Month: October 2017

Checking in with the Alternative Facts mediaby digby
Let’s catch up with the news in Bizarroworld, shall we?

That pretty much covers it.

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Oh Look, a little collusion on the edgesby digby
It looks like Trump’s campaign was trying to work with Wikileaks. Not that it matters of course. We know the whole thing is made up and Trump is just an honest guy trying to make America great again. Still, it’s a tiny bit interesting:

Alexander Nix, who heads a controversial data-analytics firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, wrote in an email last year that he reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails.

Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton’s missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix’s email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own.

If the claims Nix made in that email are true, this would be the closest known connection between Trump’s campaign and Assange.
Cambridge Analytica did not provide comment for this story by press time.

After publication, Assange provided this statement to The Daily Beast: ”We can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks.”

Nobody has published the 33,000 emails that were deleted from the personal email server Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of State.
“It’s not at all clear that anybody hacked Clinton’s emails or has them,” said one of the sources familiar with the investigation.

Nothing to see here at all. Can we move along from this Russia thing now?

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Making America Great Again one onerous fee at a timeby digby

These expensive new fees for our national parks are necessary to pay for Ivanka’s tax cuts. I’m sure you understand the priorities:

The National Park Service proposes more than doubling the entrance fees at 17 popular national parks, including Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone, to help pay for infrastructure improvements.

Under the agency’s proposal, the entrance fee for a private vehicle would jump to $70 during peak season, from its current rate of $25 to $30.

The cost for a motorcycle entering the park could increase to $50, from the current fee of $15 to $25. The cost for people entering the park on foot or on bike could go to $30, up from the current rate of $10 to $15.

The cost of the annual pass, which permits entrance into all federal lands and parks, would remain at $80.

The proposal would affect the following 17 national parks during the 2018 peak season:

Arches
Bryce Canyon
Canyonlands
Denali
Glacier
Grand Canyon
Grand Teton
Olympic
Sequoia & Kings Canyon
Yellowstone
Yosemite
Zion
Acadia
Mount Rainier
Rocky Mountain
Shenandoah
Joshua Tree
Peak pricing would affect each park’s busiest five months for visitors.

The National Park Service said the increase would help pay for badly needed improvements, including to roads, bridges, campgrounds, waterlines, bathrooms and other visitor services at the parks. The fee hikes could also boost national park revenue by $70 million per year, it said.

“The infrastructure of our national parks is aging and in need of renovation and restoration,” Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said in a statement.

Of the 417 national park sites, 118 charge an entrance fee.

The National Park service has opened the proposal to public comments for 30 days at its website.

The proposal was blasted by the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

“We should not increase fees to such a degree as to make these places — protected for all Americans to experience — unaffordable for some families to visit,” the group’s president and CEO Theresa Pierno said in a statement. “The solution to our parks’ repair needs cannot and should not be largely shouldered by its visitors.”

Ivanka, Junior, Eric, Tiffany and Baron need a tax cut. It’s the least we can do for our Royal Family.

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But her emails!by digby
I’m too exhausted with the Clinton-press relationship to go into the details of why this latest hysteria about the dossier is nonsense. Suffice to say that they are doing it again and the only way to explain it is that they know they dropped the ball during the campaign and are now eager to prove they were right to demonize Clinton after all. It is, of course, based on another lie. I’m just going to let Josh Marshall lay out the issue:

I wanted to follow up on my post from last night about the latest news on the Steele Dossier. As I explained last night, the Democratic party’s top election lawyer, Marc Elias, deserves some kind of vast national, public thank you since his decision to fund the Fusion GPS/Steele research likely played a key role in blocking the ‘grand bargain’ and policy payoffs to Russia which President Trump was hoping to make in January and February of this year.

But let’s look at the follow-up story in The New York Times.

As I explained last night, almost everything we learned last night had been known for roughly a year: specifically, that after Republican funders lost interest in probing President Trump’s ties to Russia, Democrats began funding the on-going research by Fusion GPS. What we learned last night was specifically which Democrats. A new filing from the law firm of Perkins Coie showed that it was Marc Elias who contracted Fusion GPS with funds from the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Last night on Twitter the two Times reporters who wrote the overnight storywent on Twitter and said that Elias had earlier denied all of this. One of the two reporters, Maggie Haberman, went so far as to say that Elias and others had not only lied but “lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

Ken Vogel, the lead on the Times piece, suggested that Elias had given a more general but adamant denial. “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’”

(Just in the interest of full visibility and transparency, Vogel’s a great investigative reporter.)

