Revisiting the fascism question

People who used to deny that Trump is a fascist have been changing their minds.

From the beginning of his first presidential campaign, it was clear Donald Trump was not like other candidates. The difference was not in political philosophy, because he barely seemed to have one. On any given day, he might be for or against a national healthcare program. He might want to raise or cut taxes on the rich. If “conservative” had been defined by Ronald Reagan and carried into the present by Republicans like Paul Ryan, then Trump was not a conservative.

Meanwhile, he celebrated his supporters’ violent tendencies, called Mexican immigrants rapists, and promised to ban Muslims from entering the country. Maybe we needed a different word for this. Maybe the word was fascist.

For years, the word fascist had mainly just served as an insult in American politics. Yes, there were people on the right-wing fringe who waved swastikas and celebrated Hitler’s birthday, but they had no power and nobody took them seriously. If you heard some congressman or cabinet secretary described as a fascist, it was hyperbole. No significant player in American government was literally a fascist. [1]

But maybe it was time to dust that word off as a serious descriptor. If you were going to do that in a responsible way, though, you had to be clear about what you were using the word to mean. It couldn’t just be “somebody more conservative than me” or “somebody I don’t like”. It needed a real definition that could be applied objectively.

And that was actually kind of tricky, because historical fascism has not displayed a defining set of policy positions, like communism’s public ownership of the means of production. Once in power, fascists become chameleons, championing whatever ideas their leaders find useful. Fascism often resembles a charismatic religion more than a political philosophy; the important thing is the spirit, not adherence to some 10-point plan.

But by November of 2015, I was ready to start using the word again, so I wrote “The Political F-Word” to say what I would mean by it. I said fascism was more about social psychology than politics, and described it as:

“a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

  • styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past, [2]
  • identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
  • helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
  • under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
  • reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
  • all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.”

I could easily see Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascism in that description, and believed that it fit Trumpism as well, with its vague allusions to making America great “again” (without specifying when exactly that greatness was present or how it was lost), its persistent claims of persecution and victimhood, its emphasis on “owning the libs”, its hatred of immigrants, the violence of its rhetoric (which is frequently echoed in the manifestos of mass murderers), its focus on “real Americans”, and (most of all) the cult of personality around Donald Trump himself. [3]

The subsequent eight years, I believe, have borne out what I saw in 2015. The January 6 insurrection, for example, was a direct manifestation of “helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence”, and so are the current threats of violence against the prosecutors and judges who attempt to make Trump submit to the rule of law.

Still, not everyone agreed, and calling Trump a fascist was controversial. To many, fascist meant Hitler, and (whatever you might think of him) Trump was not Hitler. This week, Tom Nichols summarized his thinking like this: He was against using fascist through the 2016 campaign because

Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill.

At the time, I thought this view was unhistorical, because Hitler also had seemed ridiculous to many Germans, even after he had become chancellor. But Nichols continued:

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

Well, Nichols is now shocked and alarmed. What changed his mind? The same things that have swayed a lot of pundits lately: the escalating rhetoric that now routinely dehumanizes his opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country“, coupled with a series of ominous proposals for his second administration:

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Nichols is not alone. [4] Though The Economist does not use the F-word, it says that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024”. WaPo’s Dan Balz also avoids fascist, but says his rhetoric is “associated with authoritarian leaders of the past”, whoever they might be. His colleague Aaron Blake puts recent Trump quotes side-by-side with Hitler’s use of the same language. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy warns that the 2024 election is

a struggle to prevent the election of a President whose embrace of fascistic imagery and authoritarian governance goes well beyond what comes out of his mouth.

In short, it’s not just the crazy things Trump says or how he says them. It’s what he’s done and plans to do.

The 2020 election plot. It’s important to realize that we’ve gone well beyond the point of Trump-says-a-lot-of-crazy-things. Openly fascist ideas and proposals are percolating in TrumpWorld right now, and are still not being taken seriously by many American voters. But before we go into those, we need to lay out what Trump has already done: launched a plot to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

People who think we can put January 6 behind us tell the story like this: After it became clear that Trump had lost the 2020 election, he latched on to every rumor of fraud because he didn’t want to admit defeat. His stolen-election rhetoric resonated with his most radical supporters, and the result was a January 6 rally that got out of hand. Eventually, though, Trump told the rioters to go home and left office peacefully. He still may be claiming he won in 2020, but so what?

Both the evidence gathered by the House January 6 Committee [5] and the Georgia and D.C. indictments against Trump, though, tell a different story:

  • As soon as it became clear that Trump was likely to lose the 2020 election, he began preparing to claim fraud and stay in office.
  • Within a few days of the November 3 election, his campaign officials and other top advisors told him that he had lost.
  • Within a few weeks, all his administration’s top investigators — Bill Barr in Justice, Chris Krebs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and others — told him that his claims of election fraud had no basis in fact. No one in a position to know supported those claims.
  • Republican officials in key states — Georgia, Michigan, Arizona — told him that the votes had been counted accurately. Again, no one in a position to know said otherwise.
  • In order to find support for the view that he had won the election, Trump had to turn to amateur conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell.
  • Barr’s successors at Justice refused to send state legislators a letter falsely claiming that evidence of significant election fraud had been found and recommending that they reconsider their states’ electoral votes.
  • Republican-controlled state legislatures all refused Trump’s urging to ignore the election results and appoint Trump electors instead of Biden electors.
  • Officials close to Trump coordinated attempts in multiple states for Trump supporters to falsely claim to be electors, and to fraudulently cast Electoral College votes for Trump.
  • His own vice president, Mike Pence, resisted his urging to count the votes of the fake electors, or to refuse to count electoral votes from states Biden had won.
  • The January 6 assault on the Capitol was planned in advance by groups like the Proud Boys, and their leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. A direct connection from the White House to the Proud Boys has not been nailed down in evidence publicly available, but may have gone through Roger Stone.

The more details come out, the clearer it becomes that this plot could have worked if only Trump had more yes-men in key positions. If the Justice Department had backed rumors of election fraud, Republican legislatures would have had cover to submit alternate slates of electors, and Mike Pence might have been convinced to count those votes, creating a constitutional crisis that the Supreme Court (with three Trump appointees) might have been unwilling to resolve in Biden’s favor. A military leader unlike Mark Milley might have provided troops to put down any subsequent disorder, and Trump would be President for Life. [6]

From the preparations for his second administration, we can conclude that Trump has learned a lesson from his first failed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, and will not make the same mistakes again. He’ll appoint a compliant attorney general, a compliant vice president, and military leaders willing to do what they’re told. Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly put it like this:

The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs. The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.

Plans for Trump’s second term. According to many reports, Trump did not expect to win in 2016, so he paid little attention to the transition plan drafted by Chris Christie. Top jobs were filled in a haphazard way, often with conservatives who had little previous connection to Trump, like General John Kelly, or with people like Senator Jeff Sessions, who backed Trump but retained independent views of how government was supposed to function. The Trump legislative agenda was largely left to Speaker Paul Ryan, who engineered a Reagan-style tax cut for corporations and the rich, but failed to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare.

As a result, Trump was frequently told that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do; it was illegal or unethical or against the norms of the federal government. By the end of his term, he had gotten rid of most of those people, but there were still enough establishment conservatives around to thwart his attempt to steal a second term.

He doesn’t want that to happen again, so plans are already in place to hit the ground running with sweeping proposals and a list of Trump loyalists ready to implement them.

Weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Trump claims that the indictments against him are purely political. [7] But rather than promise to restore the Justice Department to its proper function, Trump promises to do to his enemies what he (falsely) claims has been done to him. In an interview with Univision, he said:

What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box. … They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization, and the people aren’t going to stand for it. But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party. I mean, if somebody if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them. Mostly what that would be, you know, they would be out of business. They’d be out they’d be out of the election.

At a New Hampshire rally in October, Trump said:

This is third-world-country stuff, “arrest your opponent”. And that means I can do that, too.

In general, I’m trying to source Trump’s second-term plans to his own words and quotes from allied organizations and named advisors, rather than anonymous sources (though the Mueller Report often attached names and testimony under oath to anonymously-sourced reports Trump had labeled “fake news” at the time). But I’ll make an exception for this quote from the WaPo:

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

One person who believes this account is John Kelly:

There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.

Use the military against Americans. During his administration, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows deploying the active-duty military to enforce law and order within the United States itself. (During riots and natural disasters, governors may call out their state’s chapter of the National Guard, which consists of ordinary citizens and is the successor to the “militia” mentioned in the Constitution.) According to the NYT, he was talked out of doing so by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley — exactly the kind of appointees he will avoid in a second administration.

Instead, Trump reportedly plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day One of a second term. This would put the military on call to respond wherever he found it necessary.

Turn the federal government into a patronage machine. In the early days of the United States, the government worked according to the “spoils system”, in which federal jobs were plums a new president could award to his political allies. This led to a lot of corruption and inefficiency, so a series of reforms were passed that made most federal jobs nonpartisan civil service jobs.

Trump began trying to undo the civil service in his first term. A month before the 2020 election, he ordered the creation of “Schedule F” jobs — tens of thousands of positions formerly protected by civil service rules that would become fireable by the president.

Rather than take advantage of this power grab, President Biden reversed Trump’s executive order. But Trump has pledged to restore it if he regains office. Presidents already need to make about 4000 appointments when they take office, but Trump’s plan could cover ten times as many jobs. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is assembling a database of Trump loyalists who could fill those jobs. According to Axios:

intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump’s power will get flagged and rejected.

Create massive detention camps for immigrants and the homeless. Trump has pledged to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, a statement fleshed out by Trump advisor and speech-writer Stephen Miller, who told the NYT:

Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.

Miller is talking about rounding up not just “illegal” immigrants, deporting “millions per year”, but also revoking the legal status of many others: foreign students who participate in demonstrations Trump disagrees with, immigrants granted temporary protected status because they escaped from countries the US deems unsafe, Afghans evacuated after the Taliban takeover, and others.

To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

Trump has also proposed tent cities for the homeless, who would be arrested and relocated. [8]

The threat of non-action. In addition to the things Trump is planning to do in a second administration, we have to consider the things he might choose not to do: enforce the law against groups who do violence against his opponents. From the beginning, Trump has defended his supporters when they get violent, from describing two Trumpists who beat a homeless man in 2015 as “passionate” to saying “We love you. You’re very special.” to the January 6 rioters, whom he says he will pardon.

