wrestling with my feeling of joy in the removal of a powerful enemy.
It turns out I wasn’t the only person thinking about that issue. I’m on a Facebook group with a bunch of Unitarian Universalist bloggers (i.e., religious liberals), many of whom are ministers or ministers-in-training. Several of them wrote about their conflicted feelings concerning Scalia’s death.
At Head Above Holy Water, divinity student Michael Brown separated Justice Scalia, who was his legal and political enemy, from Anton Scalia the person, who (like everybody) was a flawed human being but nonetheless deserved compassion. Brown thinks about his internship as a hospital chaplain, when he was called to comfort dying people and their families, regardless of any differences of opinion or lifestyle.
Being awake and alive and sincere means recognizing complexity and honoring it. Spiritual healing is rooted in recognizing the differences between one’s feelings and the universal need for harmony between living beings. The boy I was who was scared, and scarred, by the bigotry Justice Scalia carried into the books of law has grown into a man who understands the beauty of contradictions.
May Justice Scalia, and Scalia the person, find peace.
Taking a conflicting view, Rev. Scott Wells pondered how to discuss Scalia’s death in front of his congregation, and particularly in front of those who had been wounded by Scalia’s judgments, or would have been wounded if those judgments had prevailed. (Wells himself is a married gay man, and reflects that due to the Windsor decision that Scalia opposed “my family is safer.” Getting theologically technical, Wells comes out of the Restorationist tradition of Universalism, where I’m more of an ultra-Universalist, like Hosea Ballou.) Wells sees eulogizing a powerful man in a way that ignores the damage he did as a triumph of “niceness over goodness”.
I would caution people to not forgive Scalia because it’s the nice thing to do, or expected of them. He did not repent of his action, nor seek your forgiveness. Quite the opposite. It is the way of the powerful to expect rules to apply to you and not to them. Do not comply. You are not the unreconciled party. And now that he’s gone, Scalia will have to manage with God’s docket; you do not have to plead to him, or for him.
“It is the way of the powerful to expect rules to apply to you and not to them.” That quote might show up at top of a weekly summary sometime.
But whether we mourn Scalia or not, we should still be fair to him. One quote I’ve seen bouncing around the internet — it was quoted in a comment on last week’s summary, and many other places — comes from his dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 case about teaching creationism in Louisiana schools. The quote starts “The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger” and goes on from there.
Fortunately, another commenter (sglover) realized that the quote is out of context. At that point in his dissent, Scalia is not stating his own opinions, he is summarizing the case made by witnesses whose credentials “may have been regarded as quite impressive by members of the Louisiana Legislature”. His larger point is that the Court’s majority was too quick to assume that the legislature passed the pro-creationism law purely out of religious motives.
I still think he’s wrong, but his argument is much more subtle than the quote makes it appear.
and the primary/caucus results
Democrats. Clinton got a much-needed 53%-47% win in the Nevada caucuses. This narrow win in a small state only nets her four more delegates than Sanders, but a win of any sort should stop the steady drip-drip-drip of what’s-wrong-with-the-Clinton-campaign stories, at least until the Democrats vote in South Carolina this Saturday.
Diving a little deeper into the Nevada results yields some mixed messages. Nevada was supposed to test whether Bernie Sanders could break through with Hispanics, and he did: According to NBC’s entrance polls, 19% of the caucus-goers identified as Hispanic/Latino, and Sanders won that segment 53%-45%. Clinton’s margin came from African-Americans, who cast 13% of the votes, but went for Clinton 76%-22%. South Carolina, where blacks are a majority among Democrats, will test whether Sanders can change that result. If he can’t, his candidacy is doomed; it’s hard to see how white liberals, or even white-plus-Hispanic liberals, can carry Bernie by themselves.
A more subtle problem for Sanders was pointed out Saturday by Rachel Maddow, and then fleshed out on MaddowBlog by Steve Benen: When you ask Sanders’ supporters how he will get elected in the fall and how he will get Congress to pass his programs after he takes office, they talk about a “political revolution”. In other words, Sanders will energize previously apathetic or discouraged voters, creating a tidal wave of support from people whose opinions had not affected American politics until his campaign gave them a voice. (I critiqued that vision two weeks ago.)
But that’s hard to square with the fact that compared to the last contested Democratic campaign in 2008, turnout is down. Nevada continued that trend from Iowa and New Hampshire. To the extent that new voters are showing up, they are indeed voting for Sanders. And the 2008 Obama campaign did draw a lot of new voters to the polls, so comparisons to any year but 2008 are not bad. But so far the revolution does not appear to be happening.
Ever since I posted “Smearing Bernie: a preview” last month, I’ve been waiting for conservatives to start taking Sanders seriously as a possible Democratic nominee, and experimenting to see which attacks get traction.
A few themes are emerging. This video funded by two billionaires focuses on Sanders’ hurting small business and promising to raise taxes. An article by CNS (formerly Christian News Service) connects Sanders to Castro. Another theme that I’ve seen in several places is that Bernie is “a loser“; he was barely able to support himself until he started getting elected to public office. Attention is also being drawn to his personal history, particularly that he wasn’t married to his son’s mother. None of these attacks has gotten national play so far, so I don’t know what conclusions the attackers are coming to.
Republicans. Trump (33%) won a clear victory in South Carolina, while Rubio (22.5%) edged out Cruz (22.3%) for second. In spite of pulling out all the stops, including bringing in his brother, Jeb Bush (7.8%) was a distant fourth, narrowly beating John Kasich (7.6%) who barely campaigned in the state, and Ben Carson (7.2%).
As a result, Bush dropped out, ending the most expensive failure in American political history. Money, it turns out, can bring your message to the voters. But if you don’t have a message, you can’t buy one.
Ever since Bush began to fade, pundits have been predicting that the Republican electorate will eventually settle on Rubio. And Rubio’s second-place finish in South Carolina is a nice bounce-back from his disastrous New Hampshire results, giving yet another lift to the Rubio-wave-is-starting meme. But he still hasn’t won anywhere yet, and no one has identified where he’s going to start winning.
Cruz is still competitive — he even took the lead in one recent national poll — but he has to shake his head when he looks at these results: White evangelicals are supposed to be Cruz’ base; nobody has pandered to as many way-out-there preachers as Cruz has, and his father is one. Those voters turned out in large numbers: 67% of the Republican primary voters identified as evangelical or born-again white Christians. But Trump won that segment. The Trump/Rubio/Cruz breakdown was 34%/21%/26%.