The Times article suggests that it was less a flat denial than some misleading but lawyerly language on Elias’s part. Citing Anita Dunn, longtime Democratic communications hand, the Times says this …

Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic operative working with Perkins Coie, said on Tuesday that Mr. Elias “was certainly familiar with some of, but not all, of the information” in the dossier. But, she said “he didn’t have and hadn’t seen the full document, nor was he involved in pitching it to reporters.” And Mr. Elias “was not at liberty to confirm Perkins Coie as the client at that point,” Ms. Dunn said.

As I wrote last night, whether Elias lied about his role funding the Fusion GPS research is really his problem. It seems clear, even based on the Times reporting, that the Clinton campaign did not know about Fusion GPS or what subcontractor was working on an oppo research project (nor would it have been routine for them to know). The key point as a story is that we already knew that the project began with funding from Republicans. Republicans lost interest after Trump won the nomination. Then Elias agreed to fund continuing the work. As I noted last night, Elias deserves some kind of big national security award from the US government for this.

But here’s what jumps out at me about the Times story: what’s not included. Let me list a few points.

* The fact that it has been publicly known for more than a year that the Fusion GPS investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia began with funding from Republicans and was later funded by Democrats. This has been known since David Corn’s report in October 2016 and reported in numerous other reports since. This is never mentioned in the Times article.

* The fact that the Fusion GPS’s investigation into Russia began as a project funded by Republicans. This is never mentioned in the Times report, although it’s alluded to in the letter from Perkins Coie Managing Partner Matthew J. Gehringer. (The precise timeline is this: Republicans hire Fusion GPS to investigate Trump business. Investigation quickly turns to focus on Trump’s ties to Russia. Republicans lose interest. Elias agrees to continue the funding with money from DNC/HRC campaign. Steele brought in to go deeper into Russia ties.)

* The Times report can be read to suggest that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $12.4 million for the Fusion GPS research. But as the Post notes, these tabulations date back to June and November 2015, fully a year before Elias signed up Fusion GPS. So by definition, it can’t all be for that research.

* Leaving out the first two points makes the Times piece seem quite misleading to me. In a different category is another detail left out. As the Post notes, the Democrats stopped funding the Fusion GPS the day before the election. But Steele had already shared his findings with the FBI because he was so alarmed by what he had found. The FBI was sufficiently disturbed and confident in Steele’s work that they agreed to continue funding his work. (They eventually stopped once Steele’s name became public.) This is highly relevant information for determining the quality and credibility of Steele’s findings. But it doesn’t appear in the Times report even though the lede of the Times report focuses squarely on Republican accusations about Steele and Fusion GPS.

Let me quote the third and fourth paragraphs of the Times piece …

The revelation, which emerged from a letter filed in court on Tuesday, is likely to fuel new partisan attacks over federal and congressional investigations into Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s election and whether any of Mr. Trump’s associates assisted in the effort. 

The president and his allies have argued for months that the investigations are politically motivated. They have challenged the information contained in the dossier, which was compiled by a former British spy who had been contracted by the Washington research firm Fusion GPS.

The FBI’s confidence in Steele’s work and going so far as to agree to keep funding it seems highly relevant information in evaluating those attacks. At the end of the day, what seems relevant to me is that the funding behind the Steele/Fusion GPS effort has been known since last year. It had details about at least the outlines of the Russian subversion campaign long before they were publicly known. 

How there’s anything bad about money from the campaign and the DNC helping to fund it is a complete mystery. The only problem is why they didn’t do more with it since this was critical information for the public to know. But the public was left in the dark.

I’m sure we’ll see hysterical calls for Hillary Clinton to don her hair shirt and come before the country to apologize for doing something that every other campaign does in order to appease Maggie Haberman of the New York Times who lashed out last night on twitter. We’ve seen this movie over and over and over again.

