Month: January 2018

Acceptable casualties
by Tom Sullivan

As expected, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on a lower court order that North Carolina immediately redraw congressional district boundaries. The three-judge panel found them so partisan it ruled them unconstitutional gerrymanders. North Carolina Republican legislative leaders argued that such action in an election year was unwarranted. Plus, the court already has decisions pending in similar cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. Those rulings will impact the North Carolina case.

Republican lawmakers stated openly their motivations behind the current maps. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” Representative David Lewis said during drafting. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” Partisan gerrymanders are permissible because they are not against the law, Lewis argued:

“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

The plan worked:

In 2016, the court said, Republican congressional candidates won 53 percent of the statewide vote. But they won in 10 of the 13 congressional districts, or 77 percent of them.

Whether partisan gerrymanders are constitutional may be decided in the Wisconsin and Maryland cases. At issue is whether (as I alluded to earlier regarding Maryland) Republicans drawn into safe districts for Democratic incumbents are denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment, and vice versa. Gerrymandering districts “safe” for your party treats your own voters in opponents’ safe districts as acceptable casualties. Independent voters are pawns in both.

That three such cases have reached the Supreme Court speaks to the prevalence of the practice and the threat gerrymandering as now practiced poses to democratic norms. If former United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were arguing the case, he might consider an appeal to norms “quaint,” but as we have seen with the current administration, democratic norms underlie more of our constitutional system than we previuosly realized.

The New York Times provides a walk-through of the issues at stake. In it, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit calls partisan gerrymandering “a cancer on democracy,” adding:

“The widespread nature of gerrymandering in modern politics is matched by the almost universal absence of those who will defend its negative effect on our democracy,” wrote Judge Niemeyer. “Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans have decried it when wielded by their opponents but nonetheless continue to gerrymander in their own self-interest when given the opportunity.”

Republican Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland has announced nonpartisan redistricting reform legislation as well as signing onto an amicus brief for the plaintiffs in the Maryland case.

Hogan, a Republican governor in a heavily Democratic state, is less gleeful about the practice than his North Carolina co-partisans whose motives in seeking further delay, plaintiffs there say, Republicans admit openly:

“But their true motive is as plain as day: the Republican contingent of the legislature wants to enjoy the fruits of their grossly unconstitutional actions for yet another election cycle.”

And so they shall.

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Donnie was a bad, bad boyby digby

Trump is going to be in a very bad mood tomorrow. In Touch is going to publish the lurid interview with adult film star Stormy Daniels in which she goes into detail sexual encounters with Donald Trump in the last decade.And then there’s this:

Mother Jones has learned that Daniels years earlier talked about having had a sexual relationship with Trump—and in lurid detail. According to 2009 emails between political operatives who were at the time advising Daniels on a possible political campaign, the adult film actor and director claimed that her affair with Trump included an unusual act: spanking him with a copy of Forbes magazine.
“She says one time he made her sit with him for three hours watching ‘shark week.’ Another time he had her spank him with a Forbes magazine.”
In early 2009, Daniels announced that she was considering challenging Sen. David Vitter, the Louisiana Republican who two years earlier had been snared in a sex scandal. Vitter’s phone number was discovered in the records of the so-called D.C. Madam, who ran a prostitution ring in the nation’s capital. Vitter, who now is a lobbyist, was a prominent social conservative who opposed abortion and gay marriage. Daniels, who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told reporters she wanted to highlight his hypocrisy. She offered up a potential campaign slogan: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing people honestly.” 

Daniels was serious enough about running that she embarked on a May 2009 “listening tour” of the state and held discussions with local political consultants. Those conversations included coming up with possible campaign contributors. According to a May 8, 2009, email written by an operative advising Daniels, who asked not to be identified, Daniels at one point scrolled through her cellphone contacts to provide her consultants with a list of names. The email noted that the potential donors included Steve Hirsch, the founder of an adult entertainment company; Theresa Flynt, the daughter of Hustler’s Larry Flynt; Frazier Boyd, the owner of a strip club chain; and Jenna Jameson, the so-called “Queen of Porn.” Also on the list: Donald Trump. 

This email was sent to Andrea Dubé, a Democratic political consultant based in New Orleans. In response, Dubé expressed surprise that Daniels was friendly with Trump. “Donald Trump?” she wrote. “In her cell phone?”
“Yep,” the other consultant replied. “She says one time he made her sit with him for three hours watching ‘shark week.’ 