It’s yet another example of how the Trump phenomenon is defying all conventional wisdom. Cruz has got to be wondering how he could possibly lose Southern evangelicals to a three-times-married New Yorker who can’t even name a particular Bible verse.
As I’ve been writing for quite a while, the Trump phenomenon has exposed something completely unexpected about the Republican coalition, even to people who have spent years observing it. It comes more and more into focus every day: It turns out that a good many members in in good standing of the conservative movement don’t care at all about conservative ideology and never have.
Small government, low taxes, family values, military toughness — a few people believed in all that literally, but for much of the conservative base those have always been symbols of something else.
The chattering classes like to say “the GOP base is frustrated because conservative leaders let them down so they are turning to Trump as a protest.” This misses the point. They did let them down but not because they didn’t fulfill the evangelical/small government/strong military agenda. They let them down because they didn’t fulfill the dogwhistle agenda, which was always about white ressentiment and authoritarian dominance. Trump is the first person to come along and explicitly say what they really want and promise to give it to them.
and Apple
Apple is challenging a court order requiring it to help the FBI crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists. That issue gets complicated in a hurry, so I’ve moved it to its own article.
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As the price of oil continues to fall and stay down, the long-term stability of oil-dependent countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia is being called into question. Both regimes look a little like crime syndicates, in which the leader commands the loyalty of his captains only to the extent that he can keep the money flowing. How much can the pool of money shrink without threatening that model?
One of my Facebook friends raised the question: Why don’t more poor people vote? And of course there are obvious answers about voter suppression, transportation when you don’t own a car, and the inflexibility of work hours for minimum-wage jobs. But there’s another answer that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, and gives me another chance to plug a classic speech by one of my friends, Tom Stites: The media covers political news from a professional-class point of view, so politics is hard for a poor person to get interested in or see the point of.
Just to give one example: When new unemployment numbers come out, what does the media focus on? How this news affected the stock market, and whether it is good or bad for President Obama’s popularity. Rarely does it discuss what this means to you if you’re looking for a job or worried about losing the one you have.
If you’re poor, the underlying message of just about every news outlet is that the news is not for you. In particular, politics is not for you. It’s an overblown wrestling match between competing groups of professionals, none of whom really have your interests in mind.
Tom’s solution is the Banyan Project, which I plug every now and then: local news co-ops whose mission is to inform the bottom 50%.
and let’s close with a candidate you probably hadn’t considered
Nothing about the Apple vs. the FBI showdown is as clear-cut as it initially appears.
There’s a way of telling the story that makes Apple sound completely unreasonable, and could even justify Donald Trump’s call to boycott the company: The FBI needs to get information off the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists (Syed Rizwan Farook), so that it can check whether there are additional conspirators or direct operational links to ISIS. The only damage in the FBI having that information is to the privacy of a dead terrorist. But Apple is fighting a court order that instructs the company to help the FBI, in a case that could well wind up at the Supreme Court. Senator Tom Cotton draws this conclusion:
Apple chose to protect a dead ISIS terrorist’s privacy over the security of the American people.
Sounds pretty bad. But that story falls apart in a bunch of ways. First, CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen argues that the information on that particular phone is probably not all that important.
What might be learned from Farook’s iPhone? Of course, we don’t know, but it’s likely that it wouldn’t be much beyond what we already know from the couple’s Facebook postings, their Verizon phone account, their computers seized by police, the evidence found at their apartment complex and the fulsome confession of their friend Enrique Marquez, who allegedly provided them with the rifles used in their massacre and also allegedly knew of their plans to commit a terrorist attack as early as 2012.
No evidence has emerged that Farook and his wife had any formal connection to a terrorist organization, and the plot involved only the couple and the alleged connivance of Marquez. What might be found on Farook’s iPhone therefore is more than likely simply only some additional details to buttress the overall account of what we know already.
Bergen thinks the FBI is pushing this case purely to establish a precedent for future cases. In public-relations terms, Farook is the least sympathetic target the FBI is likely to get, so why not have the public battle here?
He notes that Apple’s side of the argument is not so clear-cut either: Apple has cracked iPhones for the government many times in the past, and responds to court orders concerning iPhone data that has been backed up to iCloud. So what great principle are they standing on?
These revelations suggest the possibility that the facts of this particular case aren’t as important as the larger principles at stake and that both Apple and the U.S. government are using the San Bernardino case as something of a test of the question: Should tech companies give the FBI any kind of permanent backdoor?
And then things get technical: What’s different about this iPhone (as opposed to the ones Apple has previously made available to the government) is that it’s a more recent version, the 5C, whose security features Apple touted. So Douglas Rushkoff sums up what the FBI wants of Apple:
They’re saying, “We want you to reveal that the promise you made about this phone turns out not to be true.”
In an open letter to its customers, Apple emphasizes that it isn’t breaking faith with them:
For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.
Summing up a few of the technical details: Apple doesn’t have the information on Farook’s iPhone, doesn’t have his passcode, and doesn’t have a software tool that recovers the data without the passcode. What, then, could Apple do for the FBI? One security feature of recent iPhones is that the data on an encrypted phone is wiped if an incorrect passcode is entered 10 times in a row. This prevents breaking into a phone by what is called a “brute force” approach, where you connect the phone to another computer that just runs through all possible passcodes. (If we’re talking about the typical 4-digit iPhone passcode, that’s only 10,000 possibilities, which wouldn’t take very long. I’ve seen estimates varying from half an hour to an hour.)
What the court has ordered Apple to do is provide the FBI with what is basically a software patch to circumvent that auto-erase feature. Once they have that, the FBI can crack the phone.
Apple’s response is that it has never written such software, and it doesn’t want to.
The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.
In other words, there won’t be any way to un-ring that bell: Once Apple has software that circumvents its security features, what happens to that software after the FBI has Farook’s data? At a minimum, it’s available to court orders in future cases. And if it’s available to American court orders, why couldn’t it be available to Chinese court orders? Or Iranian court orders? The principle that protects a terrorist today could protect a dissident tomorrow. And if Apple doesn’t stand on a principle, it becomes a kind of court itself, deciding case-by-case which governments deserve its help in which situations.
