Month: March 2017

Lets just destroy the senate while we’re at it

by digby

Why not? They’re taking a meat ax to everything else:

House Republican leaders narrowly tailored their Obamacare repeal bill to avoid violating Senate rules, but conservatives are pushing back with advice of their own: tear up the rulebook.

A growing number of conservative lawmakers on Thursday urged GOP leaders to push the limits of how much of the health law they can reshape under a powerful procedural maneuver known as budget reconciliation — and to overrule the Senate parliamentarian if she doesn’t decide in their favor.

Such a gambit would require the unlikely buy-in of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a noted institutionalist who earlier this year avoided talk of changing his chamber’s rules to kill the ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees.

If the Senate changes precedent for what can be passed under reconciliation now, a future Senate — whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats — could enact a wide range of legislation with just a simple majority.

“There are limits to what we can do” on Obamacare while complying with the Senate rules, Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Senate Republican, said in a Thursday floor speech. Under reconciliation guidelines, bills can be passed in the Senate with a simple majority and cannot be filibustered, as long as their provisions have a direct impact on spending or tax levels.

But conservatives in both chambers are still trying to make the case for sending the Senate a more far-reaching Obamacare repeal bill than the one House GOP leaders unveiled this week.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Thursday kept up his pitch for a strategy that would see Vice President Mike Pence overruling the Senate parliamentarian, if necessary.

“I have been encouraging leaders in both houses that we should not approach this with both hands tied behind our back,” Cruz told reporters. According to the 1974 law that set up reconciliation, he insisted, “it is the presiding officer — the vice president of the United States — who rules what’s permissible under reconciliation and what is not.”

In the House, the top two leaders of the conservative Freedom Caucus are going so far as to press President Donald Trump to support an end run around Senate rules to get the policy provisions they want into an Obamacare repeal bill.

Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and vice chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) used their Thursday lunch with the president to encourage Trump to load up the bill with red-meat provisions that might not be allowed under Senate rules. If Republicans are ruled out of order, the conservative duo told the president he could circumvent the Senate parliamentarian.

Meadows and Jordan said, “‘Mr. President, if you want to reduce costs, this may not do it.’ And that’s a concern people have,” summarized Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.).

Asked how overruling Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough would work, he added: “It’s not a formal overrule. … Pence would make the ruling, or the chair would make the ruling, and obviously a Democrat would challenge that, but then you have a floor vote.”

Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) instigated a vote to overrule the chamber’s parliamentarian in 2011 after Democrats grew deeply frustrated with Republicans’ blockade of a slew of Obama’s nominees.

When MacDonough ruled against Republicans during debate on their 2015 Obamacare repeal bill, they responded by tweaking the legislation to render it compliant with reconciliation rules.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday said the GOP opted not to include provisions in their bill that don’t fit Senate rules. But hard-line conservatives, especially in the House, are exasperated with the Senate.

“I’m getting information that everything we want to do is being blocked by the Senate. I don’t buy that, on the insurance reg stuff especially,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), referring to minimum insurance standards required by Obamacare. “Whoever is sitting in the chair has authority over the parliamentarian.”

Republicans tried to gut the law’s so-called essential health benefits in the 2015 reconciliation bill, but the parliamentarian said it would not comply with the rules, according to Republican sources.

The benefits requirement is the top item Republicans would like to get into the reconciliation bill. Several Republicans say they hope Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price can tweak the list of mandatory items through the regulatory process.

Brat added that the House Republicans who are refusing to support the Obamacare repeal bill — he says there are 30 — are doing so “to save Trump.”

Blowing up the Senate rules altogether has been coming for a while. It just can’t function in a hyper-partisan environment by the old rules. The Democrats’ mistake was in not fully blowing it up to their own advantage when they had the chance. I suspect the GOP won’t be quite as reticent.

The funny thing is that President Obama and the Democrats represent a whole lot more actual humans in this country. The old system (like the archaic electoral college and the Senate itself) has worked very well to put these people in power. And they cling to the rules that favor them like they were sent down from Mt Sinai. Other rules that would keep them from exercising full power even though most of the country opposes them are not quite so sacred.

Pass the arsenic laced popcorn. This is going to be quite a show.

