The worst damage we suffered from the attack came from the things we did in response.
I spent a lot of this week meditating about why I’ve been finding the reports out of Israel and Gaza so hard to watch. I suspect most of you haven’t had to think too hard about this question: You’re compassionate people and whenever others suffer on this scale, it’s naturally going to affect you. Turning away might not always be admirable, but it is certainly understandable.
Over the years, though, I’ve gotten pretty good at compartmentalizing other people’s pain. I don’t think that’s anything to brag about either, but I find it necessary in order to stare at the news as intently as I do each week. I need to be able to spend an afternoon focusing on hurricane survivors, the looming climate apocalypse, America’s rising fascist movement, and dozens of other dismal developments — and then go make dinner and talk to my wife about our next vacation. Whatever might be going on out there, dragging that misery into my personal life (and spreading it out among my friends) is not going to help.
But this week I’ve found myself ducking a lot of my standard news sources. A news anchor I usually like starts interviewing a young adult who narrowly escaped the Hamas attack, or parents who don’t know where their daughter is now, or a nurse who works in a Gaza hospital that will soon be unable to provide basic services — and I think: “Not another one. Can we get on to something else? Isn’t there a game I can watch?”
It took me several days to figure out what was going on: I’ve been reacting to this crisis personally because it keeps flashing me back to 9-11. Not to the events themselves (which happened out there in the world and so were handled, more or less, by my compartmentalization processes), but to the emotions that swept through the country afterward, and that I often got swept up in. Those emotions energized us to take action — horrible actions, as it turned out. Mistakes we are still paying for.
In my internal system, those emotions got tagged as dangerous. Alarm bells go off whenever I feel them, either because they are rising from within myself or because I am resonating empathically with others. Never do that again. Simply feeling those emotions makes me anticipate making some unfixable mistake.
Nous sommes tous Américains.The 9-11 attack did not affect me directly. I was not in New York, and no one I knew personally died on that day. I had been to the top of the World Trade Center years before, but the building held no great symbolic value for me. (I do remember spontaneously beginning to cry, though, when I heard reports that hijacked Flight 93, the one crashed by the passengers, might have been targeting the Capitol. The thought of losing the Capitol seemed overwhelming.)
So the Hamas attacks against Israel haven’t been flashing me back to watching the second plane hit (that’s when we knew the first wasn’t an accident), or to people jumping off the burning towers, or to anything else that happened on that day.
What I keeping flashing back to is the aftermath.
For a few days, maybe even longer, the whole world was on our side. Even in France, which had often and noisily chafed under decades of living in the shadow of American power, Le Monde announced “Nous sommes tous Américains” — We are all Americans. Even ten years later:
The Eiffel Tower itself was flanked by 82-foot-tall scaffolding replicas of the World Trade Center, emblazoned with a new slogan of solidarity, in French and English: Les Français N’oublieront Jaimais. The French Will Never Forget.
It didn’t take long for our shock and loss to transmute into wounded pride and a determination to strike back. Three days later, President Bush went to ground zero and addressed the rescue workers through a bullhorn.
I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!
And the crowd chanted back: USA! USA!
We weren’t victims any more. We were avengers.
The horribleness of the attack seemed to dwarf anything that had ever happened before. All previous moral judgments became trivial. Around the country, Americans were asking “Why do they hate us?”, as if hating the world’s hegemonic power required some deep explanation. And we did not wait for answers to that question, because we knew that there could be no answers. Even trying to answer might imply that we had this coming, and that thought was unthinkable.
Nine days after the attack, President Bush provided the only acceptable answer in an address to Congress: They are Evil, so they hate us because we are Good.
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.
These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.
I remember that feeling: America was not merely a victim of evil, and we were not merely finding ourselves on the side of good: We were the avatar of Good. We now had a bottomless moral credit that would justify anything we chose to do in response.
And we used that credit.
We violated what we had agreed to in the Convention Against Torture, calculating (probably incorrectly) that the information we would get from suspected terrorists about potential attacks would prevent more suffering than we were inflicting. We violated our own constitution by setting up a “law-free zone” in Guantanamo, where we could do whatever we wanted to whomever we could ship there. We set up a means to ignore the rights of American citizens by declaring them “enemy combatants“.
Worst of all, we overthrew the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq without any notion of what to do next. Those invasions were popular when they happened, but they had been sold to the American public with a variety of shifting justifications and goals: We were preventing future attacks. We were shutting down terrorist bases. We were capturing weapons of mass destruction before they could be used against us. We were freeing people from oppression. We were spreading democracy. We would create models of government that would inspire the Muslim world.
And since neither the public nor the government had a clear picture of what we were doing, there were no principles to help us design our programs or standards to judge them by.
And it cost. At least seven thousand American troops died in combat, and half again as many contractors. Tens of thousands have committed suicide since returning home. Tens of thousands suffered debilitating wounds. The monetary cost ran into the trillions.
Notice that I have not even mentioned the death and suffering and material destruction that we inflicted on others.
And the value of what that sacrifice bought us is probably negative. In Afghanistan, we ended up giving the country back to the Taliban when the government and army we had spent 20 years building fell apart before we could even get our troops clear. In Iraq, we neutralized the regional counterweight to Iran, which is now a much bigger threat to us, to the Saudis, and to Israel than it ever was in Saddam’s day.
I can’t believe any American strategist intended those outcomes. But here we are.
The mousetrap. So that’s what I’ve been reliving: the thrill of believing I represent Good in its eternal struggle with Evil; the energy of rage running wild, unchecked by any of its usual restraints; the righteousness of a victimhood that grants me infinite moral credit, enough to balance anything I might decide to do — and how badly that all worked out.
Those feelings are the tastiest cheese any mousetrap ever offered.
How much of that cheese Israel and those who identify with Israel will now gobble up is hard to say. Maybe they’ll be wiser than we were. Maybe they’ll do better. Certainly there is one difference: President Bush enjoyed record approval ratings after 9-11, while Netanyahu has seen his popularity fall. Maybe that political reality will keep him grounded, and not let him see himself as a superhero who “will rid the world of the evil-doers“.
Maybe. We can all hope. History, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, does not actually repeat. It only rhymes. But listening for that rhyme has been wearing me down.
It’s been more than a week since the Hamas attack on Israel, and it still dominates every news program. Air attacks on Gaza have been going on for some while, and Israeli troops are massing for what could be a re-occupation. If there is anything else going on in the world, it’s having a hard time getting anyone’s attention.
From the news networks’ treatment of the topic, I gather their ratings must be up. But not because of people like me. I find I’m having a hard time watching. I tune into my usual programs, check that no surprising new development has transpired, and then go stream a drama or watch a sports event.
This isn’t normal for me. Ordinarily, I have a very thick skin for the news, even news that includes a lot of human suffering. So I’ve had to introspect about what’s going on with my emotions: Why is this so hard to watch? That’s the topic of this week’s featured post. For those of you who are also avoiding the news these days, I’ll summarize: This war has been flashing me back to 9-11; not so much the events of that day as the way it felt afterwards — that heady sense of my country being the avatar of Good in its eternal battle with Evil.
America got carried away with that mythic identification, and as a result we did horrible things. We’re still paying for those mistakes. So hearing echoes of those emotions now is terrifying; it makes me feel as if I’m about to do something I’ll regret for a long time.
That post, “My 9-11 Flashbacks”, should be out soon.
The weekly summary includes some less self-centered accounts of the war. It also discusses the continuing dysfunction of the House of Representatives. Everything else has gotten snowed under this week, so it will be covered by short notes. A scheduling conflict doesn’t give me as much time this morning, so the summary will have to post by around 11.
As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.
This week everybody was talking about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall
This, and what might happen next, is the subject of the featured post.
and war in Israel and Gaza
Hamas, which controls Gaza, launched a surprise attack on Israel Saturday. The attack was unusually vicious, even by Hamas’ previous standards, and included a massacre of hundreds of Israelis attending a rave. I don’t do breaking news, so I advise you to follow developments through some more comprehensive news source.
I have a muddle of feelings about this:
The attacks on Israeli civilians are morally repugnant and should not be tolerated, either by Israel or by world opinion. Israel has every right to defend its citizens.
The people of Gaza live under awful conditions and feel abandoned by the outside world. When human beings live in a constant state of despair and hopelessness, some percentage of them will respond violently, even if their violent options are equally hopeless. This should surprise no one. You don’t have to side with Hamas to realize that any outcome leaving Gazans in despair is not a long-term solution.