Worse yet, what happens to the security-circumventing software after this case? What if Apple’s internal security fails, and the software (or enough hints to allow some hacker to reproduce the software) gets out? It could even wind up in the hands of terrorists who decrypt information that helps them plan some future attack.
That’s how you wind up with a story where Apple is the hero: They’re bravely fighting to maintain our privacy. That’s how Edward Snowden put it in a tweet:
The @FBI is creating a world where citizens rely on #Apple to defend their rights, rather than the other way around.
It would be a mistake for people to think of this as “The People” against government security. That’s a ruse. Really, it’s the world’s biggest corporation versus the world’s most powerful military. That’s what we’re looking at.
And while I do believe that we people should defend our right to privacy, I don’t see the individual’s right to military-grade encryption. I see Visa companies, or Bank of America’s need to use it on my behalf, if Chinese hackers are using it to buy condoms on my Visa card…
For me to have something that the full focused attention of the Pentagon – which I’m sure is involved – and the FBI… To have something that they can’t break into… Imagine a real-world metaphor for that. “Oh, you’ve got a lock in your house that’s so powerful that if they brought the freakin’ army, and tanks, they couldn’t get in?”
There is certainly an economic angle here: The big tech companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. — were deeply embarrassed when Snowden revealed how complicit they all were in the NSA’s legally and morally dubious snooping on people who had done nothing to draw suspicion to themselves.
In that sense, Apple’s position (supported by Google and some other tech companies) is a sort of repentance: We have sinned in the past, but we have seen the light now and will sin no more. But the issue isn’t moral, it’s market-based: We need customers to believe we’re on their side, rather than the side of the government that wants to spy on them.
And finally, there’s a technological-inevitability angle on this: If more-or-less unbreakable encryption is possible at a price people are willing to pay, someone will provide it. (In response to Rushkoff: I don’t really need a lock and a door that tanks couldn’t break through, but if I could cheaply get one, it might be tempting.) If the U.S. government won’t let American companies provide those secure products, then they’ll be made in other countries.
So the United States can’t really stop that industry, it can just give it to some other country.
So that’s where I end up: siding with Apple in this specific case, but not making a hero out of Apple CEO Tim Cook. Right now, market forces put Apple on the side of personal privacy. Meanwhile, the FBI is trying to order the tide back out to sea. Law enforcement would do better to start adjusting to the future now.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t think this is affecting my view — I believe I’d feel the same way if Microsoft were taking a similar stand — but I should mention that I own Apple stock, as well as various i-gadgets. However, I am not currently using my iPhone’s encryption capabilities to hide any illegal activities.
As I pointed out last week, the Constitution is pretty clear about what should happen now: President Obama should nominate a replacement and the Senate should either approve or disapprove of the nominee’s ability to handle the job. (Article II, Section 2 says “he shall nominate”. The shall indicates a duty, rather than may, which would offer an option.)
Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (appointed by President Reagan) sees it that way. Asked whether the process should wait until we have a new president, she said: “I don’t agree. I think we need somebody there now to do the job, and let’s get on with it.”
When Alexander Hamilton defended the Constitution’s appointment process in Federalist #76, he expected the Senate to examine an individual nominee’s character and ability, but never considered the possibility that the Senate might engage in the kind of blanket obstruction Republicans are proposing.
But might not [the president’s] nomination be overruled? I grant it might, yet this could only be to make place for another nomination by himself. The person ultimately appointed must be the object of his preference, though perhaps not in the first degree. It is also not very probable that his nomination would often be overruled. The Senate could not be tempted, by the preference they might feel to another, to reject the one proposed; because they could not assure themselves, that the person they might wish would be brought forward by a second or by any subsequent nomination. They could not even be certain, that a future nomination would present a candidate in any degree more acceptable to them; and as their dissent might cast a kind of stigma upon the individual rejected, and might have the appearance of a reflection upon the judgment of the chief magistrate, it is not likely that their sanction would often be refused, where there were not special and strong reasons for the refusal.
But, as I have often pointed outbefore, republics don’t run just on their rules, but also on their norms and mores. So it’s legitimate to wonder whether there might be some long-standing gentlemen’s agreement or common courtesy that would prevent Obama from nominating Scalia’s replacement. The answer is pretty clearly no. Republicans have been claiming all sorts of unwritten rules to that effect, all of which resemble the rules of Calvinball.
It is true that there have not been a lot of election-year Supreme Court vacancies. (I assume justices see an election year as an inconvenient time to retire, though I don’t really know.) The closest recent example is the vacancy filled by Justice Kennedy: Justice Lewis Powell retired in June, 1987, and Kennedy was not confirmed until February, 1988 — President Reagan’s last year in office. (The delay was caused by the Senate’s refusal to confirm Robert Bork, and then by the withdrawal of Reagan’s second nominee.)
If you go further back, you get clearer parallels: Presidents Taft, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt nominated justices in election years and got them confirmed. Wilson got two justices confirmed in 1916. Eisenhower (1956) and Johnson (1968) failed to get their election-year picks confirmed but (according to Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog) “neither reflects a practice of leaving a seat open on the Supreme Court until after the election.” In Eisenhower’s case, the Senate was already adjourned for the fall campaign (so he made a recess appointment). Johnson’s pick was the target of a bipartisan filibuster, having to do with the nominee’s ethical issues.
No one has come up with an example that supports the Republican position: a Supreme Court seat that was left open for a year to allow the next president to fill it. That would be unprecedented in the last 150 years.
There is also no unwritten rule saying that a new justice should fill the same ideological role as the justice s/he replaces. Arch-conservative Clarence Thomas, for example, replaced one of the Court’s most liberal judges, Thurgood Marshall.
It’s worth pointing out that even if any of these unwritten rules really existed, Senate Republicans are in a poor position to claim them. Throughout the Obama administration, they have blasted through the previous norms and mores of Senate behavior: making the filibuster routine; blocking nominees not for individual reasons, but in order to screw up the organizations they were supposed to head; brinksmanship with the debt ceiling; and many other examples. They have consistently refused to be bound by any unwritten rules of courtesy, so why should they get the advantage of one now?
There have been several attempts to claim hypocrisy on the part of Democrats who want to follow the constitutional process. One frequently cited example is a 2007 quote from Chuck Schumer to the effect that the Democratic Senate “should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances.”
