Tag Archives: Congress

Mike Johnson is worse than you think

October 30, 2023 – 10:26 am

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.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (15)

The House, Still Divided

October 23, 2023 – 10:04 am

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.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (9)

The Action Shifts to Congress

March 1, 2021 – 11:13 am
https://www.ajc.com/news/luckovich-blog/226-mike-luckovich-heckler/M5V3NKMKC5FBRJD2WVXQSQ24Y4/

The country now depends on its most dysfunctional branch of government.

Joe Biden began his presidency with a flurry of executive orders, concerning everything from public health to immigration to racial equality. But the United States is not (and should not be) a dictatorship, so executive orders can only go so far. Executive orders can redecorate the rooms of our government, but they can’t remodel the building. To make real change, you need Congress to appropriate money and pass laws.

So as the Biden administration enters its sixth week, the action has shifted to Congress. Congress (as I have pointed out before) is the most dysfunctional branch of American government, and its weakness is the root cause the dysfunction of the other two branches: Both the White House and the courts overreach, because someone has to pick up the responsibilities that Congress drops.

Syria. We saw an example this week, when Biden ordered an air strike on Syria. The legality of this is questionable, because Congress has never specifically authorized military action in Syria. But the last few administrations have justified whatever they wanted to do in the Middle East by stretching the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolutions that Congress passed in 2001 after 9-11 and in 2002 prior to the Iraq invasion. The entire Obama/Trump campaign against ISIS, which culminated in Syria, happened under authority that Congress never realized it was granting two decades ago.

But the blame here belongs to Congress. A responsible legislative body would debate the exact bounds of presidential war-making in the area, and pass a new AUMF that repealed the previous two. Some — Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Todd Young (R-IN), for example — have pushed for this, but most congresspeople would rather dodge responsibility and then complain later if things go wrong in either direction.

In this case, you can be sure that if the US suffered some major reversal in the Iraq/Syria theater — say, a high-casualty attack against our forces or a resurgence of ISIS — many of the same congresspeople who complain about unauthorized military action now would be complaining then that the President hadn’t done enough. Again, this pattern is independent of parties. It was equally true in the Trump and Obama administrations, and under congressional leadership of Republicans and Democrats alike.

https://theweek.com/cartoons/968678/political-cartoon-gop-democrats-covid-stimulus

Covid relief. The biggest bill facing Congress right now is the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, which passed the House Saturday without a single Republican vote and two Democrats defecting. The Washington Post summarizes the content:

Beyond the minimum-wage increase, the sprawling relief bill would provide $1,400 stimulus payments to tens of millions of American households; extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits through August; provide $350 billion in aid to states, cities, U.S. territories and tribal governments; and boost funding for vaccine distribution and coronavirus testing — among myriad other measures, such as nutritional assistance, housing aid and money for schools.

The bill is popular with the American people, as well as with many Republican governors and mayors. But that isn’t enough to get it Republican votes in Congress. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have imprinted the lesson they learned during the Obama administration: If you monkey-wrench the economy, ultimately the party in the White House will get blamed for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The Democrats will be able to pass a bill popular with more than 3 out of 4 of us only because they have a slight majority in the House and can use a special budget measure to work around the Republican senators who represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than the Democrats do.

The coronavirus relief bill illustrates just how dangerously close we are to minority rule.

Minimum wage. Meanwhile, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that raising the minimum wage doesn’t fit inside the rules defining the reconciliation process. So if Senate Democrats use that process to pass Covid relief — as it looks like they must to overcome the expected Republican filibuster — the minimum wage won’t be in it. Raising the minimum wage is also popular on its own, and will probably be offered as a stand-alone bill. But popularity with the American people probably won’t garner it enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster.

https://www.facebook.com/180024368705304/posts/your-greed-is-hurting-the-economy/923712524336481/

The New Yorker blows up one central argument against raising the minimum wage:

The fast-food chains insist that if they were to pay their employees more they would have to raise menu prices. Their wages are “competitive.” But in Denmark McDonald’s workers over the age of eighteen earn more than twenty dollars an hour—they are also unionized—and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States. There are regional American fast-food chains that take the high road with their employees. The starting wage at In-N-Out Burger, which is based in Southern California, and has two hundred and ninety-five restaurants in California and the Southwest, is eleven dollars. Full-time workers receive a complete benefits package, including life insurance—and the burgers are cheap and good.

Matt Yglesias:

The genius of America is you need a 60-vote supermajority to raise the minimum wage, but the president can bomb some militia in Iran based on … I dunno … an AUMF from two decades ago that was about something else entirely or something.

The Equality Act. Thursday, the House passed the Equality Act, which would explicitly protect Americans against discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s not inconceivable that the bill could also pass the Senate and become law, but getting the ten Republican votes necessarily to overcome a filibuster looks like an uphill struggle.

Whether it passes or not, the bill is becoming a hot-button culture war issue for conservatives, raising all kinds of dark fantasies that have little basis in reality. Most conservative attempts to argue this point don’t even try to assemble evidence, and the few that do are unconvincing. For example, a Heritage Foundation report against allowing access to single-sex facilities according to gender identity includes a nine-page appendix listing “Individuals charged with sex crimes in intimate facilities”, including such incidents as voyeuristic men dressing as women to enter women’s bathrooms.