I worry that Israel’s retaliation will be so extreme that those Americans currently saying “I stand with Israel” will be horrified. I will be happy if in the weeks to come I can confess to misjudging the nation and its government. (For comparison, think about all the regrettable things we did after 9-11.)
Predictably, American politicians are using this moment to take potshots at each other. But this did not happen because Biden showed weakness in dealing with Iran, or because Trump and other MAGA Republicans have “embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement” (as Mike Pence charged). This war isn’t about the US. Israel has plenty of deterrence capability on its own, and Hamas attacked anyway.
The most partisan thing I can legitimately say is that the US government would have an easier implementing its response if we had a confirmed ambassador in Jerusalem, our military didn’t have 300 promotions frozen, and the House had a speaker who could put through emergency aid if Israel needs it. But even if we had a full team ready to tackle the crisis, this would have happened anyway. It’s not about us.
and Trump
Every time I think Trump can’t shock me any more, he proves me wrong. This week we heard him go full Nazi in an interview with National Pulse. Talking of migrants at the southern border he said:
Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. [my emphasis]
The phrase “poisoning the blood” does two things: It’s a fairly direct racial reference, and it dehumanizes the people it targets. Hitler said something similar in Mein Kampf.
All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.
At the time, Hitler was just a crazy little man who said outrageous things. Sophisticated Germans knew better than to take his rhetoric seriously.
The other thing we found out about Trump this week is that he disclosed secrets about our nuclear submarines to a foreign national who belonged to his Mar-a-Lago club. I wonder if it ever occurred to Chinese or Russian or Iranian intelligence to give agents $200K so that they could give it to Trump and join Mar-a-Lago.
In 2016, Republicans were beside themselves at the thought that classified information might have made it onto the server in Hillary’s basement, which foreign governments might have been able to hack into. Now we know that Trump just blabs secrets to random people, and they don’t care. Fox News waited nearly 24 hours before briefly mentioning this story.
When he was in office, Trump’s clubs and businesses functioned as conduits for bribery.
Trump has lashed out at his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who recently confirmed reports about Trump’s disrespect for soldiers who died or were wounded in the line of duty. Kelly joins a long list of high Trump administration officials who have bad-mouthed their former boss, calling him “a f**king moron” and many other colorful names.
Can you imagine anything like this happening to Obama? There’s virtually no such thing as an Obama-administration tell-all book. Every Obama-administration account I’ve read paints the President as sharp, compassionate, and basically decent.
and life expectancy
By now probably most of you have heard that life expectancy in the US flattened out in the 2010s (after decades of steady increase) and then started going down even before the Covid pandemic. This week two articles in The Washington Post and one in Vox provided more insight into that phenomenon.
Here’s how Dylan Matthews sums up the public’s prior understanding in Vox:
For the past decade or so, Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have been promoting a particular story about death in America. Less-educated Americans, particularly those without college degrees, have seen their life expectancy outcomes diverge from those of more-educated Americans. Much of this divide can be explained through a category that Deaton and Case call “deaths of despair”: deaths from suicide, opioid overdoses, and liver cirrhosis and other alcohol-related causes. The deaths are concentrated in non-Hispanic whites. This phenomenon indicates something is deeply wrong with the way American society treats its most marginalized citizens, including lower-class whites.
But five WaPo reporters tell a somewhat different story: Yes, addiction and suicide are cutting into life expectancy, but the big problem is chronic diseases:
Chronic illnesses, which often sicken people in middle age after the protective vitality of youth has ebbed, erase more than twice as many years of life among people younger than 65 as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined, The Post found.
In other words, we’re doing a really bad job taking care of people who need low levels of care over long periods of time, like people with diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease. Or maybe people who have survived one bout with cancer and are vulnerable to a recurrence. We’re also bad at helping people live in ways that avoid chronic diseases.
But we’re not failing everybody with chronic diseases, just the poorest and least educated Americans.
Wealth inequality in America is growing, but The Post found that the death gap — the difference in life expectancy between affluent and impoverished communities — has been widening many times faster. In the early 1980s, people in the poorest communities were 9 percent more likely to die each year, but the gap grew to 49 percent in the past decade and widened to 61 percent when covid struck.
The Vox article narrows this down further: The epicenter of the problem is high school dropouts in rural areas. Part of the problem is probably lifestyle choices like smoking and bad diet. Access to healthcare is also part of the story. (In the small town where I grew up, well-to-do people take for granted that you need to seek care in a major city if you have a serious problem. Less well-off people don’t have that option, and poorly educated people may not get good advice on where to go, even if they assemble the resources.)
Matthews makes a good point: While it would be great if the US could implement better health policies generally, narrowing the problem description makes it more tractable.
People dying now cannot wait for the whole US economy to transform to be more worker-friendly, as nice as that might be. They need solutions that are tailored for their specific problems, that can be implemented soon.
A second WaPo article looks at the influence of politics: It compares three demographically similar counties on the shore of Lake Erie: one in red Ohio, one in purple Pennsylvania, and one in blue New York.
New York advances policies that promote public health, while Ohio doesn’t, and Pennsylvania is in between. So New York discourages smoking with high taxes on cigarettes, it enforces seat belt laws more rigorously, and its Medicaid benefits are comparatively generous. The results show up in death rates. And we can only guess how much worse this is going to get, as MAGA politics causes people to lose faith not just in Covid vaccines, but in vaccines and medical expertise generally.
and you also might be interested in …
If you’re worried about President Biden’s mental acuity, you should watch this interview with Pro Publica’s John Harwood. Admitttedly, Harwood asks friendly questions and doesn’t aggressively try to fluster the President. But the questions are substantial, and Biden answers them thoughtfully. He sometimes has to search for words, but he has no trouble grasping what Harwood is getting at, and he gives coherent answers from the heart. He doesn’t have to control the conversation in order to follow it, so he can address the questions Harwood asks, rather than constantly steering the conversation back to some other topic.
You know what else Biden doesn’t do? Lapse into canned talking points or go off into long well-rehearsed monologues about how unfairly he’s been treated. When asked about something tricky, his answers are carefully nuanced. (For example, when asked about former Democrat Joe Lieberman’s work for the No Labels third-party movement, Biden carefully explains that he thinks No Labels is a mistake, but that Lieberman is acting within his rights as an American.)
I’ve been saying for a while that Trump displays far more signs of mental decline than Biden does. I think if you compare this video to any recent Trump speech, you’ll see it.
When Democrats scare themselves about the 2024 election, the possibility always comes up that a third-party candidacy might siphon votes away from Biden and get Trump elected again. But as The Nation notes, it’s not obvious that such candidates won’t pull more votes away from Trump.
Suppose you’re a Republican whose main gripe with Trump is that he promoted the Covid vaccine. You can protest by voting for RFK Jr.
The economy added 336K new jobs in September, and previous monthly estimates were revised upwards by 119K.
One way you can see the slant in American news coverage is the way the monthly employment reports get covered.
The US economy added 336,000 jobs in September, highlighting concern that the labor market isn’t cooling as fast as the Federal Reserve would like in its battle against inflation.
Bad news: More people are working and their wages are rising.
OK, that’s Yahoo Finance, so you’d expect their coverage to be aimed at investors rather than working people. But the same themes showed across the board: More people working for more money is at best mixed news, rather than the outcome our economic policies should be trying to achieve. Matt Yglesias tweeted an image of the headlines on the NYT home page, and commented:
The NYT covered the jobs report from four different angles, none of which involved the possible benefits of more people getting jobs.
I don’t think there’s anything intentionally sinister in this kind of coverage, but it does reflect the skewed motivations built into our commercial media: News companies rely either on people with enough disposable income to subscribe, or on advertisers, who want to reach consumers with money to spend. So news coverage is aimed primarily at people with money, rather than at people who are working for hourly wages or trying to find a job.
Fox News’ coverage, on the other hand, was sinister: They felt a need to actively misrepresent the report. Jesse Watters says “the Biden administration” (actually the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Standards, the same career bureaucrats who produced these reports under Trump) is “cherry picking and double counting”, because government jobs (73K new jobs in state and local government, but still 2K below the pre-Covid level) shouldn’t count (because public school teachers don’t really have jobs, I suppose), and jobs in the hospitality industry “like bartenders hostesses, waitresses” are “not really careers”. And Charles Payne declared “it was not a strong jobs report” because leisure and hospitality jobs (accounting for 96K of the 336K new jobs) are “the lowest paying jobs in America” — ignoring the fact that average hourly wages rose slightly (by 0.2%) during the month and the average workweek was unchanged.