Another time he had her spank him with a Forbes magazine.”  

Dubé and the other consultant confirmed to Mother Jones they exchanged these emails. 

The campaign consultant who wrote the email to Dubé tells Mother Jones that Daniels said the spanking came during a series of sexual and romantic encounters with Trump and that it involved a copy of Forbes with Trump on the cover. 

A fall 2006 cover of Forbes does feature Trump and two of his children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka. 

So, is everyone still sure that the golden showers tape couldn ‘t possibly exist?

Oh,those clownish demagoguesby digby

Don’t worry about the shithole stuff. He doesn’t really mean it. They never do:

Actually, he meant it.

That was written in 1922.  It took him a while to employ his anti-semitism “effectively” for political purposes. But he got it done.

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They can pass a popular bill right this minute if they want toby digby

If there’s no funding bill signed by tomorrow, it’ll be the first time a party that has majorities in both the House and Senate and White House shuts down its government.The Reagan, Clinton and Obama shutdowns all happened with a majority opposition in congress.
They may not even be able to get to 50 GOP votes in the senate at this point.

The Republicans can pass a bill with a huge bipartisan majority right now if they want to include a DACA fix and CHIP funding. It’s there, waiting for them. The public supports it. It’s dead easy.

It’s all up to the leadership and that clownshow in the White House.

Despot in waitingby digby

The Arkansas Times reports that Senator Tom Cotton is threatening his own constituents:

Ozark Indivisible, the activist group that has been pressing members of Congress from Arkansas on health care, immigration and other issues, reported on its Twitter account last night that people calling Sen. Tom Cotton’s office had received cease-and-desist letters and posted the image above.

Billy Fleming, a Times contributor, also sent me a copy of the image and an account from a person who reportedly received the letter. That person wrote:

I received a letter from the office of U.S. Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas after calling and expressing my grave concerns over his actions and support of this administration’s agenda concerning a wide variety of subjects from the attack on our healthcare, DACA and immigration issues, to national security, to the rise of white nationalist fascism, to the environment, the gutting of our State Department, the attack on the free press…and similar deeply troubling actions & motives I’ve seen Senator Cotton support & condone. It was odd to receive this letter as I’ve called other Members of Congress to express my strong thoughts and opinions about their actions and thought this to be not only my duty as an American citizen but my First Amendment right granted all U.S. citizens by our U.S. Constitution, the foundation of our Democracy.

I believe if Tom Cotton’s office were to respond as to why they sent this letter, I think they just honestly don’t want to listen to any citizen’s opposing view or hear the numerous grave concerns U.S. citizens have about the serious & ongoing attack on our Democracy and past election cycle in which a foreign, hostile Russian government interfered, they don’t want U.S. citizens to call and speak their mind and truth in a very direct manner and they obviously don’t want to be held accountable for their words and actions while serving all the people in this nation. I may have used unprofessional and unbecoming language at times as the anxiety and stress of what I’m witnessing is at times too great a burden to control and I have vehemently expressed my righteous anger at Senator Cotton’s complicitness with this harmful regime.

Fleming said he knew several people who’d received such a letter. He said he believed they all had made repeated phone calls to deliver similar talking points, but he said they were unlikely to have made rude or disparaging remarks.
[…]
Circulating yesterday was the film of an effort some months ago by a Boone County activist to pose questions to Rep. Steve Womack. She was persistent. He was not amused.

Yesterday, demonstrators — self-identified as being from “shithole countries” — were asked to leave Cotton’s Washington office after a noisy encounter with staff members who told them they’d be arrested for unlawful entry if they didn’t leave. They did, chanting “Dream Act Now.”

Democracy can be a noisy thing. It seems to have some impact on members of Congress, too.

Here’s the video of the Womack activist:

Watch this rep literally ignore a Black constituent pic.twitter.com/wuXcCbRRGT— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 18, 2018

These Republicans are very delicate flowers. It’s hard for them when they have constituents who don’t recognize that they are talking to their betters and show the kind of respect that Republican aristocrats require.

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The world’s greatest negotiator strikes againby digby

He’s so good:

President Trump blew up Republican strategies to keep the government open past Friday when on Thursday morning he said a long-term extension of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program should not be part of a stopgap spending bill pending before the House.