I’m sure Heritage believes its readers should be impressed with this mound of “evidence”. But the question is not whether such incidents happen, or whether they continue to happen in venues that allow trans access to bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. The question is whether changing the rules causes such incidents to increase. A trans-friendly bathroom policy exists in enough places now that the question should be answerable.

The Heritage report also does not consider the danger that a transwoman faces if the law forces her to use a men’s bathroom. It’s as if violence and harassment directed at transgender people should not count.

I also note another example of the selectivity of conservative care: They regard the possibility of opposite-sex voyeurism in bathrooms as a world-shaking problem. But men entering men’s bathrooms to look at boys elicits no policy response at all; the status quo is just fine.

The looming filibuster battle. I can imagine readers asking “What’s the point? Why pass bills in the House that Republicans can successfully filibuster in the Senate? They’re not going to change anything.”

That question has both a principled and a practical answer. The principled answer is that you always want to give people a chance to do the right thing, even if you don’t think they will. When politicians make excuses for not serving the people, they should never be able to say, “Nobody asked me.” All the major advances in civil rights started with people making demands that (in the short term) they knew would be turned down. Asking the question is how you get from a vague “It’s just not possible” to a specific “It would happen if those people stopped blocking it.”

The practical answer is that a showdown over the filibuster is looming, and Democrats need to be united to win it. Currently they’re not: Both Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona have come out against eliminating the filibuster.

Turning them around is going to require building popular support. But the filibuster itself is a procedural Senate thing that the average voter doesn’t care about. So the debate will turn on what the filibuster means to ordinary people as they live their lives. Popular bills need to come up and go down — along with the For the People Act, which would ban gerrymandering and many voter suppression tactics, as well as controlling dark money and encouraging small-donor campaign financing — to connect the filibuster with problems that people can see.

Defenders of the filibuster sometimes warn that Democrats will be sorry if they end the filibuster and then lose the Senate, as they might in 2022 (while still representing more voters than the GOP). But that observation ignores how the Republican Party has changed in the last decade: It has no legislative program beyond tax cuts, which can pass through reconciliation.

Conversely, Democrats are more likely to lose the Senate if voters see that a Democratic Senate can’t accomplish its goals.

Biden’s nominees. Politico published a summary of how Biden’s nominees were faring in the Senate as of Thursday. Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland is likely to be approved by the Judiciary Committee today, sending his nomination to the Senate floor for final approval.

PBS Newshour notes the “pattern of minority nominees encountering more political resistance than white counterparts”. A look at Politico’s list demonstrates that the difference isn’t across-the-board. Some Black (UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin), female (Greenfield, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines), Latino (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas), and gay (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) nominees have gotten through the process relatively unscathed.

But where Republicans have unleashed fireworks, the targets have largely been people of color, particularly women, and white transwoman Rachel Levine, who endured some abusive questioning from Rand Paul. The Newshour article focuses on Deb Haaland, who seems likely to become the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, but took some harsh grilling from Republicans on the Energy Committee. Afterwards, John Kennedy of Louisiana told reporters she was “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job”. (Haaland’s sin appears to be a desire to phase out fossil fuels. I suspect Lenin was pro-fossil-fuel, so Kennedy may not be completely wrong.)

https://theweek.com/cartoons/953708/political-cartoon-trump-neera-tanden-tweets

Newshour continues:

The confirmation of Neera Tanden, who would be the first Indian American to head the Office of Management and Budget, was thrown into doubt when it lost support from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He cited her controversial tweets attacking members of both parties.

Critics also have targeted Vanita Gupta, an Indian American and Biden’s pick to be associate attorney general, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as Health and Human Services secretary. Conservatives launched campaigns calling Gupta “dangerous” and questioning Becerra’s qualifications.

I think the apparent racism is less personal animosity than an attempt to exploit the implicit racism of the Republican base. (Manchin is a Democrat, but needs Republican votes to stay in office.) The GOP strategy is to paint Biden’s nominees as way-out, far-left, bomb-throwing extremists. As Republicans noticed during the Obama administration, and later refined in their attacks on the Squad, that kind of mud doesn’t stick as well to a white man as it does to a woman of color. (That’s why when Bernie Sanders and AOC support the same thing, the attack goes against AOC. The GOP has made AOC the face of the Green New Deal, while poor cosponsor Ed Markey can barely get any credit.) The base doesn’t even have to notice that they’re responding in a racist or sexist fashion, they just have to unquestioningly accept accusations against the chosen targets that they might doubt if the same things were said about white men.

Julian Brave NoiseCat writes about Deb Haaland:

What Haaland actually brings — and what the Republican Party seems to consider so dangerous — are experiences and perspectives that have never found representation in the leadership of the executive branch. In fact, Republicans’ depiction of the first Native American ever nominated to the Cabinet as a “radical” threat to a Western “way of life” revealed something about the conservative id: a deep-seated fear that when the dispossessed finally attain a small measure of power, we will turn around and do to them what their governments and ancestors did to us.

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