Sometimes unrealistic fantasies raise questions that deserve serious answers.
The Washington Post’s “Tradwives, SAHGs and the dream of feminine leisure” is one of those rare articles that is way more interesting than its apparent topic. OK, there’s a “tradwife” trend of sorts: social media influencers who style themselves as classic 1950s housewives, and a parallel group of stay-at-home girlfriends (or what we used to call “kept women”). But this “trend” doesn’t represent all that many women, and you probably don’t need a major newspaper to tell you what to think about them. After all, if women had been happy in these kinds of roles, second-wave feminism would never have caught on.
But Monica Hesse takes a much more interesting approach. She doesn’t analyze tradwifery as a serious option, as in “Were women really happier before feminism?”. Instead, she approaches that vision for what it is: a fantasy. “I dream of feminine leisure”, say many of the tradwives and SAHGs. And then Hesse asks why that dream might be beguiling.
Her down-to-earth answer is simple: Life is hard these days.
The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease.
What if the problem is not feminism but capitalism — specifically the American version, where work-life balance is a punchline? What if instead of 11 paid vacation days, as the average American gets, these women got the full month that is standard in the United Kingdom? What if instead of five (or six or seven) days a week, they worked the four days that countries such as South Africa and Belgium are piloting? Would that allow enough time to do a full skin-care regimen and pack a great suitcase? If college weren’t so ghastly expensive here, maybe that one lady’s daughter wouldn’t be so keen on the patriarchy as a route to leisure that bypasses the long, uphill road to financial independence.
It wasn’t fair when women had no choice to stay home. It’s not fair if women are working but are still doing the work of maintaining a home. It’s not fair if both men and women are trying to juggle it together and are still finding that there aren’t enough hours or dollars in a day.
Who wouldn’t dream of feminine leisure?
To her credit, Hesse also imagines the male side of this fantasy: Who wouldn’t want to return from work each evening to find a home in perfect order, dinner on the table, and a well-rested spouse ready to draw you into the “ease” she has been cultivating all day? (Now you just need a willing partner and a senior-vice-president salary to pay for it all.)
Hesse’s article expresses a point of view that could generalize: Maybe we’re approaching retro conservative fantasies all wrong. At root, most of them aren’t really about then, they’re critiques of now: Why does life have to be so hard? Why is it so hard to pay for college? To get a career started? To find a serious relationship partner and stay together? To afford a home? To fit children into the equation and offer them at least as good a chance as you had?
Maybe people who are trying to wish their way out of this box deserve our empathy rather than our condemnation. The various retro fantasies they indulge may not be fact-based or workable in practice, but at least they address the question: Life wouldn’t be so hard if some sugar daddy would take care of me. Or if immigrants and minorities hadn’t stolen my place in line. Or if everybody went back to Jesus. Or if the government stopped sending our money overseas. Or if we had a strong-man leader who could make our country great again (whatever era “again” is supposed to point to).
Maybe the best liberal response isn’t a screed about the evils of sexism or xenophobia or authoritarianism. Maybe we should skip past the specifics and give our own answer to the underlying question: Why is life so hard these days?
We do have such an answer, one that I believe is far more realistic and supportable than anything conservatives offer: Life is hard because sometime in the late 1970s, the US scrapped the controls that kept the rich from capturing all the growth in the economy.
We scrapped antitrust enforcement, so as a consumer you have to take whatever deal monopolies offer you. (The endless “choices” you face at the mall are often just different tentacles of the same octopus.) We scrapped unions, so as a worker you have no negotiating power. And we changed the tax system so that whatever the rich capture, they keep. The result is this graph, which every American voter should be able to draw on a napkin.
If hourly compensation had kept up, the average Americans would make more than double what they do now. So you could afford a one-income household, if that’s what your family wanted. Or you could save up for year-long sabbaticals and return to the workplace with new vision and energy. Or you could retire at 50 and see the world.
Corporate talking heads may denounce this point of view as “class warfare” or “socialism”, but such name-calling isn’t really a refutation. And it is nostalgic in a manner of speaking, but the point isn’t to recreate some past era; it’s to get back to the trends that held in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, when economic gains were widely shared.
I went kind of wild this week: Three short notes got out of hand a demanded to be featured posts. (I must be feeling better. I can even talk a little.)
The first spins out of a WaPo article by Monica Hess about the “tradwife” trend — the online influencers who post about their idealized 1950s-housewife lives. What I love about this article is that Hess doesn’t do the obvious (and dull) thing: take tradwives seriously and give a lecture about everything that was wrong with the actual 1950s and the few opportunities the decade offered women.
Instead, Hess looks at tradwifery as a fantasy, and asks why it’s attractive. What’s wrong with women’s lives today that might motivate this kind of escapism?
She got me thinking about how we might approach all kinds of conservative retro fantasies: not as workable options we need to knock down, but as symptoms of modern problems that need real (and liberal) solutions. That’s the theme of “A Different Take on Conservative Retro Fantasy”, which should be out shortly.
The other two featured posts have something to do with abortion, but didn’t combine easily into a single post. The first takes an unpopular position on the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling that reinstated the state’s draconian 1864 law: I think they got it right. It’s a horrible outcome, but that’s because the legislature created a horrible legal situation. It’s not up to the courts to invent better laws. “The Arizona Abortion Ruling” should post around 10 EDT.
The final featured post looks at the political gyrations Trump and other Republicans are performing as they try to come up with a viable political position on abortion. Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states statement looked smart last Monday, but the next day Arizona turned the clock back to 1864, pointing out what’s wrong with leaving the issue to the states. “Republicans Scramble to Contain Their Abortion Disaster” should post by 11.
Then we get to the weekly summary, which still has to cover Trump’s Manhattan trial, which starts today. There’s also the Israel/Iran attack and counterattack, OJ, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
This week everybody was talking about signs and wonders
This morning, all eyes are on the narrow corridor of the total eclipse, which stretches from Texas in the South to Maine in the North, and goes through Dallas, Cleveland, and Buffalo along the way.
I’ve never experienced a total eclipse myself (and won’t see this one either), but I imagine there must be a significant oh-wow effect to seeing the Sun go dark in the middle of the sky. It’s not hard to see why pre-scientific peoples tried to read portents into such an event, just as they read meaning into the appearance of comets and other celestial phenomena.
It’s much harder for me to understand why so many people are still doing it. We know what causes eclipses and can predict them hundreds of years in advance.
Many have mocked and scoffed at this post and even put community notes. Jesus talked about that in Luke 12:54-56. Yes eclipses are predictable and earthquakes happen and we know when comets are passing by, however God created all of these things and uses them to be signs for those of us who believe.
First off, MTG should re-read Luke 12:54-56. I don’t think it says what she thinks it does.
But more importantly, I think signs and wonders appeal to charlatans like MTG precisely because they have no content of their own. The event itself is striking, but its meaning is wide open for whatever claims people want to make.
So America should repent? OK, how about we repent our long history of racism? our wasteful burning of fossil fuels? our cruelty towards refugees who arrive at our border seeking help? our willingness to let people die of preventable causes rather than provide medical care? the vast gulf between our rich and our poor?
No? Not what you wanted us to repent? Show me what part of the eclipse points out same-sex marriage or drag shows or socialism or letting people use the “wrong” bathrooms.
And what counts as a sign that demands interpretation? As several people have pointed out, the recent earthquake was centered in New Jersey, not far from the Bedminster golf club of a noted Bible salesman. Could that be what God is angry about?
Oh, and what about this sign? During the previous administration, God sent an actual plague that killed over a million Americans. The deaths continue to be concentrated in counties that support that leader. Is that something to interpret?
When MTG talks about “those of us who believe”, she means authoritarian communities, where some leader is empowered to define a sign and attach an interpretation to it without debate. As soon as the meaning is open to discussion, though, the underlying emptiness of the “sign” quickly becomes apparent.