In the early Hitler years, the more serious threat was not that the official Gestapo would whisk you away to a concentration camp, but that the unofficial Brownshirts would beat or murder you with no interference from the police. Kristallnact was not police enforcing draconian laws, but hooligans running free. If you think the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers wouldn’t like to play a similar role today, you haven’t been paying attention.

[1] On the Right, the word communist is still used this way, as when Trump promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. I doubt he could define communist, Marxist, or fascist. The words are simply barbs that he throws at people.

[2] Four years after my F-word post, Trump made this point clearly in his January 6 speech:

Just remember this: You’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’ve got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.

[3] The 2020 Republican Convention, for example, refused to write a platform that would endorse any specific policies, but declared instead that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump” and would “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” — whatever turns that might take.

any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order

Going forward, the Republican Party would be Donald Trump, and its policies would be whatever Trump said they were.

[4] You might think Nichols’ article would have an apologetic tone, something like: “You guys were right, he is a fascist.” But no. Those of us who saw further ahead than Nichols are to blame for “the overuse of fascist” that “wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words”.

I see it the other way: Maybe if people like Nichols had taken Trump’s fascism more seriously in 2015, more of the public could have processed the threat then, and we could have avoided this whole mess.

[5] Trump supporters discount the January 6 Committee’s findings because (after Kevin McCarthy pulled all of his appointees and Nancy Pelosi named Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to replace them) no members of the committee defended Trump.

What this point ignores is that nearly all the testimony heard by the committee came from Trump appointees, Republicans at the state level who supported Trump’s 2020 campaign, and even members of the Trump family. There would have been more even testimony from Trump supporters if so many (including Trump himself) had not refused to testify. Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Peter Navarro went so far as to defy subpoenas.

I can’t help believing that if any of those people could have testified to Trump’s innocence without committing perjury, they would have.

The possible bias of the Committee’s report was an issue in the recent hearing in a Colorado court about whether Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot in 2024 by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The judge’s ruling noted:

while Trump spent much time contesting potential biases of the Committee members and their staff, he spent almost no time attacking the credibility of the Committee’s findings themselves. The Hearing [in Colorado] provided Trump with an opportunity to subject these findings to the adversarial process, and he chose not to do so, despite frequent complaints that the Committee investigation was not subject to such a process. Because Trump was unable to provide the Court with any credible evidence which would discredit the factual findings of the January 6th Report, the Court has difficulty understanding the argument that it should not consider its findings

[6] You might think, “A second Trump administration would just be four years, because of the 22nd Amendment.” But already during the 2020 campaign, Trump floated plans to serve more than two terms.

We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.

Doubting his intent would be repeating another mistake Germans made with Hitler: believing that he didn’t really mean what he said. Hitler’s 1925 book Mein Kampf laid out much of what he wanted to do and later did, but many Germans refused to take his writings seriously.

[7] That position is hard to square with the evidence those indictments lay out. Trump has been indicted because he committed crimes.

In practice, Trump simply does not address the evidence against him. See the quote from the judge’s ruling in note [5].

[8] In this context, it’s worth pointing out that the Nazi death camps did not start out as death camps, and did not specifically target Jews. In the beginning, the camps housed “undesirables” like Communists. Over time, the definition of “undesirable” expanded, and the limits of what could be done to them loosened.

November 20, 2023 – 10:16 am Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Back in 2015, many of us struggled to find a label that captured how Donald Trump was different from other “conservative” candidates. With some trepidation, we dusted off the word fascist, which in recent years had mainly been used as a hyperbolic insult. Before re-introducing and applying the word, it seemed necessary to lay out exactly what you intended it to mean. I did that in November, 2015 in a post “The Political F-Word“, which I think stands up well in hindsight.

At the time, this use was widely disputed, and it remained controversial throughout Trump’s administration. As he campaigns to be restored to office, though, Trump has increasingly been imitating Hitler’s rhetoric. (Immigrants “poison the blood of our country”. His enemies are “vermin” he wants to “root out”.) Alarming plans continue to leak out of his campaign and its allied think-tanks: vast detention camps for immigrants and the homeless, invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One, replacing the civil service with loyalists, pushing executive power to its limits, and so on.

Consequently, many who had been reluctant to use fascist are changing their minds. That’s the subject of this week’s featured post “Revisiting the fascism question”. That should appear by 10 EST.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: developments in the Israel/Gaza War, averting a government shutdown, Biden’s summit meeting with China’s President Xi, the ethics report on George Santos, a Colorado judge’s ruling on whether Trump is eligible to run for president, and more. That should appear a little after noon.

November 20, 2023 – 8:36 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Doubt and Indecision

No Sift next week. The next new articles will post on November 20.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. I do not think this is necessary.

– Bertrand Russell
“Present Perplexities” (1953)

This week’s featured post is “Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?“

This week everybody was avoiding talking about the war in Gaza

That reluctance is the subject of the featured post.

This week Israeli troops moved into Gaza in force, and have encircled Gaza City, cutting the region in two. The Gaza health ministry now reports over 10,000 Palestinian deaths, though this number can’t be independently verified.

Here are a couple of links that didn’t make it into the featured post: Ta-Nahisi Coates goes to the West Bank and interprets what he sees through the lens of Jim Crow: Some people can vote and others can’t. Some people can go wherever they want and others can’t. The history of how things got to be this way may be complicated, Coates says, but the morality of it is simple.

And Nicholas Kristof visits two Palestinian men he met 41 years ago on a bus.

I pushed back and noted how brutal the Hamas terrorism had been and how many Israeli civilians had been killed or kidnapped. Saleh and Mahmoud said that they mourned the Israeli deaths, but wondered why the world wasn’t equally outraged that Palestinians have been killed in cumulatively greater numbers. They were disappointed by my focus on the Hamas barbarism, and I was disappointed by their reluctance to unequivocally condemn those attacks.

… We parted, all of us less spry than we had been the first time. They were fairly ordinary Palestinian men who had mostly kept their heads down; they had avoided politics and had not lost family members to the conflict. But they had lost freedom and dignity. There are untold numbers just like them who never make the headlines but are stewing inside.

I remembered two young men full of promise and warmth, animated by hope and inhabiting a world in which Israelis and Palestinians interacted regularly and didn’t much fear each other. It is wrenching to see such change. As Saleh and Mahmoud became dads and grandfathers, they were shorn of a future, of vitality, of hope.

And that, I think, is the core of the Palestinian problem.

and talking about the new Speaker’s first bill

OK, the House has a speaker again so it’s open for business and ready to govern. Sort of.

The first order of business is a $105 billion emergency spending bill Biden proposed that included money for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the southern border. It seems likely to pass the Senate with a substantial bipartisan majority.

But “No, no, no,” the House Republican majority says. “That’s not how we want to do business any more. We’ll unbundle the pieces and look at them separately, then combine them with cuts so that spending doesn’t increase.”

One problem with that approach is that bundling proposals together is how you assemble coalitions big enough to pass things. But never mind, Israel is popular, so let’s start there: a $14.3 billion aid-to-Israel bill that is offset by a $14.3 billion cut in funding the IRS, undoing a piece of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that passed last year before Republicans got control of the House.

But there’s a snag in the House’s logic: The IRS funding was supposed to crack down on rich tax cheats, and is expected to raise more revenue than it costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting $14.3 billion out of the IRS budget will decrease revenue by $26.8 billion over ten years, for a net deficit increase of $12.5 billion. (The Fox News story on the bill leaves this detail out.)

So in order to “balance” deficit-increasing aid for Israel, the House adds a deficit-increasing cut to the IRS.

A few things we can conclude from this:

  • House Republicans aren’t serious about the deficit. If they were, they’d pair the $14 billion of Israel aid with $14 billion of deficit reduction, not an additional deficit increase.
  • They aren’t serious about helping Israel. Otherwise they wouldn’t try to score political points that will slow down coming to an agreement with the Senate.
  • Getting aid to Ukraine is going to be difficult. (That should make Putin happy.)
  • Helping rich people cheat on their taxes is a high priority for them.
  • If this is how Speaker Johnson approaches legislation, avoiding a government shutdown is going to be difficult. New funding has to pass both houses of Congress by a week from Friday.

Cutting spending: Great idea! Here’s a Labor Party video from Britain a few years ago that explains how austerity (doesn’t) work.

and prejudice rising in America

There were always a number of things wrong with the “melting pot” imagery America once used to describe itself. (Chiefly: the assumption that you had to give up your prior ethnic identity to become truly American, and the fact that we never allowed Black people to fully melt in.) But there’s one thing it got right: Whatever ethnic squabbles you had in the old country should be left in the old country. Germany/France, Greece/Turkey, Serb/Croat — whatever it was, we didn’t want it here. Of course we developed our own ethnic rivalries, but at least they were based on things that happened in America, not feuds brought across the ocean. Mr. Dubois and Mr. Schwartz could be good neighbors here, whatever the Der Kaiser and la République were bickering about.

We seem to have lost that. One of the many depressing aspects of the current conflict in Israel and Gaza is antisemitic and Islamophobic violence in the United States. This much should be obvious: Your Palestinian-American neighbor is not a Hamas terrorist and your Jewish-American neighbor is not trying to steal anybody’s ancestral land. I understand that Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East face difficult issues that I don’t know how to resolve. But the echoing violence here in America is something we can and should just stop. There’s no reason for it.

and the Trump trials

Donald Trump is testifying today in the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization. Last week, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric testified, and Ivanka is due up on Wednesday.

Last Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline White House”, former DoJ official Andrew Weissman outlined the standard Trump family strategy on testifying. (Sorry I can’t find video on this or quote him exactly.)

The first ploy, Weissman said, is to claim to be the smartest person in the room. You see this, for example, in things Trump has said about valuing Mar-a-Lago: He knows what it is worth, and nobody else’s opinion matters. Appraisers don’t know, assessors don’t know, accountants don’t know — but he knows. When that fails, the back-up ploy is to claim to be the dumbest person in the room: It’s not my job to know these things; I have people for that. I just do what the accountants and lawyers tell me.

It will be interesting to see which way Trump himself goes today.

Don Jr. and Eric were using the second ploy in their testimony. Junior’s Wharton MBA, he testified, doesn’t mean that he knows anything about accounting. (I have it on good authority that other Wharton MBAs were mortified by this.) The accountants, the Trump sons both claimed, did the financial statements and they just signed off on them.

Both of them were tripped up by Assistant Attorneys General Colleen Faherty and Andrew Amer, who produced emails and other documents the sons couldn’t explain.

