Month: January 2017

by digby

You’ve undoubtedly heard about the Trump transition team asking for specific names of people involved in federal agencies who have worked on issues they don’t “believe” in, like climate change and women’s issues. This is very weird. Seeking out individuals in the career jobs in the executive branch  for whatever reason is not something that’s ever been done.

They do have federal protections but now the congress is sneaking in some “special” rules to make it easier to deal with troublesome types who perhaps refuse to phony up data or those who are in jobs they just want to eliminate entirely:

Meanwhile, while everyone was focusing on the melee over the GOP trying to destroy the House ethics office, House Republicans led by Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) snuck in a revival of a rule that could decimate federal agencies. The rule is known as the “Holman Rule” (affectionately called the “Armageddon Rule,” by some Democrats) – a 1876 procedural rule that permits any member of Congress to propose an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets a specific government employee or program. Talk of “appropriations” and “amendments” sounds all impersonal and procedural – but let’s be clear. This rule could have significant impact on thousands of federal workers and their families. With the Holman Rule in place, a lone Congressman from any district could propose cutting a federal employee’s salary—or even an entire program budget– down to $1. 

Prior to this week’s Congressional bedlam, Congress’ involvement with the budget of federal agencies has been more of a broad-strokes kind of thing. Congress appropriates funds for federal agencies, and those funds can be increased or decreased; but Congress does not identify specific programs or specific employees against whom to wield its mighty power of the purse. Things work this way for several reasons, including 1) civil service rules; and 2) common sense. The federal government is the single largest employer in the nation. When individual Congressmen can propose legislation to cut specific salaries or eliminate specific positions, the livelihood of every federal employee is precariously balanced between politics and pragmatism.
Those who support the Holman Rule argue that it will work to eliminate government waste, and create accountability within all federal agencies. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) defended this drastic maneuver by pointing out that voters elected Trump with the hope of fundamentally changing the way government works, and that the Holman Rule does precisely that. 

In McCarthy’s words, “This is a big rule change inside there that allows people to get at places they hadn’t before.” Well that’s sure accurate. I’d say it’s a “big change” for the thousands of men and women working for the federal government to know that their jobs can now be specifically targeted by any member of Congress.

Leave it to Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy to spill the beans.

I’m thinking we may very well see the “reverse Atlas Shrugged” scenario that Daniel Drezner wrote about  here:

The premise of “Atlas Shrugged” is that a slow accretion of government rules, regulations and corrupt bargains forces the country’s true entrepreneurs into internal exile somewhere in Colorado. There they thrive in a blissful, gold-standard-based utopia while the rest of the country suffers under the weight of government and the rent-seeking looters and moochers who need the state to make any money. 

As a slow-motion depiction of what it is like for a country to fall apart when corruption pervades every facet of life and societal norms disintegrate, “Atlas Shrugged” is pretty gripping. So here’s my question: What would happen to the United States if the reverse “Atlas Shrugged” scenario occurred?  

After all, if you believe Donald Trump and his boosters, his Cabinet of billionaires represents the finest that the free enterprise system has to offer. What if the people who self-identify as the makers take over the state and all the bureaucrats disappear into the ether?

Drezner says he’s hearing from plenty of bureaucrats that they are decamping to the private sector. And the Intel chiefs who testified yesterday morning on Capitol Hill made it clear that those agencies are in danger of losing important personnel.

I worked in the private sector my whole life and my observation is that most of the John Galts of the world are a lot like the Donald Trump. The best of them are people who are smart enough to know what they don’t know and have some trust in people who do. There aren’t very many of those people. Mostly, I’m shocked that business succeeds as well as it does in their hands. Luck is involved, buhleeemeee.

So, maybe we’re going to see exactly what happens when the swamp is drained of career professionals (aka moochers) and DC is turned into Trump’s gulch. Should be fun.

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You say you want a revolution
by Tom Sullivan

Something Robert Reich wrote soon after November 8 is still plenty relevant:

I have been a Democrat for 50 years – I have even served in two Democratic administrations in Washington, including a stint in the cabinet and have run for the Democratic nomination for governor in one state – yet I have never voted for the chair or vice-chair of my state Democratic party. That means I, too, have had absolutely no say over who the chair of the Democratic National Committee will be. To tell you the truth, I haven’t cared. And that’s part of the problem.