With a possible government shutdown looming this weekend, the House had planned to vote late Thursday on a stopgap spending bill that would keep government funding flowing to Feb. 16 as delicate negotiations continue to protect young, undocumented immigrants brought illegally as children from deportation.

But by midday Thursday, the chances of a shutdown appeared to be rising. Efforts to negotiate a broader budget deal that would protect young undocumented immigrants, raise spending for military and domestic programs and fund children’s health care had been making progress until Mr. Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries” last week. The ensuing uproar upended budget and immigration talks and emboldened Democrats. On Thursday, senior House Democrats introduced a resolution to censure the president for his words.

Republicans, hoping to keep the government open while tempers cool, turned to a one-month stopgap spending measure, but that gambit may be nearing a dead end. Illustrating the trouble, Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, whose constituents include hundreds of thousands of federal workers, announced together that they would oppose the temporary spending bill. They had been seen as among the most likely yes votes in the Senate, where Republican leaders need at least nine Democrats to support the bill.

“Congress should remain in session with no recess until we work out a long-term bipartisan budget deal that addresses all issues,” Mr. Warner and Mr. Kaine said in a joint statement.

The president’s tweet only added to the confusion. Republican leaders had spent Wednesday pressuring Democrats to vote for the spending bill, arguing that opposing it would effectively block a six-year extension of the children’s health program, attached to the spending bill as a sweetener for lawmakers in both parties.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said on Wednesday that it would be “unconscionable” for Democrats to oppose funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program with a “no” vote on the short-term spending bill.

Hours after Mr. Trump’s tweet, the White House tried to walk it back. A White House spokesman, Raj Shah, said that the president supports the House’s stopgap bill.

But Democrats pressed their advantage. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, brought up the tweet and questioned whether it meant that the president opposes the stopgap measure that congressional leaders from his own party are trying to pass.

“Who knows?” Mr. Schumer asked. “It’s a mess.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, made clear that she was unmoved by the inclusion of CHIP funding in the stopgap bill.

“This is like giving you a bowl of doggy doo, put a cherry on top and call it a chocolate sundae,” she said.

They’re still laughably trying to shame Democrats with eye-rolling sanctimony that only a child could possibly believe was sincere:

“I’m more than puzzled why they would threaten to turn their backs on those children and shut down the government while they’re at it over the entirely unrelated issue of illegal immigration,” Mr. McConnell said.

Give that man a Fake News Award.

Why the president suddenly undercut Republican arguments was not immediately clear. On Wednesday, the Trump administration released an official statement endorsing the stopgap measure, including the extension of funding for CHIP.

He had no idea what the negotiations taking place on the Hill were because he’s fulminating about his poll numbers and Steve Bannon. He probably just sent off that tweet while on the phone with his lawyer trying to get In Touch Magazine to spike their 5,500 word Stormy Daniels story about his sexual (non)prowess. He’s busy.

I have no prediction about the possible shutdown.It could happen. But it will happen because Republicans couldn’t muster the votes to keep the government open. That’s on them. They have a majority and a daft president who has no clue what he’s signing. This shouldn’t be that hard.

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Sloppy Steve has a big story to tellby digby

I wrote about Sloppy Steve’s big adventure for Salon this morning:
Around the first of the year, the New York Post’s Page Six published a blind item about the Russia investigation grand jury in Washington in which an alleged witness told the paper:

The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally. Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley.

The source went on to note that 11 of the 20 jurors are African-American and that “there was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.”

This was briefly taken up by the right-wing media, which charged that this proved the whole process was rigged against Donald Trump, apparently on the assumption that black people could not possibly judge him fairly. That was strangely reminiscent of candidate Trump’s insistence during the campaign that the judge in the Trump University case could not be fair because of his Mexican heritage. Indeed, that wasn’t the only echo of Trump’s own words. As Think Progress pointed out at the time: “whoever leaked this tidbit to the New York Post sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump.”

Think Progress noted that the use of the words “central casting” was the first major tip-off, since that’s an old-fashioned phrase Trump is particularly known for. MSNBC’s Steve Benen even wrote a story last February asking why the president is so “preoccupied” with it. An even bigger clue is that Trump and Page Six columnist Richard Johnson have a close relationship going back decades. Last month, Johnson even wrote a column called “Richard Johnson’s life with The Donald.“

Between the signature phrase, the familiar racism and the relationship with the author, it’s not much of a stretch to suspect that Trump himself was the source of this sneering little story. The fact that it would be shortsighted and counterproductive to insult members of a grand jury that’s hearing evidence in a criminal case in which you may be implicated doesn’t rule him out. If anything, it’s another bit of evidence pointing in Trump’s direction.