This is not a story. I knew that Democrats had paid for the dossier after the Republicans who originally funded the research dropped out since October of 2016, before the election. It was in the very first story published about it by David Corn of Mother Jones. The New York Times said it in every article they’ve written about it. Why this is a story now is simply because the wingnuts are pushing it and the Village media are trying once again to cover their own misbehavior during the campaign. It’s the same dynamic we’ve seen for many, many years.

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The shock troops of the “culture of dehumanization”by digby

I wrote about Jeff Flake and the NRA for Salon this morning. Flake is trying to tone down the rhetoric (if not the policy.) The latter is ramping up to a full fledged armed conflict:
On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump spent hours insulting Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee on Twitter, House Republicans announced they were planning to launch congressional investigations into a couple of old, bogus Clinton scandals (including those emails again), the story of the Niger ambush shape-shifted into something very different than what we’d heard and a protester threw Russian flags in Donald Trump’s face as he was on his way to lunch in the U.S. Senate.

Then all hell broke loose.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a longtime Trump critic, announced that (like Corker) he would not run for re-election. Then he went to the floor and gave a speech condemning the president’s behavior and his party’s complicity in what he had described in his recent book as a “culture of vicious dehumanization.”

Sens. Corker, Flake and John McCain, as well as former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have all made similar speeches in recent days, taking Trump to task for what Flake called on Tuesday “the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals” and “the daily sundering of our country — the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons.” In other words, there is a Republican rebellion brewing against Trump’s puerile, obtuse, demagogic conduct and demeanor, which they consider a risk to the republic. They are correct in that. He is a clear and present danger.

After all the Sturm und Drang of yesterday’s speech and the fallout from Trump’s Twitter rant against Corker, it’s important to note that all three of those senators voted with their party on Tuesday night to nullify a signature regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which banned forced arbitration provisions, essentially giving a big fat wet kiss to big business and Wall Street. That perfectly illustrates one very important point about all this feuding within the Republican Party: It has very little to do with policy.

It’s true that Republicans were unable to pass their signature promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. That wasn’t because they didn’t agree on the necessity of doing it, only about how to get it done. Even then, it was a close-run thing, with McCain casting the deciding no vote on the basis of process, not substance (and, let’s face it, for a measure of personal revenge.)

In other words, these Republicans are not having a big change of heart about what they want to do. They are simply waking up at last to the fact that their base could not care less about their “ideology.” All those years of dog-whistle racism, nativism and white nationalism, with obscure references to freedom and small government and “family values,” worked all too well. Their voters heard it loud and clear and figured out that all the blather about tort reform and death taxes were winks and nods toward what was really important: the culture war. At last the true-blue culture warriors have their own loony commander in chief and he’s fighting it out in the open.

We’ve had scary hints lately of where this might be headed. Steve Bannon is out making speeches about “winning at all costs” and taking credit for every establishment Republican who throws in the towel rather than face a far-right primary challenger. A bloody culture war by attrition. Recent exposés about the affiliations between Breitbart News, its wealthy benefactors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, and the white supremacist movement are downright chilling. But nothing illustrates the escalation of the culture war more vividly than the new direction of the National Rifle Association.

After the massacre in Las Vegas, we went through the usual ritual of expressing our horror at such wanton, useless violence, while some people insisted that “this time” we really were going to “do something.” Mowing down hundreds of citizens at a country music festival for no apparent reason seems like something that might actually spur action on the part of political leaders. The NRA stayed silent for several days and then quietly said it would not object to regulation of the “bump stock,” the device that made it possible for one person to shoot so many people so quickly. Hallelujah, the NRA has seen the light!

The NRA and its CEO Wayne LaPierre knew if they just waited a few days, we would all move on to the next crisis and nothing would happen. They were right. The legislation to regulate bump stocks is stalled in Congress, and Donald Trump’s White House isn’t likely to press the question.

The NRA is Trump’s staunchest supporter, after all, and it’s opening a new front in the culture war on his behalf. Last week, the group released the latest in a series of videos that had previously appeared to threaten the press and the Resistance. The new video features NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch issuing this call to arms:

We are witnesses to the most ruthless attack on a president, and the people who voted for him, and the free system that allowed it to happen in American history. From the highest levels of government, to their media, universities and billionaires, their hateful defiance of his legitimacy is an insult to each of us. But the ultimate insult is that they think we’re so stupid that we’ll let them get away with it. These saboteurs, slashing away with their leaks and sneers, their phony accusations and gagging sanctimony, drive their daggers through the heart of our future, poisoning our belief that honest custody of our institutions will ever again be possible. So they can then build their utopia from the ashes of what they burned down. No, their fate will be failure and they will perish in the political flames of their own fires.