While we’re discussing Fox, The Five’s co-host Greg Gutfeld started out talking about a Philadelphia DA’s light treatment of shoplifters and looters, segued to how unfair it was that 1-6 rioters didn’t get a similar “criminal mulligan”, and then went totally off the rails, claiming that “elections don’t work” and “you need to make war” like we did to end slavery.
The race-baiting in Guttfeld’s rant was barely cloaked at all. “They” (the looters) get off easy because they’re “the oppressed”, while “we” (1-6 rioters) don’t because we’re “the oppressors”. In case you didn’t catch that, Black criminals get treated better than White patriots.
About shoplifting and other retail theft: Retailers appear to be using crime as an excuse to close stores that they wanted to close for other reasons. “Shrink”, the technical term for inventory losses as a percentage of sales, rose only slightly from 2021 to 2022. 2022’s shrink was the same as it was in 2019 and 2020. Crime appears to have been no worse at the stores Target closed than in similar stores that stayed open.
I’m biased here, but the two cases don’t look that similar to me. The Nobles move from suburban Des Moines to suburban Minneapolis because they have a transgender son whose treatments and school-bathroom use have become illegal in Iowa. That’s a genuinely political motive.
But the Huckinses move from a neighborhood in Portland where they didn’t feel safe to a small town in Missouri where they can leave their truck unlocked and play with their grandchildren, who already lived there with Ginger Huckins’ daughter from a previous marriage.
Both families say they’re happier in their new homes. But Steve and Ginger Huckins are better off for reasons only tangentially related to politics: their grandchildren and the small-town lifestyle. I’m sure Oregon also has small towns where they could feel safe, and Missouri includes St. Louis, where they might be no safer than in Portland. (I live in a blue Boston suburb where people aren’t very rigorous about locking things up and I never worry about walking home after dark.)
The Nobles, on the other hand, are running away from acts of the state legislature, which would create problems for their family in any part of Iowa. The article makes me wonder if there are any blue-state refugees who are truly parallel to the Nobles. I suppose someone might move to avoid taxes (one of the Huckinses’ complaints) or regulations on a business, but even those reasons seem weak compared to the state persecuting your son.
My Facebook friend Jennifer Sheridan (who designed the t-shirt I’m wearing in my FB profile photo) wrote:
I think I have figured out something important about the Book Banners.
When I was a kid in school, I was a book nerd, and my friends were book nerds, and we all knew which books had “dirty parts.” We would read them, probably giggle a bit, and then get on with our lives. No one ever made a big deal about it, it was nothing.
And I realize looking back, that if you weren’t a book nerd in school, you probably don’t know there have ALWAYS been library books that had dirty parts.
If you are a grown person now, and are hearing “filthy” passages from some books that are popular today, you might find it shocking that books with those kinds of passages can be found in public school libraries.
But because you didn’t read as a kid, you think this is all something new. It isn’t new; you’ve just shown you never cared about books.
I’ll just add that I went to a religious elementary school, so I knew where all the dirty parts of the Bible were.
and let’s close with something untranslatable
One of my favorite books to randomly page through is As They Say in Zanzibar by David Crystal, a collection of proverbs and sayings from other cultures. How else would I discover that in Ukraine they say “Those who have been scalded with hot soup blow on cold water.”
Sometimes these words of wisdom seem to contradict each other. For example, Canadians are credited with “Crooked furrows grow straight grain” while on the Ivory Coast they say “A crab does not beget a bird.”
And then there are sayings that are just obscure, like the Slovenian “When you are chased by a wolf, you call the boar your uncle.”
Almost as much fun are idioms from other languages. When a someone is very stubborn, Russians say “You can sharpen an ax on his head.” To the Portuguese, taking the blame for something you didn’t do is “paying the duck”.
Where we say that something easy is “a piece of cake”, the Poles say “It’s a roll with butter.”
I admit to having been surprised when Speaker McCarthy was voted out by the House Tuesday. Ordinarily, when I see a guy getting ready to jump out of an airplane, I expect him to have a parachute somewhere.
McCarthy had been heading towards this moment since he became speaker in January: He made impossible promises to the MAGA faction, and changed the rules to give them an easy way to get rid of him if he didn’t keep those promises. When they threatened him, he said “Bring it on!“, scheduled the vote as soon as possible, and publicly announced he wouldn’t make a deal with Democrats to save himself.
I thought: “Wow! He must have some great trick up his sleeve.” And then: nothing. Splat!
This crisis wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. In January, Jonathan Chait envisioned the coming debt-ceiling negotiation, which he framed as a hostage-and-ransom situation [1]:
In the current circumstances, a successful hostage release would be all but impossible. Imagine a Republican Speaker — any Republican Speaker — figuring out a ransom that almost the entire caucus could agree on. The intraparty dynamics virtually guarantee that anything a Republican leader could agree to would immediately be seen on the far right as too little.
The procedural concessions McCarthy has made mean that he can be recalled as speaker if he doesn’t negotiate a high enough ransom.
McCarthy had nine months to contemplate this scenario, and did manage to survive the debt ceiling deal in May. But the subsequent swerve to avoid a government shutdown nailed him. If he ever had a plan, he didn’t put it into operation. Even in retrospect, I can’t guess what he thought was going to happen.
This chain of events proves that I can’t be relied on to tell you what will happen next. So instead I’ll focus on what can happen and what should happen.
The Speaker pro tem. Since McCarthy’s ouster, the speaker’s chair has been occupied by a speaker pro tempore — literally “speaker for a time”. The temp is Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, and his name comes from a list that McCarthy had to provide when he became speaker.
My first thought was that McHenry would be like the temporary buildings that got built to house the military during World War II, many of which are still standing: The Republican caucus is too dysfunctional to elect a new speaker, so the temp will wield the gavel until the next Congress is seated in 2025. (With any luck, Democrats will take back the House and we’ll be done with this nonsense.)
But that doesn’t seem like a viable option without a rule change, which might be just as hard as electing a new speaker. Rule I, Clause 8(b)(3) says:
In the case of a vacancy in the Office of Speaker, the next Member on the list described in subdivision (B) shall act as Speaker pro tempore until the election of a Speaker or a Speaker pro tempore. Pending such election the Member acting as Speaker pro tempore may exercise such authorities of the Office of Speaker as may be necessary and appropriate to that end. [my emphasis]
The first version of this I saw omitted “to that end”, which (in my reading) changes everything. McHenry’s authority appears to be limited to whatever is needed to elect a new speaker. [2]
But not so fast, claims Matt Glassman of Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute. “that end” might be interpreted not as “the election of a Speaker”, but as “act as Speaker pro tempore”. In that case, McHenry might have have broad powers. There’s no precedent for this situation, so whatever the current House allows will become the precedent.
So far, McHenry appears to be taking a narrow view of his powers, with one exception: Tossing Nancy Pelosi out of the courtesy office McCarthy allowed her doesn’t seem to serve the end of electing a new speaker. It’s trivial, but it might be a test. If the House elects a new speaker quickly, McHenry probably won’t test his powers further. If Republicans deadlock, though, the temptation to do something substantive will grow as the November 17 shutdown deadline looms. [3]
Potential speakers. So far two Republican candidates have announced themselves: Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise. Scalise is the current majority leader, and so would be the leadership’s next-man-up after McCarthy. However, Scalise is currently battling blood cancer and may not have the energy. Next up after him would be Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who is supporting Scalise and hopes to become majority leader if Scalise moves up.
Jordan is the “Freedom” Caucus candidate and has been endorsed by Trump. When he was nominated against McCarthy in January (despite claiming to support McCarthy himself), Jordan got at most 20 votes. So I have to see Jordan’s candidacy as a test of Trump’s influence; he’d never be elected on his own.
Putting this as delicately as possible, Jim Jordan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking has rated Jordan one of the least effective lawmakers in Congress (202nd out of 205 Republicans examined), based on him sponsoring very few bills and passing hardly any of them. He has a law degree from Capitol University, but has never passed a bar exam. In his memoir of his years as speaker, John Boehner called out the “political terrorists” in the Republican caucus; in a subsequent interview, he named Jordan as an example:
I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart ― never building anything, never putting anything together.
And then there’s the whole he-ignored-sexual-abuse thing from when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State.
The Speaker needs to be a master of House procedure, skilled at forming and speaking for a consensus, and an ace vote-counter. Nancy Pelosi had those skills, which is how she managed to get so much done with a majority the same size as McCarthy’s. McCarthy lacked the skills, and Jordan seems like the antithesis of a good speaker.