That story came to mind upon reading the news this week about former Trump campaign head and White House adviser Steve Bannon testifying before the House Intelligence Committee and being subpoenaed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s office. I couldn’t help but think about Trump’s scathing statement that Bannon had “lost his mind,” and the tweet calling him “sloppy Steve,” and wonder whether anyone had warned Trump that insulting a man who had been in the highest reaches of the campaign, the transition and the administration might not be the best strategy. Pushing for him to be fired and cast out of the movement he helped create just doesn’t seem like a savvy move. It would have been easy to blow off the Wolff book as fiction and give Bannon a pass to keep him inside the tent. A man with a lot of ammunition and nothing to lose is dangerous.

This week, Bannon appeared before the House Intelligence Committee for about 10 hours and did something nobody else has been able to do. Members of both parties, who have not been able to agree on anything for months, came together to protest Bannon’s claim of some form of executive privilege that has never existed before. They were upset enough that when Bannon’s lawyer explained that he was making the claim because his testimony was voluntary, they quickly drafted a subpoena and gave it to him so that he could say he was compelled to talk.

It didn’t work. According to Bannon and his attorney, the White House would not allow him to speak about anything to do with the presidential transition, the administration or any conversations he’d had with the president after leaving the White House. That’s way beyond the scope of any legitimate executive privilege.

It sounds as though it was quite the three-ring circus. For instance, Axios’ Jonathan Swan reports:

Bannon attacked the Republicans running these congressional committees for choosing to investigate the Trump campaign and Russia. He said it was part of an “establishment” plan to try to “nullify” the election result. Gowdy challenged him on that, asking Bannon who is this establishment you refer to who is trying to nullify Trump’s victory? Bannon answered: Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Gowdy countered that Bannon couldn’t have it both ways. Was he also referring to Trump confidant Kevin McCarthy — the leader of the Republican House conference — who is surely part of the same Ryan-McConnell “establishment?”

There’s no word on how Bannon responded to that. But according to Swan he did “slip up” early on with a particularly damning little bit of info. He admitted that he’d had a conversation with former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, former press secretary Sean Spicer and former legal spokesman Mark Corallo about Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. (Corallo later reportedly resigned over the cover-up.) That got the committee very excited, but Bannon clammed up afterwards and said he wished he could say more.

How funny that Bannon would drop that one little hint of inside knowledge of the single most important part of the puzzle — a possible conspiracy and cover-up — and nothing else. One might even suspect he did it on purpose just to let the White House know that even though they had claimed executive privilege, he was still in the driver’s seat.

It was around the time of the supposedly inadvertent slip that word came into the committee hearing that The New York Times was reporting that Bannon had been subpoenaed by the Mueller grand jury. Presumably Bannon and his lawyer knew about that, but they hadn’t mentioned it to the committee, which had to pause its questioning to make sure it was not interfering with the Mueller probe. We now know that the FBI had shown up at Bannon’s house with the subpoenas on Jan. 9. We don’t know why Mueller’s team didn’t ask him to come in voluntarily as they have done with everyone else, but in any case, as of yesterday he has agreed to do just that.

It’s all very odd. Nobody else has been subpoenaed out of the blue by the special counsel, and nobody else has been instructed by the White House to claim such an expansive version of executive privilege before a congressional committee. It would seem that all the parties believe there is something unique about what Bannon has to offer.

A source close to Bannon told NBC News that “he’ll answer any questions” Mueller wants to ask. And why not? Donald Trump made sure that he has plenty of time on his hands and nothing left to lose.

They hated sole superpowerby digby

What could go wrong?

One year into Donald Trump’s presidency, the image of U.S. leadership is weaker worldwide than it was under his two predecessors. Median approval of U.S. leadership across 134 countries and areas stands at a new low of 30%, according to a new Gallup report.

The most recent approval rating, based on Gallup World Poll surveys conducted between March and November last year, is down 18 percentage points from the 48% approval rating in the last year of President Barack Obama’s administration, and is four points lower than the previous low of 34% in the last year of President George W. Bush’s administration.