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Good news on the health insurance front! 

By Spocko

We hear so many tragic stories about people who will go bankrupt and/or die because of the repeal of the ACA that I thought Americans would want some good news about health care insurance.

12 happy health insurance men – and friend

Things are looking up! Especially for health insurance execs who make more than $500,000 a year!

(BTW, including that detail in the plan feels like something included just so it can get pulled out. “How did that get in there!? [They ask innocently] That’s crazy, of course we will remove it! We care about people*!” All the while keeping in the inclusion of the horrific detail: “61 days without insurance means your pre-existing condition status comes back.”

Chart O’ the Day

by digby

That’s right. Most of the people who have the most to lose under Trumpcare voted for Trump.

I doubt they’ll have regrets. Trump will blame Obama and they’ll believe him. Like all gullible marks they want to believe and so they will. And they’ll never regret not voting for that horrible old hag because she was a corrupt liar and they are sure she would have been much worse.

The sad thing is that if this passes, a lot of these people will have to drop their health insurance because it will be unaffordable. And they will suffer. And no matter how deluded they may be, just like the elderly folks who send their money to Nigeria, they don’t deserve to die just because they are gullible.

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The more worldly people in the Republican Party are to blame for this. They turned Obamacare into the devil for their own cynical political purposes and capitalized on it for years. Now the American people are going to pay for their manipulative malevolence.

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What’s the rush?

by digby

Chris Hayes asks Republicans why they aren’t bothering to have any hearings on their new Trumpcare bill. It seems like a pretty big deal, in that it’s going to dramatically impact one sixth of the economy, 20-30 million people directly and virtually everyone indirectly, and is a matter of life and death.

They don’t have an answer:

.@chrislhayes asks @RepLanceNJ7 how many hearings the GOP has held on Trumpcare 5 times – he won’t answer #inners https://t.co/q6Vxrxpwn8

— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 10, 2017

.@chrislhayes asks 2 GOP congressmen how many people in their districts are on the ACA exchanges. One has no idea and the other is way off. pic.twitter.com/XurjukXBu3

— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 10, 2017

I love the fact that these congressman can’t be bothered to find out how many of their own constituents will be affected by this bill.

But that’s because they don’t care. This is a political game to them, a way to say “gotcha” to their rivals. The fact that humans being will be harmed is not their concern.

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The “President Brand” is doing very well

by digby

It’s all working out very well for him and his family. And nobody cares:

It is a golden age for golf — at least as far as the Trump Organization is concerned.

On Memorial Day weekend, the Senior P.G.A. Championship will be held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington. In July, the company’s course in Bedminster, N.J., is hosting another major event, the United States Women’s Open. The company is also bidding to host the Scottish Open or a half-dozen other possible professional tournaments at courses it owns in spots around the world from Miami to Dubai.

“The stars have all aligned,” Eric Trump, who as executive vice president of the Trump Organization oversees all its golf properties, said on Thursday morning, while sipping an iced tea at the restaurant inside the Trump International Hotel before appearing at a promotional event for the Memorial Day tournament. “I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”

What he did not mention at the news conference, while the cameras were rolling, is the product placement of incalculable value that is helping boost the Trump Organization’s golf courses: his father.

President Trump has given the family’s global inventory of golf courses — 15 that it owns, one that it manages in Dubai and three others under construction — a new level of international attention. He has returned to his home at Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for four out of the last five weekends in office to play golf at two of his nearby courses, including rounds with the prime minister of Japan. Before he was sworn in, Mr. Trump spent days interviewing potential cabinet members at his Bedminster course. In total, Mr. Trump has played golf at least seven times since he was inaugurated — each time at his family’s own courses.

Mr. Trump is certainly not the first golfer in the White House — 16 of the last 19 presidents have been golfers, including Barack Obama, who played 333 rounds of golf, according to a count by Mark Knoller, a CBS News reporter who maintains such data. But Mr. Obama’s most frequent golf venue was Joint Base Andrews, not a collection of golf courses he owns, where membership initiation fees hit as high as $250,000.