Scalise has his own issues. He once billed himself as “David Duke without the baggage“. Since “the baggage” was a long history of KKK leadership, that ought to give his supporters pause.
Before he endorsed Jordan, a number of people suggested Trump himself become speaker, since the Constitution does not require the speaker to be a member of the House. However, the rules of the Republican House caucus bar anyone under indictment for serious crimes from serving in leadership, so they’d need to change that. Trump has fanned this speculation, and is still floating the idea that he might take the job temporarily, but I suspect he doesn’t want the headache of having real responsibilities.
Any of these candidates would need near-unanimity in the House GOP to get over the top, and so will probably need to make the same sorts of impossible promises McCarthy made. Presumably they’d have to prove their toughness by shutting down the government in November. But again, what possible ransom could the new speaker get from Biden and Schumer that Gaetz et al would consider enough? So aren’t we right back here by Christmas or so?
In short, I don’t see how House Republicans resolve this on their own.
But here’s what could and should happen: Lawler (or some similar non-MAGA Republican; Michelle Goldberg suggested Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania) should announce his own candidacy for speaker together with support from a handful of fellow moderates. He should pledge not to shut down the government, to fulfill the deal McCarthy made with Biden to avoid a debt-ceiling default in May, and to pass rules that would create a more even sharing of power between the two parties. (Not full parity, but closer to it.) Then he should ask for Democratic support. If his handful of Republicans held firm and the Democrats came through, he’d be speaker, and the House could start to function again. Republicans and Democrats could negotiate with each other in good faith, rather than tee up another hostage crisis.
The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change — perhaps in a manner consistent with bipartisan recommendations from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
Maybe simply threatening such a thing could get Republicans to unite around somebody like Scalise and not shut down the government. (If Scalise did shut it down, that motion-to-vacate trick would work just as well for Lawler as it did for Gaetz.)
I don’t expect this to happen any time soon, because Republican moderates are invariably spineless. But nothing prevents it.
And if the House’s leadership vacuum stretches into November, and if the government shuts down while Biden and Schumer are still waiting to find out who they should be negotiating with, the boundaries of plausibility might shift.
Sherlock Holmes, a fictional detective looking backward to figure out what did happen, famously observed: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Something similar should hold looking forward: When you eliminate all the scenarios that can’t happen, one of the options remaining, however implausible, must be what will happen.
[1] One theory that explains MAGA faction’s inability to formulate coherent goals during the debt-limit and shutdown negotiations is sabotage. In other words, shutting down the government isn’t a threat, it’s a goal. The analogy would be to a kidnapper who wants to kill the hostage, and so makes shifting and impossible demands.
You might wonder why MAGA Republicans would want to cause a shutdown, but the answer is pretty simple: The Biden economy has been remarkably good, especially considering the Covid disruption he inherited from Trump. Unemployment continues to be quite low, and wage increases have begun to outrun inflation. The unemployment rate has been under 4% for 21 of the last 22 months, compared to 20 months for the entire Trump administration. When Biden took office, unemployment was at 6.3%.
The rising-real-wages phenomenon is recent, though, so the public has barely noticed and isn’t giving Biden the credit he deserves. If a lengthy government shutdown starts a recession, he never will get credit.
The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed. … UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!
[2] The rule suggests an in-between possibility: electing a speaker pro tem rather than taking one off a list. The pro-tem’s term might only last until a new speaker is elected, but having been elected might allow him to claim the full powers of a speaker.
[3] Politically, a government shutdown usually hurts the party that seems to be causing it, which is usually the Republicans. But this one would be even worse than the others, because it wouldn’t have any principled justification. Republicans wouldn’t be shutting down the government to cut spending or limit abortions or even hand Ukraine to their buddy Putin; they’d be shutting down the government out of sheer incompetence, because they couldn’t get their act together to elect a speaker. I can’t imagine the public taking that well.
Fritschner gives McCarthy no credit for the continuing resolution that temporarily resolved the shutdown issue: McCarthy knew he needed Democratic votes to pass the CR, but sprung his proposal on them suddenly with no time to read it. Democrats manipulated the situation to get some time: Majority Leader Jeffries launched a time-wasting speech on the House floor, and Jamaal Bowman even pulled a fire alarm. Fritschner speculates that McCarthy hoped Democrats would vote his resolution down, allowing him to blame Democrats for the ensuing government shutdown.
People want us to give the guy credit for stopping a shutdown but it is still not clear to me right now sitting here writing this that he *intended* to do that.
And now that the House has until November 17, what could Democrats hope for from McCarthy?
And what is McCarthy signaling to us on funding? He’s going to steer us directly back into the crazy cuts and abortion restrictions, the Freedom Caucus setting the agenda, breaking his deal with Biden, and driving us towards a shutdown in November.
Ok we are reasonable people, maybe he’s just telling them what they have to hear and he’ll screw them at the last minute. So what’s he saying to us privately? What reason is he giving us to think any of this is going to turn out well if we help him? None.
The supposed “institutional interest” would have us not only put out Republicans’ many fires for them, it would have us do so based on our specific belief and trust that *McCarthy is lying*. Like, his lying is supposed to be a good thing, and what sells the arrangement for us.
It all called for too much trust in a guy who had (again and again) proven untrustworthy.
A few days ago, it seemed obvious what the week’s big news story was: the leadership vacuum in the House of Representatives. Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted Tuesday, and the Republican caucus seems to be back where it was in January: holding a narrow majority on paper, but unable to unite that majority behind any single leader or agenda. McCarthy managed to become speaker by making impossible promises to the party’s MAGA fringe and giving them the power to throw him out if he didn’t deliver. He didn’t deliver, and they threw him out.
While the GOP figures out what to do next, the House is frozen and the clock is ticking on the temporary funding that averted a government shutdown last week. New money needs to get appropriated by November 17 or the government shuts down. Averting that shutdown is what got McCarthy booted, so even if a new speaker gets chosen in time, it’s hard to imagine what he will do to resolve the situation. Anyway, that’s the subject of this week’s featured post, which should be out by 10 EDT.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news the last few days, though, the dysfunction in the House is barely a sidebar: Saturday Hamas launched a shocking attack on Israel. Hundreds or even thousands of people, mostly civilians, have already been killed, and no one knows how the situation will resolve. This isn’t the kind of topic I’m equipped to cover, so I’m not planning to write much about it. You’ll need to follow developments through some other news source.
A much slower-breaking news story got some significant coverage this week: the decline of life expectancy in the US. The WaPo had two enlightening articles on it, and Vox had something interesting to say as well.
And we’ve all got numb to the continuing outrages from Donald Trump. Thursday we found out that he had discussed nuclear secrets with a Mar-a-Lago member from a foreign country. Also, his rhetoric went full Nazi in an interview last week: Migrants crossing our southern border are “poisoning the blood of our country”. And there were the usual batch of developments in his criminal cases and the civil fraud trial currently happening in New York.
That’s all in the weekly summary, which should be out around noon or so.
You guys, the UAW — you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.
This week everybody was talking about the close call on a government shutdown
McCarthy’s sudden reversal made all this week’s cartoons obsolete.
The government did not shut down Sunday morning, and will not shut down until at least November 17.
The shutdown, which had appeared nearly inevitable, was avoided when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy changed his position Saturday morning: He allowed a vote on a short-term continuing resolution. Once the resolution came to the House floor, it passed easily, 335-91. It then went to the Senate, where it passed 88-9. The bill was signed by President Biden Saturday evening with an hour to spare.
The resolution was opposed almost entirely by Republicans: 90 representatives and nine senators. Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois was the lone Democrat in opposition. Two House Democrats, Rep. Katie Porter of California and Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska, did not vote. The Republican opposition came mostly from the party’s right wing, the likes of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
The resolution continues funding government departments at the same levels as fiscal 2023, which ended on September 30. It also added $16 billion for disaster relief, but included no additional aid to Ukraine. (A similar bill in the Senate had $6 billion for Ukraine, but the House bill got through first.)
President Biden believes he has a promise from Speaker McCarthy to allow a separate vote on Ukraine aid soon. However, Biden also believed McCarthy had committed himself to funding the government back when the debt-ceiling deal was reached in June. McCarthy ultimately came through, but not without considerable drama.
It also remains to be seen if McCarthy will continue as speaker. Gaetz and his right-wing allies in the “Freedom” Caucus had threatened to withdraw their support from McCarthy if he made a deal to get Democratic votes, as he did Saturday.