One is tempted to suggest that purple passage could have used an editor. But these people are armed to the teeth, so I’m assuming they’re serious about all that lurid, violent imagery.

That ugly “us against them” rhetoric is the consequence of people like John McCain and Bob Corker taking advantage of everything the right-wing media could offer their party, while turning a deaf ear to what Jeff Flake has called the “culture of vicious dehumanization.” That culture is turning into a full-fledged war and the NRA is leading the charge.

Will anyone try to stop them?

A curious factoid
by Tom Sullivan

Wonder Lake and Denali. Photo by Denali National Park and Preserve via Creative Commons.

“Elegant” and “depressing” is how the Washington Post describes Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s speech yesterday. After castigating the sitting president’s behavior as “reckless, outrageous, and undignified,” and saying he would “not be complicit” in supporting conduct within the executive branch that is “not normal,” the Arizona Republican announced he would not run for reelection. Flake said:

It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party — the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.

From the Post’s lead editorial:

“None of this is normal,” Mr. Flake said. “And what do we as United States senators have to say about it?”

The answer: not much. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has been speaking up — after he, too, decided not to stand for reelection. A few others have shown some courage at times: Mr. Flake’s fellow Arizonan, the indomitable John McCain; the independent-minded Susan Collins of Maine; Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. But given that Mr. Flake’s fellow Republicans privately agree with much of what he had to say, the silence from his leaders and most of his colleagues is overpowering.

Others joined in, including Stephen Colbert, noting that Flake would be “complicit and absent.” Colbert continued:

“First McCain, then Corker, now Flake,” Colbert said. “Why is it that Republicans only speak up against Donald Trump when they know they’re not running for re-election? They finally grow a set, and then they say, ‘I’m taking my balls and going home!’”

Several data points in the citations above — “governing philosophy,” Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and “not normal” — come together in something Political Animal’s Nancy LeTourneau picked up yesterday from a report in Alaska Dispatch News.

Murkowski’s fellow Republican and fellow Alaskan, Sen. Dan Sullivan, told a story to the recent convention of the Alaska Federation of Natives. He described a meting he and Murkowski had had in the Oval Office with the president and Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke:

“We had maps and we were talking all about Alaska issues. So many issues. Our fisheries. Whaling, the culture of whaling in Alaska. The economy. The military,” Sullivan said.

They brought up Obama administration actions that they said hurt Alaska, such as a block on the King Cove-Cold Bay road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, Sullivan said.

On each one, Trump asked Zinke: “Can we change that and help Alaska?”

Trump thought of one on his own. Wasn’t the name of a big mountain in Alaska changed by executive order? he asked, referring to Denali, the former Mount McKinley named for the president from Ohio.

“Lisa — Sen. Murkowski — and I jumped over the desk. We said no, no!” said Sullivan, who is originally from Ohio.

Why? Trump asked.

“The Alaska Native people named that mountain over 10,000 years ago,” Sullivan said he told him. “Denali, that was the name.”

What jumped out at LeTourneau is, here is a man with no discernible knowledge about the job to which he was elected. She had a short list of what he’s proven he doesn’t know, to which I’d add no discernible of knowledge of domestic or foreign policy. In the Republican debates, the would-be commander-in-chief didn’t know what the nuclear triad was. He has no knowledge of or interest in legislative procedure.

The CEO president issues memos of what he wants done to the co-equal legislative branch and just expects them to take care of it, as he would his underlings in the private sector. He probably had to watch “I’m Just a Bill” on YouTube for the basics on how a bill becomes law.

LeTourneau observes:

So the real estate mogul from New York who didn’t know things like what happened with immigration reform in 2013 did know that President Obama officially returned Mount McKinley to its original name, Mount Denali. Trump wanted to reverse that action, but had no clue why the people of Alaska would object.