If you’ve ever had somebody else do your taxes, you should understand that accountants don’t work the way the Trumps claimed. Accountants are not auditors; they apply laws and rules to the numbers you give them. If you lie to your accountant about, say, what you spent to keep your home business operating or how much you paid for the house you just sold, it’s not up to the accountant to do an independent investigation and correct you.

Same thing here: When Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment was three times its actual size, it wasn’t the accountants’ responsibility to get out a tape measure and check.

and tomorrow’s elections

Ohio votes on whether to guarantee a right to abortion. Kentucky and Mississippi have surprisingly competitive governor’s races. And Virginia’s legislative elections will tell us whether the issues Glenn Youngkin won on two years ago still resonate.

this week’s best schadenfreude moments

Now that Mark Meadows appears to be offering testimony that contradicts what he said in his book, his publisher is suing him.

Crypto-currency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on all counts. Wikipedia sums up his spectacular fall:

Prior to FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried was ranked the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 60th richest person in world by The World’s Billionaires. His net worth peaked at $26 billion. By November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered his net worth to have been reduced to zero.

The satirical NYT Pitchbot‘s take:

If the federal prosecutors can put Sam Bankman-Fried in jail for stealing billions of dollars, imagine what they can do to you.

but hardly anybody has been talking about the World Series

If you’re younger than, say, 50, you probably have no notion of what the World Series meant when I was growing up in the 1960s. For a little over a week, the world all but stopped. If somebody was playing football on Saturday or Sunday, nobody noticed.

And it wasn’t just the sports world that ground to a halt: The games were all played in the daytime until 1971, and radio broadcasts echoed through factories and other workplaces. Young fans like me applied considerable ingenuity to sneaking radios into our classrooms. (If you could stuff one of the cheap new transistor radios into a shirt pocket and cover the bulge with a sweater, you could thread the earphone cord under a sleeve as far as your left wrist — or right wrist if you were left-handed. Then you could prop your head up palm-to-ear while pretending to do schoolwork with your dominant hand.)

There were no “playoffs” until 1969, and no “wild card” teams until 1995. The regular-season champion of the National and American Leagues played each other, and since there was no interleague play during the season (until 1997), the two leagues were impossible to compare. So the Series held a considerable mystique: These match-ups — Mickey Mantle facing Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson — could only happen in an All-Star game or a World Series. No one knew what to expect.

That mystique cloaked a difficult truth about baseball: Unlike football or basketball, baseball is so inherently random and streaky that you can’t tell how good a team is by watching it for only a week or two. (For example, countless no-name pitchers have thrown no-hitters during their one magical day in the sun, only to immediately fade back into obscurity.) So while it was undoubtedly true that occasionally the lesser team won the World Series (like the Pirates beating the Yankees in 1960 despite being outscored 55-27 over the course of seven games), it was easy to suspend disbelief and convince yourself that the winner was indeed the best team.

That’s much harder to do now. Twelve teams — nearly half of the 30-team league — get into the playoffs, so one or two of them are bound to get hot and play way over their heads for a few weeks. Whichever two teams are most favored by luck and circumstance will meet in the World Series, and one of them will win. Is that “champion” the best team in baseball? Don’t be silly.

Under the pre-1969 system, this year’s World Series would have featured the Orioles (101-61 in the regular season) against the Braves (104-58), instead of the Rangers (90-72) against the Diamondbacks (84-78). An Orioles/Braves series would have been the culmination of the drama fans had been watching all summer. (Within the National League, the Braves/Dodgers pennant race would have been epic.) Instead, those of us living outside of Texas and Arizona were scratching our heads saying, “Wait. Who are these guys again?”

Or we just ignored it. Because “World Series winner” — the Rangers this year, in case you hadn’t heard — has just become a line in a record book. It doesn’t actually mean anything any more.

and you also might be interested in …

The latest set of polls from NYT/Siena aren’t good, and aren’t good in mysterious ways: Trump has a surprising amount of support among young voters and voters of color.

I finally broke down and subscribed the The Status Kuo blog by Jay Kuo. His latest post is “One Year Out from Election 2024“, and it roughly parallels the argument I made in “About the Polls” in September. He is concerned about the polls, but still thinks Biden is in a far better position than the polls make it appear.

David Roberts:

Every single Dem presidential candidate of my lifetime, the tag-team of RW media & shitty MSM has honed in on some (often silly) weakness & beaten it to death. Gore is insincere; Kerry’s a flip-flopper; Clinton had her emails; Biden’s age. Only Obama has escaped this. …

Any realistic alternative to Biden would also be tagged with some flaw, some Thing, some narrative that the media beat to death until the public started repeating it back to them. It’s structural, just how the game works.

And then we’d get calls to shove that person aside in favor of some other even-more-unicorn unicorn that would not be subject to the same shit. There is no unicorn. Solve the structural information problem or things keep getting worse.

It reminds me of a refrain I’ve heard so often in climate/energy over the years: “they’ve polarized X, let’s talk about Y instead.” Dudes. They can polarize anything! They’ve spent decades building a giant polarization machine! There is no non-polarizeable term/tech/policy!

The vote to expel George Santos from Congress failed. But the interesting voice here is Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who voted not to expel him. Jackson points out that an Ethics Committee report on Santos is due in two weeks. The Ethics Committee process that gives investigated members certain rights, and expelling Santos without the report would set a bad precedent. Jackson fully expects to vote to expel Santos after the report comes out, but not until then.

He anticipates an objection:

“But Jeff, the other side doesn’t care about precedent or due process!” Perhaps, but I do. And I think we all should. So that’s the standard I’ll defend.

MSNBC’s Hayes Brown argues the other side:

The bigger threat, as I see it, is not that members are kicked out too easily for partisan reasons. It’s that members who are clearly unfit to serve are permitted to remain because of the letters next to their names.

and let’s close with something anachronistic

I’ve closed with this 2Cellos video before, but not for nine years. This 17th-century performance of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is worth a second look.

Just for reference, here’s AC/DC’s original.

November 6, 2023 – 10:54 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?

The endless spiral of tragedy seems too depressing to contemplate. But beyond the repetitive segments of the 24-hour news cycle, a few articles are worth paying attention to.

Nobody I know, including me, wants to talk about the war in Gaza and Israel. Sometimes we feel compelled to: It is the news, after all. It is consequential, and informed citizens in the world’s most powerful democracy should form opinions about it.

And yet …

I’ve been witnessing, experiencing, and occasionally complaining about this phenomenon for nearly a month now (since the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel). But it really came home to me Friday evening. I was at a church potluck dinner. My church is full of opinionated people, many of whom have a fairly high assessment of their grasp of world affairs. Then someone brought up the war, and there was an awkward silence. Eventually we segued onto some other topic.

I did not break the silence, because anything it occurred to me to say sounded either pompous or stupid. I have no simple paradigm that lays everything out clearly, and no five-point plan for peace. The people who can fit everything into a simple frame — whether that frame is the Global Zionist Conspiracy or God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15 — are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution. The situation seems to illustrate a famous Bertrand Russell quote:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

And yet, a simple Google search for a source shows that this quote is out of context: Russell’s next line was “I do not believe this is necessary”, and from there he laid out a hopeful message of how he believed human happiness might be achieved.

I have no comparable vision. But if I have no grand explanation to present, Russell at least inspires me to start collecting articles and ideas that seem useful if we want to think seriously about the situation.

Colonialism plays a role, but maybe not the one you think. In the critique of Israel that is popular in some left-wing circles, Zionism is just one more example of White colonists stealing land from indigenous peoples. Previous examples include the United States, where Native Americans were steadily pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations, and the apartheid regime of 20th-century South Africa. In this narrative, the foundation of Israel is an unjust act of Jewish aggression from the beginning, and all the subsequent unhappiness — from the Nakba of 1948 to last month’s Hamas attacks and the Israeli reprisals — can be laid at the door of the early Zionists and their contemporary successors.

Simon Sebag Montefiore does a good debunking of this view in “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False” in The Atlantic: Most of the Jews who moved to Israel in the last century or two were not “settlers” so much as refugees — from Czarist pogroms, Nazi death camps, Soviet oppression, Ethiopia, or long-vanished Jewish quarters of Muslim cities like Baghdad. Many of these refugees (especially the Ethiopians) do not fit any reasonable definition of White. Josh Marshall echoes this point:

You cannot look at the range of inhabitants of Israel and all the Palestinian territories together and think the conflict is fundamentally or consistently about skin color. Many Ashkenazi Jews [i.e. from European backgrounds], in American terms, look white. But more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from the Arab and Islamic worlds. There are many Palestinians and Israeli Jews who could not be readily identified as one or the other by physical appearance or skin color alone.

There is a role for colonialism in this narrative, but it is more subtle. (I’m leaving Montefiore’s article at this point and going off on my own interpretation of history.) In the aftermath of the Holocaust (and the Western world’s relative indifference to it as it was happening), the Zionist vision of a sanctuary for Jews — a place that would always accept them and never throw them out — became compelling for many non-Jews. Once, Western liberals might have imagined that civilization and education would eventually overcome the ancient prejudices, but what society had been more civilized or better educated than Germany? And among those ancient prejudices, antisemitism seemed virtually unique. Jews, of course, are not the only group that has ever been persecuted, and the Holocaust was not history’s only genocide. But antisemitism’s ability to subside for decades and then spring up with renewed virulence made virtually any nation’s guarantees suspect.

In addition to that theoretical justification, there was a practical problem that needed a solution: Postwar Europe was full of displaced persons, including many survivors of the death camps. They couldn’t be sent back to their families, who were either dead or similarly displaced. Often their entire villages no longer existed, or were now occupied by the people who had collaborated with the Nazis to send them away. But they had to go somewhere.

Palestine was of course where the Zionists envisioned their homeland, but the great powers were not bound by their preferences. (Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union takes place in an alternate history where part of Alaska became a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Holocaust.) There was even a certain logic to making the nations that caused the problem pay the price: What if, say, Bavaria, where Hitler’s movement got its start, had been set aside as a Jewish homeland?

But even suggesting such a thing sounds laughable, because Bavaria already had citizens (some of whom share my last name, though I’ve never met them) and cities like Munich. But so did everyplace else, including Palestine. The world had no desirable empty spaces. The challenge was to find a place whose current inhabitants volunteered, or could be induced to cooperate.

Or whose desires could be ignored.