McCarthy has clearly been frustrated by the nihilism of his party’s right wing, which never proposed a government-funding deal it could support. McCarthy told reporters after the vote:
If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.
The next question is whether Gaetz and his allies will carry out their threat to submit a motion to vacate the chair, which would remove McCarthy from the speakership unless Democrats decided to save him. (They say they won’t without getting something in return.) Over the weekend he said he would submit the motion sometime this week. McCarthy responded with bravado: “Bring it on. Let’s get this over with.”
Also: Will anything be different as we approach November 17? McCarthy bought himself (or his successor) some time, but if he has some plan for achieving a less chaotic outcome, he hasn’t revealed it yet.
One final point: The fact that McCarthy’s change-of-mind resolved the issue so quickly is pretty convincing evidence that Republicans were causing the problem.
and the Trump trials
The New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the Trump Organization won a big victory Tuesday: Judge Arthur F. Engoron issued a partial summary judgment on the case, declaring that Trump had committed fraud by inflating his net worth when applying for bank loans. Because Trump Organization’s fraud is ongoing, the judge
cancelled all of the business licenses for the Trump Organization and its 500 or so subsidiary companies and partnerships after finding that Trump used them to, along with his older two sons, commit fraud.
His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.
Under the New York General Business Law you can only do business in your own name as a sole proprietor or with a business license, which the state calls a “business certificate.” All of Trump’s businesses were corporations or partnerships that require business certificates.
The judge’s ruling found that a trial was unnecessary to determine fraud, because all the arguments Trump’s lawyers presented in his defense were beside the point.
[The Office of the Attorney General] need only prove: (1) the [statements of financial condition] were false and misleading; and (2) the defendant repeatedly or persistently used the SFCs to transact business.
The instant action is essentially a “documents case”. As detailed [elsewhere in this ruling], the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, clearly satisfying OAG’s burden.
Trump’s attorneys instead argued a number of legally irrelevant points, like that the banks in fact did not lose money, or that the SFCs contained a clause warning the banks to do their own valuations, or that property valuations are subjective. Their stubbornness in repeating arguments the judge had already rejected as frivolous led the judge to sanction the attorneys $7500 each. (David Cay Johnston notes that this ruling could be cited in some future disbarment hearing.) University of Michigan business law professor Thomas elaborates:
What we’ve seen with Donald Trump over and over again is that often arguments that gain traction with his supporters are flatly inconsistent with the law.
I’ve heard a number of analogies capturing why the nobody-lost-money argument fails. Here’s my favorite: What if as you were closing up at your job, you stole $100 from the till, then went to the racetrack and bet it on a horse that won? In the morning you could replace the $100, so your employer didn’t lose money. But you’re still a thief.
Probably the most egregious overvaluation was of Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower, which he claimed was three times its actual size and valued accordingly. The judge comments:
In opposition, defendants absurdly suggest that “the calculation of square footage is a subjective process” … A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.
Of course Trump will appeal, but an appeal is not just a do-over. He’ll have to support an argument that the judge did something wrong. The judge’s reasoning is simple and doesn’t seem to rely on esoteric points of law, so an appeal doesn’t seem to have much to work with.
Meanwhile, a trial on the rest of the state’s charges, including insurance fraud, will begin today. Thursday, the appeals court refused to delay that trial pending a ruling on Trump’s appeal. The trial will also determine the fines Trump will have to pay. The state is asking for $250 million.
Trump has said he’s going to appear in court today, though it’s not clear what he plans to do there, since it’s not time for him to testify, if he intends to do that at all (which I doubt). Trump says a lot of things, so I’ll believe he’s coming when I see him.
In political terms, one consequence of this decision isn’t getting the attention it deserves: Like sexual assault, Trump’s involvement in fraud is no longer just an accusation: It is a finding of a court of law. Trump is no longer just “alleged” to have committed fraud. He committed fraud.
Fani Willis got the first guilty plea from one of her 18 RICO defendants. (It’s kind of amazing this isn’t even the lead story under “Trump trials”.) Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and was sentenced to five years of probation. He is also committed to testify in future proceedings, and if he doesn’t testify truthfully, the deal is revocable.
Hall’s role in the Georgia election-stealing scheme is both low-level and easily established: When Trump allies were trying to assemble (or invent) evidence of voter fraud in Georgia, they illegally accessed voting machines in Coffee County.
The security breach in the county about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta is among the first known attempts by Trump allies to access voting systems as they sought evidence to back up their unsubstantiated claims that such equipment had been used to manipulate the presidential vote. It was followed a short time later by breaches in three Michigan counties involving some of the same people and again in a western Colorado county that Trump won handily.
… Authorities say Hall and co-defendants conspired to allow others to “unlawfully access secure voting equipment and voter data.” This included ballot images, voting equipment software and personal vote information that was later made available to people in other states, according to the indictment.
In a RICO case, specific crimes like these are used to establish the existence of a corrupt organization that other defendants belong to. Hall’s guilty plea raises the question of whether it will start a stampede to make a deal with Willis before the other defendants do. A defendant’s only leverage in such a deal is if s/he can testify to something Willis can’t already prove.
In other Georgia-election-case news, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and three of Trump’s fake electors lost their bid to move their cases to federal court. Mark Meadows’ similar motion had already been denied, and Trump surprisingly announced he will not try to shift his case to federal court.
Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro are the first of the 18 (now 17) RICO defendants facing trial. They requested a speedy trial, which will begin October 23. CNN has speculated that they will be offered plea deals to avoid this trial, which would preview the state’s evidence to the other defendants.
and the sham impeachment hearing
Like the rest of the House Republican investigations of Joe Biden, the opening session of their impeachment inquiry did not live up to its billing. None of the witnesses called were “fact” witnesses, i.e., none of them saw or heard President Biden doing anything impeachable. The witnesses also made much weaker claims than the Republican congressmen did.
Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky: “I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing. More information needs to be gathered before I can make such an assessment.”
Law professor Jonathan Turley: “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment. That is something that an inquiry has to establish.”
That’s a far cry from the claim House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer made, that the GOP probes have “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain.”
A rule of thumb: Investigations that are going somewhere get more and more specific. For example, the Manhattan case about Trump’s Stormy Daniels payoff — widely considered the weakest of the four Trump indictments — has come down to this: 34 Trump Organization documents are fraudulent business records.
The longer the Republican investigation of Biden stays at the level of “Hunter did shady things and Joe must have been involved somehow”, the more likely it is to go nowhere.
A tip on interpreting headlines: When a headline attributes some wrong-doing to “the Biden family“, that means the article contains no new information about President Biden himself. If they had anything on Joe, that would be the headline.
and the rain
Climate Change Summer has turned into Climate Change Fall. Friday, as much as 8 inches of rain fell on parts of New York City, shutting down the subways and producing flash floods. The storm was not due to a hurricane or tropical storm. Instead, seemingly innocuous systems came together unexpectedly to produce a hurricane-like rainfall. The NYT explains:
It has been raining a lot in New York, which hasn’t seen a September this wet in over a century. Climate change is very likely stoking more ominous and lengthy downpours because as the atmosphere heats up, it can hold more moisture, said Andrew J. Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher who specializes in flash floods at Columbia Climate School at Columbia University.
The 2018 National Climate Assessment (a new version of which is due sometime this year) found that the amount of rain that fell during the heaviest 1 percent of rain events had increased by 55 percent across the Northeast since 1958, with most of the increase happening since 1996. That trend will only get worse as global temperature rise, causing more evaporation from oceans and lakes and giving storms more water to fuel deluges.
Biden and Trump each talked to auto workers, but in very different ways. Biden went out on the picket line with UAW strikers and addressed them with a bullhorn. In addition to the quote at the top of this post, he said:
Wall Street didn’t build the country. The middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class.
Biden handed the bullhorn to UAW President Shawn Fein, who said:
These CEOs sit in their offices, they sit in meetings, and they make decisions. But we make the product. They think they own the world, but we make it run.
Whether we’re building cars or trucks or running parts distribution centers; whether we’re writing movies or performing TV shows; whether we’re making coffee at Starbucks; whether it’s nursing people back to health; whether it’s educating students, from preschool to college — we do the heavy lifting. We do the real work. Not the CEOs, not the executives.
About 400 to 500 Trump supporters were inside a Drake Enterprises facility for the speech. Drake Enterprises employs about 150 people, and the UAW doesn’t represent its workforce. It wasn’t clear how many auto workers were in the crowd for the speech, which was targeted at them.