In the women’s NCAA basketball tournament, both the Iowa/Connecticut final-four game Friday and the Iowa/South Carolina championship last night set records for TV ratings. Final numbers for last night’s game aren’t in yet, but Friday’s game drew 14.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched basketball game ever on ESPN.
Friday’s blockbuster matchup with a controversial finish peaked at 17 million viewers, surpassing every NBA Finals and MLB World Series game last year. It was only topped by five college football games in 2023. Meanwhile, no Daytona 500 race or Masters Tournament final round has exceeded Friday’s numbers since 2013. Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals between the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors beat Iowa vs. UConn with 18.59 million viewers, but it was aired on ABC.
People who don’t watch sports usually don’t grasp the soap-opera aspect of being a fan. You watch not just for the competition and the beauty of the sport, but because you’re in the middle of a story and want to see how it comes out. Like soap opera, each episode/game answers some questions, but raises others that will keep you watching future games.
Women’s sports have languished behind men’s sports largely because of the inherent chicken/egg problem of attracting new fans: If you haven’t been watching, you don’t know what questions the next game is supposed to be answering.
This year, the stardom of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark got women’s basketball over the hump. Once you started watching, you also began to wonder about Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, and a bunch of other stars. You might continue to follow them in the WNBA or watch next year’s college games.
That may not be the case you’d really like to see. The Mar-a-Lago documents case is more open-and-shut, and the two January 6 conspiracy cases go to the heart of Trump’s assault on democracy. But it is a real indictment of a real crime. If any other ex-president faced such a thing, it would be extraordinary. We’ve just gotten used to taking Trump’s wrongdoing for granted.
You can tell Trump himself is worried, because he’s acting out. He’s been attacking the judge’s adult daughter, and now says that he is willing to go to jail on the free-speech principle that he can attack anybody he wants, no matter what the judge’s gag order says.
Trump says a lot of things, and most of them turn out not to be true. I think he’ll whimper like a small child if he has to go to a real jail. I also think Judge Merchan will have to do something to establish who is in control of his courtroom.
The drama of Trump’s bond isn’t over yet. So, two weeks ago, he was supposed to come up with nearly half a billion dollars to secure the civil fraud judgment against him while he appealed. But then at the last minute, a NY appeals court lowered it to $175 million and gave him ten more days to come up with it, which he appeared to do.
The coverage came from Knight Specialty Insurance, whose CEO is Don Hankey, the “king of subprime car loans” and a major Republican donor. State AG Letitia James noticed that Knight is “not an admitted carrier in New York, and lacks the certificate of qualification required by New York Insurance Law Section 1111” so she challenged the sufficiency of the bond.
So now the question isn’t whether Trump has the money, it’s whether Knight does.
Steve Bannon, you may recall, was criminally charged in a scheme to defraud people who wanted to build chunks of Trump’s border wall with private funding. Trump pardoned him, so he wasn’t convicted with his co-conspirators, one of whom was recently sentenced to more than four years in prison. (Think about the weirdness of that for a second: Somebody defrauds your supporters, so you pardon them.)
The House goes back to work today, which means something will have to happen with Ukraine funding. Speaker Mike Johnson is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, so he might as well do the right thing. But we’ll see.
what I feel is happening right now is that we’re being gaslit. The press is pathologizing Biden’s normal signs of aging, and they’re normalizing Trump’s blatant signs of of dementia. And so the people are really being told a kind of double lie. Either it’s twice as many people believe Biden is not as cognitively fit as Trump. Or we have the tired old “two old men” narrative, you know, we have a gerontocracy. And the point is that, look, we’re talking about a tale of two brains here. Biden’s brain is aging, Trump’s brain is dementing. We’re comparing apples to rotted oranges here. They’re not the same.
One example I found persuasive is the Nancy/Nikki incident:
The Dementia Care Society says that a sign of advanced dementia is when you start combining people and generations. You literally mash people together into one person. … Trump showed us the combination of people when he made Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley one person. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue, okay? It wasn’t that he meant to say one name and he said the other. He gave a speech about the person I’m running against in this primary who was responsible for security at the Capitol. He actually confused the two people. You see the difference?
The Trump Media stock meltdown seems to be underway. It began publicly trading under the symbol DJT on March 26, and jumped up above $70 a share on the 27th. It closed Friday at $40.59. Last I checked this morning, it was $36.52.
DJT’s main problem is that the underlying business is worthless. The usual start-up story is that a company may be losing money right now, but its revenues and user base are growing fast, so profitability is going to happen eventually. DJT is losing money now, isn’t growing, and has no plausible plan to ever make money.
WaPo speculates on Trump’s plan to end the Ukraine War, which he has said he could do in 24 hours. The gist: Russia gets to keep Crimea and some section of eastern Ukraine. Ukraine gets … I’m not sure what. And the US drops its sanctions in an effort to make Russia less dependent on China.
The Munich analogy gets way over-used, but this does sound awfully Munich-like.
The underlying problem of No Labels is that it reads the electorate wrong. Yes, most people do wish that the two major parties would compromise and govern, rather than posture and logjam. But that desire for compromise has no content on particular issues. There is no centrist philosophy that informs centrist positions on economic and cultural matters, and no centrist vision of America’s future.
Worse, most of the specific positions centrist politicians stake out are actually compromises already proposed by Democrats and rejected by Republicans. Take the budget deficit. Want to split the difference between Democratic tax increases and Republican spending cuts? Good luck with that; Obama already tried it.
The lack of a No Labels candidate means RFK Jr. is the only significant third-party option. I think the way to run against him is to let him talk. He’s a loon who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. The more people see him, the less they’re going to want him to be president.
Jon Tester’s seat in Montana might decide the Senate majority. (Democrats currently hold a 51-49 advantage, but the seat Joe Manchin is retiring from is considered unwinnable.) This week WaPo published a weird and complicated story about the main Republican challlenger, former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.
It’s about the bullet in his forearm, which he says he picked up in Afghanistan but never reported. Then he later told a park ranger a story about shooting himself accidentally in a national park. That lie was technically a crime, but the statute of limitations has passed. As to why he covered up the wound to begin with, I’m still confused.
and let’s close with something natural
One of the best photo contests online is Smithsonian Magazine’s. Here we see a glacial lake in Denali National Park in Alaska.
The Biden administration has finally begun to distance itself from the Netanyahu government. How much difference will that make?
Israel’s attack Monday night on a three-car convoy of the food-aid group World Central Kitchen brought to a head something that had been building slowly for a long time: American discontent with the war in Gaza.
Israel immediately said the attack, which left seven aid workers dead, was a mistake. But WCK Founder José Andrés wasn’t buying it:
This was not just a bad luck situation where, “Oops, we dropped a bomb in the wrong place.” … The airstrikes on our convoy I don’t think were an unfortunate mistake. It was really a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by everybody at the [Israel Defense Forces].
The IDF’s investigation concluded that the army unit involved had believed the vehicles they were tracking from the sky had been taken over by Hamas gunmen, and that they were not aware of the coordination procedures put in place between the military and World Central Kitchen for that evening.
Andrés is calling for an independent investigation.
One reason this particular incident has had such an impact on world opinion is that it is part of a larger pattern.
Scott Paul, of Oxfam, said in a briefing with other relief organisations on Thursday before the results of Israel’s investigation were released: “Let’s be very clear. This is tragic but it is not an anomaly. The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”
“Systemic” seems very carefully chosen. It does not necessarily mean “intentional”, but it includes that possibility. What “systemic” suggests to me is a kind of indifference: As things are, aid workers die on a fairly regular basis. This fact does not cause the system to change.
According to AP (which attributes the number to the UN) “at least 180 humanitarian workers have been killed in the war so far”. Those 180 are again part of a larger whole: around 33,000 Gazans, at least 13,800 of them children, have died since the war started. A much larger number of people are at risk due to the famine developing as insufficient quantities of food are brought in.