Two things stand out about that: First, no more vacancies came up during Bush’s term, so we don’t know to what extent Schumer (who was just an ordinary senator at that time, and spoke only for himself) was just posturing in front of a liberal audience. (If today’s Republicans posture about blocking all nominees, but then go ahead and do their constitutional duty anyway, that would be fine.) Second, the quote is plucked out of its context, as Josh Marshall explains (with video of Schumer’s remarks):
What Schumer actually said was that Senate Democrats had been hoodwinked by President Bush’s first two Supreme Court picks – Roberts and Alito. They’d accepted assurances that they were mainstream conservative judges who would operate within the precedents and decisions of the Rehnquist Court but hadn’t. (Certainly, the experience since 2007 has more than ratified this perception.) Schumer said Democrats should try to block any future Bush nominees unless they could prove that they were ‘in the mainstream’ and would abide by precedent. …
Schumer quite explicitly never said that the Bush shouldn’t get any more nominations. He also didn’t say that any nominee should be rejected. He said they should insist on proof based on judicial history, rather than just promises that they were mainstream conservatives rather than conservative activists, which both have proven to be. But again, set all this aside. He clearly spoke of holding hearings and being willing to confirm Bush nominees if they met reasonable criteria.
Another attempt is to cite a 1960 sense-of-the-Senate resolution which the conservative American Thinker blog characterizes as “against election-year Supreme Court appointments”.
Except that’s not what it says. The resolution opposed recess appointments to the Supreme Court, which put a justice on the Court temporarily without Senate approval, not election-year appointments. Since Obama is not making a recess appointment — Republicans having fought tooth-and-nail to limit Obama’s recess-appointment power — the 1960 resolution has no connection to the current situation.
A tweet from Ken Wissonker puts a different slant on the wait-for-the-next-president idea:
As a friend put it: “Apparently, the GOP thinks that Black Presidents only get 3/5ths a term.”
The attempt to imply that Obama’s nominee will somehow be illegitimate is part of the larger effort to de-legitimize Obama’s entire presidency. And it’s hard to escape the conclusion that race has played a role in this project.
This week it became clear that President Obama will nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace the late Anton Scalia, but we don’t yet know who. Meanwhile on the Republican side, a number of reasons/excuses for not considering that nomination were raised. I’ll discuss them, along with the history of election-year Court nominations, in the first featured post “Replacing Scalia (or not)”. It should be out by 8 EST.
Another topic of discussion this week was Apple’s decision to fight a court order instructing it to help the FBI crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists. To some, Apple is siding with terrorists over public safety, leading Donald Trump to call for a boycott of Apple products. To others, Apple is championing the individual right to privacy against a snooping government. My intuition puts me on Apple’s side of this question, but the deeper I looked, the more I realized that neither position is as clear-cut as a first glance makes it appear. I’ll sum up what I found in “The Apple/FBI question is harder than it looks”. That should be out by 9.
In the weekly summary, there are election results to consider: the Democratic Nevada caucuses and the Republican South Carolina primary. Digging into the entrance/exit polls reveals stuff with implications beyond the simple vote totals. The falling price of oil has led to speculation about the long-term stability of oil-dependent dictatorships like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Right-wing groups are experimenting to see which burn-Bernie attacks work, just in case. And we’ll close with a pitch for making Canada the next president of the United States.
This week’s featured post is “Back to Ferguson“, which I’ll explain below.
In the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, I’m taking a week off from presidential politics. Next week we’ll have the Democratic caucuses in Nevada and the Republican primary in South Carolina to talk about. Both happen Saturday.
This week everybody was talking about Justice Scalia’s death
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s final act, as far as I was concerned, was to posthumously remind me that I am not as good a person as I like to think.
Good People, as I picture them, see death as the great leveler, the ultimate reminder of our common humanity. Like John Donne, they believe the bell tolls for them. Every death — even necessary ones like casualties in a just war or criminals killed in the act of trying to kill somebody else — is tragic: How sad it is that a situation might make a person’s death the lesser evil.
Under no circumstances would news of someone’s death cause a Good Person’s heart to take an involuntary leap of joy. Or inspire a Good Person to say, “I wonder if Justice Thomas will follow his lead this time too?”
Bad. Bad, bad, bad.
But at least my badness puts me in some good company. As Clarence Darrow wrote, “I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”
Scalia’s career. You can read more complete obituaries of Scalia elsewhere. Here’s how I remember him: When President Reagan appointed him in 1986, he was alone on the Court’s far right wing. Outnumbered, he became famous for his thought-provoking dissenting opinions, which were principled, but based on principles different from the ones that motivated the rest of the Court. Liberals developed a kind of grudging admiration for him; you knew in your heart he had to be wrong, but it was often very hard to explain why. Anticipating his criticisms made us sharper — like iron sharpens iron, as the Bible says.
But late in his career, as part of a conservative majority, he became the Court’s most openly partisan judge. His opinions became elaborate rationalizations of why his side should win, regardless of principle. And so, he had a sweeping view of the Constitution’s commerce clause when that was necessary to keep marijuana illegal, but an unprecedently narrow view of the same text when he needed a reason to strike down ObamaCare. He waxed eloquent about legislator’s original intent when that was convenient, but violated it outrageously by finding corporate rights in places the authors of the Constitution clearly never intended. He was part of the nakedly political 5-4 majority that made George W. Bush president, a decision so unabashedly partisan that it explicitly warned future Courts not to use it as a precedent. He attended secretive meetings of the Koch Brothers’ donor network, as (enabled by Scalia’s vote in the 5-4 Citizens United decision) it raised vast sums of money to elect Republicans.
Beyond his unprincipled partisanship, Scalia will be remembered for undermining the traditional decorum of the Court. As he aged, he seemed less and less able to imagine that an intelligent, well-intentioned colleague might disagree with him, and showed less and less restraint in flinging oddly Victorian insults (like “argle-bargle” and “jiggery-pokery”) at their arguments.
Replacement?Mitch McConnell wasted no time in warning President Obama not to bother appointing a replacement.
The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.
Senator McConnell is right that the American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice. In fact, they did — when President Obama won the 2012 election by five million votes.
She goes on to remind McConnell of the constitutional duties of the President and the Senate. I think that’s the right line here: Let’s follow the Constitution, which is pretty clear:
[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.
So it’s simple: Obama should do his job by appointing someone and the Senate should do its job by voting on that nomination.