What that tells me is that Trump focused like a laser beam on what Obama accomplished—even to the point of noting that he renamed Mount Denali. But just as with things like Obamacare, the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran nuclear agreement, he didn’t bother to learn anything about the actual policies. He simply cataloged them and became obsessed with undoing them, just as Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested.

He doesn’t know much, but somewhere in his lizard brain he’s filed away odd factoids like that. It’s “an itemized list of Obama’s accomplishments” and he’s “made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his presidency,” LeTourneau writes.

He has no governing philosophy other than getting even. I re-read Obama’s 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech and remember the reality star’s stone-faced scowl all the way through it. Sadly, it’s actually plausible that our sitting president ran for office to get revenge on Obama — both for winning the presidency in spite of his opposition and then for poking fun at him afterwards.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Go Dodgers!by digby

A couple of Dodger cats with their toy Dodger Dogs rooting for the home team. Big night for LA baseball fans. It’s 100 degrees, a record for LA at this time of year and a record for the World Series.
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If they can’t lock her up for the uranium sale, maybe this will workby digby
On TV today, over-stimulated pundits are all excited about the new investigations into Hillary Clinton’s alleged collusion with the Russian government back in 2010 to give them uranium so that they could have nuclear weapons (which they’ve had since the 1950s but whatever.) Anyhoo, they aren’t stopping with that:

Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) released the following statement after opening a joint investigation into decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016:

“Our justice system is represented by a blind-folded woman holding a set of scales. Those scales do not tip to the right or the left; they do not recognize wealth, power, or social status. The impartiality of our justice system is the bedrock of our republic and our fellow citizens must have confidence in its objectivity, independence, and evenhandedness. The law is the most equalizing force in this country. No entity or individual is exempt from oversight.

“Decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 have led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered. These include, but are not limited to:

• FBI’s decision to publicly announce the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s handling of classified information but not to publicly announce the investigation into campaign associates of then-candidate Donald Trump;
• FBI’s decision to notify Congress by formal letter of the status of the investigation both in October and November of 2016;
• FBI’s decision to appropriate full decision making in respect to charging or not charging Secretary Clinton to the FBI rather than the DOJ;
• FBI’s timeline in respect to charging decisions.

“The Committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn. Congress has a constitutional duty to preserve the integrity of our justice system by ensuring transparency and accountability of actions taken.”

According to pundits on CNN the one thing the GOP base wants more than anything is to lock up Hillary Clinton. This is the most potent base motivator they have. Build the wall, lock her up, ban the muslims. This is what moves them. It’s all that moves them.

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Flake’s a Trumpist
by tristero

Like fellow Republican Ted Bundy, who could and did charm and deceive many gullible people before slaughtering them, Jeff Flake is affable, good looking and personable. Don’t be fooled.

Flake has voted the Trump agenda over 91% of the time. He will now position himself as the moderate alternative to the insane Trump. And without for a moment diminishing the existential threat Trump is, a President Flake would be more deceitful, more cunning, and likely get more terrible things done.

We live in dreadful times when someone with a political agenda as extreme as Flake is looked to as some kind of hero.

Update by digby:

I don’t see it quite this way, FWIW. I think Charlie Pierce makes the nuanced case here.

“Reckless, outraged and undignified” by digby
Jeff Flake’s speech was hopefully a first step in the GOP reining in Trump until the Democrats can take back the congress. It’s the best we can do at the moment. It’s not much but it’s all we’ve got.
Here it is:

Mr. President, I rise today to address a matter that has been much on my mind, at a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than it is by our values and our principles. Let me begin by noting a somewhat obvious point that these offices that we hold are not ours to hold indefinitely. We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office. And there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles.

Now is such a time.

It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret, because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics, regret because of the indecency of our discourse, regret because of the coarseness of our leadership, regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our — all of our — complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.

In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order — that phrase being “the new normal.” But we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue — with the tone set at the top.

We must never regard as “normal” the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country – the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.

None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that this is just the way things are now. If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that this is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences, and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.

Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as “telling it like it is,” when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified.

And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else: It is dangerous to a democracy. Such behavior does not project strength — because our strength comes from our values. It instead projects a corruption of the spirit, and weakness.

It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? — what are we going to say?

Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.