Trend: Global Approval of U.S. Leadership
The recent drop in approval ratings is unrelated to the world’s being less familiar with the new U.S. administration. The global median who do not have an opinion about U.S. leadership in 2017 (23%) is similar to the 25% in the last year of the Obama presidency.

Instead, disapproval of U.S. leadership increased almost as much as approval declined. The 43% median disapproval, up 15 points from the previous year, set a new record as well, not only for the U.S. but for any other major global power that Gallup has asked about in the past decade.

Big Losses Are Among Close Allies, Few Gains

The relatively fragile image of U.S. leadership in 2017 reflects large and widespread losses in approval and relatively few gains. Out of 134 countries, U.S. leadership approval ratings declined substantially — by 10 percentage points or more — in 65 countries that include many longtime U.S. allies and partners.

Portugal, Belgium, Norway and Canada led the declines worldwide, with approval ratings of U.S. leadership dropping 40 points or more in each country. While majorities in each of these countries approved of U.S. leadership in 2016, majorities disapproved in 2017.

In contrast, U.S. leadership approval increased 10 points or more in just four countries: Liberia (+17), Macedonia (+15), Israel (+14), and Belarus (+11). The 67% of Israelis who approve of U.S. leadership is on par with the ratings Israelis gave the U.S. during the Bush administration. Notably, interviewing in Israel took place before Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but he had repeatedly promised to do so during his campaign for president.

And the people who hate us the most are are closest neighbors.I wonder why?

Regionally, the image of U.S. leadership suffered most in the Americas, where approval ratings dropped to a new low. The median of 24% who approve of U.S. leadership in the region now stands at about half of what it was in the last year of the Obama administration (49%).

Approval of U.S. leadership plunged in every country in the region in 2017. In fact, there were double-digit decreases in all countries except Venezuela, where approval dropped nine points.

A rogue superpower making enemies all over the world. I feel so safe.

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From the Dept of What the $&*&%# Were They Thinking??? 

by tristero

Remember when the NY Times devoted a complete editorial page to letters effusively praising Barack Obama, interspersed with pictures of exclusively black voters?

Me neither.

But today I woke up to find that the Times had turned over their entire editorial page to nothing but rabid Trump-ists and apologists… interspersed with pictures of white people: 3 white men and 1 white woman.

Folks, this is not normal behavior from a mainstream news outlet. I cannot recall anything remotely like this, ever, from the NY Times. It is beyond disgraceful editorial judgment. and the implications are downright terrifying.

Temporarily offline
by Tom Sullivan

Screen grab via Washington Post.

You wish.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly informed America yesterday that the president’s campaign promise that Mexico would pay for a “big, beautiful” border wall was “uninformed.” The wall wasn’t the only exaggeration the president had difficulty erecting yesterday.

After much hype (his own) about the prospective “Fake News Awards,” the launch of his awards page on gop.com last night flopped.

Prior to the crashed site, New York magazine inquired whether the awards, like Trump University, were actually a real thing:

During the White House briefing Tuesday afternoon, a reporter asked the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, what was up; Sanders had no information, but seemed to reveal herself when she referred to it as a “potential event.” In his newsletter that night, CNN’s Brian Stelter said that he’d “suspected for a few days that the idea has fizzled,” adding that his overtures to the White House had been met with silence.

And then, at 8:00 o’clock, Trump shared a link to the Republican National Committee’s website, gop.com. “And the FAKE NEWS winners are…” he said.

The link was broken, like everything else.

When finally the site was working, readers discovered the top award for fake news went to New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman for predicting financial markets would collapse with the reality star in the Oval Office. Others covered errors by journalists on social media to a story about the president overfeeding Japanese fish. The eleventh and final envelope contained “THERE IS NO COLLUSION!” (All caps in the original.)

The “highly anticipated” awards have already vanished from the GOP’s front page.

The Guardian’s Sabrina Siddiqui reminds readers:

Trump has often used his bully pulpit to highlight errors in the media, even when news organizations have taken steps to correct and apologize for any inaccuracies, and he has labeled the press the “enemy of the American people”. Trump has yet to acknowledge any of his lies, which have been tracked in an exhaustive list by the New York Times and underscore the president’s near daily disconnect from the truth.

In anticipation of the “potential event,” Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona denounced the president from the Senate floor, comparing him to Josef Stalin and Bashar al-Assad:

It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase “enemy of the people,” that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.

This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president’s party.

Flake gives a good speech. A pity he doesn’t back them up with votes as high-minded.

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