As much as the Republicans may hope for a Republican president whose appointments will cement the Court’s conservative majority for decades to come, I think that position is suicidal when it comes to holding the Senate. Take the NH seat: Senator Kelly Ayotte has been running not as a down-the-line Republican, but as an exemplar of New Hampshire’s traditionally independent common sense. (Along with another endangered Republican incumbent, Mark Kirk of Illinois, she is a founding member of a small group of Republican senators who recognize global warming.) If Mitch McConnell were running here, he would lose. Turning the race into a simple red/blue contest for control of the Senate, and hence the Court, helps Ayotte’s challenger, Gov. Maggie Hassan.
It also probably helps the eventual Democratic presidential nominee to have a court appointment riding on the outcome. Control of the Supreme Court — not just possibly someday, but immediately — would give either Hillary or Bernie a powerful uniting message after a divisive primary campaign.
Who, then? Various short lists of possible Obama appointees are floating around. At the top of most of them is Sri Srinivasin, who was approved by the Senate unanimously for his current job as a federal appellate judge.
If I were Obama, I would take McConnell’s obstruction threat seriously, and appoint whoever I thought would work best in a why-don’t-they-do-their-jobs attack ad. I’d be looking for a Mr. Rogers type: Somebody who exudes a sense of basic decency, who wouldn’t ring any alarm bells about affirmative action or political correctness.
Recess appointment. Unofficial reports say that Obama will not make a temporary recess appointment, which he could attempt since the Senate is currently not in session. But that path is filled with technicalities and possible disputes. SCOTUS blog summarizes:
The bottom line is that, if President Obama is to successfully name a new Supreme Court Justice, he will have to run the gauntlet of the Republican-controlled Senate, and prevail there. The only real chance of that: if he picks a nominee so universally admired that it would be too embarrassing for the Senate not to respond.
My suggestion for a recess appointment: Sandra Day O’Connor. She retired to spend more time with her husband, who has since died, and she’s still active as a part-time substitute judge at the appellate level. As a replacement for Scalia, she would move the Court somewhat to the left. But it would be hard for Republicans to justify blocking a judge originally appointed by the sainted President Reagan.
Interesting sidebar here: The Court recently issued a stay blocking President Obama’s plan to limit the carbon emissions of power plants. That indicated that, when the case reaches them from its current location in an appellate court, the Supremes might be inclines to strike it down, almost certainly by the 5-4 ideological split it then had.
Without Scalia, though, and assuming a decision has to be made before he can be replaced, the Court will reach a 4-4 non-decision, and the lower court ruling will stand. The appellate court seems likely to uphold Obama’s action.
The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House budget committees said last week they were forgoing the decades-long tradition of hearing testimony from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, claiming they expected Obama’s budget to offer little in debt reduction.
and Oregon
The occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge ended Thursday morning after 41 days, when the last four guys surrendered to the FBI. The occupiers got no concessions: The two ranchers whose re-imprisonment sparked the occupation remain in prison. No changes in federal land use policy have been announced. The leaders of the occupation have been arrested and charged.
A bonus was that Cliven Bundy, father of occupation leader Ammon Bundy and the center of a previous armed stand-off in 2014, has also been arrested and charged.
In a 32-page criminal complaint, prosecutors allege Bundy and his co-conspirators led a massive, armed assault against federal officers in April 2014 near the town of Bunkerville, Nev.
According to the U.S. attorney for Nevada, Bundy and his armed supporters on horseback effectively ambushed federal Bureau of Land Management officials as they were trying to round up 400 of Bundy’s cows illegally grazing on federal land.
The way the government backed down from that confrontation undoubtedly emboldened the Malheur occupiers. Bundy and his allies considered the 2014 showdown a victory. If the Malheur occupiers had walked away with concessions, that also would have been a victory, and quite likely would have led to an even more aggressive move in the future.
So far, it looks like the government has played this right: No police or government agents were killed. One occupier died in a confrontation that appears to have been largely of his own making. The government wanted a middle path between the 2014 Bundy showdown and Ruby Ridge; it seems to have found one.
Apparently the evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy’s son) played a role in the surrender of the final occupiers. I’ll be interested to see if he becomes a spokesman for the militiamen.
but more people should be paying attention to Ferguson
That’s covered in this week’s featured post “Back to Ferguson“. The Justice Department says policing in Ferguson has to change to uphold its citizens’ constitutional rights. Ferguson replies: We can’t afford it. So where does the buck stop?
and Darwin
Friday was Charles Darwin’s 207th birthday. That’s my annual reminder to review the evolution/creation discussion.
A few years ago, I realized that the whole intelligent design (ID) controversy is not a scientific issue, but a political one. … ID is not a theory, it is a political pressure group. …
Political issues require political arguments, and political arguments are different [from scientific arguments]. Political arguments must be short, easy to understand, memorable, and preferably entertaining.
In my case, I also want them to be true.
One point from the “Non-Eggheads” post I’d like to hit a little harder: If you ever listen to a Creationism/ID talk, you won’t actually hear an alternative scientific theory. Instead, such talks invariably focus on criticisms of evolution (most of which were made and answered in the 1800s). Why? Because they have no alternative scientific theory to present.
Let me give an example to flesh that out a little. According to current evolutionary theory, life on Earth has a single family tree. In other words, any two living things have a common ancestor if you go back far enough. A lot of work has gone into figuring out how that tree branches, what is more closely related to what, and when the common ancestors lived. That work is ongoing, and every now and then our picture of the tree shifts a little as new evidence emerges.
It’s fine to criticize that single-family-tree idea, but a real Creationist alternative theory would answer this very basic question: How many separate family trees are there, even approximately? And that leads to other questions: Did they all begin at the same time? What markers tell us that two living things are from different trees? Then you get to a bunch of more specific research topics: Do lions and house cats have a common ancestor? Collies and poodles? Polar bears and grizzlies? What about the 400,000 species of beetles biologists have postulated? Did 400,000 separate acts of creation lead to 400,000 family trees of beetles, or do some beetle species share a common ancestor?
That’s the kind of stuff a real “creation science” would be researching. You never hear about it, though, because there is no such research and no such theory. Creationist “scientific” organizations spend their money, as Abby says, constructing and popularizing political arguments rather than doing science.