It’s something to which few activists paid attention until last year’s Democratic primary fight. I don’t recall it being as big an issue during the 2008 primary as the fight itself. That was then. This is now.

There is a growing collection of 2016 election postmortems filling my in-box these days. Many reflect Reich’s opinion that turning the Democratic Party from a fundraising machine that lines the pockets of “political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves” into “the voice of the dispossessed” should be the main focus.

This one yesterday from Vox is one of the best. Please give it a read. Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, warns Democrats of “traps” and “detours” on the way back. Endless blame games and focus on micro-targeting groups Democrats lost in November avoids addressing the “electoral geography” that matters in how we elect the president and the congress:

From that perspective, one 2016 pattern stands out. Compared with previous presidential contests, the partisan gap between big-city and non-big-city voting patterns widened. Trump won because he rang up unusually high margins (although not unusually high turnouts) among voters across all social strata in suburban, small-city, and semi-rural counties, especially in the Midwest. In many of those places, Democrats are not an organized presence at all.

Now where have I heard that before?

Skocpol continues:

Anti-institutional tendencies in today’s culture make the idea of dismantling the existing order attractive to many people. But social science research has long shown that majorities need strong organizations to prevail against wealthy conservative interests in democracies. The real problem in US politics today is hardly too much unified organizational heft on the center left; it is too little. Unless the Democratic Party becomes stronger and more effective, a radicalized Republican-conservative juggernaut is likely to take over for decades.

Dismantling the existing order was the attractive notion that gave us Donald Trump. We are all about to be lab rats in an over 300 million-subject experiment in how well that works. Reich believes instead the order of the day for progressives is to transform the Democratic Party from “a fund-raising machine into a movement.”

That seems to be the goal of all those Our Revolution emails from Bernie Sanders. Let’s hope the newly activated are as serious about “taking back the Democratic Party” as the rhetoric suggests. Heads up: It’s work.

One of the potential rewards is closing the rift between electeds and party regulars. One of the more pernicious effects of the money chase is that activists who are not big donors are to be seen and not heard until election time. Want to know why elected officials seem unresponsive? It’s because the rank-and-file aren’t even the JV squad and the varsity players are too busy shaking down sponsors for new uniforms. We’re playing for the same school, but not on the same team.

Paul Curtis (Alien & Sedition) wrote a decade ago about the point of creating a movement. It’s not about electing the right (meaning the left) people:

The lesson of the 2004 election was that the fortunes of a political movement cannot ride upon the fate of a presidential campaign; if anything, it should be the other way around.

Likewise, the fortunes of a political movement cannot be made dependant upon the courage of politicians. The point of a political movement is to make the courage of politicians irrelevant.

by digby

While you’re losing your health care, think about this:

The plan is an implicit acknowledgment by Republicans and the incoming administration that Mexico will not pay for the border wall — a promise from Trump that was always viewed skeptically. Instead, American tax dollars will. 

The tentative plan would likely be just a piece of a broader, multi-year border security strategy, which Capitol Hill Republicans are still hashing out. They’re already framing the spring cash infusion — which could total hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars — as a “down-payment” on Trump’s “build-the-wall” platform. That pledge vaulted the New Yorker from afterthought to front-runner in last year’s crowded GOP presidential primary. 

Multiple Republican sources said the House will also likely pass a border-security package sometime later in the spring or summer. The plan could meld new provisions to older bills passed by the House and the Homeland Security Committee in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
The cost of a border wall is potentially enormous, with estimates ranging from a few billion dollars to as much as $14 billion. And that’s just for constructing the wall or fence; it does not include a range of other expenses, from maintenance to border patrol agents to purchasing private property from Texas landowners. 

Still, House Republicans feel they need to give Trump the tools he needs to carry out his wall promise as quickly as possible. The proposal under discussion could offer a way to produce legislation within his first 100 days in office.

And then all those great strawberry picking jobs will open up and America will be Great Again.

