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Month: September 2018

A majority is not enough by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 8, 2018

A majority is not enough
by Tom Sullivan


Note: Red/blue shading is not a political marker in map above.

If there is anything confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh this week have proved, it is how important U.S. Senate elections are. Senators confirm Supreme Court justices. Red states control a number of Senate seats disproportionate to their populations. Only a couple of months ago, I mentioned where that trend is taking us:

By 2040, Philip Bump responds, “30 percent of the population of the country will control 68 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate. Or, more starkly, half the population of the country will control 84 percent of those seats.”

For a state where the votes split roughly evenly Democrat:Republican, and with a U.S. House delegation gerrymandered to split 3:10, North Carolina Democrats already have a sense of what that is like.

Just after the November 2016 election, I argued there were not enough blue states to elect enough Democratic senators for a veto-proof, two-thirds majority. Even a four-vote margin would take 27 states with two Democratic senators each. Hillary Clinton won 20.

There may yet be an emerging Democratic majority nationally. The problem is not numbers but distribution. Russia aside, the 2016 presidential election was an object lesson in how the Democrats’ triple bank-shot approach to presidential elections works, or doesn’t. Progressives and the Democratic Party have lacked a strategy to address that problem for decades, excepting Howard Dean’s 50-state plan which was as promising as it was short-lived.

Distributing my For The Win primer this year has been instructive for illustrating why Democrats lose heartland Senate seats. Examine at the top of this post my most current map showing counties where I have sent it. Except for states which for various reasons I did not “spam” (AK, CT, DE, HI, MA, NH, NJ, RI, VT), counties in the center of the country showing no color either had no Democratic organizations or committees with no discernible digital footprint as of March 2018. (One cannot email a 5 Meg file to a land line.)

If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit

Granted, many of those Plains States counties have small populations. (Nebraska has roughly a dozen counties with populations under 1,000.) But Democratic strategists inside the Beltway have for years essentially forfeited such states (and with exceptions, their Senate seats) to Republicans. How dare Dean spend money organizing out there when those funds could be better spent in places with more electoral votes? But what the distribution of that elusive Democratic majority could leave them with is permanent control of the U.S. House and permanent minority status in the Senate and on the Supreme Court.

The Great Compromise and in-migration to cities has handed less-populated states disproportionate representation in the Senate. Republican senators, as we have seen, will not challenge an unhinged, unfit, and amoral president for fear of their jobs. Only red-state senators with a political death-wish (Republicans or Democrats) will support a constitutional amendment to reconfigure the Senate and lessen the political clout of their less-populous states. If Democrats expect to avoid permanent minority status in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, they have no choice but to win Senate seats in states where they are now uncompetitive. Establishment pols are unlikely to support that. The progressive movement will have to.

One obstacle to that is less-engaged progressives’ fixation on top-of-ticket races. Here in North Carolina, the Republican super-majority in the legislature since 2012 is wreaking havoc even with a Democratic governor. Fortunately, the kind of expanded organizing and engagement that can reclaim state legislatures can also help retake U.S. Senate seats. But many just waking up to the threat still look to Washington for answers that are not coming.

After years of following national politics, it was only this year it finally dawned on me why. What most Americans think they know about party politics comes from watching the quadrennial presidential election. It is the only time they are paying close attention. And besides, the media coverage is unavoidable.

So, too, with many progressive activists one meets. Federal candidates and national issues hold more interest for them than local matters. Yet, control of state legislators that draw (or currently draw) state and federal district boundaries is necessary before a progressive majority can govern like one. In states as well as nationally, progressives cannot wall themselves off in cities and expect to advance their national agendas. As I wrote last year:

But we are where we are, in part, because Democrats chasing the “emerging Democratic majority” saw changing demographics as favoring them in presidential and statewide races. They abandoned the countryside, focusing instead on the concentrations of blue voters in the cities. That left the plains and mountain states and rural counties (and their elected seats) to the tender mercies of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Ask the South Vietnamese how holding the cities and leaving the countryside to their opponents worked out.

What a shrinking white population fears is being just another minority in a country it knows too well treats minorities badly. Not to put too fine a point on it, since the country’s founding they and their forebears have been doing the treating. What progressives and Democrats face now and in the near future is similar. Except, they face being a permanent minority in the U.S. Senate and on the Supreme Court while nationally holding a numerical majority.