The larger numbers, though, are harder to form clear opinions about. Some of the 33K dead were the Hamas fighters Israel has every right to target. Some civilians were Hamas supporters, and some probably ventured into places they had been told to stay out of or ignored Israeli warnings about impending attacks.
But the seven WCK workers did everything right. They told the IDF what they were doing, which centered on delivering food to people who need it. They, like the 180 dead aid workers they joined, were people risking their lives to make sure strangers got food and medical care. We are, in short, talking about seven (and 180) of the best people in the world.
Until now, the Biden administration has chosen to keep its conflicts with the Netanyahu government behind closed doors. The public would hear reports that Biden was pressuring Netanyahu to be more forthcoming in negotiations over the ceasefire-for-hostages deal the US would like to broker, but publicly the US had Israel’s back at the UN and in every other public forum. Biden has paid a fairly large political price for this among progressive Democrats, especially young people. More recently, even longtime supporters of Israel, like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have begun criticizing Netanyahu.
Thursday, Biden and Netanyahu had a phone call. The White House account of that call had a significantly different tone: Biden was demanding specific actions, and threatening consequences if they didn’t happen.
President Joe Biden ticked through several things that he needed to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do immediately: open up the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the port of Ashdod in southern Israel for humanitarian aid; significantly ramp up the supplies getting in through Kerem Shalom.
For now, Israel seems to be doing what Biden asked. But it will take time to see whether anything has substantively changed: Will more aid get through to Gazans? Will the famine abate? Will an attack on Rafah produce a new spike in civilian casualties? Will some kind of ceasefire-for-hostages deal actually happen? And if nothing changes, will Biden follow through with the “changes in our own policy” Secretary Blinken has suggested?
I think it’s important to keep repeating a point I’ve been making from the early days of the Gaza conflict: Americans should not be bringing this war home. American Jews are not the Netanyahu government. American Palestinians are not Hamas.
Memo to the bigots. Israel does not set its policies or run its war from: Synagogues, Jewish community centers, Holocaust museums, Kosher grocery markets, Jewish-owned cafes & shops
Bringing a mob to scream outside these places is an act of hate and antisemitism, not protest.
Thanks to everybody who wished me good health this week. Your wishes have kinda-sorta been granted. Every symptom of this illness — fever, congestion, coughing, etc. — has gotten significantly better, with one exception: My voice still isn’t coming back.
Some people pay significant sums of money to go on silent retreats, where they aren’t supposed to talk to anyone. Well, this week I’ve had a silent retreat in the comfort of my own home. So far, though, the spiritual benefits of this practice seem to be escaping me. I have never thought of myself as the kind of person who loves the sound of his own voice, but it turns out that I do.
There have been two big news stories this week: the eclipse and the Israeli attack on a convoy of World Central Kitchen vehicles in Gaza. I don’t have a lot to say about the eclipse; it’s like the kind of oh-wow event you either do or don’t find moving. The WCK attack, on the other hand, has taken on a symbolic significance beyond the simple facts. It has brought to a head the discontent with Israel’s prosecution of the Gaza War that has been growing for some while, pushing the Biden administration to take a more forceful approach to the Netanyahu government. Whether anything will come of it remains to be seen.
So this morning’s featured post is “Will the World Central Kitchen attack change anything?” I don’t try to answer that question. The article mainly pulls together what we know at this point. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary includes a discussion of the eclipse, and in particular of the strange tendency on the Christian Right to attach meaning to it, along with other signs and wonders like the New Jersey earthquake and the Baltimore bridge collapse. At long last, it looks like one of the Trump criminal trials will start next week. The predicted meltdown of Trump Media stock has started. No Labels is not going to field a candidate. That should be out before noon EDT.
So have a great week, everybody. And don’t forget to appreciate the sound of your own voice.
This week everybody was talking about the Key Bridge collapse
My wife and I drive past Baltimore at least twice a year, and we disagree about whether we’ve ever been on the Key Bridge. (Usually we take the I-895 tunnel.) Nonetheless, I’ve seen an exit for the bridge many, many times, and it feels like a real place to me.
Anyway, the bridge’s collapse looks like a series of unfortunate events: A big container ship lost power, lost control of its steering, and rammed the bridge, bringing it down. Some quick work closing the bridge to traffic saved a lot of lives. (In the video, you can see the last few cars and trucks getting across.) The lives not saved were workers doing maintenance late at night. All six were Central American migrants here legally.
The Port of Baltimore, one of the East Coast’s busiest harbors, is closed until the wreckage can be cleared away. That’s going to have economic consequences all over the country.
What should happen next is fairly obvious: rebuild. Baltimore needs its outer beltway. People (like me) who drive down the east coast do not need or want to add to the city’s congestion. And the two alternate routes are tunnels where it’s illegal to carry hazardous materials. If this bridge were in a red state, Congress would quickly approve bipartisan funding and the rebuilding process would begin.
But Maryland is a blue state and Baltimore is the kind of city Republicans like to demonize. So nothing will be simple.
The immediate media response to the disaster illustrated the disadvantage pundits labor under when they care about facts.
TV talking heads who were trying to be honest and responsible had to admit they didn’t know what had happened or why. Not so, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who instantly raised the issue of whether this was a terrorist attack. Misogynist Andrew Tate (who had been successfully deplatformed from social media until Elon Musk brought him back) declared the event a “cyber attack” and predicted a “Black Swan event” would follow. Alex Jones then upped the ante, announcing “WW3 has already started.”
Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo immediately thought of “the potential for wrongdoing or the potential for foul play given the wide open border”. Utah legislator and candidate for governor Phil Lyman tweeted, “This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.” Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union pointed at “drug-addled” employees and Covid lockdowns as possible causes. Both the Baltimore mayor and the Maryland governor are Black, which has made them tempting targets.
But remember: All the local emergency response people performed admirably. Eventually we’ll find out the root causes, which quite probably have nothing to do with the mayor or governor. And the central victims of the tragedy — the people who died — were migrants doing hard jobs.
I wish Fox Business had interviewed me. I could have raised my theory that God was angry over the blasphemy of the Trump Bible. It makes as much sense as anything else.
More than a year ago, a three-judge panel ruled that the congressional districts drawn by the South Carolina legislature were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In particular, Black voters were intentionally moved out of the 1st district, currently represented by Republican Nance Mace.
South Carolina appealed to the Supreme Court almost exactly a year ago, and the Court has done nothing. But while the Court was “considering” the appeal, nobody else could do anything either. So there is no alternative map, and the electoral process has to move forward, with the state required to mail overseas and military ballots by April 27 for the primary June 1.
Thursday the three-judge panel relented, giving the state the OK to use the racially gerrymandered map for this election cycle. Quite possibly, this will result in an ill-gotten House seat for the Republicans.
We see what they’re doing. We know the conservative majority of this Supreme Court decided to let Black voters continue to be discriminated against in South Carolina this year in violation of the Constitution
This was part of a larger segment where Hayes also discussed the Court helping Trump stall his federal January 6 case until after the election.
and other right-wing freakouts
The Fox News silo worked itself into a lather about the ways Joe Biden has “disrespected” Easter. Jay Kuo explains two that Trump raged about in one tweet. The marketer of the Trump Bible described these actions as “blasphemous” and “examples of the Biden Administration’s years-long assault on the Christian faith”.
First, Biden proclaimed Easter as Transgender Day of Visibility. OK, Biden did make a proclamation recognizing the Transgender Day of Visibility, which has been on March 31 since it was established in 2009. Easter, which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, happened to fall on March 31 this year, as it tends to about one year in every 23. If this upsets you, you should blame the Sun and Moon, not Biden.
BTW. The whole idea that Christianity has something to do with gender Identities is suspect. No matter how hard people work to inject their bigotries into the Bible, their bigotries remain their bigotries, not their religious convictions.