What separated Palestine from everyplace else wasn’t just the Zionist vision, it was that the Arab world had no power. World War I had brought down the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent treaty of 1922 divided the region into a British mandate and a French mandate. These colonial powers then drew the outlines of the subsequent states: Syria and Lebanon by the French, and Iraq, Jordan, and the Hejaz (a forerunner of Saudi Arabia) by the British. The strife-torn histories of several of these states comes in part from their unnatural founding. (As we saw during the Iraq War, there is little reason for Iraqi Kurdistan — largely the Ottoman province of Mosul — to belong to the same country as the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad and Basra.)

When Britain and the United Nations (with American support) split the Palestine mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the great powers were doing what great powers often do: paying their moral debts with someone else’s assets.

Today, Americans often shake our heads at the two sides: Why can’t they get along? We are dismayed when every dispute seems to have no beginning: The Israelis have no choice but to do Z, because the Palestinians did Y. And the Palestinians had no choice but to do Y, because the Israelis had already done X … back and back and back to A and beyond. “Why not leave them to fight it out?” we sometimes think, because it has nothing to do with us.

But it has everything to do with us. We played a large role in the great-power coalition that redrew the world after World War II. That arrangement set the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians up to fight with each other. What has happened since was not fate; both sides have made mistakes and have blown opportunities to seek peace. But it’s not all their fault either.

Jews deserve a state. The Western powers should not have made Palestine provide one. That is history now and there’s no undoing it. Generations have been born and died in Israel; moving either the Israelis or the Palestinians somewhere else would be no more just than moving you or me from our homes. But we also can’t wash our hands of the current situation. If there is some way to resolve it that demands sacrifice, the US, Britain, the EU, and perhaps other countries should be ready to make some of those sacrifices.

The situations in Gaza and the West Bank may be linked, but we can’t lose sight of the differences. Here I would point you to Matt Yglesias’ “Israel’s Two Wars“. He believes that Israel has little choice but to root Hamas out of Gaza (with all the costs that entails), but opposes what has been happening slowly for decades on the West Bank.

while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught.

Yglesias believes that the closest the two sides came to peace was at the 2008 summit in Annapolis. The framework of that near-agreement was that Israel got to keep its most populous West Bank settlements, in exchange for giving the new Palestinian state land elsewhere. Obviously that compromise gets harder for Palestinians to accept the more settlements there are. Yglesias believes that sabotaging such a two-state solution has been a deliberate Netanyahu policy.

Josh Marshall interprets Netanyahu slightly differently:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 was based on a very different premise [than an Annapolis-style agreement]: that the Palestinian issue could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved and with no major repercussions. …

For those of us who never believed this could be true, it did slowly become a matter of reason over experience. That couldn’t go on forever. And yet, year after year somehow it did. Israel’s economy grew stronger. It normalized relations with more Arab countries. It even managed a de facto normalization and something close to a de facto, though sub rosa, alliance with Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t work and yet it kept working. Until it didn’t.

What exploded Netanyahu’s legitimacy and reputation on October 7th wasn’t just an abject national security failure. It exploded the whole idea that the occupation could be effectively managed and that Benjamin Netanyahu could manage it.

He sees a return to the Netanyahu status quo as a failure of imagination: a simultaneous inability to imagine peace and an inability to imagine the nightmares that will continue to happen until both sides are willing to take risks for peace.

What might happen in Gaza. One of the most dismal aspects of thinking about this war is that all roads seem to lead nowhere. Simply punishing Hamas, but leaving it in control of Gaza, just starts the clock ticking down to the next attack. But occupying Gaza would be an endless quagmire.

In Iraq, the US demonstrated the limits of military power: A superior military can go wherever it wants and destroy whatever it chooses. Any goal that can be achieved by going places and destroying things can be achieved by military might alone. However, neither winning over a population that hates you nor establishing a government they will cooperate with fits that description.

Israel wants to wind up living next to a Gaza that is stable rather than a launching pad for future attacks like the ones we just saw. But what kind of government could achieve such a goal?

Francis Foer takes on this challenge in “Tell Me How This Ends“.

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

Foer asked “a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington” to imagine “a plausible endgame for Gaza”.

What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

That plan has a number of moving parts, and requires a number of countries, including the Gazans themselves, to make sensible decisions. The basic steps are

  • Israel goes into Gaza and destroys Hamas as a viable government. But it does not stay as an occupying power.
  • During a transition period that is framed from the beginning as temporary, a collection of Arab countries not aligned with Iran — the article suggests Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, and Morocco — manage a reconstruction. Presumably, this reconstruction is funded by some combination of the oil-rich Arab states, the US, and the EU.
  • What makes the transition temporary is turning Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority that currently oversees the West Bank.

Each participant buy-in might be difficult to achieve, but Foer tries to answer those objections: Egypt will want its companies to get reconstruction contracts. The PA will want to “substantially [bolster] its position in the West Bank.”

It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor.

Now we’re back to the “sacrifices for peace” from the last section. So why would the Israeli government (whatever it looks like when the war ends) make such concessions?

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.

A million things can go wrong with the plan Foer describes, and with the resolution of Gaza as a stepping stone to a broader peace. Certainly, plans that seemed more promising have failed in the past. Peace is definitely a long shot. But we have to hope that at some point all involved will realize that there is no alternative. At that point, an admonition of the original Zionist, Theodore Herzl, can be repurposed: “If you will it, it is no dream.“

November 6, 2023 – 9:15 am Categories: Articles | Comments (24)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

For about a month I’ve been watching a tendency both in myself and in just about everyone I know: We’d rather not think about the war in Gaza. Yes, it’s news. Yes, we see ourselves as citizens of a democracy who have a duty to stay well informed. But this is just too depressing. Maybe there’s something amusing we can stream on Netflix.

The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t help. Every time I look at CNN, it seems like they’re interviewing either a relative of a Hamas hostage, someone who managed to hide or run from the October 7 attack, or a Gaza nurse who has no supplies — as if the tenth such interview will communicate something the first nine failed to capture.

In some sense, though, this kind of situation is the Weekly Sift’s whole purpose: Beyond the endless repetition, somebody out there must be saying things we need to think about. I’ve tried to pick a few out in this week’s featured post, “Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?” That should be out around 9 or so EST.

The weekly summary will cover the new Speaker’s attempt to play politics with Israel/Palestine aid, the ongoing Trump trials, the polls a year out from the election, the actual elections happening tomorrow, and an old man’s rant about the World Series, before doing something I try to never do: repeat a closing. I used this 2Cellos video as a closing nine years ago, but it’s still great. That should appear before noon.

November 6, 2023 – 8:24 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)

Worldviews

Someone asked me today in the media, “People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.“

– Speaker Mike Johnson to Sean Hannity

This week’s featured post is “Mike Johnson is worse than you think“.

This week everybody was talking about the new speaker

Wednesday, the House ended three weeks of chaos by electing Mike Johnson (R-LA) Speaker of the House on a party line vote. The featured post outlines why Johnson scares me more than some random right-wing extremist with similar views on most issues: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist. So he feels perfectly justified in ignoring the will of the electorate and imposing his moral vision on us.

But there’s more to think about here than just Johnson. Last week I may have raised your hope that non-MAGA Republicans had found their backbones. I apologize. After watching the MAGA wing torpedo Tom Emmer’s candidacy for speaker, his supporters gave in and voted unanimously for Mike Johnson, whose ideology differs from Jim Jordan’s only by being more theocratic.

Ken Buck of Colorado is a prime example. Two weeks ago, in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, Buck seemed to be taking a principled pro-democracy stand:

I asked [Steve Scalise] last night: “Will you unequivocally and publicly state that the election, the 2020 presidential election, was not stolen?” He didn’t answer that question very clearly and Jim Jordan didn’t answer that question very clearly.

But then he backed down and voted for Johnson, who led 100 Republican members of Congress in supporting an unsuccessful lawsuit by the Texas attorney general that would have invalidated the electoral votes of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without those states, Joe Biden would not have had 270 electoral votes and the outcome of the election would have been thrown into dispute. (The Supreme Court refused to consider the case on the grounds that Texas had no standing.)

After casting his vote in support of Johnson on Wednesday, Buck told CNN that he had not heard Johnson acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as he had previously demanded of Jordan and Scalise.

“I have not gotten that promise from Mike,” Buck said. “I hope he comes around to that point.”

Here’s how much respect Johnson has for Buck’s question: When Johnson faced the press for the first time as speaker, ABC’s Rachel Scott tried to ask something similar. She was shouted down by the Republican congresspeople surrounding Johnson, highlighted by North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx yelling, “Shut up! Shut up!” The Hill describes the Speaker’s response:

Johnson smiled, shook his head and said “next question.”

That seems to be Speaker Johnson in a nutshell: He dresses more neatly than Jim Jordan, keeps his cool, and is not as uncouth as Virginia Foxx. But he’s on the same page, and will unapologetically take advantage of their rudeness.

In the same Katy Tur interview, Rep. Buck mentioned that he wanted assurances from the speaker candidates that they would bring Ukraine funding up for a vote. It looks like he didn’t get that from Johnson either. Thursday, Speaker Johnson announced that he intended to separate Ukraine and Israel funding bills. The implication of that is that each bill would be subject to the Hastert Rule, which does not allow votes on bills that don’t have majority support inside the Republican caucus. Ukraine aid is a close question within the caucus, so it may not come up for a vote in the full House, where it would surely pass.

and the Israel/Gaza war

Unless you implicitly trust one side or the other, it’s hard to get any clear idea of what’s going on in Gaza. Bombs are falling, and whatever anyone intends, they fall (like the rain) on the just and the unjust alike. A ground invasion has started, but doesn’t seem yet to be an all-out assault. Such an assault may still be coming, but it might not.

The possibilities for the war to expand are numerous. A northern front could open between Israel and Hezbollah. A uprising in the West Bank is possible. I’ve seen a claim on X/Twitter — God knows if anything on X is true these days — that Israeli settlers are attempting to expel Palestinians. Peter Beinart believes this report enough to claim he saw it coming in his article last spring: “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?“.

and another mass shooting

This is America, so you don’t have time to process one shooting before the next one happens. Saturday night, shots were fired in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood.

A shooting erupted in the middle of Ybor City after a Saturday night full of Halloween celebrations, leaving two dead and at least 18 people injured, Tampa police said.

But you may not be ready to think about that yet, because the rampage in Lewiston, Maine Wednesday evening is still so fresh. A shooter attacked random people in a bar and in a bowling alley, killing 18 and wounding 13. (Early reports that 50-60 people had been injured were wrong.) The shooter has been identified as Robert Card, and his body was found Friday; apparently he killed himself.