The situation is not so unlike the pre-Civil War period when the prospective admission of new, non-slave states threatened to dilute Southern states’ leverage in Congress and thus their ability to stave off the abolition of slavery. In this instance, however, swelling populations in blue states do not add to Democrats’ clout in the Senate nor add to the ability of a numerical majority of Americans to see their interests defended by the Supreme Court. That privilege already lies with red states where Democrats find little footing, largely through neglect.

I wrote during the last presidential race, President Bernie could not solve that problem. Neither could President Hillary. Neither can abolishing the Electoral College. Short of secession, that problem has to be addressed today, on the ground, locally, by Democrats and progressives organizing, learning, engaging their neighbors, and winning them over.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother: Cougar cubs!

Published by digby on September 8, 2018

Friday Night Soother: Cougar cubs!

by digby

Jeff Sikich crawled into dense shrub in a streambed in a remote part of the Santa Monica Mountains in early August. There, hidden in the rustling shrubs, were four blue-eyed babies — a quartet of mountain lion kittens.

The tiny cats tried to make a run for it, but they didn’t get far.

“They’ll hiss. They try to move and bite,” said Sikich, who scooped up the kits while Mom was away. At 3 ½ weeks old, their tiny teeth couldn’t do much damage to the researchers.

The babies are a pleasant discovery for the team, which is studying mountain lion behavior in an increasingly urbanized environment. It means the large cats are continuing to mate successfully, giving the local species a greater chance at survival, Sikich said.

The problem with these cats is inbreeding because the freeways, especially the 101, are blocking their habitat.

Advocates led by the National Wildlife Federation are raising money for a wildlife overpass on the 101 that would help mountain lions and other animals cross the busy highway safely. The bridge could be completed by 2022

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This is one of my personal charities. If you feel like giving some cash to help these beautiful wild cats survive in the Santa Monica Mountains, you can do it here.

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Before and After

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

Before and After

by digby

Trump today speaking about the Woodward book:

Here’s a little contrast for any of you educated Republicans who are still on the fence about whether or not the Democrats are just too extreme for you:

Kids, presidents used to speak like this guy, not the weird orange man with the yellow cotton candy on his head.

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More books a-coming

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

More books a-coming

by digby

Vanity Fair reports on a couple of the new books scheduled to come out in the coming months:

Already this past November, Doubleday announced that CNN legal analyst and New Yorkerstaff writer Jeffrey Toobin had inked a deal for a book about Robert Mueller’s special-counsel probe into alleged Russian collusion and obstruction of justice among members of Trump’s inner circle. More recently, I’ve learned that New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt has a Mueller-oriented project in the works as well. Schmidt has blown the lid off some of the most consequential stories about the Russia investigation, and he now has a deal with Random House—brokered by Gail Ross of the Ross Yoon Agency—to show for it.

In a similar vein, Times columnist and best-selling author James Stewart is writing a book about the relationship between the White House, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. “It’s looking at the broader question of whether the rule of law will prevail, or whether an alleged ‘deep state’ or the White House will manage to subvert that,” Stewart told me. “Mueller might be the epilogue, but until we know more, it’s hard to say for sure.” Stewart, whose longtime agent is Amanda Urban at I.C.M., is working with Ann Godoffat Penguin on the as-yet-untitled work, which he said is tentatively slated for a fall 2019 release.

The Stewart book could go either way. I’m going to guess he’ll go the wrong way. He was one of the primary instigators of the Whitewater probe with his book “Blood Sport” (handily dispatched by Gene Lyons in his book “Fools for Scandal.”) If he stays true to that form, he will undoubtedly find there was a Deep State conspiracy to stop Donald Trump … by sabotaging Hillary Clinton and keeping all the suspicions of Trump’s conspiracy with Russia under wraps.

It was a risky strategy that surprisingly didn’t pay off.

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Confused Cornyn

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

Confused Cornyn

by digby

These people…

Except yesterday the Republicans said this:

Later Thursday, Bill Burck, a lawyer who oversaw the process of providing Bush administration documents, undercut Booker’s grand gesture, saying that the material in question had been cleared on Wednesday night at the request of the senator’s staff.

“We were surprised to learn about Senator Booker’s histrionics this morning because we had already told him he could use the documents publicly. In fact, we have said yes to every request made by the Senate Democrats to make documents public,” Burck said in a statement.

The office of Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, also said that senators, including Booker, were notified “before they spoke today” that the restrictions on the documents had been waived.

I guess Cornyn wants him investigated for saying he was doing something they later said he didn’t actually do. That must be one of the more obscure Senate rules.

Cornyn was a member of the Texas Supreme Court. I have never been able to get over that.