It is “synergy” to be sure, for the Trump family and its golf enterprise. Eric Trump says the company has invested more than $1 billion in the golf course business since 2005 and has seen a recent surge in revenue because of the continued rising fortunes on Wall Street, which is always good for this high-end game, as well as the unprecedented attention that the brand is receiving.

But to some, it sounds like a serious conflict of interest. Mr. Trump owns the resorts, and critics say he should not be using the Oval Office as a global advertising platform for his businesses. While Golf Digest has called the president “Golfer in Chief,” these critics say he may be more appropriately called “Marketer in Chief” for Trump golf properties.

“You might call it corruption-tinged synergy,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit group. “It is yet another effort by the family business to cash in on the presidency.”

Eric Trump defended the overlap, saying it was nothing unusual. “Bush arguably brought name recognition to Crawford, Texas,” Eric Trump said on Thursday, noting that George W. Bush had a ranch there that he frequented. But when pressed — Mr. Bush derived no commercial benefit from his ties to Crawford — Eric Trump then offered a different defense.

“The American people elected a businessman,” he said, adding that to his father the golf courses are “his home” and the fact that they are for-profit enterprises is secondary.

But the overlap is already drawing protests, including from environmental groups, which are angry that one of the first acts Mr. Trump took as president was to move to repeal a landmark Environmental Protection Agency rule — hated by the golfing industry — that is intended to protect drinking water supplies. “A devastating economic impact on the golf course industry,” the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America argued, as it urged members to help push to kill the rule.

Even women’s rights and immigrant rights groups are rallying, including one called Wall of Us, which is calling on the Ladies Professional Golf Association to move its United States Open tournament scheduled for July at the Trump family course in New Jersey, given the president’s past comments that many considered insulting to women.

For Mr. Trump, who ridiculed Mr. Obama for playing too much golf when he was in office, the sport is more than a pastime; it is potentially good for his business. And he has been noisily and passionately promoting his golf properties in every corner of the typically staid golf community for more than a decade.

In 2022, Bedminster is scheduled to host one of golf’s most prestigious men’s major championships, and he has forcefully — and so far unsuccessfully — lobbied the sport’s foremost national governing body, the United States Golf Association, to award its most prized tournament, the United States Open, to a Trump golf course.

As early as 2001 he began buying golf courses, and snapped up several in the years after the financial crisis. He typically buys clubs and then spends millions renovating them — and then defies golf conventions.

For example, many of golf’s most distinguished courses are understated and highlight natural elements of topography, but the Trump golf properties often showcase grandiose artificial features like waterfalls, soaring fountains and sculpted rock formations. None of Mr. Trump’s courses made Golf Digest’s 2016/2017 list of top 100 golf courses.

At the same time, several golf courses in the Trump catalog have commanded respect for their impressive layouts and substantial challenges, and because they are routinely in spectacular condition. A few have climbed into annual rankings of top 100 courses nationally or worldwide.

Mr. Trump has for years been the chief promoter of his golf empire. His face, and adept golf swing, have graced the cover of countless golf publications. Until last year, Mr. Trump regularly beseeched prominent golf writers and the editors of top golf magazines to play with him at his courses, offering to whisk them off on his private jet to Scotland.

Though Mr. Trump has said the company’s golf resorts have been a roaring financial success, running golf courses is not easy, and an economic downturn or even a rainy summer can hurt the bottom line.

It is impossible to know how much money Mr. Trump’s courses actually make. The Trump Organization is privately held and it has not released any detailed financial information on them. Mr. Trump has not released his tax returns, which would also shed light on the courses’ profitability.

What little information has been released does not paint a full picture. Take Mr. Trump’s resort in Doral, Fla., which he bought in 2011 with financing from Deutsche Bank. On the financial disclosure forms he was required to file as part of his bid for the presidency, he said that course had revenues of more than $50 million in 2014.

The course’s profits were not listed, but Mr. Trump’s lawyers disclosed in a 2016 court case that after paying operating costs, the resort had actually lost $2.4 million that year.

Long before Mr. Trump was mixing golf and politics, he was well known for doing business on the links.

Mr. Trump brought up one such game at a meeting last month of top corporate executives, pressing Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, to share a story about a game they played years ago at one of Mr. Trump’s courses.