Second, Biden supposedly banned religious designs from the White House Easter-egg art contest. This also is true, sort of. But religious designs have been banned from the contest for 47 years, including the four Trump-administration Easters. The contest, it turns out, is partially funded by the Department of Agriculture in cooperation with the American Egg Board as a promotional event for eggs. (There had to be a propaganda purpose somewhere, right?) AEB President Emily Metz explains:
So when we say, “can’t be overtly religious”, we just can’t be seen to be promoting one religion over the other, the same way we can’t be seen to be promoting one political viewpoint or ideology over the other. We have to be totally neutral in everything we do and have it just be focused on egg promotion and marketing activities.
If you ever find yourself wondering why MAGA conservatives can’t raise any outrage over climate change or mass shootings, just remember that they have far more important things to get upset about.
A day after NBC chief political analyst Chuck Todd told “Meet the Press” viewers that McDaniel “has credibility issues that she still has to deal with,” hosts on the network’s cable affiliate — including Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — echoed the rebuke, citing her support of Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election.
The Detroit News reported that McDaniel was on a phone call where Trump pressured Michigan election officials not to certify the election returns from Wayne County. MSNBC host Joy Reid commented:
We welcome Republican voices. The reality is: This isn’t a difference of opinion. She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.
Conde said in his memo that the decision to bring McDaniel on board was made “because of our deep commitment to presenting our audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experiences, particularly during these consequential times. We continue to be committed to the principle that we must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”
David Roberts, who has no connection to NBC, summed up my point of view:
The basic dilemma facing media, which they are still trying to wriggle around (see: the McDaniel affair), is that elevating voices genuinely representative of MAGA means tolerating lies, bigotry, & anti-democratic sentiment. You can’t have one without the other.
and you also might be interested in …
I had expected the Right not to start their campaign against the 22nd Amendment (which stops presidents from running for a third term) until Trump had actually won his second. But no.
Conservatives have gritted their teeth for years as the Left, in their hatred of Trump, has attempted to pervert the meaning of first the Twenty-fifth Amendment and, more recently, the Fourteenth Amendment. The case for repealing the Twenty-second Amendment is far more straightforward: As with Prohibition, it is simply a matter of finding the will to get rid of a bad idea that needlessly limits Americans’ freedom.
And don’t worry about him being five months older in 2028 than Biden is now because of “the glaringly obvious differences between the men in their brain power, physical strength, and ability to walk in a straight line”.
They’re clearly not seeing the fat, out-of-shape Trump I see, or listening to the incoherent speeches I hear.
The motivating vision here is of the Great Leader as president for life. Anything that stands in the way will have to go.
Crypto-currency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a multi-billion-dollar scheme that caused the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange Bankman-Fried founded. He simultaneously ran a hedge fund that made risky bets with clients’ assets.
The FTX fraud has no direct connection to the Trump real-estate fraud, but it does illustrate a related point: Fraud is fraud, whether the target loses money or not. The FTX collapse started when the relationship to the hedge fund was exposed by CoinDesk. But if everyone had stayed ignorant, the risky bets might well have paid off and everyone would still have their money. That wouldn’t make the whole scheme any less fraudulent.
Trump misbehaved in his typical democracy-threatening ways this week. He repeatedly attacked the adult daughter of the judge in the Stormy Daniels case. And he reposted on Truth Social a video involving a truck with a life-sized full-color back-gate image of Joe Biden bound and gagged.
Imagine the impact all of this is having on potential witnesses and jurors in the criminal cases against Trump. If Trump can get away with threatening a Judge’s daughter, if he can do this to the President of the United States, then what’s going to happen to them if they take the witness stand against him or vote to convict?
I don’t know whether Judge Juan Merchan could scare Trump straight with a few days of revoked bail pretrial detention, or whether that’s what Trump wants to happen, the better to make his victimhood case to the voters. But I’m starting to think the experiment is worth trying.
The October 7 attacks unified Israel, but that unity is starting to come undone again. Sunday evening, thousands protested in Jerusalem.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has now been under arrest in Russia for a year. Many voices in America noted the anniversary, but one did not: Trump. America-First clearly has an exception when it comes to Putin’s Russia.
By the end of this year, the trucks will for the first time start traveling alone, without human minders like Jenkins, as two major companies — Aurora and Kodiak Robotics — launch fully autonomous trucks in Texas. …
By default, driverless passenger vehicles and trucks can ride anywhere in the United States, unless a state explicitly says they can’t. That means companies can test and operate their vehicles across most of the country. Two dozen states, including Texas, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, specifically allow driverless operations, according to data compiled by Aurora, while another 16 states have no regulations specific to autonomous vehicles.
The number of jobs that could be replaced here is in the millions.
Here’s what I predict: The overall accident rate of autonomous trucks will be lower than human-driven trucks, but they will have different accidents. The question is what the public will do when somebody dies in a way that would never have happened if a human were involved.
For reasons I explained in the teaser, I’ve had to cut corners this week. The closing is supposed to be orthogonal to the news, with a touch of the humorous, amazing, uplifting, or silly. I don’t have one this week, so please help me out: Talk among yourselves about suitable closings for a week like this one.
The mifepristone suit from Amarillo is so embarrassingly bad that even the Court’s conservative majority can’t justify doing what it wants.
The anti-abortion-pill case that right-wing culture-war groups primed to get to the Supreme Court got to the Supreme Court. Oral arguments happened Tuesday, and did not go nearly as well as anti-abortion groups probably imagined when they filed the case. Even Amy Coney Barrett seemed skeptical.
There probably won’t be a decision until June, so there’s no sense going into great detail now. But there are a couple of things worth noting:
When you grease the way for a case to make it to the Supreme Court, you wind up with a greasy Supreme Court case. Legally, this was a bad argument that never should have come this far, and even some conservative justices seemed embarrassed by it.
US courts continue to entertain notions of “Christian conscience” that are so expansive as to be passive aggressive. The rest of us are expected to change our lives so that right-wing Christians can have a buffer zone around extensions of “conscience” they have intentionally constructed to control us.
I explained the greased slide that brought this case to the Supreme Court back when the case was first being heard in Amarillo, almost exactly a year ago: The Northern District of Texas, which contains Amarillo, has one judge who hears just about all the cases. That judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is a right-wing culture warrior who can be counted on to rule in the “right” way, independent of facts or the law. The Northern District sits inside Fifth Circuit, whose appellate court is not quite as lawless as Kacsmaryk, but has a similar right-wing bias and will not examine his rulings too closely.
So in this case, foes of abortion rights incorporated their group in Amarillo precisely so they could file their suit in Kacsmaryk’s court. (The Judicial Conference has since changed the rules to limit this kind of judge shopping.) Kacsmaryk did his part and issued a nationwide injunction stopping the sale of mifepristone. The 5th circuit cut that injunction down a little, leaving mifepristone legal but limiting the possibilities for prescribing it. The Supreme Court previously stayed both rulings pending its own examination of the injunction.
That’s what they were discussing Tuesday.
The big reason the case should never have come this far is the plaintiffs’ lack of standing. In non-legalese, they can’t show how the availability of mifepristone harms them, so there’s no injury for the court to try to correct.
According to the doctors, their concrete injury is that someone might take mifepristone, might experience medical complications, might go to the hospital for care, and then the physicians in question might have to complete the abortion despite their moral objections to doing so.
Standing is supposed to be real, not speculative. The injury is supposed to be either happening, or so close to happening that it seems bound to happen without an injunction. A maybe-maybe-maybe argument doesn’t give you standing. There’s a good reason for this requirement: Otherwise, judges could make pronouncements about any topic that interested them, and the awesome power our system gives the courts could be abused.