The opening act of the circus previewed everything that was to come

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

The opening act of the circus previewed everything thatwas to come

by digby

We’re going to look back on this and laugh reufully wondering how it was we survived. If we survive:

So many outbursts later, it can sometimes be hard to remember way back to the First Presidential Tantrum, when Donald Trump was annoyed that his inauguration crowd had far fewer people than Barack Obama’s, and turned then-press secretary Sean Spicer into a punch line in the process.

As it turns out, Spicer’s humiliation was even more complex behind the scenes. According to new documents obtained by The Guardian, Spicer was forced to call the National Park Service repeatedly on January 21, the day after the inauguration, to ask for more flattering photographs of the crowd on the mall. A government photographer did, indeed, crop the photos to eliminate much of the empty space, though The Guardian says that it is not clear whether these photos were actually published.

The new details, which were not published in the final investigative report of the crowd-size kerfuffle last June, suggest that the photographer, whose name was redacted from the report, was contacted by an unidentified official who asked for “any photographs that showed the inauguration crowd sizes.” He was reportedly asked to edit some more of his photos and submit them again.

“He said he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” the investigators said. “He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.”

It was obvious from that first day that it was going to be a shitshow. And it has succeeded beyond our expectations.

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A Wingnut’s wingnut

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

A Wingnut’s wingnut

by digby

Kavanaugh might as well have been shooting watermelons in his backyard. (Those who followed the Clinton scandals will know what I’m talking about.) He was a Vince Foster obsessive, one of the worst of the worst:

Anticipating the imminent publication of Kenneth Starr’s memoir of the Clinton impeachment, I looked into Judge Kavanaugh’s files in the Office of Independent Counsel records, housed in the National Archives. What I discovered sheds light on how Mr. Kavanaugh made his way in his early career, and how he flagrantly breached his role as a neutral public servant and followed the imperatives of a political operative.

Mr. Kavanaugh served under Mr. Starr as associate independent counsel between 1994 and 1997, and then again in 1998. Although not yet a judge, he was charged with investigating impartially what Attorney General Janet Reno deemed substantial specific accusations of presidential misconduct arising from a failed real estate investment known as Whitewater.

Judge Starr’s predecessor as independent counsel, Robert Fiske, had looked into unfounded claims that the White House counsel Vincent Foster, who committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park in 1993, had in fact been murdered as part of an alleged White House cover-up related to Whitewater. After a thorough investigation, Mr. Fiske concluded in 1994 that there was nothing to the conspiracy theories and that Mr. Foster, who suffered from depression, had indeed killed himself. Official accounts by the National Park Service in 1993 and by a Republican congressman, William Clinger, the ranking member of the House Government Affairs Committee in 1994, came to an identical conclusion, as did a bipartisan report of the Senate Banking Committee early in 1995.

But shortly after the Senate report was released, Mr. Kavanaugh convinced Mr. Starr to reopen what he called a “full-fledged” investigation of the Foster matter, telling his colleagues, as justification, that “we have received allegations that Mr. Foster’s death related to President and Mrs. Clinton’s involvement” in Whitewater and other alleged scandals.

Who were these unnamed, presumably reliable sources on whose word the case should be reopened? Mr. Kavanaugh’s files in the National Archives make clear that they were some of the most ludicrous hard-right conspiracy-mongers of the time.

One was Reed Irvine, a self-appointed debunker of the “fake news” of mainstream media. Another was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, an English author of a book entitled “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton” that posited that the Oklahoma City bombing was an F.B.I. plot gone awry. A third was Christopher Ruddy, today the chief executive of Newsmax and confidant of President Trump, but at the time on the payroll of the right-wing tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife to promote conspiracies.

As inventive as they were vindictive, these partisans concocted all sorts of wild theories to explain why Mr. Foster could not have killed himself. According to one of Mr. Kavanaugh’s sources, Mr. Foster had been working for the National Security Agency and was being blackmailed by the Israelis over a secret Swiss bank account. Carpet fibers had been found on Mr. Foster’s clothing, which was proof positive that he was murdered, his body wrapped in a carpet and then dumped. Another charged that “long blond hairs” on Mr. Foster’s clothing pointed to a cover-up.

Mr. Kavanaugh noted in various memos that he personally believed that Mr. Foster had indeed committed suicide — “my thoughts, not the Office’s position,” he clarified at one point. But he did not file away the harebrained theories; instead, he apparently felt obligated to address the conspiracy-mongers’ already disproved fantasies. And for nearly three years at a cost of $2 million he aggressively followed up. He investigated the Swiss bank account connection, down to examining Mr. Foster’s American Express bills for flights to Switzerland. He meticulously examined the White House carpets, old and new. (By now, Mr. Foster had been dead four years.) He sent investigators in search of follicle specimens from Mr. Foster’s bereft, blond, teenage daughter. (“We have Foster’s hair,” one agent working for Mr. Kavanaugh reported in triumph.)