One individual in the crowd who held a sign that said “union members for Trump,” acknowledged that she wasn’t a union member when approached by a Detroit News reporter after the event. Another person with a sign that read “auto workers for Trump” said he wasn’t an auto worker when asked for an interview. Both people didn’t provide their names.
In other words, Biden lent his support to an event workers started on their own, while Trump staged a event for the cameras, complete with extras playing phony roles. His support for working people is about as authentic as his property valuations or his marriage vows.
and Cassidy Hutchinson’s book
I read Cassidy Hutchinson’s new book Enough. A lot of what’s in it is stuff you already know if you watched her testimony and followed the news about her.
But it does make it easier to understand how she could fall under Trump’s spell: She had a psychologically abusive father whose approval she valued but could never secure. He was a head-of-the-household type who had big plans, but was never wrong. It was up to Cassidy’s mother to make the details of those plans work, and to take the blame if things fell apart. So that role was already in Cassidy’s head, waiting for Trump to slide into it.
Her description of the Trump White House resembles an abusive family in a lot of ways. Hutchinson and her boss Mark Meadows lived in fear of Trump’s temper. And if he did erupt, the explanation that he’s an over-coddled asshole wasn’t available to them. Instead, they believed they should have foreseen and prevented whatever set him off.
The book also underlines a problem in our justice system: It’s expensive, even if you did nothing wrong. When Hutchinson got her first subpoena from the January 6 Committee, everyone told her she needed a lawyer. She was driven to use a TrumpWorld lawyer when an independent lawyer quoted her a six-figure price. Only after she got disgusted with herself and wanted to change her testimony did she ask Liz Cheney for help. Cheney gave her a lead on a firm that took her case for free.
This raised a question in my mind: If you’re a witness and not a target of an investigation, and if you intend to answer all questions truthfully, why do you need a lawyer? All the coverage I’ve seen takes the necessity of counsel for granted, so I asked a lawyer I know to spell it out.
He made three points:
You don’t always know for sure that you won’t eventually be a target, even if you’re innocent.
A lawyer can negotiate about how you’ll testify, to minimize how much the investigation will disrupt your life.
If you’re not familiar with all the relevant laws, you may not realize that you violated one. If you did, you may need to negotiate a plea deal or a cooperation agreement.
With Trump and his allies threatening retribution if they ever get back in power, both sides need to think about this problem. Merely witnessing a suspected crime shouldn’t bankrupt you.
Governor Newsom is wasting no time in naming her successor: Laphonza Butler, the president of Emily’s List. The official announcement is expected later today.
Newsom had made two pledges, both of which this appointment fulfills: He said he would appoint a Black woman, and that he would not give any of the candidates already running for this seat in 2024 an advantage by naming them as the interim.
I didn’t watch the second Republican presidential debate. In reading accounts of it, nothing made me feel like I missed out.
Ron DeSantis is a terrible strategist. He was riding high immediately after last fall’s midterm elections for a simple reason: He won his race handily, while Trump’s favorite candidates almost all lost. His potentially winning message against Trump was obvious: I can win and Trump will lose again. (If Trump wanted to respond by claiming he didn’t lose, let him. It makes him sound like a whiner. Ask: “So are you living in the White House now or not?” When that sets off another rant, respond with an eye roll and “Whatever.”)
DeSantis’ policy positions should have sounded conservative while remaining vague, giving a wide range of Republicans room to fantasize about the wonderful things he might do after he won.
Instead, he committed to very specific and not very popular policies, like a six-week abortion ban, taking books out of libraries, and seizing control of universities. It’s been all downhill from there.
and let’s close with something out of this world
In 2024, NASA is planning to launch a probe to study Europa, a moon of Jupiter where scientists hope to find an ocean of salty water under a thick crust of ice. The presence of water, kept in a liquid state by friction-producing tides powered by Jupiter’s gravity, opens up the possibility of finding extra-terrestrial life for the first time.
The probe, which NASA is calling the Europa Clipper, would go into orbit around Jupiter in 2030.
Over several years, it will conduct dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life.
“OK,” I imagine you thinking, “but what’s that got to do with me?”
NASA is offering a variety of ways for you to engage with the mission. Inspired by the thought of Europan life, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has written a poem for the mission “In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa“. NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign invites you to cosign Limón’s message.
The poem will be engraved on the Clipper, along with participants’ names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and participant’s names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system.
Other suggested activities have a more educational flavor: NASA provides material that might nudge you to write your own space poetry. Or you can download a line-drawing of the Clipper and Europa suitable for coloring. The coloring can get even more interesting if you put textured surfaces under the paper.
When is it reasonable for an official (and his party) to hold on in the face of suspicion?
Last week, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey was indicted for bribery. He immediately resigned as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as the bylaws of the Senate Democratic caucus mandate. Almost as quickly, big-name Democrats — like New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy — began calling for him to resign his seat in the Senate, which nothing in the rules requires him to do. Other Democrats, like Rep. Andy Kim, announced they would run against him (if necessary) in 2024.
As I noted last week, though, senators were slower to comment. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania appears to have been the first senator to call for Menendez’ resignation. But since then the floodgates have opened. At least 30 senators — all Democrats, including New Jersey’s other senator, Cory Booker — are asking him to resign.
The Constitution’s Article I, Section 5 allows the Senate to expel a member, but that requires a 2/3rds vote. And even if Democratic senators were willing to go that far, Republicans are unlikely to cooperate, because they would have to recognize that indictments — like Donald Trump’s indictments, say — are serious matters. So Menendez is not going to be expelled.
New Jersey’s constitution allows for the recall of federal officials, but no senator has ever been recalled, and it’s not even clear such laws are consistent with the US constitution. But 25% of New Jersey’s registered voters would have to sign a recall petition, and even if that Herculean goal could be achieved, it’s not obvious how much sooner the special election would be than the 2024 election when Menendez’s seat comes up anyway.
In practical terms, then, nobody is going to force Menendez to leave office early if he doesn’t want to go. So we’re left with the more abstract question: When should a public official resign or be removed?
The fundamental tug-of-war is between two principles: First, that an indictment is not a conviction. US law says that accused people are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If the question is whether he will go to jail, Menendez deserves his day in court just like anybody else.
But whether he should stay in the Senate is a different question. Public office is a privilege, not a right. If we’re debating whether someone should hold a position of power, maybe very-credible-suspicion is a high enough standard. Julius Caesar famously divorced his wife Pompeia after a scandal, even though he also held that she was innocent, saying “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”
Maybe that’s the right principle here, too: If the citizens of New Jersey have good reason to doubt that their senator is serving their interests rather than the interests of whoever can bribe him, maybe he shouldn’t be a senator any more. Maybe they shouldn’t have to wait for a jury verdict or for his term to end naturally.
If you believe that, then someone like Menendez should resign. Arguably, so should Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who appears to have a long history of accepting expensive gifts from rich men who may or may not have specific cases before the Court, but who clearly want to influence the general direction the Court takes. And while Donald Trump currently holds no office (except in the imagination of the Qanon faithful), he also should step aside and let the GOP nominate someone not facing multiple felony indictments.
Obviously, Menendez, Thomas, Trump, and many others in recent history don’t see it that way. And while Democrats would like to be free of Menendez’ baggage, the great majority of Republicans are unwilling to ask their tainted leaders to step aside.
So why don’t more people do that? And to what extent is their reasoning justifiable?
The big reason to step aside, or to hope someone from your party steps aside, is that otherwise the individual’s battles take center stage and distract attention from the issues that person is supposed to be dealing with on behalf of the People.
To me, the only justifiable reason not to step aside is that you have already become individually important. That’s the case, for example, if your resignation means that you will be replaced by someone of the opposite party — possibly flipping control of some house of Congress or changing the partisan make-up of the Supreme Court. Such partisan considerations shouldn’t be absolute — at some point, people just have to go, whatever the consequences — but a change in the government’s partisan balance does raise the bar.
A second possible reason is if the charges against you really are the kind of “witch hunt” Trump is always talking about. If the same partisan machinery can target your replacement just as easily as it targets you, then you might as well stand and fight.
This is how I think these considerations apply to current cases: If Menendez leaves office, his replacement will be named by New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Murphy. So the seat will stay in the Democratic column. Further, I don’t know of anything that makes Menendez unique among Democrats. If, say, he were the lone crusader on some issue, I could see him wanting to stay on. But none of that is true, so he should go.