A lot of articles have covered the case’s standing issue. But I was pleased to see Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern raise the passive aggression issue in Slate. (They don’t use that terminology, which I started using in 2013.) Under questioning, plaintiff lawyer Erin Hawley (wife of the famously swift senator) made an even stronger claim than the quote above would imply. When you read “complete the abortion”, you probably pictured a woman taking mifepristone, her body starting to eject the fetus, but not quite succeeding in getting it out. She might then show up in an emergency room, where an ER doctor opposed to abortion might have to complete the removal of a fetus that is doomed but not yet entirely dead.
However, that grisly scenario is exceedingly unlikely. A far more likely complication (still rather uncommon) is that the woman takes mifepristone, miscarries, but then doesn’t stop bleeding afterward. In this scenario, the abortion is over, the fetus is dead, and now an ER doctor needs to treat a bleeding woman.
The plaintiffs don’t want to, because patching up a woman who has taken a drug to give herself an abortion would make them “complicit” in the abortion.
Hawley … then approached the lectern and cleared up any confusion: Yes, she insisted, treating a patient who has undergone a medication abortion violates the conscience of the plaintiff physicians even if there is no “live” fetus or embryo to terminate anymore. “Completing an elective abortion means removing an embryo fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue,” Hawley told Kagan. So the plaintiffs don’t object just to taking a “life.” They also object to the mere act of removing leftover tissue, even from the placenta.
Of course, these doctors must remove “dead” fetal tissue and placentas all the time—from patients who experienced a spontaneous miscarriage. By their own admission, the plaintiffs regularly help women complete miscarriages through surgery or medication. Those women they will gladly treat. Other women, though—the ones who induced their own miscarriage via medication—are too sinful to touch. Before the plaintiffs can administer even lifesaving emergency treatment, they need to know the circumstances of this pregnancy loss: Spontaneous miscarriages are OK; medication abortions are not.
It’s impossible to imagine this logic being accepted in any non-abortion circumstance. Suppose a guy gets drunk and drives his car into a tree. When he shows up in the ER, would a doctor (maybe from a religious sect that forbids alcohol) refuse to treat him in order to avoid being complicit in his drunk driving? ERs don’t work that way. In any other circumstance, injured people show up and get treatment. The guy who stitches up participants in a barroom brawl doesn’t need to know what started it or who was right.
It is a twisted line of logic, one that should never have reached the Supreme Court in the first place. But it is also a product of the court’s past indulgence of outlandish claims about moral “complicity.” … All this is reminiscent of Little Sisters of the Poor, a case about a Catholic charitable group that was afforded an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The Little Sisters were asked to check a box signaling to the government that they could not comply with the mandate, at which point the government would step in to cover their employees. But the Little Sisters refused, viewing this action—the checking of a box to opt out of coverage—as “complicity” in abortion because it would in turn trigger government payment for contraception (which they viewed as abortifacients). The Supreme Court and the Trump administration ultimately indulged the Little Sisters’ claim.
It may violate conservative political correctness to say so, but the Little Sisters were just being assholes in that suit. They invented an extravagant claim of conscience in order to screw up ObamaCare and interfere in other women’s lives.
Refusing to bake cakes or make web sites for same-sex weddings (other situations the Supreme Court has treated seriously) are similar examples of passive aggression. Going far beyond any legitimate Christian concern, such cases involve constructing an enormous hypersensitive conscience that will feel “complicit” in anyone’s behavior that it fails to control. Making the world safe for such a construction restricts the freedom of everyone else.
No non-Christian religious group would be allowed to do this. And Christians will keep extending such notions of “complicity” until courts tell them to stop. That should have happened a long time ago.
This week’s Sift was assembled against a headwind. All week I’ve been battling a fairly heavy cold, which I kept falsely promising myself would be gone by Monday. As a result, the amount of quality brain-power available to sift the news has been limited this week, and what I produce today will undoubtedly suffer from that lack. It was not a week for subtle contemplation of whether I’ve been asking the right questions.
But I can testify to this: the “fever dream” is a real phenomenon. My slightly overheated brain, whose stamina was questionable all day long, devoted its nights to constructing Byzantine plots on elaborate sets involving characters ranging from Snoop Dogg to Loki to Doc Adams from “Gunsmoke”. My normal-temperature brain wouldn’t know how to do this.
Anyway, the news: The ridiculous case against the abortion drug mifepristone had oral arguments at the Supreme Court Tuesday. The conservative majority would love to give the anti-abortion movement what it wants here, but this particular case is too badly constructed to allow that outcome. Instead, I expect to see a ruling in June that dismisses the case, but provides the movement with a road map for constructing the next one: “Here, guys. This is what we need to see.” That’s going to be the topic of the featured post.
The summary has some Trump-trial news to plow through, beginning with the NY appeals court reducing Trump’s bond and giving him ten more days to come up with it. (Until Thursday, if I count right.) That happened just before I pushed the “Post” button last Monday, and we still have no explanation of what the court was thinking.
Meanwhile, Trump misbehaved in another case, the NY state Stormy Daniels case that starts jury selection in two weeks. The judge left himself and his family out of the gag order against Trump, so he proceeded to attack the judge’s adult daughter numerous times. I wish I spoke better simian, because this appears to be some kind of primitive assertion of dominance. But I can’t decide whether the right response is to dominate back, say by revoking Trump’s bail for some period of time, or if that’s exactly what the Orange One is trying to provoke. I could go on, but let’s leave that to the summary post.
In the physical world, the big event was the collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore. If this were happening in a red state full of “real” Americans, the next move would be obvious: Congress would quickly pass a bipartisan bill providing money to rebuild. But Baltimore is one of those nasty cities full of Black and Brown Democrats, so things can’t be that simple.
Easter happened, so of course we were treated to a round of accusations of how the Biden administration was insulting Christians, who are the most coddled people in America. But at least they have the new Trump Bible to seek comfort in. Ronna McDaniel was quickly hired and fired by NBC. Israelis demonstrated against the Netanyahu government. And a few other things happened, some of which I even noticed.
Everything will appear at its own pace this morning. I’m vaguely intending to get the featured post out by 9 EDT and the summary by noon, but don’t count on that.
The great improvement in health that high-income countries experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not a result of better medicine — as William McNeill claimed — or even economic growth per se. It was, rather, the consequence of political decisions to make massive investments in drinking water, sanitation, housing and poverty reduction.
– Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A history of the world in eight plagues
I intend the quote above as a general comment on the House Study Committee’s report on its FY 2025 budget proposals (the subject of “What Republicans Want”). If 19th century leaders had demonized “spending” the way the HSC does, we’d still be having cholera epidemics.
This week everybody was talking about Trump’s finances
The other Trump-related thing happening today is a hearing on his New York criminal case, the one concerning the fraudulent business records that hid his payoff to Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election. What most observers expect to come out of today’s hearing is a trial date in April.
House conservatives are of course unhappy that the government is going to keep governing. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to recall Speaker Johnson, but did it in such a way that it won’t immediately come to the floor. She’s being coy about exactly what would cause her to force a vote.
There is still narrow path out of the hellscape of Gaza. A temporary ceasefire and hostage release could cause a change of Israel’s government; the rump of Hamas fighters in south Gaza could be contained or fade away; and from the rubble, talks on a two-state solution could begin, underwritten by America and its Gulf allies. It is just as likely, however, that ceasefire talks will fail. That could leave Israel locked in the bleakest trajectory of its 75-year existence, featuring endless occupation, hard-right politics and isolation. Today many Israelis are in denial about this, but a political reckoning will come eventually. It will determine not only the fate of Palestinians, but also whether Israel thrives in the next 75 years.
If you are a friend of Israel this is a deeply uncomfortable moment. In October it launched a justified war of self-defence against Hamas, whose terrorists had committed atrocities that threaten the idea of Israel as a land where Jews are safe. Today Israel has destroyed perhaps half of Hamas’s forces. But in important ways its mission has failed.