Mr. Kavanaugh apparently took a special interest in Hillary Clinton’s bruited affair with Mr. Foster, a popular rumor in the fever swamps of the right. As he reported, his investigators “asked numerous people about it,” before he decided to ask Mrs. Clinton herself.

Of course, Mr. Kavanaugh proved nothing new, as there was nothing new to prove except in conspiratorial illusion. But there was nothing funny about his Inspector Clouseau performance. For months, his inquiries callously harassed a grieving family and Mr. Foster’s friends. His office spread malicious sexual innuendo about Hillary Clinton, whom he seems to have regarded as prey. By reopening a closed investigation, he irresponsibly gave the Foster conspiracy freaks credibility to continue smearing the Clintons and poison public debate for another three years, all at the taxpayers’ expense.

I can’t believe one of Starr’s made men is going to be on the Supreme Court. These people are zombies and they’ve been dining on their own voters brains for decades now.

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Headline of the week. Quote of the day.

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

Headline of the week. Quote of the day.

by digby

You know when Abraham Lincoln made that Gettysburg Address speech, the great speech, you know he was ridiculed? And he was excoriated by the fake news. They had fake news then. They said it was a terrible, terrible speech. Fifty years after his death they said it may have been the greatest speech ever made in America. I have a feeling that’s going to happen with us. In different ways, that’s going to happen with us.

KellyAnne Conway’s husband:

That headline goes with an essay by Michel Gerson, George W. Bush speechwriter:

Trump pursues no deep or subtle strategies. He does not even consistently seek his own interests. He responds like a child or a narcissist — but I repeat myself — to positive or negative stimulation. It is the reason a discussion on “Fox & Friends” can so often set the agenda of the president. It is the reason that Trump’s lawyers, in the end, can’t allow him to be interviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It would be like a 9-year-old defending a PhD dissertation. Or maybe a rabbit jumping into a buzz saw.

This lesson can’t be lost on foreign intelligence services, which can pre-order a comprehensive account of the president’s psychological and political vulnerabilities for $18 online. (Note: Woodward now owes me.) Here is the increasingly evident reality of the Trump era: We are a superpower run by a simpleton. From a foreign policy perspective, this is far worse than being run by a skilled liar. It is an invitation to manipulation and contempt.

Pointing to the polls is the main response of Trump and his supporters. Whatever the president is doing, most Republicans want more of it. As one apologist argues, “His personality is a feature, not a bug. Many Americans are comfortable with that.” Put another way, a motivated group of Americans — which largely controls the GOP nomination process — enjoys Trump’s reality-television version of presidential politics. And you can’t argue with the ratings.

I can and do. What we are finding from books, from insider leaks and from investigative journalism is that the rational actors who are closest to the president are frightened by his chaotic leadership style. They describe a total lack of intellectual curiosity, mental discipline and impulse control. Should the views of these establishment insiders really carry more weight than those of Uncle Clem in Scranton, Pa.? Why yes, in this case, they should. We should listen to the voices of American populism in determining public needs and in setting policy agendas — but not in determining political reality.

He’s right about one thing. It’s really about rational vs irrational. What’s alarming isn’t so much Trump. There have been Mad Kings before. It’s that there are tens of millions of Americans living inside his delusion with him.

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Cherry-picking precedent by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 7, 2018

Cherry-picking precedent
by Tom Sullivan

For days this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Judge Brett Kavanaugh has cited his regard for precedent in defending his judicial opinions. Yet, confirming a new Supreme Court justice to a lifetime appointment under the precedential circumstances of the Trump administration seems to be a concern neither to Kavanaugh nor to Republicans on the committee.

During Supreme Court confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) finally brought up “the elephant in the room.” “The president of the United States who has nominated you,” he told Judge Brett Kavanaugh, “is an unindicted co-conspirator implicated in some of the most serious wrongdoing that involves the legitimacy of his presidency.”

As we have seen in these hearings, there is precedent and then there is precedent.

Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono pointed to two Kavanaugh opinions on Thursday which she believed illustrated how Kavanaugh’s “ideological viewpoints” influence his rulings. In the Priests for Life case, Kavanaugh decided that filling out a 2-page form placed a “substantial burden” on the religion of employers when it came to providing health insurance covering contraception under Obamacare. Hirono found that defied logic. In Garza v. Hargan, he did not consider it burdensome for the Justice Department to keep a pregnant undocumented minor in custodial detention from obtaining an abortion.