There will be no expense too great to fulfill King Trump’s puerile promises.

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Trump and Tucker

by digby

I doubt Roger Ailes would have put Tucker Carlson in Megyn Kelly’s time slot. But then he was a very successful TV guy who undoubtedly understood why Carlson has been fired from every other network: he’s a snotty, smartass jerk. Fox News viewers like grumpy old blowhards (O’Reilly), earnest true believers (Hannity) and hot babes(Kelly.) Carlson annoys everyone but a certain subset of right wing insiders.

Interestingly, Carlson has become a Trump booster which is sort of a surprise since he wrote this about him last year:

About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair. I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day.
“It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Trump said matter-of-factly. “But I get more pussy than you do.” Click.

It’s not really surprising now that I think about it. After all, Carlson was a huge Bush booster even after he wrote this about him in 1999:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker’s] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them,” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ “

“What was her answer?” I wonder.

“Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”

Carlson expressed shock at the time that the Governor would say such a thing (man, those were more innocent times, weren’t they?) but he came around.

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Trump owes Wall Street bigly

by digby

We don’t know much about Trump’s fortune. But now we know this, from today’s Wall Street Journal:

The debts of President-elect Donald Trump and his businesses are scattered across Wall Street banks, mutual funds and other financial institutions, broadening the tangle of interests that pose potential conflicts for the incoming president’s administration. 

Hundreds of millions of dollars of debt attached to Mr. Trump’s properties, some of them backed by Mr. Trump’s personal guarantee, were packaged into securities and sold to investors over the past five years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of legal and property documents. 

Mr. Trump has previously disclosed that his businesses owe at least $315 million to 10 companies. According to the Journal’s analysis, Trump businesses’ debts are held by more than 150 institutions. They bought the debt after it was sliced up and repackaged into bonds—a process known as securitization, which has been used for more than $1 billion of debt connected to Mr. Trump’s companies. 

As a result, a broader array of financial institutions now are in a potentially powerful position over the incoming president. If the Trump businesses were to default on their debts, the giant financial institutions that serve as so-called special servicers of these loan pools would have the power to foreclose on some of Mr. Trump’s marquee properties or seek the tens of millions of dollars that Mr. Trump personally guaranteed on the loans. 

“The problem with any of this debt is if something goes wrong, and if there is a situation where the president is suddenly personally beholden or vulnerable to threats from the lenders,” said Trevor Potter, who served as a general counsel to the presidential campaigns of Republicans George H.W. Bush and John McCain. 

The good news is that Trump didn’t make any speeches to Goldman Sachs that we know of so he’s in the clear on the corruption thing.

There’s nothing wrong with debt, of course. His businesses are no different than most in that regard. It’s standard business practice. The problem is that he’s going to be president with tremendous power over the institutions with which his businesses are involved. The conflicts of interest are … well, you know.

But this is our new reality and we’d better get used to it. This morning this happened:

This is what it’s going to be like with a president who communicates through twitter. Jesus H. Christ.

Schumer said Trump could not count on the Democrats to save his butt on this and I pray the Democrats will stick with that. If these destructive maniacs do this, they have to take full responsibility for it. Trump and his buddies demagogued this for years and convinced a whole lot of people that the reforms had made them worse off than they had been before. That was the lie. And now they have all the power they need to put up or shut up. They don’t need the Democrats’ help.

This is one of those situations where there can be no negotiation. It’s not like it was when the reforms were being negotiated within the Democratic Party and everything that came out would theoretically be an improvement, even if it was imperfect or wasted an opportunity to go farther. This is about enshrining the idea that government funded health insurance is a bad thing. And they’re coming for medicaid, the VA and Medicare too. It will be a massive step backwards not an inadequate step forward.


Trump seems to have been under the impression that once he won everyone would stop opposing him. And it makes him angry when they do. Somebody really needs to show him some educational comic books about how government works.