Here, today, I stand to say that we would better serve the country and better fulfill our obligations under the constitution by adhering to our Article 1 “old normal” — Mr. Madison’s doctrine of the separation of powers. This genius innovation which affirms Madison’s status as a true visionary and for which Madison argued in Federalist 51 — held that the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract each other when necessary. “Ambition counteracts ambition,” he wrote.

But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition? What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats? Of course not, and we would be wrong if we did.

When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do — because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseum — when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

Now, I am aware that more politically savvy people than I caution against such talk. I am aware that a segment of my party believes that anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect.

If I have been critical, it not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the president of the United States. If I have been critical, it is because I believe that it is my obligation to do so, as a matter of duty and conscience. The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters – the notion that one should say and do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.

A Republican president named Roosevelt had this to say about the president and a citizen’s relationship to the office:

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.” President Roosevelt continued. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

Acting on conscience and principle is the manner in which we express our moral selves, and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. I certainly put myself at the top of the list of those who fall short in that regard. I am holier-than-none. But too often, we rush not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing—until the accommodation itself becomes our principle.

In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice almost any principle. I’m afraid that is where we now find ourselves.

When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country and instead of addressing it goes looking for somebody to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to first look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops. Humility helps. Character counts. Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly and debased appetites in us.

Leadership lives by the American creed: E Pluribus Unum. From many, one. American leadership looks to the world, and just as Lincoln did, sees the family of man. Humanity is not a zero-sum game. When we have been at our most prosperous, we have also been at our most principled. And when we do well, the rest of the world also does well.

These articles of civic faith have been central to the American identity for as long as we have all been alive. They are our birthright and our obligation. We must guard them jealously, and pass them on for as long as the calendar has days. To betray them, or to be unserious in their defense is a betrayal of the fundamental obligations of American leadership. And to behave as if they don’t matter is simply not who we are.
Now, the efficacy of American leadership around the globe has come into question. When the United States emerged from World War II we contributed about half of the world’s economic activity. It would have been easy to secure our dominance, keeping the countries that had been defeated or greatly weakened during the war in their place. We didn’t do that. It would have been easy to focus inward. We resisted those impulses. Instead, we financed reconstruction of shattered countries and created international organizations and institutions that have helped provide security and foster prosperity around the world for more than 70 years.

Now, it seems that we, the architects of this visionary rules-based world order that has brought so much freedom and prosperity, are the ones most eager to abandon it.

The implications of this abandonment are profound. And the beneficiaries of this rather radical departure in the American approach to the world are the ideological enemies of our values. Despotism loves a vacuum. And our allies are now looking elsewhere for leadership. Why are they doing this? None of this is normal. And what do we as United States Senators have to say about it?

The principles that underlie our politics, the values of our founding, are too vital to our identity and to our survival to allow them to be compromised by the requirements of politics. Because politics can make us silent when we should speak, and silence can equal complicity.
I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit.

I have decided that I will be better able to represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and my conscience by freeing myself from the political considerations that consume far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.
To that end, I am announcing today that my service in the Senate will conclude at the end of my term in early January 2019.

It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican party — the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.

There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal — but mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems and giving in to the impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

We were not made great as a country by indulging or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorying in the things which divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are.

This spell will eventually break. That is my belief. We will return to ourselves once more, and I say the sooner the better. Because to have a heathy government we must have healthy and functioning parties. We must respect each other again in an atmosphere of shared facts and shared values, comity and good faith. We must argue our positions fervently, and never be afraid to compromise. We must assume the best of our fellow man, and always look for the good. Until that days comes, we must be unafraid to stand up and speak out as if our country depends on it. Because it does.

I plan to spend the remaining fourteen months of my senate term doing just that.

Mr. President, the graveyard is full of indispensable men and women — none of us here is indispensable. Nor were even the great figures from history who toiled at these very desks in this very chamber to shape this country that we have inherited. What is indispensable are the values that they consecrated in Philadelphia and in this place, values which have endured and will endure for so long as men and women wish to remain free. What is indispensable is what we do here in defense of those values. A political career doesn’t mean much if we are complicit in undermining those values.

I thank my colleagues for indulging me here today, and will close by borrowing the words of President Lincoln, who knew more about healing enmity and preserving our founding values than any other American who has ever lived. His words from his first inaugural were a prayer in his time, and are no less so in ours:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.