If you wanted to make the point that American gun laws are insane, you could hardly have designed an event more perfectly. In July, Card bought a Ruger SFAR high-powered rifle and a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. Ten days later, while serving as an Army reservist at a camp in New York,

the army gave Card a “Command Referral” to seek treatment after he told army personnel at Camp Smith Card had been “hearing voices” and had thoughts about “hurting other soldiers.” A National Guard spokesperson confirmed to CNN Card was transported to the nearby Keller Army Community Hospital at the United States Military Academy for “medical evaluation,” after Army Reserve officials reported Card for “behaving erratically.”

His family was also worried about him.

Card’s family told NBC News on Thursday that he had been hearing voices for months. “His mind was twisting them around,” said Katie Card, the suspect’s sister-in-law.

She said the family reached out to police and Card’s Army Reserve base as they “got increasingly concerned.”

Unfortunately, Maine only has a “yellow-flag law”, a watered-down version of the red-flag laws 21 other states have.

Even though Card underwent psychiatric treatment, [Nick] Suplina [senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety] said he believes that would not have immediately set Maine’s yellow flag law into motion because that process involved a law enforcement agency in a different state. [New York]

The family would have likely had to contact police in Maine, starting a new process, Suplina said.

So in the United States, or at least in Maine, you can be crazy, people can know you’re crazy, there can be a recent record of you buying a gun suitable for mass killing, and nobody can do anything about it.

I’ve heard several local people explain that implementing a more effective red-flag law hadn’t seemed all that urgent, because Maine (and particularly a small town like Lewiston), just didn’t seem like the kind of place where these things happen. But the inadequacy of that kind of thinking has been exposed over and over again: Parkland, Florida wasn’t the kind of place where these things happen. Neither was Uvalde, Texas or Newtown, Connecticut. After last year’s Fourth of July shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, I tried to explain what that meant:

I don’t think I’ve ever been to Highland Park, and you probably haven’t either. But you’ve seen it. The movies use Chicago’s North Shore suburbs to symbolize affluent communities so sheltered from the scary aspects of modern life that teens have to seek out adventure for themselves. Ferris Bueller lived in Highland Park; so did Joel Goodsen from Risky Business. That idyllic family life The Good Wife had before her crooked-politician husband went to jail and everything fell apart? It was in Highland Park. The town sits between Lake Forest, where 1980 Best Picture Ordinary People was set, and Winnetka, site of the Home Alone house. (But parts of that movie were shot in Highland Park too.)

During their glory days with the Bulls, basketball legends Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen had Highland Park mansions. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was born there. About 30K people live there now, and the 2010 census says the median household income is over $100K.

Here’s what I’m trying to get across: If a mass shooting can happen in Highland Park, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in your town too.

So me say it again: As long as we have these crazy gun laws, we’re all vulnerable.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could invalidate another kind of red-flag law: one that takes guns away from domestic abusers. Such laws are excellent from two points of view:

  • They undoubtedly save the lives of spouses, children, and other close associates of violent individuals.
  • And they probably prevent mass shootings, because mass shooters often start on a smaller scale, with violence against the people closest to them.

But maybe a law disarming domestic abusers is one of those nice things we just can’t have in the United States, at least not under this Supreme Court.

According to Vox’ Ian Millhiser, Zackey Rahimi is “an individual that no sensible society would allow to have a gun”. Allegedly, in addition to assaulting his girl friend in a parking lot, Rahimi fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the incident. He was involved in five other shooting incidents in a little over a year.

And yet, an appeals court recently found that Rahimi has a constitutional right to own a gun. In fact, any law that tries to take his guns away is unconstitutional on its face.

That means that, if the Fifth Circuit’s decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, this federal ban on firearm possession by domestic abusers may never be applied to any individual, no matter how violent that individual may be and no matter how careful the court that issued a restraining order against such an individual was in ensuring that they received due process.

But we haven’t gotten to the craziest part yet: That result is a correct application of the doctrine Clarence Thomas laid out in the 2022 Bruen decision.

Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed — particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.

And that’s where we’re out of luck. Domestic abuse certainly existed in the Founding Era, but it wasn’t considered a crime. And there’s no contemporary record of any law taking flintlock pistols away from wife beaters. So unless the Court wants to backtrack on a fairly recent decision, Rahimi (and even worse people) will get to keep his guns.

and the Trump trials

Another of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case pleaded guilty Tuesday: Jenna Ellis.

Ellis, who once described herself as part of an “elite strike force team” of attorneys pursuing unfounded claims of election fraud, pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” a tearful Ellis told the judge.

What damage Ellis’ testimony might do to Trump — or to co-defendant Rudy Giuliani, who Ellis worked with closely — is still speculative. In the NYT, Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland cast her as a star witness, but it’s hard to say at this point.

Rudy Giuliani, flanked by cooperating witnesses Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis.

Two different Trump gag orders were in the news. In the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization in New York, Judge Arthur Engoron called Trump to the stand, found his testimony not credible, and fined him $10,000. Engoron had earlier issued a gag order on Trump preventing him from attacking officers of the court when Trump had baselessly posted on Truth Social that Engoron’s law clerk was Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend. He had fined Trump $5K when the post persisted on Trump’s campaign website, which his lawyers said was “inadvertent”.

This fine came after Trump told reporters outside the courtroom on Wednesday that “This judge is a very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him — perhaps even much more partisan than he is.” Judge Engoron took that as yet another reference to his clerk, which Trump denied on the stand. (He claimed he was talking about Michael Cohen, who had appeared that day as a witness. Attacking witnesses is also typically frowned upon.) This was the claim Engoron said he didn’t believe.

Meanwhile, Judge Tanya Chutkan (presiding in the federal election interference case against Trump) issued a gag order banning him from attacking prosecutors and witnesses in that trial. She stayed the order temporarily while waiting for an appellate court to rule, but then reinstated it when Trump used the temporary break in the order to go after potential witness Mark Meadows.

Trump is claiming that his status as a former president and current presidential candidate gives him rights no other criminal defendant would have. I doubt the appeals court will agree with him.

Ultimately, Trump will have to be found in contempt of court because he is in fact contemptuous of the proceedings against him. Clearly, $10K fines are not going to restrain him. Eventually, we’ll have to see if jail time works.

This should be an exciting week in the New York fraud trial: Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka are expected to testify.

you also might be interested in …

The Commerce Department reported that the US economy grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter. (And yes, that number does account for inflation.) The previous week, a report from the Federal Reserve said that both mean and median household wealth is up. In other words, American households are generally richer than they were before the pandemic.

One of the continuing mysteries of American politics is that President Biden consistently polls badly on economic issues, while the country’s economic statistics have been quite good.

Weird weather continues to result from climate change: Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco as a Category 5 storm Wednesday. It is the only Cat 5 storm to hit the Pacific coast, and intensified from a mere tropical storm in less than 24 hours.

Virginia holds its elections in odd years, making the state a possible bellwether of national trends. Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the governor’s race drew attention to critical race theory and other right-wing education tropes.

A week from tomorrow, the governorship is not on the ballot, but control of the legislature is. Democrats currently hold a small majority in the Senate and Republicans in the House.

Here are a few things Trump said in Sioux City, Iowa yesterday. He bragged about being willing to ignore our NATO obligations.

I remember, the head of a country stood up and said, “Does that mean that if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” And I said, “That’s right. That’s what it means. I will not protect you.”

He said hello to Sioux Falls, not realizing where he was. (Sioux Falls is in South Dakota.) And he claimed that Hungary shares a border with Russia.

The NYT collects some of Trump’s other recent blunders: He warned that the US is on the verge of World War II. He bragged about being ahead of Barack Obama in the polls, and claimed that he beat Obama in 2016. He referred to Hungarian President Viktor Orban as the president of Turkey. He pronounced Hamas as if it were hummus.

But Biden is the one who’s out of it because he’s too old.

Mike Pence suspended his presidential campaign. From the beginning, his campaign has felt like one of those moments in football when a quarterback cocks his arm and I think, “Where is he throwing that?” And sure enough, the pass goes right to a defender and gets intercepted.

Same thing here. I never understood what voters Pence was targeting. MAGA voters resent Pence for not cooperating in Trump’s coup. Non-MAGA voters resent Pence for staying loyal to Trump right up to moment of the coup. Maybe he thought that he could reclaim the Evangelical voters he led to Trump in 2016, but they’re long gone. In the GOP, the good-Christian-family-man boat sailed a long time ago.

He should have thrown the ball out of bounds and punted.

You may not know about Conservapedia, the conservative alternative to the “liberal” (i.e., reality based) Wikipedia. But Kat Abu pays attention to these things, while managing to keep her sense of humor.

and let’s close with something massive

There’s something really primal about singing along with large numbers of people. Also, large groups often sound surprisingly decent. (The notes sung tend to average out on the right ones.) Astrid Jorgensen of Australia started the Pub Choir project to create singing-together projects on an epic scale.

At Pub Choir events, Jorgensen teaches a well-known song in 3-part harmony to non-trained singers. The performance is filmed and posted on the net.

In this video, Pub Choirs in cities across Australia unite to sing Toto’s “Africa”. The result is strangely compelling, whether you like the song or not.

October 30, 2023 – 12:23 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Mike Johnson is worse than you think

Most Americans don’t know much about Christian Nationalism.
They’re about to find out.

If you hadn’t heard of Mike Johnson until this week, don’t be embarrassed. Neither had I and neither had anybody but his Louisiana constituents and the most obsessive observers of politics. And so since Wednesday, when the House Republican caucus suddenly pulled unity out of a hat and elected Johnson speaker on a party-line vote, we’ve seen a lot of scrambling to characterize him.

Matt Gaetz, who had started this three-week circus by introducing a motion to get rid of Kevin McCarthy, declared victory by christening Johnson as “MAGA Mike”. Critics pointed to his role in Trump’s election denial: He organized the 100+ House Republicans who signed an amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit challenging the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and offered legal cover to the 147 Republicans who voted not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

After initially repeating Trump’s baseless lie that voting software developed for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez had flipped votes from Trump to Biden (the same lie that Fox News refused to defend in court, and so had to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to compensate for), by January 6 Johnson was making a claim less obviously insane:

On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional. [1]

Other people noted his extreme views on social issues: Johnson has sponsored a six-week abortion ban. As a lawyer for Americans Defending Freedom, he defended laws criminalizing gay sex (which doesn’t sound very freedom-loving to me). He sponsored a federal version of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law. He’s a climate-change denier who fights all efforts to discourage fossil fuel use. His discussion of the border dog-whistles the racist Great Replacement Theory. All of which caused the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie to characterize him as “an election-denying extremist who believes that his allies have the right to nullify election results so that they can impose their vision of government and society on an unwilling public”.