The left wing of the Democratic Party has been skeptical of Israel for some while now. So it’s not surprising that AOC told Jake Tapper yesterday that Israel had “crossed a threshold” that justifies use of the very serious term “genocide”. Most progressives are reluctant to consider Israel’s post-Holocaust mission as a special case, and instead see the Palestinians as just another victim of Western colonialism. (Among European nations, Ireland in particular identifies with Palestine, casting Israel in the role England played in Irish history, right down to causing a famine.)
A recent Pew Research poll found Americans marginally supporting Israel’s conduct of the war, with 38% finding it either completely or somewhat acceptable, compared to 34% who found it completely or somewhat unacceptable. This is a remarkably small margin given Americans’ longstanding sympathy with Israel, and it could quickly vanish if the famine that the World Food Programme calls “imminent” becomes a reality that Americans regularly see on their TVs.
Jared Kushner is thinking about Gaza’s “valuable waterfront property” that might become available for development after Israel moves current residents to the Negev Desert. (Plans for such a move have not been announced. So far, I think, this is just Jared’s fantasy.)
North Carolina Republicans have gotten a lot of bad press nationally for their loony candidate for governor, Mark Robinson. But the rest of the ticket is pretty far out too. Their nominee for State Superintendent of Public Instruction is Michele Morrow, who defeated the incumbent Republican Catherine Truitt in the GOP primary.
North Carolina is not that red a state any more. Due to gerrymandering, its legislature has a substantial Republican majority. But the state also has a two-term Democratic governor (Roy Cooper, who can’t run for a third term), and Trump carried it in 2020 by less than 75K votes out of more than 5 million.
Facing attention from Congress (particularly Bernie Sanders), a couple big drug makers (AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim) cut the price of their inhalers to $35 per month from as much $645. The other two major suppliers (Teva and GSK) so far have not responded.
There’s a lot of competition to be the wackiest red-state legislature, but Tennessee is definitely in the running.
Last Monday, the Tennessee Senate has passed SB2691, including an amendment “to prohibit the intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight”. According to The Tennessean, the amendment is based on the chemtrail conspiracy theory, which holds that the contrails of airplanes contain chemicals “sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public”.
But don’t worry, good citizens of Tennessee, your legislature is on the case.
and let’s close with something unexpected
Once in a while, days don’t go the way you planned. Buzzerilla collects a few examples.
A higher retirement age, an abortion ban, more tax cuts for corporations and the rich, less regulation, an end to wokeness, and to burn as much fossil fuel as humanly possible. And that’s not all.
Wednesday, the House Republican Study Committee put out a report on its budget proposals for FY 2025, which begins in October. The mainstream media publicized a few of its more controversial features, like recommending an increase in the retirement age, federally banning abortion by giving fertilized ova 14th Amendment rights, and reversing nearly everything that would hasten the day when sustainable energy replaces fossil fuels.
But the report is 180 pages, and you can’t really appreciate the steady drumbeat of wrongheadedness until you read the whole thing (which I did). This article summarizes the report in some detail. But first, let me justify why this document deserves your attention.
How political parties communicate their vision. Ordinarily, there are several ways you can figure out what a political party stands for:
position papers of the party’s nominee
a detailed platform passed by the national convention
bills they pass in any house of Congress they control, even if those bills fail in the other chamber or get vetoed by the president
Unfortunately, none of that works with today’s GOP. Apparently, having an “Issues” page on your campaign website is an obsolete idea. Googling either “Donald Trump for President” or “Joe Biden for President” will take you to a fundraising page with no “Issues” tab. Adding “issues” to the search helps a little with Biden, but not Trump. The Biden search will lead you to a “Priorities” page at WhiteHouse.gov, but it’s a bit out of date. (Covid-19 is still the first priority mentioned.) For Trump you’ll be directed to various news outlets’ summaries of what he stands for, not an official statement by the Trump campaign.
Of course, you could instead listen to what Trump says in his speeches, if you can make any sense out of them, beyond grasping Trump’s desire for revenge against the long list of people he feels have wronged him. As I described last week (after his “bloodbath” remark), he tends to speak in word salads that allow his partisans to claim that he didn’t really mean whatever part of his speech you found alarming.
As for platforms, the Democrats passed a fairly detailed one in 2020, which (again) is a little out of date. For example, it says “We will maintain transatlantic support for Ukraine’s reform efforts and its territorial integrity.”, but that was before Russia’s full-scale invasion started.
The Republicans don’t even offer that much. Their 2020 “platform” complains a lot about the media misrepresenting the Party’s positions, but says “the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention”. What it does say is that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda”. In short: We’re for a man, not a set of ideas.
But the Republican majority that has controlled the House in 2023-2024 is almost completely unable to pass legislation. Simply keeping the government open has been a struggle, which finally came to a conclusion Friday, halfway through FY 2024.
Instead, their time has been dominated by battles over the speakership and investigations of the Biden family that have produced little more than talking points to raise on Fox News. The only major bill I could find that passed the House and died in the Democratic Senate was the Secure the Border Act, which would have funded a border wall and reinstituted President Trump’s wait-in-Mexico immigration policy.
So OK, you might conclude that Republicans at least have a position on the border. Of course, when Democrats tried to offer them most of what they wanted on that issue, they turned it down, preferring to retain the border as a talking point rather than take any action on it. So maybe they care about the border and maybe they don’t.
There are other places you might look to find a Republican vision for the future, but most of them are by outside groups: The Heritage Foundation, for example, has put together Project 2025, which Mother Jones has described as “a blueprint for a wannabe-White-House-autocrat”. That vision calls for undoing any effort to avoid a climate catastrophe, dismantling the civil service, and a few other things.
But that’s the Heritage Foundation, not any official GOP group. So it’s deniable.
The House Republican Study Committee report, on the other hand, actually is something. This committee is not the whole Republican conference, but it’s close: Its membership includes 166 of the 218 (or so) House Republicans. By itself, it’s the “majority of the majority” of House Republicans’ Hastert Rule. The intro letter is promising (other than the apostrophe missing in its first line – “the President of the United States cognitive decline”):
The RSC budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 25 does not shy away from the severity of the challenges America faces. As any family knows, attempting to live within your means when you are in debt is challenging. The RSC budget provides a sober pathway to balance the budget, reduce prices, preserve the programs Americans have paid into, and create economic growth and opportunity. As in previous years, the RSC budget also celebrates the work of House conservatives who have fought for legislation that preserves American values, combats Biden’s woke and weaponized government, and protects the freedoms that should be enjoyed by every American.
So OK, let’s go. What’s in it? Let’s take the sections in order.
Deregulation. This is the first section of the plan, and I was immediately unimpressed. The section’s second paragraph is:
The cost of federal regulations in 2022 was estimated to be $1.939 trillion—amounting to 7.4 percent of GDP.[footnote 1] To contextualize, the total amount of individual income tax revenues for 2022 was $2.263 trillion.[2] Despite the high fiscal toll on the American people, the Biden administration has continued to push for regulation after regulation.
Footnote [1] is a report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank known for climate-change denial. And while that report does contain the $1.939 trillion estimate, it sends you to another footnote, and I was unable to track down what this number really means.
In general, conservative estimates of the “cost” of regulation ignore any balancing consideration of the benefits. For example, a regulation forcing utilities to replace lead water pipes with something less toxic will cost them money. However, the children whose brain development is not compromised by that lead will grow up to be more intelligent, more productive, and less likely to commit crimes (because lead exposure affects impulse control). So even if we ignore moral considerations and just talk about dollars, those are real economic benefits that any honest appraisal would have to weigh against the costs. But the CEI doesn’t do that kind of stuff.
Among the specific Biden administration regulations the RSC report calls out is “A Green New Deal emissions proposal that will make vehicles significantly more expensive”. Again, the costs of not regulating carbon emissions are ignored: stronger hurricanes, more wildfires, longer droughts, etc. The RSC targets any effort to avoid or mitigate climate change by reducing fossil fuel dependence. So: more drilling, more pipelines, less conservation, more gas-guzzling vehicles, and less accountability for energy companies.