“Jeff actually watched me make a hole in one; can you believe that?” Mr. Trump said at the White House meeting, adding, “I was the best golfer of all the rich people.”

And it’s so nice to see our president parlay the office to make his family wealthier. As he said about not paying taxes like the stupid American worker — that makes him “smart.” And it’s not like he’s being polite to people who give money to charity. That would be corruption and we can’t have that.

Honestly, this is one of the areas in which it’s overwhelmingly obvious that the United States has now become a very big, very rich banana republic. This is not normal. Or, at least, it didn’t used to be.
But I’m afraid that when it’s all said and done and the other side puts up some above-board highly moral Jimmy Carter type the Republicans will attack him for being corrupt and the Democrats will bray ineffectually about how Donald Trump was a corrupt oligarch who got away with murder but it will make no difference.

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Imperial Life in Trump City

by digby

I wrote about the vast incompetence of the DC Coalition Provisional Authority (aka the GOP majority government) for Salon today:

This week’s rollout of Paul Ryan’s “repeal and replace” Obamacare bill is an excellent reminder of what the country would look like if any Republican other than Donald Trump had won the presidency — not that different. We can now say for sure that the problem isn’t just that the party nominated an crude, unprepared conman for the top job. The problem is that the party itself is a big sloppy hot mess. How could we have forgotten?

Like the old Republican cry of “tort reform,” which nobody really understood, “Repeal Obamacare” became a slogan that would evoke lusty cheers from an audience of partisans. If you asked any of them what it meant in practice, not one could tell you. Not that it mattered. The whole issue was political kabuki once the Affordable Care Act was rolled out and tens of millions of people signed on to it, and the Republicans knew it. Their elected legislators just kept voting for repeals they knew would never be enacted and screaming their empty slogan at rallies to keep their base excited.

When Trump unexpectedly won the elections, after having promised that he too would “Repeal Obamacare!” and “replace it with something terrific” which he promised would happen immediately, cover everyone and be much cheaper and much better, Republicans were suddenly stuck with a problem that had no solution. Now that he’s president, Trump has discovered that “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Based on what we’re seeing from the GOP Congress, he’s actually right about that.

I won’t go into all the machinations here because they’re changing by the hour. First Trump’s on board and then he’s not and then he’s back on. (He’s been saying for weeks that he’d really prefer to let Obamacare fail — sabotage it from the executive branch —and then blame the Democrats.) He does not want people to call this monstrosity “Trumpcare” — but everyone is doing it anyway.

House Speaker Paul Ryan is holding televised power point presentations that would be equally incomprehensible but more entertaining if he used some puppets to help him explain it, as Glenn Beck used to do on his old Fox News show to reveal the “Soros conspiracy.” The Freedom Caucus is rebelling, the entire medical community is freaking out, conservative senators are telling Ryan to back off and start over and the White House is still trying to figure out where the light switches are.

In other words, they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Surprise! You thought it was just Trump, didn’t you?

It’s been a while since Republicans had to do anything but run their mouths and throw sand in the government’s gears. Obstruction is much easier than governing. But as they were honing their skills as an opposition party over these last few years, they also empowered a group of amateurs, fanatics and flim-flam artists to rise to positions of power in the party. In their hands opposition was largely a matter of theatrics, playing to the crowd. With the help of the burgeoning right-wing media, vastly wealthy benefactors, a well-established but radicalized ideological infrastructure and an energized grassroots, they won office for a period of years by promising a conservative nirvana with numbers that never added up. The GOP was ripe for a snake oil salesman like Donald Trump.

I mentioned in passing in this Salon piece some time ago that during the Trump transition all the Republicans were seemingly running their résumés through the Heritage Foundation, which was acting as the virtual H.R. department for the new White House. It reminded me that even before the Obama years, when people still extolled the Republicans as the “grownups,” there were strong warning signs that the party was becoming so rigidly partisan that it was losing basic expertise and competence.