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He’s a big fan of intelligence

by digby

Your new president America:

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Back to the future

by digby

I wrote about the Democrats’ return to old habits today for Salon:

Postmortems for the 2016 election are ongoing, but the early consensus that Republicans won because they were more attentive to the economic needs of the white working class seems to be holding up. The regions where such people turned out in larger numbers than usual for Donald Trump are also the ones where he took narrow victories in winner-take-all electoral states, so it’s a natural assumption.

Regional disparities in economic data show that while those rural and exurban areas are recovering from the financial crisis, they still have not improved to the extent the more populated metropolitan areas have. Those without college degrees do suffer from the ongoing dislocation of major agribusiness, automation and globalization, which made them excited to support a candidate who promised to reverse all that.

But there’s more to what happened than economics, and I think everyone understands that too. Race played a large role in Donald Trump’s campaign, from his promises to deport Mexican and Muslim immigrants to his emphatic claim of “I am the law and order candidate.” There have been many thoughtful essays written about how the subtext of “Make America Great Again” intersects with the changes brought by the Civil Rights movement. (This by Jamelle Bouie at Slate is highly recommended, explaining why some Obama voters moved to Trump.)

But answers about what to do about all this are not as simple as people think. Obviously a different message delivered by a different messenger might help, but this racial divide is a longstanding challenge for Democrats, going back at least as far as the mid-1960s, when Lyndon Johnson signed the major civil rights and voting rights laws. Paul Krugman of the New York Times pointed this out back in 2015, citing a paper by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote entitled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?”:

Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”

This translates to a general antipathy and mistrust toward government, and plays into the hands of powerful economic interests which seek to manipulate lower-status white people for their own ends.

Democrats cannot abandon people of color in order to win over this group of voters. But unless they do, their economic appeals will remain tangled up in racial politics. (Even Franklin D. Roosevelt had to give up one to get the other.) Perhaps there are more Barack Obama-style candidates out there who can walk that line and are “lucky” enough to run at a time of such economic turmoil that people are willing to think outside their normal boxes. Barring that, it’s more likely that Democratic politicians will seek to find other ways to appeal to this group in the hope they can lure enough of them to win national elections.

That brings us to what is the likely outcome of this quest for the elusive white voter who mistrusts government and feels disrespected and dismissed by the liberal elites who fail to understand him: the culture war. It’s already showing the usual signs of revival, which should come as no surprise. Obama himself, in his first press conference after the election, went right there:

How do we make sure that we’re showing up in places where I think Democratic policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a difference, but where people feel as if they’re not being heard? And where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, you know, politically correct, out-of-touch folks, we have to be in those communities.

In fact, Nancy Pelosi attributed Clinton’s troubles with white males to those culture-war issues all the way back in the summer:

I think that, so many times, white, non-college-educated white males have voted Republican. They voted against their own economic interests because of guns, because of gays, and because of God, the three G’s, God being the woman’s right to choose.

This is familiar ground. These contested issues are comfortable for bothconservatives and liberals to openly fight over. They’ve been doing it for years.

I would expect to see more articles like this one in the Atlantic cropping up over the next few months, reminding Democrats that they’d they’d better find religion:

[T]here’s a religious illiteracy problem in the Democratic Party. It’s tied to the demographics of the country: More 20- and 30-year-olds are taking positions of power in the Democratic Party. They grew up in parts of the country where navigating religion was not important socially and not important to their political careers.

This could have been written in 1981, 1985, 1989, 2001 or 2005. In fact it was, ad nauseam. Democrats would lose elections and immediately start handwringing over their alleged hostility to “pro-life” people, hemming and hawing over gay rights, and mumbling about “family values” and “religious liberty.”

It’s as ridiculous now as it was then. The Democratic Party is full of religious people, not the least of whom are African-Americans and Latinos who are religious at higher levels than whites. Any urban politician navigates religion all the time. In fact they are far more religiously “literate” than their rural brethren, since they have to be able to speak to members of many different religious denominations: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics and every possible variety of mainline or evangelical Protestant.

In fact, it’s truly insulting that people keep insisting that Democrats are irreligious, particularly since it seems to be the churches attended by liberals where racists and fanatics choose to “express their beliefs” about abortion, God, guns and gays with a hail of bullets.