And that analysis is true as far as it goes, but it misses the underlying theme that justifies these views and portends worse ones we haven’t heard yet: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist.

Christian Nationalism. In a nutshell, Christian Nationalism is the belief that the United States was founded not as a secular republic, but as a specifically Christian nation. In an interview with Politico, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who specializes in evangelical Christianity and politics, elaborates:

Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want.

On most contentious issues, this puts Christian Nationalists on the same side as ordinary conservatives, and makes it easy to confuse one with the other. But there’s a difference: Ordinary conservatives at least give lip service to the idea of fairness, while Christian Nationalists don’t. Their side represents God’s Truth, so of course they should win. The appropriate standards are God’s standards, so it would be ridiculous to apply abstract rules equally to both sides.

For example, one point I often make in my articles on the Supreme Court’s “religious freedom” cases is that they aren’t about freedom at all; they’re about giving special rights to Christians. (The “praying football coach” won his case because he’s Christian. No Muslim or other non-Christian coach should imagine that the Court will defend his right to lead players in prayer on the 50-yard line.) But I make that point expecting the other side to deny it. If I could argue with Sam Alito or Amy Coney Barrett, I would expect them to spin their position in a way that makes it sound scrupulously principled and fair.

Similarly, when I accuse MAGA Republicans of being against democracy, I expect them to dodge, not to confront the point. Somehow, they’ll paint gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Electoral College, and the filibuster as pro-democracy, not anti-democracy.

But in either case, a true Christian Nationalist might accept my characterization and openly defend it: Of course Christians should get special rights, because the United States is a Christian nation. And ultimate sovereignty belongs to God, not to the People. If democracy leads to the People voting down God’s laws, then democracy has to go. [2]

For example, in this broadcast radio host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association claimed that the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause only applies to Christians.

But the point is, by “religion” the Founders were thinking of Christianity. So the purpose was to protect the free exercise of the Christian faith. It wasn’t about protecting anything else. They weren’t providing any cover or shelter for the free exercise of Islam or even Judaism or even atheism. They weren’t saying you can’t do it, I want to be clear on that. They weren’t prohibiting that. They were just saying “That’s not what we’re talking about here.” …

If we don’t understand the word “religion” to mean “Christianity” as the Founders intended it, then we have no way to stop Islam. We have no way to stop Satanism. We have no way to stop any other sort of sinister religious practice that might creep onto these fruited plains.

Mike Johnson. While Du Mez admitted she had never heard Johnson characterize himself as a Christian Nationalist, she believes the shoe fits.

I feel comfortable applying that [label]; it’s not in a pejorative way. It’s simply descriptive. As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. …

But he goes much deeper than that, and really roots that in what he would call a biblical worldview: The core principles of our nation reflect these biblical truths and biblical principles. He has gone on record saying things like, for him, this biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government.

Now, all this authority, of course, is under this broader understanding of God-given authority. So it’s not the right of any parents to decide what’s best for their kids; it’s the right of parents to decide what’s best for their kids in alignment with his understanding of biblical law. Same thing with the church’s role: It is to spread Christianity but also to care for the poor. That’s not the government’s job.

And then the government’s job is to support this understanding of authority and to align the country with God’s laws.

You can hear his belief in God’s sovereignty in his first speech to the House as Speaker:

I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night. I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us, and I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time. [3]

In an interview he gave during his first campaign for Congress, Johnson said:

We don’t live in a democracy, because a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. … The Founders set [our system] up because they followed the Biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.

And:

The Founders believed that we’re endowed by our Creator with these rights, and that we owe our allegiance ultimately to our Creator, because He’s going to be the judge of all of us. One day, every knee is going to bow before the Lord.

God ordained civil government with certain authority. But He gave it limited authority. … The overarching problem we have right now is that the government has gone beyond the scope of the authority that was ordained by God. … And when the government grows and it expands its scope of authority, it usurps it from somewhere else. It takes the power and authority that God had ordained for the Church and the Family.

The Christian-establishing Constitution is what Christian Nationalists have in mind when they talk about defending or restoring “the Constitution” — not the document that you or I might read, the one that never once mentions God, and whose meanings and intentions Americans have been arguing about since the Founding, but that document overlaid with a very specific set of interpretations rooted in an Evangelical Christian moral vision.

In this way, they are treating the Constitution much the way they treat the Bible itself — as if their own very elaborate interpretations were sitting right there in the text. As Speaker Johnson told Sean Hannity:

I am a Bible-believing Christian – someone asked me today… people are curious, “What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the Sun?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it, that’s my worldview – that’s what I believe.”

But if you ever do what Johnson suggests — pick up a Bible and try to read it de novo, as if no one had ever told you what it is supposed to mean — you almost certainly will fail to find anything resembling a “worldview”, and certainly not a view that transparently applies to the 21st-century world. [4]

Instead, you’ll find a number of evocative stories open to a wide range of interpretations. To take an extreme example from the very beginning: In the Garden of Eden story, it’s not entirely clear that the serpent is the villain. What the serpent tells Eve turns out to be true, and God’s threat that she will die if she eats the forbidden fruit only becomes true because God makes it true: He banishes her and Adam from the Garden specifically so that they won’t eat from the Tree of Life. So which of the two supernatural antagonists has Eve’s best interests at heart?

In short, the people who want to bring America “back to the Bible”, or to “restore the Constitution”, aren’t talking about the actual Bible or the actual Constitution. They are talking about these revered documents with their particular sect’s interpretations pasted on top of them.

And now one of them is running the House of Representatives.

[1] Note what is not being claimed here: that Biden’s voters weren’t real or weren’t entitled to vote. Instead, the claim is that these legitimate voters cast their votes in ways that shouldn’t have counted — like by mail in districts that in previous elections had different rules about voting by mail.

Even if this claim had some legal legitimacy, which I doubt, trying to fix it two months after the election violated the way we have always done things here in America: We argue about the election rules before the election. We don’t wait to see who wins, and then, if we lose, try to invalidate the votes of fellow citizens who voted in good faith under the rules their local officials had laid out for them.

[2] Arguing with a Christian Nationalist can be jarring for precisely this reason: They happily take the position you had hoped to trap them in. It’s as if a child accused their parents of liking another child better, and the parents replied, “Of course we like Jenny better. Now shut up and clean your room.”

[3] Someone needs to ask Johnson whether God has raised up Joe Biden to his current place of authority. I can’t guess what his answer would be.

[4] Try this experiment: Find some article (like this one) listing all the Bible verses that supposedly condemn abortion. Now go to each one and read the whole chapter the verse comes from. You will discover that, in context, these verses have nothing to do with abortion.

Anti-abortion views, like many other conservative Christian views, do not come from the Bible. They come from somewhere else — largely whatever the Christian community wants to believe — and are imposed on the Bible through interpretation.

October 30, 2023 – 10:26 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This is America, so you don’t get a chance to process one mass shooting before there’s another one. Saturday night in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, two were killed and at least 18 injured when a dispute between two groups devolved into gunfire. This follows Wednesday’s single-shooter rampage in Lewiston, Maine. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court may be about to trash state red-flag laws that keep guns away from dangerous people. I haven’t decided yet whether to cover our gun problem in a featured article or in a very long note in the weekly summary.

What I know I’m writing a featured article about is the ascension of Mike Johnson to the speakership. Initially, Johnson was covered as just another MAGA extremist, but in fact it’s worse than that: He’s a follower of Christian Nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. That post should appear maybe around 10 EDT. If there’s a gun article, it will follow around 11.

The weekly summary will discuss how the House GOP “moderates”, who seemed to have found their backbones when Jim Jordan was running for speaker, crumbled completely in the Johnson vote. I don’t have a lot to say about the Israel/Gaza War, but I’ll link to people who do. There’s Trump trial news every week: more people flipped on him, two different judges are trying to figure out how to discipline his outbursts (which would send any other defendant to jail for contempt), and his children are going to have to testify this week in the Trump Organization fraud trial. And he gets more befuddled on the campaign trail, where he projects his own mental decline onto President Biden.

You may not have noticed Mike Pence was running for president, but he has dropped out. A Cat 5 hurricane hit Acapulco without drawing much media attention. Virginia is about to have an important election. And I’ll close with 18,000 people singing a Toto song. I’ll try to get that out by noon or so.

October 30, 2023 – 8:26 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)

Null and void

It’s ridiculous that Republicans cannot elect a speaker, but it is also, at this point, unsurprising. A gaping void exists at the center of the populist strain of Republican politics; where the ideas ought to be, you too often find a long, primal scream of “Noooooooo!!!!”

– Megan McArdle
“Republicans have created a void that’s becoming harder to escape“

This week’s featured post is “The House, still divided“.

This week everybody was talking about chaos in the House GOP

The featured post provides a quick summary of where we are and how we got here, and then references a couple of deeper essays about how the House and the House Republican caucus actually work. But if you’re looking for some clear this-is-what-happens-next-and-when speculation, I don’t have it.

The McArdle quote above (and the article it comes from) makes a good point: Factions compromise with other factions because they have policy goals they want to achieve. But MAGA really has no goals beyond returning Trump to power. Cutting the deficit? No. When Trump was in power and had two years of a Republican Congress, they exploded the deficit with both tax cuts and spending increases. Inflation? They complain about it, but have no plan for addressing it. Crime? Ditto.

I’m sure my Republican readers would add other things they care about: the left-wing capture of schools and education policy, the progressive drift of corporations and the mainstream media, the DEI bureaucracies metastasizing across every class of institutions, the gender-medicine doctors rushing kids onto puberty blockers and hormones. …

But notice how few of the things on the list are things Congress can actually fix, even theoretically.

Imagine that you’re an establishment Republican trying negotiate for MAGA support to become speaker, or that you’re Biden trying to make a deal to keep the government open. What can you offer them that they would actually care about enough to give you something back?

If reality mattered, the House Republican infighting would smash once and for all the myth that Trump is a great deal-maker. He claims that if he were president he could bring Ukraine and Russia to an agreement in 24 hours. But the squabbling among his allies in the House has brought Congress to a standstill for three weeks with no end in sight.

Where is he, and why can’t he solve it?