The most vivid example of that was the Bush administration’s failed attempt at building a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq after having trashed the place. As chronicled in the book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, young conservatives who had posted their résumés at Heritage back then were hired by the Pentagon for entry-level jobs in Baghdad. They found themselves running multi-million-dollar programs, and making decisions supposedly designed to rebuild a market society for a country of millions of of people. The place was a shambles, with senior people who might know what they were doing fleeing in horror at the mismanagement and lack of direction from above and the infighting and turf wars throughout the operation.

This week’s ProPublica blockbuster exposé of the Trump administration’s “beachhead” operation suggests that Republicans didn’t learn a thing from that disastrous experience. Once again a GOP administration has hired unqualified ideologues and inexperienced neophytes to staff jobs that should be done by professionals. Only this time, it’s not the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq under the catastrophic leadership of appointed “viceroy” Paul Bremer. This time it’s the United States government, under the leadership of a failed businessman who lucked into the presidency with a lot of outside help.

ProPublica’s list of those hired, which its reporters culled from lists gathered from Freedom of Information requests, runs into the hundreds of people, including:

A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school.

And the administration is now crawling with lobbyists, at least 36 of them at last count, despite Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp.” Apparently he drained it and turned it into the executive branch swimming pool. But then his credo is “to the victors belong the spoils,” and that evidently doesn’t just apply to stealing resources from foreign countries. It’s why they call corrupt political machines a “spoils system.”

So we have yet another Republican president throwing Bush-league amateurs into jobs that are over their heads, along with a Republican Congress full of people who’ve either been getting by on an unearned reputation for seriousness or whose definition of legislating is to hold their breath until they turn blue and then declare victory.

If you liked the way the Bush administration handled running Iraq in the first years of the war, you’re going to love how the Trump administration and the GOP Congress runs America. It seems that’s the only model the Republican Party knows anymore.

It’s “great” when Americans don’t work together
by Tom Sullivan

Baby Boomers are too young to remember victory gardens, bacon grease recycling, and Rosie the Riveter, the icon celebrating American women working in WWII factories to build tanks and ships and airplanes for the war effort. But that was over 70 years ago. Somewhere along the way, the Midas cult soured on Americans pulling together. That spirit is dead.

Today, the only female production cultists concern themselves with is reproduction. And they’re pretty selective about that, too. Under the new regime, it’s every man for himself. Women are nobody’s concern except women’s. At least, that’s how Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois treats their health care. This exchange during the 27 hours of debate on the Republican Obamacare replacement in the House Energy and Commerce Committee captures the new Make America Great Again ethos.

The Republican congressman voiced complaints about coverage mandated in the Affordable Care Act. Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle (Pa.) asked him to give specifics:

“What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus replied. “I’m just … is that not correct? And should they?”

Doyle reminded Shimkus there is no health care plan that covers only the personal medical choices of each person.

“There’s no such thing as a la carte insurance, John,” Doyle stated.

“That’s the point, that’s the point,” Shimkus countered. “We want the consumer to be able to go to the insurance market and be able to negotiate on a plan.”

“You tell me what insurance company will [negotiate a plan],” Doyle fired back. “There isn’t a single insurance company in the world that does that, John. You’re talking about something that doesn’t exist.”

In a press release from June 2013, Shimkus identified himself as “a Christian who is 100 percent pro-life.”

WOW. The #GOP’s reason to object to insurance covering prenatal care? “Why should men pay for it?” Watch: #Trumpcare #ProtectOurCare pic.twitter.com/Q55nG1Un8j— NARAL (@NARAL) March 9, 2017

Shimkus’ views are of a piece with Speaker Paul Ryan’s misshapen views of how insurance is supposed to work. He displayed those yesterday in a PowerPoint presentation that opened him up to instant Internet mockery. Charlie Pierce writes:

It was like watching something on cable access late at night, or a flop-sweaty rookie substitute teacher, and it was hilarious—except for the parts where people will lose their health insurance and die, of course. And this is what he said and, peace be unto Dave Barry, I am not making it up, either:

Paul Ryan said that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidize the sick.

This is literally how all insurance works. If someone’s house burns down, some of your fire insurance money goes to help that person rebuild. If someone gets sick, some of your premium, healthy person, goes toward that person’s coverage. Increasingly, I have come to believe that Paul Ryan is a not particularly bright creature from another world. Let us see if we can explain this to the lad.