Clarence Thomas’ case is trickier, because President Biden would want to appoint someone far more liberal. At some point, though, even Republicans should want him gone, because defending his corruption taints their whole party. In a better-functioning political system, Mitch McConnell would go to President Biden and say, “We could support removing Thomas if you’d pledge to replace him with someone on this list.” Biden would push back with his own list, and eventually they’d come to an agreement.
What makes Donald Trump’s case special is that the Republican Party is dominated by his personality cult. So he is already personally unique. For many in the MAGA movement, politics amounts to Trump or not Trump, and is only tangentially connected to the issues that used to motivate the GOP, like taxes, abortion, national defense, or protecting businesses from government regulation. Agreeing to let Trump go is defeat in itself, not a strategic move that lets them fight on better ground.
So we can expect Trump to fight on until he is either decisively defeated or dies by natural causes. His cult will fight alongside him, independent of what crimes he has committed or what evidence is revealed. Individual Republicans need to decide whether they are part of that cult or not.
And finally, I’ll consider Joe Biden, who is facing an impeachment inquiry in the House. So far, though, that inquiry has revealed nothing of substance, and looks like a pure fishing expedition. It is not hard to imagine a similar quantity of Nothing being raised against Kamala Harris not long after Biden resigned.
So pending any substantive evidence of wrongdoing, Democrats should stick by Biden. In the unlikely event that something really convincing is found against him, though, I’d ask him to step aside, because Biden is not unique. Unlike the GOP, the Democratic Party is not a personality cult, and should respond to evidence.
Attacks on Swift demonstrate a more general truth: Conservatives actually don’t admire people who succeed through talent and hard work.
I barely follow contemporary music, so I know little about Taylor Swift, beyond recognizing her picture and appreciating that she has a lot of fans. [1] During the summer, though, she was hard to ignore: Along with the Barbie movie, Swift’s Eras Tour was the big cultural event. Both were identity-affirming experiences for women that, as a man, I could only envy. [2]
Recently, though, she really caught my attention when MAGA-world decided to take on her fans, the Swifties. God knows what they were thinking. I always thought politics was about connecting with popular movements, not daring them to run over you.
The backstory is that early in her career Swift was resolutely non-partisan, to the point that many people speculated that she was a Republican. But in 2018 she decided to come out against Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. In this video (I think from a documentary about Swift) she’s telling her reluctant Dad why she needs to do this:
She votes against fair pay for women. She votes against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which is just basically protecting us from domestic abuse and stalking. [Points to herself] — stalking! She thinks that if you’re a gay couple, or even if you look like a gay couple, you should be allowed to be kicked out of a restaurant. It’s really basic human rights, and it’s right and wrong at this point. And I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words “Tennessee Christian values”. Those aren’t Tennessee Christian values. I live in Tennessee. I am a Christian. That’s not what we stand for.
Her father doesn’t argue with any of those points, but he worries that violent right-wingers will target her.
On Tuesday morning, the singer posted a short message on Instagram encouraging her 272 million followers to register to vote. Afterward, the website she directed her fans to — the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org — recorded more than 35,000 registrations, according to the organization.
Here, I’d say: Go back and read her reasons for opposing Marsha Blackburn. Rather than dumb, she sounds pretty well informed. But “dumb” wasn’t insulting enough, so American Greatness writer Roger Kimball took it a step farther.
Also, she is homely.
As if none of the rest of us have eyes, and women like Swift should care whether Kimball finds them attractive. (Did I mention she’s dating a football star?) And famous “alpha male” Nick Adams retweeted what he thought was an apt comparison. [4]
Raise your daughters to be classy like Lauren Boebert, not trashy like Taylor Swift.
This next-level success she has today she accomplished after navigating a polarized political climate. When she speaks up, people listen.
More importantly, there’s nothing the right could do that could meaningfully affect Swift. She has an incredibly devoted fanbase, a sold-out tour that lasts until November 2024, which again, is going to make her a billionaire, and maybe even has a hot new boyfriend. You can’t convince a Taylor Swift fan that she’s ugly or untalented, and these days, they seem to run the world.
And another Salon writer, Amanda Marcotte, hit back, claiming the anti-Swift venom comes from incels whose worship of established-in-court-sexual-assaulter Donald Trump has made them even less appealing to women.
GOP propagandists have learned that a great way to get their mostly male audiences fired up is to indulge their grievances about women these days. Modern chicks, the gripe goes, have been spoiled by feminism, and that’s why it’s so damn hard for a Trump voter to get a date. … Indeed, the irony of all this is that, in appealing to young men through grievance, the right is only making men’s problems worse. If you’re having trouble with the ladies, going MAGA intensifies your unlikeability. But isn’t that what cults always do? Sell their members “solutions” that actually compound their existing problems.
Those are the kinds of points that other people are much bettered positioned to make than I am. But I do have one thing to add that I don’t think is getting enough attention: American conservatives often praise capitalism as a system where anybody who has talent and works hard can rise to the top. So in theory, they should love people who make that climb. In fact, though, they hate those people, especially the ones who remember where they came from and try to help other people rise too.
The heroes of conservatism are almost invariably folks who were born rich: Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, Elon Musk.
Have you ever wondered why conservatives demonstrate such hatred for “the Hollywood elite” and athletes who get political like Colin Kaepernick? That’s because entertainment and athletics are industries where poor and working class people can hit it big if they work hard and have talent. People like Stephen King or Ben Affleck or Eminem are villains, even though they are White men who have lived genuine Horatio Alger stories. And if you’re Black like LeBron James or female like Barbra Streisand, forget about it. You’ll never have the right to an opinion of your own.
Swift is not the best example here, because she was raised in the professional class and never had to wonder if she’d be able to afford college. But her parents didn’t have yacht-and-mansion money, like she does now. She had talent and worked hard, and it paid off for her. But she doesn’t support the billionaire class politically, so she should “stay in her lane“, just like LeBron should “shut up and dribble”.
The point of the Horatio Alger myth is to keep the masses content: We may not have much now, but we could someday. We should admire the billionaires because maybe, just maybe, we’ll be one ourselves someday.
But that fantasy is never supposed to come true. Conservatism is all about keeping the rich on top, not opening their ranks to admit climbers.
[1] This isn’t unusual for me. Back in the 70s, I remember being amazed that so many songs I recognized from the radio were all by the same artist — some guy named Elton John.
[2] Male identity is a tricky thing to affirm these days, and people who try are usually more embarrassing than inspiring.
But the most prescient analysis of what has recently become more obvious came from Doug Muder back in 2014 in an article titled, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party.”
In a week full of big news events, probably the biggest is the one that didn’t happen: The government didn’t shut down yesterday, and will stay open for at least another six weeks. There’s a lot to say about how that transpired and what comes next, as the MAGA wing of the House Republican caucus comes after Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
But the government-that-didn’t-shut-down had a lot of competition for our attention: A New York judge issued summary judgment on one part of the state attorney general’s civil suit against Trump. He ruled that Trump committed fraud by inflating the value of his properties to get bank loans, and he cancelled the Trump Organization’s licenses to do business. Also, one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia RICO trial pleaded guilty, New York flooded after massive rains, Joe Biden walked a picket line, and House Republicans opened their impeachment investigation against Biden.
So of course I’m going to write about Taylor Swift. This week I couldn’t help being amused by right-wingers’ ridiculous attempts to go after her online: She’s dumb, her music sucks, she’s homely, and so on. Other people know far more about Swift, her fans, and her music than I do, but this story is a hook for making a point that’s been on my mind for a while: Conservative rhetoric lauds Horatio Alger types, whom the capitalist system allows to rise to the top through talent and hard work. But in practice, right-wingers actually hate those people. How dare they have opinions of their own, or remember where they came from?
I’ll put more detail into that point in “MAGA and the Swifties”, which should by out around 9 EDT.
I’ll also contrast Democrats asking for Bob Menendez to resign from the Senate with Republicans who stay loyal to their own corrupt leaders like Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas. That piece, “When should public officials resign?” should be out a little after 10. And I’m shooting to get the weekly summary out by 11 this week.
So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department. Weird, huh?
This week everybody was talking about the looming government shutdown
Typically, a government shutdown happens because the House, Senate, and Presidency aren’t all controlled by the same party, and one party wants something the other doesn’t want to give. Attempts to work out a compromise fail, so the new fiscal year starts and big chunks of the government close for lack of money.
So in 1995, Speaker Newt Gingrich wanted major cuts in spending that President Clinton wouldn’t agree to. In 2013, Republicans wanted to defund ObamaCare. Those shutdowns resulted from a dysfunctional inability to negotiate a compromise, but they at least represented a coherent clash of policy goals.