When Franklin Graham isn’t mediating between the FBI and crazy people, he’s touring America to rally religious conservatives to be more politically active.
I don’t think we’re going to make it another election cycle if we don’t get God’s voice back in the political arena. … I feel that we are going to have to meet our political obligations as Christians and make our voice known if America is to be preserved with the type of Christian heritage which has given us the liberties we now enjoy. For unless America turns back to God, repents of its sin, and experiences a spiritual revival, we will fail as a nation.
According to Graham, one “great sin that has been flaunted and celebrated” is same-sex marriage.
Here’s what continually amazes me about all the God-will-punish-us-if-we-don’t-turn-back prophecies: When was that God-fearing era we need to “turn back” to? When we were committing genocide against the Native Americans and holding millions of Africans in slavery? Or was it later, during the era of Jim Crow and lynchings? Or when we dropped atomic bombs on cities full of Japanese civilians?
I have a hard time picturing — much less respecting — a God who would shower us with blessings while we were doing all that stuff, but is going to drop us flat now that we’re letting same-sex couples live together in loving relationships.
This week’s guns-make-us-safer story: A guy in Texas opened fire on his neighbor’s puppy, who was trespassing on his lawn. A friend of the puppy’s owner shot back. The dog died. Neither human was wounded, but both are facing felony charges.
Guns don’t kill puppies. Crazy Texans with guns kill puppies.
One of David Wong’s “5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story” is that it’s about “a lawmaker saying something stupid”. He points out that there are so many state legislators that on any given day one of them is bound to have said or done something ignorant or offensive. For that reason, I don’t call your attention to bad laws just because they get proposed in some legislature; I wait to see if they have any real support.
Well, this one does: Senate Bill 1556 made it out of a committee in the Tennessee Senate on 7-1 party-line vote. (That tells you something about the Tennessee Senate right there; there are barely enough Democrats to get one on every committee.) It allows counselors and therapists to refuse to counsel clients “as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the counselor or therapist”. The counselor’s only obligation is to provide a referral.
Counselors refrain from referring prospective and current clients based solely on the counselor’s personally held values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.
This is yet another example of conservatives abandoning their ideal of “small government” when it proves inconvenient. In short, the counseling profession is not allowed to establish its own code of ethics free from government meddling.
and let’s close with something crazy
A huge controversy erupted after Beyonce sang “Formation” at the Super Bowl, while dressed to honor the Black Panthers. But there’s a background level of crazy here that I previously had not noticed: More than 800K viewers have seen a video detailing all the Illuminati symbolism in previous Super Bowl halftime shows. I mean, we all knew about Madonna (right?), but who suspected Katy Perry of being “a high-level Illuminati witch”? I’ll have to go back and look at her videos again.
If Ferguson can’t justify its behavior, but can avoid change by pleading poverty, then what do we say to the guy who can’t figure out how to support his family without dealing drugs or robbing liquor stores?
In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in August 2014, the eyes of the country were on Ferguson, a city of 21,000 that is part of the St. Louis metropolitan area. Through the subsequent fall and winter, I discussed Ferguson several times on this blog, including “What your Fox-watching uncle doesn’t get about Ferguson” about the protests, and “Justice in Ferguson“, which covered the two reports the Justice Department issued last March.
The gist of what the Justice Department found was that in the specific case of Michael Brown, the evidence matched the account of the shooter, a white police officer, well enough that no charges were called for. (I felt good about my coverage here: I hadn’t claimed the officer was guilty of murder, but only that local authorities hadn’t performed a fair and credible investigation. The Justice Department’s investigation satisfied me.)
But Justice Department found that the more general complaints of Ferguson’s black community were justified: Policing in general was racially biased, and excessive force was commonly used, including inappropriate use of tasers and dogs. Complaints of excessive force were largely ignored, and officers were not disciplined. (As the Justice Department’s lawsuit — which we’ll get to in a few paragraphs — charges: “The supervisory review typically starts and ends with the presumption that the officer’s version of events is truthful and that the force was reasonable.”)
The Department’s report found that the root of the problem was even bigger than the police: Ferguson used its municipal court system to wring revenue out of the poor, creating an adversarial relationship between the police and the community. In short, the primary mission of the police was not to maintain order, but to find violations for which people could be fined. The city budget called for and depended on regular increases in revenue from fines.
Last month, Ferguson and the Justice Department worked out an agreement to reform Ferguson’s police and court practices without taking a lawsuit through the courts. But Tuesday, Ferguson’s City Council unanimously “approved” that agreement with seven unilateral amendments.
Those seven conditions on acceptance are that (i) the agreement contain no mandate for the payment of additional salary to police department or other city employees; (ii) the agreement contain no mandate for staffing in the Ferguson Jail; (iii) deadlines set forth in the agreement are extended; and (iv) the terms of the agreement shall not apply to other governmental entities or agencies who, in the future, take over services or operations currently being provided by the City of Ferguson; (v) a provision for local preference in contracting with consultants, contractors and third parties providing services under the agreement shall be included; (vi) project goals for minority and women participation in consulting, oversight and third party services shall be included; and (vii) the monitoring fee caps in the Side Agreement are changed to $1 million over the first five years with no more than $250,000 in any single year.
The arguments for these changes amount to: We can’t afford it. Ferguson can’t afford to raise police pay to attract better officers, particularly if the other reforms are going to reduce the city’s revenue. It can’t afford to monitor compliance with the agreement. It can’t afford to change as quickly as the Justice Department would like (and maybe stalling will allow it to strike a better deal with a Trump or Cruz administration). Revision (iv) gives the city an additional card to play: It could nullify the agreement by disbanding its police department and contracting out to some neighboring town or to St. Louis County. (Other nearby towns — a report by Arch City Defenders named Bel Ridge and Florissant in addition to Ferguson — also misuse their municipal court systems, and probably don’t like the precedent the Justice Department is setting in Ferguson. )
The Justice Department responded the next day by filing a lawsuit in federal court. The suit does not ask for specific remedies, but that the Court “Order the Defendant, its officers, agents, and employees to adopt and implement policies, procedures, and mechanisms that identify, correct, and prevent the unlawful conduct”. Presumably, the government has a court order in mind and thinks it has a good chance of getting it.
It’s possible to tell this story in a way that creates sympathy for Ferguson’s officials: Even if they now have the best of intentions, their budget is already in deficit, and that deficit will only get worse if the police and courts stop shaking down poor blacks for money. And if change also requires additional expenditure … well, where is that money going to come from?