This is literally how America provides for the common defense and general welfare, too, by pooling resources and sharing risks. It’s how we bought those ships Rosie riveted.

God save us all, Ryan is still in training pants and they let him drive and vote. He’s two steps away from the White House and he’d be an improvement on the current resident.

Susie Madrak tweeted:

I knew that Paul Ryan presentation reminded me of something: Timeshare salesmen! #slick #snakeoil— SuburbanGuerrilla (@SusieMadrak) March 9, 2017

But what really churns my gut is this anti-American view among the likes of Ryan and Shimkus that it is somehow anti-American for Americans to pull together, to pool resources and have each other’s backs. You know, all that “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again” stuff. All that working together for the common good from before my time when America was supposed to be great or something. Now it’s “American” to think I’ve got mine, screw you.

Timeshare salesmen indeed.

A Pro-Trump Rally

by digby

A lot of very nice people showed up:

Uhm… holy shit…

Maricopa County burnished its reputation as the Trumpiest in America last weekend as hundreds of locals, including heavily armed militiamen, white nationalists and even a few elected officials, gathered to support the 45th president. The ensuing “March for Trump” was as horrifying as it sounds.

“I heard ‘lock her up, lock her up,’ and we still need to pursue that,” announced Arizona Congressman Anthony Kern; a nod to a prominent Trump campaign promise to imprison then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“If you don’t like it here, go to Syria, go to someplace else,” one attendee shouted.

“I don’t want ’em, as a veteran I don’t want ’em, let ’em go back home,” another seconded. “If they’ve got a problem, let Saudi Arabia take care of ’em.”

Some even dared to tell Dan Cohen of the The Real News Network how they’d make America great again now that Trump was in office. And Muslims weren’t the only religious minority unwelcomed.

“If she is Jewish, she should go back to her country,” a 13-year-old Trump supporter said of a protester.

“This is America, we don’t want Sharia Law,” one attendee explained. “Christian country,” he added.

One man insisted that Senator John McCain was a “secret communist.”

“I think there’s a lot there,” he said of Pizzagate, a deranged right-wing conspiracy theory that Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was running a child prostitution ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. “Definitely enough to warrant an investigation.”

The day’s proceedings would grow uglier still.

“I just want to let them know that I can’t wait for the liberal genocide to begin,” an Oath Keeper shouted at a small group of protesters.

“That’s the way to make America great again,” he later told Cohen. “Liberals are destroying the country.”

By the way, this is happening too:

I assume these crazies are a small minority. But the number of young faces in that group is very disturbing.

And notice how may are still proudly sporting their Hillary for Prison shirts. That makes them feel very, very powerful.

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“You can do anything”

by digby

Poster in New York City on International Women’s Day

The state of the scandal

by digby

This piece from Julian Sanchez about the wiretapping brouhaha is the sanest summary I’ve read:

I’ve already explained, in a post over at Just Security, some of the law and background surrounding what we know about Donald Trump’s incendiary claim that his predecessor wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower during the presidential campaign, and I’d suggest reading that if you want to delve into some of the wonky details, but I thought it might be worth a separate point to pull out some of the critical points and remark on how the story has evolved since Saturday.

There’s no basis on the public record to support the allegation that phones at Trump Tower were wiretapped, or that the Trump campaign was targeted for electronic surveillance, let alone on the orders of Barack Obama. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has publicly denied it, and FBI Director James Comey has reportedly been pressing for a disavowal from the Justice Department. This appears to be something Trump concocted on the basis of (deep breath now) his own misreading of a misleading Breitbart News article based on a talk radio host’s summary of months-old reports in the British press. Those news stories—which conspicuously haven’t been reported out by the deeply-sourced intelligence journalists at U.S. outlets, and so should be taken with a grain of salt—concern some sort of order, purportedly sought by the FBI from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, targeting Russian banks in order to follow up intelligence leads concerning possible transfers of funds from Russia to Trump aides. If the reports are true, that’s vastly different from what Trump alleged, and not obviously improper on its face, though when intelligence surveillance intersects domestic politics, even indirectly, there’s always an elevated risk of abuse.