The 2018 shutdown was a bit strange, because during the post-midterm-election session, Republicans still controlled all three power centers, pending a Democratic takeover of the House when the new Congress would be seated in January. In December, Republicans had worked out a deal to fund the government that didn’t include more money for Trump’s Wall. But when he saw how badly that deal played with his base, Trump reneged.
The government was shut down for 35 days, during which time the Democrats took control of the House, ending the possibility of passing a wall-funding bill. So Trump relented, reopened the government, and then declared a national emergency that allowed him to divert money appropriated for other purposes into wall-building.
This year is stranger yet, because the Republican majority in the House can’t even agree on a set of demands, much less negotiate a compromise with the Democratic Senate and White House.
Here’s how everyone expected the process to work: Speaker McCarthy would placate the far-right “Freedom” Caucus by passing what is know as a “messaging bill” — a bill that everyone knows has no chance to become law, but which includes provisions that express what the MAGA base really wants. Of course the messaging bill would be rejected by the Senate, and then the real negotiating could begin.
The problem is that the House GOP can’t even get its messaging bill together, so negotiations with the Senate and the White House can’t start. The WaPo examines the possibilities, none of which resolve the situation in time to avoid a shutdown.
Calls for his resignation mounted from ethics groups, Republicans and even longtime Democratic allies who stood by him last time, including the governor, state party chairman and the leaders of the legislature. And party strategists and elected officials were already openly speculating that one or more of a group of ambitious, young Democrats representing the state in Congress could mount a primary campaign against him.
Three-term Congressman Andy Kim has already announced his candidacy, posting:
Not something I expected to do, but NJ deserves better.
Joe Walsh comments on all the things that didn’t happen.
So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department. Weird, huh?
The one bad sign from Democrats is that the Democratic Senate caucus seems to be standing by Menendez. He had to resign as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, but Majority Leader Schumer is not asking for his resignation from the Senate.
And if there’s corruption in the air, there must be a Clarence Thomas story. Pro Publica has been ahead of everybody else on Thomas scoops, and they published a new one Friday: In 2018, Thomas rode on somebody’s private jet — he never reported the trip, so we don’t know whose — to attend the winter donor summit of Stand Together, the Koch-led network of high-roller conservative money men.
During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.
That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.
Political fund-raising violates the code of ethics that applies to lower-court judges. But the Supreme Court has no formal code and is expected to police itself.
In 2021, Thomas sided with the Kochs in a 6-3 ruling allowing dark money groups to keep their donors secret. The court will soon hear a Koch-backed case that could sharply curtail the ability of government agencies to issue regulations. Pro Publica claims Thomas has flipped his position to support the Koch view.
Clarence Thomas secretly accepted millions in lavish gifts from billionaires. He secretly shows up at a fundraiser for billionaires to help raise money for a super PAC. And he votes on cases to help billionaires. This isn’t the appearance of corruption, this is corruption.
and Rupert Murdoch
While Fox News has been focusing attention on Joe Biden’s age issues, Rupert Murdoch has continued to run both Fox and News Corp at the age of 92. This week he announced he will turn the empire over to his son Lachlan, sparking a series of retrospectives about his career.
but we should be paying attention to a court case that hasn’t gotten much coverage yet
I’m becoming dangerously complacent about Supreme-Court-considers-triggering-Armageddon stories. Remember Moore v Harper and the “independent state legislature” theory? The upshot of ISL is that once you get control of a state legislature, you can gerrymander to make your control permanent, and then leverage that power to determine all the other elections in your state. “Independent” means “unchecked by the courts”, which means that if your power grab violates the state constitution, no one can call you on it.
Anyway, that was decided in June, and the Court did not in fact opt to make it easier to end democracy. It was a 6-3 decision, which means that we’re still safe from permanent minority rule, at least until John Roberts and either Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett change their minds. So rest easy, everybody.
The origin of this dispute is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things: CFPB issued regulations cracking down on the payday-lending industry, which could use some cracking down on, because it exploits people who live paycheck-to-paycheck. CFSA represents payday lenders who would rather operate without government interference. So it sued. In the course of that lawsuit, it made an atomic-bomb-scale argument: The whole CFPB is unconstitutional.
Now, you wouldn’t expect mortgage bankers, home builders, and realtors to be fans of federal regulation, but those associations filed a brief warning that striking down all of CFPB’s rules simultaneously could cause the real estate market to seize up, disrupting some large portion of the entire economy, and possibly setting off a Depression.
But it’s actually worse than that, because of course there’s no line in the Constitution saying “Congress shall establish no consumer financial protection bureau”. So CFSA had to make a broader argument: The way CFPB is funded is unconstitutional. Congress doesn’t appropriate a specific amount of money for CFPB each year. Instead, it gets whatever funding it needs up to some cap, and the funding is perpetual until Congress says otherwise.
Here’s the problem, as described by Vox’ Ian Milhiser: If funding something without approving a specific sum each year is unconstitutional, there goes Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Under this interpretation of the Constitution, moreover, many key federal programs simply could not exist. Medicare, for example, is a health insurance program that pays for beneficiaries’ health costs as those costs arise. It is impossible for Congress to determine, in advance, the specific dollar amount that Medicare will spend in any given year. To do so, Congress would need to precisely predict which health services would be provided to every senior in the United States, and how much each one of those services would cost.
Imagine it: I recently had a fairly expensive medical test. (It came out well. Thank you for wondering.) We’re near the end of the fiscal year, so under a specific-sum appropriation system, Medicare might say, “I’m sorry, but we can’t pay for your test because medical expenses nationally ran a little high this year and we’ve already spent all the money Congress appropriated.” Every year, millions of Americans like me would game the system to get our medical care done in October rather than September. Some number of people would take their chances without care, and some of them would die.
Oh, and all those programs would be vulnerable to government shutdowns — not that we ever have to worry about that.
The hyper-conservative Fifth Circuit appeals court agreed with CFSA.
Consumer Financial reveals just how deeply delusional thinking has penetrated into the post-Trump federal judiciary. The plaintiffs’ arguments in Consumer Financial have no basis in law, in constitutional text, in precedent, or in rational thought. And they risk the sort of economic catastrophe that the United States hasn’t experienced for nearly a century.
And yet a federal appeals court bought these arguments. So now it’s up to the Supreme Court to save the United States from calamity.
It’s a safe bet that Justices Thomas and Alito will vote to blow up the system. (Alito, IMO, is the most predictable judge on the Court. You don’t need to know anything about the facts of the case or the relevant law, just who stands to benefit. He will consistently vote for Republicans over Democrats, corporations over working people, and Catholics over secularists. The CFPB protects working people from corporations, so he’ll be against it.) So we’ll need to count on two of Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett to save us.
This week’s scandal: John Fetterman wears hoodies and shorts. It’s technically a violation of the Senate dress code, but when he’s dressed like that he votes from the doorway.
A Nebraska woman who acquired abortion pills that her teenage daughter used to end her pregnancy last year was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.
Last week, I wondered how conservative media would erupt if AOC were caught doing something like Lauren Boebert’s lewd behavior while watching a musical. Turns out AOC was wondering the same thing.
And while we’re talking about family values (i.e., Boebert), Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are facing death together after 77 years of marriage.
In the silly-but-amusing category, conservative podcaster Clay Travis tweeted about Kansas City Chief tight end Travis Kelce:
Travis Kelce is doing Bud Light and covid shot commercials. He needs to fire all his marketing agents. Or he needs to just go ahead and cut his dick off, become a chick, and endorse Joe Biden.
I’ve used X/Twitter for years now. I use it to cast a wider net for points of view than I’ll find in my usual news sources. I don’t often post content other than links to this blog.
Since Musk took over, I’ve thought about leaving X. And I’ve checked out Mastodon as an alternative. But inertia is powerful, so I’ve stayed.
If they start charging a fee, though, I’ll have to take positive action to stay on X. I’ll have to give them a credit card number or something. Just by doing nothing, I could quit.
I would do nothing, and see how long it took them to turn off my account. I suspect the vast majority of users would do the same. Charging a fee will probably complete Musk’s destruction of the platform, setting fire to the remainder of his $44 billion investment.
had lunch with my son at school for his birthday. he can pick 2 kids to sit with him and one I had never met. i asked afterward who he was and he said “oh, i don’t really know him but no one had picked him for birthday lunch before”
The Weekly Sift 