Kavanaugh displays a habit, Hirono said, of “citing law as you wish it to be and not as it is.” After suggesting how what he considers an “undue burden” differs in ways that in past opinions weighed against a woman’s right to control her reproduction, the Democrat said (video):

Often times, your own perspective, a judge’s ideological viewpoints, etc., come into play as to which precedent to apply, how to apply the precedent, and what part of the precedent you want to apply.

Kavanaugh, she suggested, cherry-picks his precedents.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate noticed the same thing. In trying to persuade Democrats he considers Roe settled law, Kavanaugh repeatedly cites 1992’s Planned Parenthood vs. Casey as a reinforcing “precedent on precedent.” Lithwick and Stern observe:

Oddly, though, Kavanaugh’s time clock pretty consistently stops at Casey, and he does not ever seem to mention the landmark 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which not only reaffirmed the core holdings of Roe and Casey, but also significantly bolstered the definition of an “undue burden”—the kinds of speedbumps government may place in the way of a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy.

In Whole Woman’s Health, Justice Breyer, writing for a five-justice majority, struck down several Texas abortion restrictions on clinics in the state, explaining that the undue-burden standard demands that courts consider “the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits.” A law whose burdens outweigh its benefits cannot pass constitutional muster. Post–Whole Woman’s Health, it became clear that courts must assess whether an abortion restriction furthers any valid government purpose, rather than merely defer to a state’s vague claims that any justification sought for such a restriction is reasonable. For the first time and in important ways, the mushy “undue burden” test laid out in Casey had real teeth.

As University of California–Irvine law professor Leah Litman has explained, courts that have sought to erode that test in the years since Whole Woman’s Health have used all sorts of tricks and devices to pretend that the undue-burden test was some vaporous thing into which all the hopes and dreams of abortion opponents could be packed. In some instances, they have managed to distinguish or mischaracterize it. But in his notorious dissenting opinion in Garza v. Hargan, Kavanaugh simply ignored it. In a move that looks familiar after this week, he cited Roe and Casey and a slew of cases about parental consent. But the directive in Whole Woman’s Health—that reviewing judges take seriously the burdens placed before women and reckon with the asserted interests proffered by the government—went wholly ignored. Why, one might ask, does this case not enter into the pantheon of Roe and Casey, becoming, for all intents and purposes, precedent on precedent on precedent? Perhaps because it doesn’t strike Kavanaugh as “settled law.” Or perhaps because reverse-engineering Casey has become the roadmap to effectively ending legal abortion in the United States.

Kavanaugh’s answers when pressed revert to standard say-nothing evasions and selective citations that support his respect for his preferred precedent. Lithwick and Stern argue the nominee’s refusal to cite Whole Woman’s Health and Obergefell during these hearings takes “this cherry-picking to a new level.”

Donald Trump’s instability has drawn scores of headlines this week. He threatens the country’s stability, has already damaged its world standing, and now means to take women’s freedom back half a century. Perhaps no greater indicator of the damage he can do is the looming prospect of his elevating Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. The generation of women whose financial futures are all but lost to the Great Recession are about to lose even more. But as Brett Kavanaugh says, liberty.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Another of those great GOP achievements?

Published by digby on September 7, 2018

Another of those great GOP achievements?

by digby

I wonder if the anonymous op-ed writer would like to put this one on the list of all those great things the silent patriotic bureaucrats of the Trump administration have accomplished even though the president himself is a cretinous moron?

The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugees did not present a significant threat to the U.S., three former senior officials told NBC News.

Hard-liners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S.

At a meeting in September 2017 with senior officials discussing refugee admissions, a representative from the National Counterterrorism Center came ready to present a report that analyzed the possible risks presented by refugees entering the country.

But before he could discuss the report, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand dismissed the report, saying her boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would not be guided by its findings.

“We read that. The attorney general doesn’t agree with the conclusions of that report,” she said, according to two officials familiar with the meeting, including one who was in the room at the time.

Brand’s blunt veto of the intelligence assessment shocked career civil servants at the interagency meeting, which seemed to expose a bid to supplant facts and expertise with an ideological agenda. Her response also amounted to a rejection of her own department’s view, as the FBI, part of the Justice Department, had contributed to the assessment.

If that isn’t the view of the resistence insiders, they once again failed to stop Trump and his extremist enablers.