On an abstract level, Ferguson raises issues similar to the ones in Flint: Once we segregate poor people into their own city or town, how does that municipality raise enough money to provide the basic services civilization demands? Where does the money come from to pump in clean water and truck out garbage? How are roads paved and buses run, so that people can get to their jobs? Who puts out fires? Who drives the ambulances and where do they take people for care? Who educates children and protects the innocent from crime?
If no external help is available, the answer is often to victimize the poor and voiceless. If somebody has to suffer, why not somebody the larger public doesn’t care about?
But we need to recognize where this financial-necessity logic leads: If Ferguson can’t justify its behavior, but can avoid change by pleading poverty, then what do we say to the guy who can’t figure out how to support his family without dealing drugs or robbing liquor stores?
The Justice Department may have no practical answer to the question of how Ferguson can afford to start policing its citizens fairly, with due regard to their rights as Americans. But nonetheless it must insist that the buck not stop there. If a Ferguson that respects the rights of its citizens is not financially viable and is doomed to bankruptcy, then the county and the state and even the nation have a problem. In truth, that problem already exists. The question is whether the rest of us will be allowed to hide it inside the borders of Ferguson and then look away.
So Judge Scalia is dead. I’m titling this week’s summary “Bells” in honor of my two conflicting impulses: John Donne’s “it tolls for thee” and the Munchkins’ “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.”
The featured article this week is “Back to Ferguson”, discussing the inability of Ferguson and the Justice Department to reach an agreement about police reforms, which caused Justice to take the case to court this week. That may sound like a local issue, but the larger implications of herding poor people into financially shaky municipalities — and then cutting corners to try to make it work — apply to Flint and lots of other American communities.
My discussion of Scalia’s death and its political implications is long enough that I probably ought to break it out into a separate article, but it has the chatty this-and-that style more typical of the summaries, so I’m leaving it there. Also in the summary: the Malheur occupation is finally over, with a complete government victory; Darwin’s birthday has me doing my annual look at the Creation/Evolution argument; Billy Graham’s son is touring the country to motivate evangelical political engagement — apparently he thinks the “great sin” of same-sex marriage threatens America’s place in God’s favor, while slavery and genocide didn’t; and I’ll close with an apparently serious discussion of the role of the Illuminati in past Super Bowl halftime shows. How did I miss the Luciferian implications of Katy Perry?
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
— Justice John Paul Stevens,
dissenting opinion in Citizens United(2010)
You’ve seen me wrestle with this the lasttwo weeks. On most issues, I agree with Bernie more than Hillary. But I also think the difference between the two is tiny compared to the difference between any Democratic candidate and any Republican candidate. (We can, for example, argue about whether Bernie’s ideas for breaking up the big banks are better or worse than Clinton’s plans to strengthen the Dodd-Frank regulations of Wall Street. But Republican candidates want to repeal Dodd-Frank, and go back to the system we had in 2008.) And I believe Clinton is the stronger general-election candidate for a number of reasons.
I think it’s way too early to make the unite-behind-a-winner argument. There has to be some point in the electoral process where people express their consciences and vote their ideals. Otherwise, the horse-race mentality becomes self-stoking: People won’t support a candidate they agree with because he can’t win, and he can’t win because the people who agree with him won’t support him.
It’s still too early. I want everyone to know that there is substantial support for more radical solutions than we’ve been offered in past election cycles. I want Clinton to know that if she’s the nominee in the fall. I want the media to know that, so they won’t take seriously Republican claims that Hillary is some kind of left-wing extremist, or that her positions are as far left as public discussion ever needs to go. I want the next set of Democratic presidential candidates to know that, so liberals will be emboldened to run and moderates will take their left flank into account.
My decision was made easier by Hillary’s narrow win in Iowa (which was not decided by coin flips — how do these things get started?). If she had suffered a surprising loss, especially a large loss, then another large loss in New Hampshire (which the polls are predicting) might send her campaign into a death spiral. I wouldn’t want to feel responsible for that.
As for those of you who vote later in the process, I don’t think my decision tells you much. I think pragmatism should be an increasingly important factor as the campaign goes on. Which way that pushes you and how that weighs against your idealism is something we all have to decide for ourselves.
but I wasn’t the only Democrat talking politics this week
The one thing that makes me nostalgic for the days when Hillary was supposed to coast to the nomination is the level of Democrat-on-Democrat belligerence I’m seeing. Given the people I hang with, I’m seeing it mostly as attacks on Hillary by Bernie supporters, but I’m told it goes both ways.
If I had the power to make a rule for the rest of the Democratic nomination process it would be this: Don’t repeat Republican rhetoric.
So Sanders supporters should not be gleefully finishing the character assassination that Richard Mellon Scaife’s right-wing Arkansas Project started against the Clintons in the 1990s. If you don’t trust Hillary, fine. But recognize that the Hillary-can’t-be-trusted meme dates back to a series of crap scandals that fell apart when their details came out, which nonetheless have left a grungy film on her image. (In last week’s episode of the TV show Billions, a lawyer explains the ineffectiveness of refuting a false charge after it makes headlines: “If someone says Charlie fucked a goat, even if the goat denies it, he goes to the grave as Charlie the Goat Fucker.”) If you refer vaguely to that untrustworthy image, rather than to specific Clinton statements you have specific reasons not to believe, you’re making use of Scaife’s propaganda.
The emails, BTW, are just the latest crap scandal. Last week I wondered whether similar security violations would show up in the emails of past secretaries of state, if anybody examined them through the same magnifying glass. Apparently, somebody else wondered that too, and it turns out they do.
Similarly, it’s fine for Clinton supporters to wish for more details about how Sanders would pay for his programs. But the notion that they can’t be paid for buys into the taxes-are-already-as-high-as-they-could-possibly-go message that Republicans have been trying to convince of us for decades.
Likewise, any kind of red-baiting should be off the table: Sanders’ policies are what they are and if you want to criticize them on their merits, fine. But criticizing them because you have managed to attach a socialist or communist label to them … leave that to the Republicans. And if his defense policies don’t seem muscular enough for you, that’s a legitimate thing to discuss. But don’t imply that Sanders is somehow disloyal or doesn’t want to defend America. That’s Ted Cruz rhetoric.