Inevitably, Democrats will try to find ways to better “relate” to the white people who didn’t vote for them in the last election. Unfortunately, they are likely to fall back on their old ways, because these folks don’t care for certain members of the Democratic base. So Democratic candidates may try to find ways to earn that trust by describing liberals as “out-of-touch elitists” and insulting their own religious followers by calling them illiterate. This is unlikely to do anything but demoralize the liberal base and make it that much harder to win elections. But it’s as comfortable as a pair of old slippers, and if there’s one thing Democrats are looking for right now, it’s comfort.

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Wrecking crew
by Tom Sullivan

We often build a new stadium beside the old one before we demolish the old one and turn it into a parking lot, my wife observes. Same thing with replacing old bridges. We build the new ones first before we blow up the old so we minimize disruption for commuters. But radicalized congressional Republicans are so hopped up on disruption they may just implode Obmacare before sitting down to design a replacement.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is worried his Republican colleagues may do just that:

“I think it’s imperative that Republicans do a replacement simultaneous to repeal,” Paul said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” cautioning that disaster in the form of insurance company bankruptcies and a “massive” bailout could follow a move to repeal the law without a new one in its place. “If they don’t, Obamacare continues to unravel.”

Some Republicans, determined to repeal Obamacare quickly now that they have one of their own entering the White House, have advocated repealing the law with a delay period in which they would try to come up with some replacement. If they failed to pass a new law in that time, millions of people who depend on Obamacare for their health insurance could lose their coverage.

“And your point is?” the GOP caucus dared say aloud.

“Not insurance at all”

The New York Times reports on the results from Kaiser Foundation focus groups in the Rust Belt:

Surveys show that most enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces are happy with their plans. The Trump voters in our focus groups were representative of people who had not fared as well. Several described their frustration with being forced to change plans annually to keep premiums down, losing their doctors in the process. But asked about policies found in several Republican plans to replace the Affordable Care Act — including a tax credit to help defray the cost of premiums, a tax-preferred savings account and a large deductible typical of catastrophic coverage — several of these Trump voters recoiled, calling such proposals “not insurance at all.” One of those plans has been proposed by Representative Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services. These voters said they did not understand health savings accounts and displayed skepticism about the concept.

When told Mr. Trump might embrace a plan that included these elements, and particularly very high deductibles, they expressed disbelief. They were also worried about what they called “chaos” if there was a gap between repealing and replacing Obamacare. But most did not think that, as one participant put it, “a smart businessman like Trump would let that happen.” Some were uninsured before the Affordable Care Act and said they did not want to be uninsured again. Generally, the Trump voters on Medicaid were much more satisfied with their coverage.

And yet proposals under consideration may indeed demolish what’s there before constructing something to replace it. (Republicans had 7 years to design a replacement for what was essentially a Republican plan in the first place.) The Washington Post reports:

House Republicans tasked with writing the repeal legislation said that no final decisions have been made on what it will include. Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi (R-Ohio) who chairs a House subcommittee that oversees health care, called the incoming administration’s Jan. 27 deadline “a challenging goal.”

Among the unanswered questions is whether Republicans will immediately end health-care taxes, such as an additional 0.9 percent Medicare payroll tax and a 3.8 percent investment income tax, that were created to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. Some Republicans have insisted that the taxes should be eliminated immediately, even if lawmakers decide to delay the repeal of other parts of the law. Others worry that repealing the taxes will make it impossible to pay to keep Obamacare afloat while a replacement is finished.

BOOM!

Photo C. Frank Starmer and Sparky Witte from http://oldcooperriverbridge.org CC BY-SA 3.0.

QOTD: A Man

by digby

Specifically the president of the Kentucky Senate, arguing against abortion:

“This is my belief: there are two viable beings involved,” he said, as quoted by the Herald Leader. “One had a choice early on to make a decision to conceive or not. Once conception starts, another life is involved, and the legislature has the ability to determine how that life proceeds.”

It’s nice that he thinks the living, breathing, fully formed, pregnant human is “viable.” But let’s face facts. It could have chosen not to whore itself all over the place and get itself pregnant, amirite? At that point a man’s got to take over the decision making.

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