A long list of proposals are backward-looking slaps at Covid regulations like vaccine or mask mandates. These proposals would tie the hands of public health officials in the next pandemic, whatever it is.
Another long list of proposals remove restraints from banks and other financial industries, allowing them to resume many dangerous and deceptive practices that were exposed after the 2008 financial collapse. A perennial Republican proposal is to do away with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because why would consumers ever need to be protected from predatory banks and other lenders?
But OK, reasonable people can disagree about whether current federal regulations are cost-effective, or whether we need less regulation rather than more. But the proposals endorsed in this section are unlikely to lead to wiser regulatory decisions. Most of them amount to regulating the regulators, binding agencies in red tape that will make it nearly impossible for them to stop corporations who decide to make money by, in effect, killing people.
Taxes. The second section is about tax reform. You might expect Republicans to object to Biden’s tax policies, and maybe trace them back to Obama’s policies.
But no. This section begins by decrying all the taxes ever collected from Americans.
By the end of 2024, the federal government will have taken $98.9 trillion in wealth out of the hands of Americans since 1789 through taxes and other revenue.[71] To the lament of Americans everywhere, the size of government and subsequent mandatory wealth transfers have increased dramatically since the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which gave the federal government the power to tax income. From the New Deal to the Great Society, the Left has continued to tap into Americans’ hard-earned dollars to fund a bloated federal government. Put simply, bureaucrats in Washington and Democrats in Congress believe they know how to spend your money better than you.
Preach, brother! Why couldn’t the government just leave me alone to build my own interstate highway system?
The simple fact is that through government we can buy things collectively that we can’t buy as individuals: parks, clean air, defense from invaders, public health projects, and stuff like that. Precisely where to place the boundary between the public and private sectors, and how to raise the money for public-sector investments, are also questions people of good faith might legitimately argue about. But “they believe they know how to spend your money better than you” is just a stupid way to look at these questions.
And when you talk about the “bloated federal government” created by the New Deal and the Great Society, what you’re really talking about are Social Security (from the New Deal) and Medicare and Medicaid (from the Great Society). Put together, those programs make up 45% of the federal budget.
Those all fit under the general description of insurance, something government provides much more efficiently than the private sector. (To see why this is, look at medical insurance. A private insurance company devotes much of its marketing budget to making sure they attract the right kind of clients — the ones who are unlikely to get sick. But Medicare insures everybody over 65, so it can’t manipulate its client base. Also, private insurance routinely undercovers preventative care, because a company might be paying to prevent a problem that won’t appear until after the client has switched to another company.)
The HSC report makes one point about the tax system that it’s hard to argue with: “Carve-outs for special interests embody corporate cronyism”, which is bad. However, I don’t think they see the same cronies I do, because a fundamental theme of their plan is to end “high rates of taxation on investments and savings”.
I just finished doing my taxes, and, as usual, I’m appalled: Being retired, most of my income consists of dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at rates far lower than what working people pay on their wages. So even though I benefit, I see the favorable rates on investment income as “carve-outs for special interests”. Treating wages and investment income the same is what seems fair and simple to me. (Typically, the hardest part of my taxes is filling out the “Qualified Dividends and Capital Gains Worksheet”. But it saves me thousands, so I do.)
Fairest of all is cracking down on rich people who cheat on their taxes — which is why I support the Inflation Reduction Act’s increase in the enforcement budget of the IRS. (The HSC report falsely refers to this as “Providing funding to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to spy on low-and middle-income Americans.”)
And continuing their pro-global-warming agenda, the RSC wants to repeal all the fossil fuel taxes in the Inflation Reduction Act, together with any tax breaks for sustainable energy sources.
The RSC also wants to eliminate federal inheritance taxes, a.k.a. “the death tax”. Since the threshold for filing estate tax is now $13.6 million, only the estates of very wealthy people pay this tax. (If you don’t think $13.6 million sounds like wealth, you’re out of touch with the American people.)
The RSC Budget would cut taxes by nearly $5.5 trillion over the next 10 years. The pro-growth effects of these tax reductions would result in $566 billion of additional revenue.
This is what George H. W. Bush correctly called “voodoo economics” when he ran against Reagan in 1980. The RSC’s voodoo is what lets it cut taxes and claim that it produces a balanced budget.
Poverty and Welfare. The RSC report has a clear view of why people are poor: They’re lazy and need to be pushed to work more.
The RSC Budget would require all federal benefit programs be reformed to include work promotion requirements that would help people move away from dependence and toward self-sufficiency.
Studies evaluating TANF and its predecessor’s work requirements found that the modest employment increases that occurred shortly after the requirements were first implemented faded over time (generally because most adults not subject to the requirements also found jobs, just a bit more slowly).[40] These requirements did little to reduce poverty and tended to increase rates of deep poverty (defined as income below half of the federal poverty line), rigorous evaluations found.[41] Families who lost cash assistance faced serious consequences that include higher rates of hardship, such as higher risk of homelessness, utility shutoffs, and lower school attendance among children.
Fundamentally, the Republican view of motivation is “Carrots for the rich. Sticks for the poor.” If you want rich people to do something, you have to give them a tax break or a subsidy. But if you want poor people to do something, you need to threaten them with a punishment.
But this paragraph is my favorite:
Despite two positive changes included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, one unintended consequence was to exempt homeless individuals, veterans, and individuals aged 24 and under who were previously in foster care from the work requirement. The RSC budget supports revising existing SNAP law to ensure that these groups of people are subject to the work requirement if they do not have dependents. SNAP and our welfare system should embrace that work conveys dignity and self-sustainment and encourage individuals to find gainful employment, not reward them for staying at home.
Did you catch that? We need to be careful that we don’t reward homeless people for staying at home.
The RSC does not grasp the concept of a poverty trap, something constructive that people could theoretically do to escape poverty, but they can’t do practically because they’re too poor. For example, homeless people have trouble maintaining basic hygiene, which makes it very hard for them to get hired. But if they don’t somehow come up with jobs, we’re going to stop subsidizing their food. This is going to give them “dignity”.
Republicans also want to bundle all such programs into “block grants” that give states “flexibility to administer their own programs”. These bundles have a terrible history, because the poor can’t afford lobbyists. As a result, money in the grants tends to wind up being spent on all sorts of things other than poor people. This was at the root of the Brett Favre fraud in Mississippi.
They also want to turn child nutrition into block grants, and the report decries the “widespread fraud” in the free school lunch and breakfast program, i.e., some kids who aren’t quite poor enough are getting fed.
Defense. The RSC proposes a $895.2 billion FY 2025 defense budget, slightly more than Biden’s $850 budget. The report lists a number of things it wants to fund, but doesn’t say which ones are already in Biden’s budget.
One thing the RSC does want to do with the defense budget is fight its culture wars, eliminating any money for “woke training and programming”, such as teaching soldiers of different races, genders, and religions how to get along and respect one another. It worries about military aid to Ukraine and other nations going through international organizations that “have a history of promoting abortion or sexual orientation and gender identity programs”. It’s not enough that our money not go into such programs; the organizations associated with them are too tainted to use. It wants Defense strategy to ignore climate change, and cancels funding for efforts to run military bases on sustainable power by 2030.
DOD should not waste valuable taxpayer dollars on inefficient forms of energy. Energy needs should be met through the most cost-effective and tactically sound methods possible. The DOD should be prohibited from entering into any contract for the procurement or production of any non- petroleum-based fuel for use as the same purpose or as a drop-in substitute for petroleum. Further, the Armed Forces should be exempt from procurement requirements for clean-energy vehicles and renewable energy portfolio standards for DOD facilities.
The RSC wants to privatize as much of the military’s support positions as possible. This includes doing away with the independent school system on military bases, which is excellent.