I’m similarly disturbed by the Hillary-is-a-warmonger charge that gets thrown around. (That’s not Republican rhetoric, but the more it catches on, the harder it’s going to be to unite Democrats in the fall.) Admittedly, there is a policy difference between Hillary and Bernie: Hillary is likely to spend more on defense than Bernie, and to use American power more forcefully. And it’s worth taking into account that Hillary voted to authorize the Iraq War while Bernie opposed it.
This course if fraught with danger. … If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that would come back to haunt us. In recent days, Russia has talked of an invasion of Georgia to attack Chechen rebels, India has mentioned the possibility of a preemptive strike on Pakistan, and what if China were to perceive a threat from Taiwan?
So, Mr. President, for all its appeal, a unilateral attack (while it cannot be ruled out) on the present facts is not a good option.
She supports the resolution in order to give President Bush all possible tools to pressure Saddam Hussein into compliance with UN inspections. So her 2002 position reflects the same approach to conflict that as Secretary of State she initiated (and Secretary Kerry completed) with regard to Iran: increasing pressure of all sorts to get the desired outcome without fighting. “I take the President at his word,” she says — that word being that Bush would do everything possible to disarm Saddam without war. That was her mistake.
Also, look at her husband’s administration: We didn’t fight a major land war during those eight years. (As The Onion put it after Bush replaced Clinton: “Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”) Bombing was part of a ring-of-pressure that ended Serbia’s genocide against Bosnia and Kosovo, and forced the fall (and eventual war-crimes trial) of President Milosevic without a U.S. invasion. Actually, Bill Clinton’s most suspect military decision was the war he didn’t fight: He didn’t try to stop the Rwandan genocide.
So is a vote for Clinton a vote for war? I really don’t think so.
and New Hampshire is inundated with politicians
The Onion reports: “Plows Working Around Clock To Keep New Hampshire Roads Clear Of Campaign Signs”. It’s a joke, but that’s really what it feels like. I’m ready to unplug my phone.
Blogger Chuck Fager reflects on what the great New Hampshire poet Robert Frost might have said about all this.
Polls are predicting a large Sanders win in New Hampshire. But after that things really get interesting. So far, Sanders hasn’t shown much support from non-whites, who aren’t much of a factor in either Iowa or New Hampshire. But Hispanics are a large percentage of the Democrats in Nevada (caucus February 20) and blacks are the majority among Democrats in South Carolina (February 27 primary).
Even though those states currently look good for Clinton, it’s not unreasonable to expect Sanders to start picking up non-white support. Blacks were slow to warm to Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008, but they did eventually come through for him. Sanders has already been endorsed by a few prominent blacks like Ben Jealous and Cornell West. Bill Clinton’s role in creating the mass-incarceration problem might start working against Hillary, even though her current positions on the issue are pretty good.
For what my opinion is worth — after all, I’m a white guy with a mostly white circle of friends, and so far I’ve refused to put my black and Hispanic acquaintances on the spot to represent their people — I suspect that belonging to an discriminated-against minority tends to make a voter cautious. Feeling like you have the freedom to fall in love with an idealistic-but-impractical candidate might be a symptom of privilege, comparable to a college student majoring in art history rather than business or engineering. If that’s the case, then Bernie can hope for a snowball effect with non-white voters: The more support he gets, the more viable he looks to people who will only support a viable candidate.
Or maybe the snowball will melt in Nevada and South Carolina, as snowballs tend to do.
As for the Republicans, Trump is expected to win, but beyond that things are unpredictable. As I predicted last week, the media decided that Rubio’s third-place finish in Iowa gave him momentum. But he had a truly embarrassing debate Saturday night, suffering mostly at the hands of Chris Christie, who was supposed to be fading. Some polls have John Kasich gaining.
A neurologist takes a whack at explaining why Ted Cruz creeps people out. He has “atypical” facial expressions: “Senator Cruz’s countenance doesn’t shift the way I expect typical faces to move.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s insincere or psychopathic, but if watching him just makes you feel uneasy, that’s probably why. Tech-savvy people have joked that Cruz falls into the “uncanny valley” — that region of animation where human characters are accurate enough to seem like they ought to be human, but instead are just unnerving.
but there are advantages
So many important political people show up in New Hampshire just before the primary that you can have some really interesting encounters. (On election night in 2008, for example, I realized that the guy standing behind me at the bar was Senator Durbin.)
Last weekend, the local get-money-out-of-politics group, NH Rebellion, held a conference in Manchester. Both Hillary and Bernie were there, along with Kasich. (Trump was on the schedule, but I never heard whether he showed up or what he said.)
Somehow, maybe because hardly anybody else who got the email realized what a unique opportunity it was, or were just distracted by all their other opportunities, I wound at a table in a coffee shop with Rep. John Sarbanes, my own congressional representative (Annie Kuster), and half a dozen other people. Sarbanes — if the name rings a bell, you might be remembering his father the senator — is the guy in Congress leading the fight for the Government By the People Act, which is a way to do public financing of campaigns without a constitutional amendment and without running afoul of the Supreme Court. (It reflects a lot of the ideas Lawrence Lessig has been pushing.)
I’ll be talking about the merits of that proposal in future weeks, but for now I just want you to bookmark John Sarbanes, because he looks a lot like a future presidential candidate. He’s handsome, personable, smart, and relates well to small groups. He’s also on the right side of a major issue, and got there early.
One of the things Sarbannes described over coffee was how he’s been getting more congresspeople to talk about campaign finance reform (which the conventional wisdom has said for years that voters don’t care about; it’s an inside-baseball topic). He says he tells his colleagues not to talk about campaign finance instead of their usual issues, but to use it to “caffeinate” their usual issues: Instead of saying “we need to do something about climate change”, say “we need to do something about climate change and what’s stopping us is all the special-interest money lined up on the other side“. [The quotes are approximate; I wasn’t taking notes.]
and you might also be interested in
A federal grand jury has indicted 16 people in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. LaVoy Finicum, the only occupier who has died, is being hailed as a martyr by the kind of people who need that to be true. Cartoonist Matt Bohrs points out the difference between Finicum and the various young black men who have been gunned down by the authorities.
and let’s close with some north-of-the-border mischief
For decades, the GOP has been killing off its demagogue-detecting and bullshit-rejecting antibodies. Now it’s helpless.
The Weekly Sift 