In the real world, without reality-TV editing to make him look brilliant, Trump is terrible at making deals. He broke two of Obama’s agreements — the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accords — claiming each time that he would get a “better deal”. (“I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled,” he said about his fantasy Paris renegotiation.) In fact, he got no deal, and in each case the country is worse off than if he had left Obama’s agreements in place.

In 2017, he came within one vote of undoing another long-negotiated Obama compromise, Obamacare. He would have taken health insurance away from millions of Americans — again with no plan to replace it beyond a fantasy.

His big diplomatic “accomplishment”, the USMCA, is basically what Obama had already negotiated as part of the Trans-Pacific Parternship, another deal Trump blew up. His flashy negotiations with North Korea produced a great photo opportunity — which benefited Kim more than anyone — and no substantive progress on the main issue, North Korea’s nuclear missiles. His trade war with China gave him great opportunities to posture, but accomplished nothing.

And then we get to Trump’s #1 issue: immigration and the border. The pieces of a deal have been lying around ever since the Gang of Eight compromise passed the Senate and died in the House in 2013. Neither side likes things the way they are and everybody has something to gain from striking a deal. But even with two years of a Republican-controlled Congress, he got no immigration legislation passed, and even shut down his own government to (unsuccessfully) pressure the Republican Congress to fund his wall.

and war

There are lots of individual stories in the Israel/Gaza war, but the fundamental situation didn’t change much this week: Hamas still holds hundreds of hostages. Israel is attacking Gaza from the air, but hasn’t launched a ground invasion yet. Lots of people in Gaza are dying (though it looks like Israel wasn’t responsible for destroying that hospital). A shipment of humanitarian aid made it into Gaza, but it’s a drop in the bucket.

If Israel has a plan for resolving this situation without killing a huge number of civilians, nobody seems to know what it is. In Israel’s defense, though, I haven’t heard a good suggestion yet for what they should do.

Hamas released two American hostages, but there are still other American hostages in Gaza. Why them? Why now? I don’t think anybody knows.

Biden gave an Oval Office speech to the nation [video, text], explaining why Israel and Ukraine deserve our support. He also said:

the United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away.

But without any viable peace plan, it’s hard to take that sentiment seriously, whether it comes from Biden or from Israeli leaders.

Biden also urged Americans not to bring the Gaza conflict home, citing the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian American near Chicago. The article says the boy’s mother came to the US 12 years ago, which would make him an American citizen.

We can’t stand by and stand silent when this happens. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.

And to all of you hurting — those of you who are hurting, I want you to know: I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.

Times like these are when I’m most grateful that Biden defeated Trump in 2020. I shudder to think of this kind of crisis going on in the world with Trump posturing and grandstanding and appealing to everyone’s worst impulses.

I’m impressed that the White House text of Biden’s speech includes his handful of verbal stumbles and misstatements. For example, he referred to Netanyahu as “president” rather than “prime minister”. The text corrects that mistake with a strikethrough, but doesn’t pretend he didn’t say it.

Ukraine’s summer offense didn’t gain much ground, but their increasing drone and missile capability has challenged Russia’s dominance of the Black Sea.

Mitch McConnell is still on board with helping Ukraine defend against Russia’s invasion:

No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We’re rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that. I think it’s wonderful that they’re defending themselves- and also the notion that the Europeans are not doing enough. They’ve done almost 90 billion dollars, they’re housing a bunch of refugees who escaped. I think that our NATO allies in Europe have done quite a lot.

I was late finding “How Not to Respond to a Terrorist Attack“, which Benjamin Wittes posted the day of the the Hamas attack on Israel. But it’s well worth bookmarking and coming back to after future attacks, wherever they occur and whomever they victimize.

Fundamentally, he urges humility on those of us tempted to comment quickly. What needs to be affirmed in the immediate aftermath of murder is not deep or complex, but very simple: Murder is wrong. Not “wrong, but” or “wrong, except”, but just wrong. There is a strong temptation, which I feel myself, to segue past the tragedy of individual lives cut short, and to talk instead about the larger context, the need for revenge, what I think will or should happen next, how this event proves some other point I often make, and why people who disagree with me are dangerously misguided.

and the Trump trials

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheseboro pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis. So three of the original 19 defendants in the Georgia RICO case have now pleaded guilty.

By all accounts, Powell and Cheseboro got very good deals, which they took just before their trial was supposed to begin. Neither will do jail time.

There are two theories on how they got such good deals: Either they have really juicy testimony to offer against the other conspirators, including Trump, or Willis really, really wanted to avoid revealing all her evidence and strategy in a trial before Trump’s trial. (Both Powell and Cheseboro had taken advantage of Georgia’s law giving them the right to demand a speedy trial. There’s still no trial date for the other defendants.)

Powell and Cheseboro are widely assumed to be two of the unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators in Jack Smith’s January-6-conspiracy indictment against Trump, but neither has any deal with Smith so far. As long as that’s the case, it’s hard to see what they could testify to for Willis. Either might legitimately plead the Fifth Amendment rather than describe crimes Smith could still indict them for.

If either of them makes a deal with Smith, the floodgates will open.

The biggest immediate impact of the guilty pleas is its effect on Trump politically: It’s hard to claim there was no crime when your former allies have already confessed to crimes.

As for where each fit into the larger conspiracy: Powell was at the center of spreading the Big Lie, as well as the effort to seize voting machines. Cheseboro organized the fake-elector scheme. I would expect Powell’s testimony to be most damaging to Rudy Giuliani and Cheseboro’s to John Eastman, if you’re looking for the next possible dominos. And Mark Meadows was everywhere, so any new testimony might target him.

Judge Chutkan issued a gag order against Trump

All interested parties in this matter, including the parties and their counsel, are prohibited from making any public statements, or directing others to make any public statements, that target (1) the Special Counsel prosecuting this case or his staff; (2) defense counsel or their staff; (3) any of this court’s staff or other supporting personnel; or (4) any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.

and then explicitly described what is not included:

This Order shall not be construed to prohibit Defendant from making statements criticizing the government generally, including the current administration or the Department of Justice; statements asserting that Defendant is innocent of the charges against him, or that his prosecution is politically motivated; or statements criticizing the campaign platforms or policies of Defendant’s current political rivals, such as former Vice President Pence.

Trump predictably claimed that this order violates his First Amendment rights. This is in line with Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that indictment is a meaningful act. A grand jury of ordinary Americans has found that the evidence of his criminality is sufficiently strong that a trial has to be held. That’s not nothing, and it restricts a person’s rights in ways that are necessary for holding a fair trial.

For example, unindicted Americans are free to travel wherever they want. But if you’ve been indicted, you have to be present when your trial starts. The rights you would ordinarily expect as an American have been narrowed to accommodate your trial.

Again and again, Trump pretends that his indictments are nothing, and so his rights should not be restricted in any way.

Meanwhile, Justice Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing Trump’s ongoing New York $250 million civil fraud trial, fined Trump $5K for violating his previous gag order and threatened to jail him for future violations. The gag order had been issued after a Trump Truth Social post targeted Engoron’s principal clerk.

Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff

As requested, Trump took down the offending post. But apparently it was still posted on his campaign web site. Trump’s lawyers claimed this violation of the order was inadvertent, but at a minimum it shows Trump and his people failing to take the order seriously.

It’s just a matter of time before some judge has to jail Trump for contempt, because he is in fact contemptuous.

Forbes is claiming that former Trump Organization CFO Adam Weisselberg committed perjury during his testimony at Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. After the report was published, prosecutors cut Weisselberg’s testimony short.

Weisselberg is still on probation after pleading guilty at a previous trial and serving three months in prison.

Significantly, perjury in the first degree is also a felony punishable by up to seven years. But perhaps most importantly, the Manhattan district attorney would not have to undertake a new prosecution of Weisselberg for perjury to move to revoke his probation. It would be enough for the DA’s office simply to convince Judge Juan Merchan that Weisselberg engaged in new, criminal conduct during that [five-year] period.

and you also might be interested in …

Threats and disasters are more newsworthy than positive trends, so it’s easy to imagine the world is in worse shape than it actually is. Brian Klaas calls attention to ten charts of important trends, several of which are encouraging. For example, the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has been falling for two centuries, and falling faster in recent decades.

Rep. Jeff Jackson’s podcasts have been offering a great inside view of how the House works. Now it looks like North Carolina will gerrymander him out of Congress.

As I envision my next car, I find [one, two] cautionary tales of road trips in EVs. I am leaning towards a plug-in hybrid.

A San Francisco chef describes how his idea of a restaurant has changed post-Covid: small dining room, short menu, no reservations, and a retail shop to even out revenue. He thinks this model will catch on.

and let’s close with something harmonious

A barbershop quartet demonstrates that all music is really barbershop. A song just takes about 20 years to get there.

October 23, 2023 – 12:06 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

The House, Still Divided

With several looming crises demanding Congress’ immediate attention,
the House of Representatives has been frozen for three weeks,
with no end in sight.

Quick review. Matt Gaetz moved to kick Kevin McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair three weeks ago. Eight Republicans and all the Democrats voted yes, so McCarthy was out. Then Steve Scalise tried to unify the Republican conference around his bid to be speaker, but he saw that wasn’t working and dropped his candidacy before a vote was held.

Next up was Jim Jordan, who had Trump’s endorsement and kept saying he could get the votes, but didn’t. Twenty Republicans voted against him on the first ballot, 22 on the second, and 25 on the third. Then the Republican conference held a secret ballot on whether he should continue, and the majority said no. So Jordan has also withdrawn. [1]

In between Jordan’s second and third attempts, the idea of empowering Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry came up. His exact powers under the current rules are vague, but are being interpreted narrowly, so that he can only preside over votes to elect a new speaker. The House could allow him to act more like a speaker himself, so that bills could come to the floor and the House could function again. [2] But that idea went nowhere within the Republican conference and never came to a vote on the floor.

Jordan’s third failed vote happened Friday, after which the Republican conference asked him not to continue. He withdrew, an ever-increasing number of obscure Republicans have thrown their names out as speaker candidates, and the Republicans took the weekend off, as if they had all the time in the world. They’ll reconvene tonight to try to find a new candidate, and maybe the whole House will vote sometime.

Meanwhile, the world is not waiting for House Republicans to either get their act together or ask Democrats for help. The Ukrainians and Israelis are undoubtedly running out of certain key munitions, and a government shutdown is looming in less than four weeks.

The Democrats. Meanwhile, House Democrats have stayed united behind Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Republicans have not sought their cooperation.