There are long sections focused on China and Russia, but again, it’s hard to tell which proposals differ from what Biden wants to do. The report is strongly supportive of Ukraine, but does not mention that Republicans have been blocking funding since September.
The fact that Iran is “closer than ever before to a nuclear weapon” is somehow Biden’s fault, when it was Trump who cancelled the agreement that controlled Iran’s nuclear programs. The report describes Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran as “successful”, even though this policy failed to produce the “better deal” Trump promised.
The Hamas attack on Israel is also somehow Biden’s fault, and had nothing to do with Trump’s decision to ignore the Palestinian problem entirely.
Conservative values. There’s a long section on abortion, beginning with
RSC celebrates the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision as a historic victory in the effort to defend innocent life and to return to the Constitution as it was written. … The RSC Budget applauds the following measures designed to advance the cause of life:
Then follows a long list of proposals various Republicans have advanced to limit women’s access to abortion, including ones that would federally block drug-induced abortions, prohibit abortions after the mythical six-week “fetal heartbeat”, recognize a newly fertilized ovum as a “person” under the 14th Amendment, ban abortions at 15-weeks due to mythical fetal pain, prohibit the use of fetal stem cells in research, prohibit any ObamaCare health insurance policy from covering abortion, prevent telehealth services from prescribing abortion drugs, deny federal funds to universities whose student health organizations provide abortions, and dozens of others.
The report endorses a similar list of anti-critical-race-theory proposals, which ban teaching or promoting “critical race theory” in all sorts of settings. No one can define CRT, but as best I can tell, any recognition of White privilege in America or any truthful recounting of America’s racial history violates these proposed laws.
A number of proposals to protect gun rights are lauded, including several that prevent the government from keeping track of who owns or purchases guns. The RSC also wants to defund red-flag rules that take guns away from domestic abusers, allow concealed carry across state lines, and remove regulations on silencers. The problem of mass shootings is not mentioned.
The report endorses the usual bunch of anti-trans proposals: targeting trans athletes, banning care options, mandating bathroom policies, etc. The section on the border is about what you’d expect: finish Trump’s wall, reinstitute Trump’s cruel and probably illegal treatment of migrants, etc. Some proposals (like hiring more asylum judges to process cases faster) were included in the border proposal Republicans tanked after Trump said he wanted the issue to campaign on. The RSC also wants to reinterpret the 14th Amendment so that it no longer guarantees birthright citizenship, despite what the text actually says.
Healthcare. The RSC wants to return to the bad old days before ObamaCare. The report calls for a “more market-oriented” approach to health insurance, and promises lower premiums by eliminating “ObamaCare mandates”. In other words, you could once again buy junk insurance that doesn’t cost as much but will vanish in a puff of smoke when you actually need it. States would be empowered to define what insurance plans have to cover, and insurance companies could sell across state lines. This would lead to a race-to-the-bottom among states, similar to what we saw with credit card regulation after interstate banking was approved. (There’s a reason why you have to send your payments to South Dakota.) Younger, healthier individuals could get lower-priced policies, taking them out of the insurance pool. The result would be exorbitantly expensive insurance for people who actually need care. The Inflation Reduction Act’s provisions to control drug prices would be repealed. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program would be “streamlined” by turning them into block grants to the states.
Medicare. The RSC plan to “save” Medicare is essentially a privatization plan, where Medicare mainly provides premium supports for private insurance programs.
This plan ignores one essential fact about private health insurance: Competition between insurance companies does not center on providing better care at lower prices, but on luring healthier clients and discouraging sicker ones. Denying care is a double-win for an insurance company. Not only does the company not pay for the care, but patients who need care will be motivated to find other insurance.
Take cancer, for example. You don’t really know how good your plan’s cancer coverage will be until you get cancer. But at that point you have become an undesirable customer, so the company would rather you switched to some other insurance. Providing the kind of care and service that attracts people with cancer is a bad business model.
Social Security. The report points to the projection that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money in 2033, and correctly observes that there are three things to do about that: keep the program running with money from the general fund, raise taxes, or cut benefits. It rejects the first two options and proposes to cut benefits.
Recognizing political dynamite, the RSC refuses to cut current benefits for people already retired. However, Republicans would
force Congress to vote on cost-of-living increases every year, as opposed to the current system where COLAs are automatic
lower benefits for future retirees in a means-tested way
raise the retirement age as life expectancy rises.
None of these benefit cuts are quantified. And, as always, Republicans promise increased revenues from the (mythical) economic growth that their income tax cuts will promote. These days, though, they also add in the economic “growth” that will come from burning more fossil fuels (as long as you don’t have to account for the costs of climate change).
Raising the retirement age as people live longer and are able to work longer makes a certain intuitive sense. But there’s a problem: The gains in lifespan almost entirely benefit wealthier people. Working class and poor people, in general, have had only modest increases in life expectancy in recent decades.
[T]he study shows that in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.
This eye-opening gap is also growing rapidly: Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables.
Also, while people who do primarily mental work can easily work into their 70s if they’re so inclined, people who do physical labor often don’t have that option. If you raise their retirement age, they’ll wind up eating cat food.
Budget reform. The RSC proposes a series of “reforms” that would lock the government into conservative priorities, no matter what the voters want. Like a constitutional amendment to cap revenues and force a balanced budget.
This proposal would bar annual spending in excess of 20 percent of GDP and prevent Congress from relying on tax increases to balance the budget, which is key to preserving a dynamic and innovative economy.
This is a seriously bad idea. For example, consider the recent pandemic. In FY 2020 (Trump’s last full year), federal spending was over 30% of GDP. That spending was what allowed Americans to stay home, and prevented many Americans from losing their homes when their jobs disappeared. If the government had been limited to 20% of GDP, Covid would have run wild and probably millions more Americans would have died. Millions of others would have been homeless.
Now start imagining various future climate-change doom scenarios — seas rising, farmlands turning to deserts, and so on. The government would just have to throw up its hands.
And not allowing Congress to raise taxes makes all sorts of policy changes impossible, whether voters want them or not. Republicans wouldn’t have to argue against Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, for example, because both would be constitutionally infeasible.
The RSC also proposes that the reconciliation process not be allowed to increase spending or taxes. In other words, if Republicans get control of the presidency and Congress, they can use reconciliation to pass their priorities (like the Trump tax cuts), but if Democrats get control, they can’t pass theirs (like the Inflation Reduction Act).
Other mandatory spending. There’s a grab-bag of stuff in here, most of which was too in-the-weeds for me to evaluate. However, I did notice the proposals to end student loan forgiveness, auction off the TVA’s non-nuclear assets, revoke the charters of home-loan guaranteeing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and reduce the benefits of federal employees.
Non-defense discretionary spending. Another grab-bag of (mostly) cuts. Stop the Forest Service from buying more land. Eliminate anything to do with “the left’s climate agenda”, or any program that can be tarred as “woke”. Eliminate the Consumer Product Safety Commission because it advances “Biden’s radical climate agenda, including attempting to ban gas stoves”. (This whole talking point is a canard. The footnote that supposedly supports it includes a CPSC spokesman saying the commission “isn’t coming for anyone’s gas stoves”.)
The RSC wants to cut funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, not because cybersecurity isn’t a problem, but because CISA is trying to fight disinformation online. The Republican agenda is based on disinformation, so they see this as a threat. Similarly, Republicans want to eliminate Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grants, because the program doesn’t exempt right-wing terrorist groups. OSHA is targeted for cuts to get revenge for President Biden’s Covid vaccine mandates. Similarly, the US contribution to the World Health Organization is eliminated.
Of course Republicans want to cut funding for the EPA and leave the Paris Climate Accords. Also: stop funding Amtrak and prohibit spending on high-speed rail.
The report calls for eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as cutting support for the Smithsonian (because the museum complex is too woke).
So there it is: the Republican fantasy world in its full glory. Now you know what you’re voting for if you vote Republican in November.
The Weekly Sift 