The White House has been dodging and weaving a bit in its public statements following Trump’s allegations on Twitter. Initially, aides told multiple reporters that they thought the president had been reacting to the Breitbart piece, which was circulated internally on Friday. But, as I explain in more detail in my Just Security post, the sources drawn on for the Breitbart piece don’t actually support Trump’s claims. More recently, spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway insinuated that Trump may have some other classified basis for his accusations. She’s called on the FBI to release more information, while other White House officials have suggested it should fall to Congress to investigate. This is all, to put it mildly, grossly irresponsible. If the president has classified information about improper surveillance of his campaign, he is empowered to declassify it. If he’s not sure whether to believe what he reads on the Internet, the head of the executive branch is not limited to relying on Breitbart News to learn about the activities of his own intelligence community. But it should be wholly unacceptable for Trump to level serious accusations of criminal abuse of intelligence authorities by his predecessor,  then punt to Congress when pressed to produce evidence.

The fact that Trump is apparently unshakable in his conviction on this point, with one spokesman indicating that he doesn’t believe Comey’s denial, is one more data point confirming that the relationship between the White House and the intelligence community had become untenably dysfunctional.  At the most recent Cato Surveillance Conference, a panel of former senior intelligence professionals voiced concern that Trump might be unwilling to accept intelligence that conflicted with his preconceptions. Some skepticism of the intelligence community is, to be sure, both healthy and justified, but if the president is more inclined to trust thinly-sourced conspiracy theories on talk radio than his own FBI director, that seems to quite starkly validate the panelists’ concerns. Signaling that intelligence output is going to be disregarded whenever the facts aren’t to the president’s liking is how you get politicized intelligence, which is detrimental to national security and, in the worst case, can lead to outcomes like foreign wars over nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Notwithstanding all that, it could not hurt for Congress to kick the tires a bit and ask to be briefed on what intelligence tools have been employed in the course of the Russia inquiry, to what extent they may have ensnared either the communications or other records pertaining to Trump associates, and how widely any such information was subsequently disseminated. Not, again, because there’s any reason to credit Trump’s dramatic claims, but because the crossroads where foreign intelligence meets domestic politics is inherently a high-risk territory. Our history is, alas, replete with instances of information gleaned from foreign intelligence surveillance—often pursuant to investigations that were, in their inception, perfectly legitimate—later being improperly used to advance a political agenda. Quite apart from Trump’s most recent allegations, news headlines over the past month have been dominated by intelligence leaks that create the appearance of a war between the administration and elements of the intelligence community, which as I’ve written previously, is unlikely to end well for American democracy whichever side comes out on top.

This last is important but wishful thinking I’m afraid. I do not believe that anyone Republican other than say, Just Amash are sincere in their sudden “concern” about this.It’s not in the right wing DNA to deny authority. And whatever vestige of civil libertarianism there was in the party is going by the wayside very quickly in the age of Trump. And frankly a lot of Democrats are little better although there are many more civil libertarians among them than Republicans.

Still, it’s important to keep trying:

To the extent all this has awakened some members of Congress to the potential for abuse inherent in so-called “incidental” collection of Americans’ communications and other information as a byproduct of foreign-targeted surveillance, one hopes that newfound awareness outlives this news cycle. Many of the same officials now incensed by leaks harmful to the Trump administration have pooh-pooed concerns about the scale of collection on U.S. citizens under §702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which must be reauthorized—and ought to be reformed—by the end of the year. Several pundits have made the Obama administration’s loosening of the rules for sharing raw intelligence collected by the NSA pursuant to Executive Order 12333 part of their narrative about a “soft coup” against Trump by the “Deep State.” Surely they should be even more worried about the fact that the FBI can query NSA’s vast databases of §702 intercepts for the communications of Americans, exempt even from the statutory requirement (which does apply to CIA and NSA) to count and report on how often such “backdoor searches” occur. If such easy access to intercepts presents an unacceptable risk of political abuse, surely the solution is not simply to purge the current intelligence bureaucracy and stuff it with more devout loyalists, but to change the rules that make it possible.

The only American the Republicans seem to be concerned about is Donald Trump. I’m sure they would be concerned about themselves. But the principle of the thing is lost on them. Always has been.

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