On their own, without getting any concessions whatever, Democrats could have helped Republicans save McCarthy or elect Jordan — the only options that made it to the floor where they were allowed to vote. But other than maybe Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan is the last person Democrats want to see as speaker, so that was never going to happen. And McCarthy had crossed and double-crossed everybody during his nine months as speaker, so in the absence of a public deal, Democrats had no motive to bail him out of his well-earned troubles. (As one member put it: “It’s not our circus and he’s not our clown.”)

Democrats have been pretty clear about what they want in exchange for getting the Republicans out of this mess. [3] They want a power-sharing deal similar to what the Senate did last term when it was split 50/50: equal numbers from each party on committees (with Republicans as chairs, because the GOP still holds a majority), and some mechanism that would allow either party’s leadership to bring a bill to the floor.

They would probably settle for this much: A speaker who admits Joe Biden won the 2020 election, together with guarantees that the new speaker will

So far, though, Democrats have been offered exactly nothing. Republicans have insisted that they will elect a speaker on their own, which they have been unable to do.

Why are House Republicans doing this? It’s a great question. If you’re pressed for time, you can settle on “because they’re incompetent jerks” and not be wrong.

But I found two essays that offer a deeper understanding: Josh Marshall’s “The Inside Story of How Jim Jordan Broke the Model, Didn’t Become Speaker and Decided That was Fine“, which is behind TPM’s member paywall, and “The game theory of the Republican speakership crisis“, which is on Nate Silver’s Substack blog. [4]

Marshall describes the “stable and functional system” that House Republicans have operated under since the 2010 Tea Party wave election. This system is designed to deal with a particular problem: The mythology of the far Right says that they represent “the American people” [5], but their actual policies — ban abortion, promote fossil fuel use, cut Social Security, abandon Ukraine, expel the Dreamers, ban books about gender or race from schools and libraries, make voting as hard as possible, cut rich people’s taxes — are unpopular outside a few dozen deep-red districts. So the Party needs to have one message for its true believers and another for the general public.

The congressional party is controlled and run by the hard right minority variously called the Tea Party or Freedom Caucus. But they are a bit too hot for national public consumption. They also rely on the idea that their far right policy agenda has broad public support but is held back by a corrupt/bureaucratic establishment. For both of these reasons a system was developed in which this far right group runs the caucus, but from the background, while it is nominally run by a mainstreamish Republican leader. Under John Boehner, Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy this basic dynamic remained more or less the same. It works for everybody because the Freedom Party calls the shots while the party maintains broad electoral viability via figureheadish leadership.

Meanwhile the stresses created by the gap between party goals and electoral viability is played out in psychodrama between a cluster of self-styled rebels and the beleaguered leader of the moment. This feature is more important than it looks. The big Freedom Caucus beef with McCarthy was that he couldn’t take the far right legislation they jammed through the House and magically force the Senate to pass it and Biden to sign it. The true believers are thus in a perpetual state of being betrayed by a menagerie of RINOs and other softies who make up the ever-shifting definition of ‘the establishment,’ a fact that keeps the conservative media fundraising water wheel chugging forward.

Making Jim Jordan speaker would have broken this model, which is probably why it didn’t happen. Going into the 2024 congressional elections with Speaker Jordan would be suicide for Republicans in swing districts, and they know it. Meanwhile, members from pro-fascist districts can’t go back to their voters and say they elected a speaker who won’t impose his will on Biden by shutting down the government. So there are really only two possible outcomes:

  • A speaker so obscure that both the “Freedom” Caucus and swing-district Republicans can claim they got what they wanted (and express shock if the new speaker does something unpopular in their district).
  • A deal with Democrats that “Freedom” Caucus members can cite as a new betrayal by “the establishment”.

Glassman’s take. On Silver’s blog, Nate lets Matt Glassman explain how the House really works: A speaker’s power isn’t primarily located in his or her office, but comes from leading a procedural coalition.

In the modern House, the Speaker almost always has a partisan majority that gives him this deferential backing to create a procedural coalition. That is, backbench members vote in lockstep on procedural matters such as what bills to consider and what rules to consider them under, even if they are opposed to the actual legislation. They do this because the benefits they receive from the party, such as committee assignments, electoral support, and the help of other party members on bills they do like, outweigh the small costs of occasionally having bills on the floor they oppose. Bucking the party on procedural votes is a serious transgression.

In turn, the empowered leadership supports the backbenchers, by raising massive sums of money and spreading it around to campaigns, by protecting the Members from tough votes from coming up on the floor, and by developing a party program and negotiating deals between party factions, as well as with the Senate and president.

McCarthy’s problem during the 118th Congress was that he never had a stable procedural coalition.

So McCarthy was a Speaker In Name Only.

To Glassman, then, the question is bigger than just the one-day problem of electing a speaker: Going forward, does the majority that elects the new speaker represent a new coalition that the speaker can call on day after day to govern the House? If not, the chamber will soon be back in the same soup.

This is why it never made any sense for McCarthy to seek Democratic votes to bail him out when his partisan procedural coalition was failing. If Democrats had helped McCarthy win the Speakership in January—perhaps by voting present, as many observers suggested they could do in exchange for some goodies—it might have won him the office, but it would have left him in the exact same bind on the very next vote (the vote on the rules package). Unless he was willing to create a permanent procedural majority coalition with the Democrats, there was no point in getting their help that one time. His only choice was to try to make peace with the GOP rebels. Ditto on the resolution to vacate the Speakership.

Likewise, unless Democrats were ready to form a lasting coalition with McCarthy, it made no sense to save him.

McCarthy didn’t need one vote, one time. He needed an ongoing procedural coalition. Unless the Democrats were going to form a permanent alliance with him, saving him on the vacate vote wouldn’t have done any good.

Glassman notes the same far-right dynamic Marshall pointed out: Unlike the GOP moderates, the “Freedom” Caucus has a narrative that works either way:

In fact, the core brand of the Freedom Caucus is their opposition to the GOP House leadership. It’s almost impossible for the party leadership to discipline HFC members and induce party loyalty, because they prefer to be at odds with the leadership; defeating their policy proposals, cutting them out of negotiations, or calling them out publicly as disloyal to the party only serves to reinforce their brand among their constituents and allies in conservative media. …

And so the story of the 118th Congress has largely been one of the Freedom Caucus holding the GOP leadership hostage, forcing leadership to either sign on to their extreme conservative populist agenda—one that has no chance of policy success in the Senate or with President Biden—or see their procedural majority fall apart. There’s no compromise. You either do what they want, or you go work with the Democrats after they abandon you. It’s a win/win for them, in any case. They either get their policies, or they get their betrayal narrative.

Hardball competition. Most of the time, the competing wings of the GOP resemble the two women who came to Solomon claiming the same baby: When Solomon announced his decision to cut the baby in two, one woman was satisfied and the other withdrew her claim so that the baby might live. [6]

In my analogy (which Glassman doesn’t make), the baby is the country, the “Freedom” Caucus is the first woman, and the GOP establishment is the second. Again and again — the debt ceiling crisis is the most recent example — the far Right has shown itself willing to let the country come to harm if that’s what’s necessary to get their way.

They thought their tactics would work here: In the medium-to-long term, the country faces disaster with no speaker and a frozen Congress, and the Republican Party faces electoral disaster if its dysfunction keeps bringing this level of chaos while the whole world watches. So obviously the establishment Republicans would have to give in and let Jim Jordan take the gavel. With no Solomon in the picture to reward those who actually care about America, how could Jordan lose? Scalise played his assigned role as Solomon’s second woman and withdrew his claim, leaving Jordan as the only choice.

And that’s where the narrative changed. Such a blatant display of independence-for-me, party-loyalty-for-you was too much for a small group of moderates and Republicans interested in governing (like Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, who is the point person on the issue of keeping the government open).

And this is the upshot to the first roll call vote on Jordan’s Speakership candidacy: a group in the GOP besides the Freedom Caucus decided to play hardball. The longstanding asymmetry and Freedom Caucus monopoly on hardball behavior may be coming to end.

Glassman has no idea how this resolves. He lays out four possibilities, one of which (Jordan grinding out an eventual victory the way McCarthy did in January) has already failed. The other three are:

  • Republicans come up with a candidate so obscure that all factions can spin his/her speakership as a victory. There’s a certain beer-goggles effect needed to bring this about: It’s getting late and they’ve got to go home with somebody. [7]
  • Moderates make a deal with Democrats.
  • There’s a bipartisan deal to empower McHenry, so the House can do business without a permanent speaker.

Glassman leans towards the third option, while recognizing that (like the other two) it’s just a band-aid: There’s still no governing coalition that can keep the House functioning.

[1] Tim Miller comments:

Is there a better encapsulation of the GOP elected officials during the Trump years than Jim Jordan winning 194-25 GOP votes in the public ballot and then losing the majority by secret ballot?

Miller is referring to the level of intimidation the GOP’s far right wields against the rest of the Republican caucus. At times this goes as far as physical threats, like those Don Bacon, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Carlos Gimenez, and others complained about after opposing Jordan.

I want to sympathize with Bacon et al, but did they really not know until now that their party’s base is full of violent fascists? Wasn’t the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband a clue? Clearly, they just never thought the leopards would eat their faces.

For the record, Jordan has denounced threats against his opponents. But I’m not impressed. Back in the heyday of lynchings and the KKK, Southern states would send distinguished gentlemen to Congress, who of course would express horror about what the ruffians back home were doing. It meant nothing then and it means nothing now. Jordan plays to and postures for the violent Right, just as the Southern gentlemen did then.

[2] Article I Section 5 of the Constitution says, “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” So the House can do whatever a majority of its members want, assuming a majority can be found to want something.

[3] Of course they’d be thrilled if a handful of Republicans would join them to make Jeffries speaker, but I don’t think even the Democrats who make that suggestion consider it a serious possibility.

[4] Substack will ask you to pay to subscribe to Silver’s blog, but it will let you click through without subscribing. BTW, I’m developing a policy on Substack subscriptions: I’m shameless about clicking through once or twice, but the fourth or fifth time I consult the same blog I usually subscribe.

[5] As Rep. Russell Fry said of Jim Jordan: “The American people trust him.” Clearly, Rep. Fry does not consider me an American.

[6] For those who don’t recall the rest of the story, Solomon’s first judgment was just a test. After he saw the women’s responses, he concluded that the woman who was willing to lose her case to save the baby’s life was the real mother.

[7] Matt Ygelsias jokes about the current list of nine candidates:

At least four of these people aren’t real, they’re just making up names.

October 23, 2023 – 10:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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