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Month: November 2018

Trumpies are the “super-elites”?

Published by digby on November 8, 2018

Trumpies are the “super-elites”?

by digby

He’s made this bizarre observation before but it’s getting more common on the stump. He said this on Monday night’s rally in Indiana:


You know, they talk about the elites. “The elites.” Well, I know all the elites. They’re not very smart in many cases. They have a lot of hatred in their heart. 

I don’t know about you but many of you went to better schools than they did. We did better in the schools than they did. We have better houses, homes, boats. We do better than they do. We work harder than they do. We make more money than they do. 

So why are they called “the elites”? But let’s let them be called “the elites,” because you, we are the super-elites. We are the super-elites.

He whines constantly about everything but this one is particularly revealing, don’t you think?

Obviously, he’s got a tremendous sense of insecurity that propels his compulsive lying and bragging. And I get that his followers likewise feel socially insecure. But the way he expresses it in these material terms can’t possibly apply to them. They didn’t go to the best schools and they don’t have more money.

I get why his followers hate elites. And I get why he hates elites. But this is a very weird way of putting it. Especially since he’s never thought before that he should identify with his followers (which, I admit, he’s not really doing here.)

I’m sitting in an apartment the likes of which nobody’s ever seen. And yet I represent the workers of the world. And they love me and I love them. I think people aspire to do things. And they aspire to watch people. I don’t think they want to see the president carrying his luggage out of Air Force One. And that’s pretty much the way it is.

I noted his a while back:

As Politico pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Trump has been in office for over a year now and he hasn’t gone to a baseball game or visited a soup kitchen or dropped in at any local eateries (ones he doesn’t own, anyway.)

He has persisted in the habits of a celebrity, positioning himself as someone whose lifestyle is just a bit out of reach. His mingling happens chiefly at his private clubs in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia, where he is not walled off by the Secret Service …

When he travels it consists of private fundraisers, circumscribed photo-ops or big rallies. He mainly watches Fox News which has turned itself into Trump TV, devoted to serving Trump’s ego and pressing his agenda. He doesn’t mingle with the hoi polloi if there’s any way to avoid it.

He’s so strange that I guess it really doesn’t matter. There’s probably an element of him trying clumsily to identify with the average Joe for political purposes but he’s incapable of doing it convincingly.

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His Roy Cohn

Published by digby on November 8, 2018

His Roy Cohn

by digby

The NY Times editorial board has this:

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, always knew he was running the Russia investigation on borrowed time. That time may have just run out on Wednesday afternoon, when President Trump ousted his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, less than 24 hours after Republicans lost their eight-year lock on the House of Representatives.

So who’s going to protect Mr. Mueller now?

Until Wednesday, the job was being performed ably by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who assumed oversight of the Russia investigation when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March 2017.

Under Mr. Rosenstein’s leadership, the investigation Mr. Mueller took over has resulted in the felony conviction of the president’s former campaign chairman, guilty pleas from multiple other top Trump aides and associates and the indictments of dozens of Russian government operatives for interfering in the 2016 election. For more than a year, Mr. Rosenstein walked a political tightrope, guarding Mr. Mueller’s independence on the one hand while trying to appease Mr. Trump’s increasingly meddlesome demands on the other.

That task now falls to Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who on Wednesday became acting attorney general and, far more alarmingly, the man Mr. Mueller now reports to.

The good news is that no one, including Mr. Whitaker, can stop the multiple prosecutions or litigation already in progress — including the cooperation of Paul Manafort; the sentencing of Michael Flynn; or the continuing investigation of Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, and the Trump Organization by federal prosecutors in New York. The courts will have the final say on what happens in each of those cases.

Democrats will also soon be running the House, returning it to its place as a coequal branch of government and holding Mr. Trump to account for the first time since he took office. “We are immediately issuing multiple letters to key officials demanding that they preserve all relevant documents related to this action to make sure that the investigation and any evidence remains safe from improper interference or destruction,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who is expected to soon head the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The bad news is, well, pretty much everything else. Mr. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piece arguing that Mr. Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Mr. Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.

Conflicts of interest like this are what led Mr. Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. That was the ethical thing to do, even if it sent Mr. Trump into a spiral of rage.

Mr. Sessions, a veteran of the Senate, is an institutionalist at heart. “The Department of Justice,” he once said, “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” That sentiment was never going to survive long under Mr. Trump, for whom improper influence has been a central plank of governing philosophy. Ethics, not so much.

The irony is that Mr. Sessions was among the president’s most effective and loyal foot soldiers. Soon after becoming attorney general, he turned Mr. Trump’s cartoonish law-and-order campaign talk into reality by directing federal prosecutors to bring the harshest charges possible in all cases. He helped obliterate the legacy of President Barack Obama, Mr. Trump’s predecessor and nemesis, by pushing to scale back or end policies that Mr. Obama had championed, including legal protections for the 700,000 young immigrants who came to the United States as children.

But personal loyalty is what Mr. Trump really cares about, and on that count Mr. Sessions failed spectacularly. If Mr. Whitaker has any concern for the independence of the department he is taking over — not to mention the rule of law in America — he will follow Mr. Sessions’s lead and hand the reins of the investigation to someone less evidently invested in destroying it.

It’s not even clear Mr. Whitaker may legally hold the post of acting attorney general, since he has never been confirmed by the Senate. But if so, he could do a lot of damage, much of it behind closed doors. For example, he could tip off the White House to what the special counsel’s office is up to, or he could block Mr. Mueller from taking significant investigatory steps, like bringing an indictment, without having to notify Congress or the public until the investigation is complete. And any report Mr. Mueller ultimately submits goes directly to the attorney general — who may decide whether or not to pass it along to Congress.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he thinks the attorney general should function as a president’s personal lawyer, protecting him from justice and persecuting his enemies. In the days before Mr. Sessions recused himself last year, Mr. Trump tried desperately to stop him, at one point complaining, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to the infamous mob lawyer and fixer who had mentored him as a young man before dying in 1986.

The president may believe that in Mr. Whitaker he’s found his Roy Cohn. He may also believe that the Republican majority in the Senate — increased on Tuesday with likely Trump loyalists — is prepared to embrace such a corrupted standard for American justice. So it’s a good moment to recall another figure from that era — Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, who said in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, “Whether we shall continue to be a government of laws, and not of men, is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”

Yeah. If they are allowed to vote.

By the way, here’s Mitch yesterday:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested Wednesday that if Democrats use their new House majority to aggressively pursue oversight of President Donald Trump and his administration, that would amount to “presidential harassment” and could backfire on the party.

Trump:

Whittaker has apparently alrady decided that he won’t approve any subpoena of the president.

Just a reminder. Ken Starr subpoenad the president and he ultimately ended up volunteering. Brett Kavanaugh put together a list of sickeningly personal questions about his sex habits, they filmed the testimony (which is never done) and then put it on the internet for the whole country to see.

That’s how they rolled. And they would do it again.

When he was on CNN I always called him the human penis. Because, well, look at the picture.

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The White House press office merges with Infowars

Published by digby on November 8, 2018

The White House press office merges with Infowars

by digby

CNN’s Jim Acosta was told to turn in his press pass. He’s no longer allowed on the White House grounds:

The video embedded in her tweet is sped up to make it seem as if Jim Acosta is “karate chopping” the woman’s arm as she reaches for the microphone.

Guess where Huckabee Sanders’ clip came from?

On the first day after the midterms, Trump held a rambling press conference in which he acted as if he was drugs. (Nothing particularly uniques about that …) Then he fired Jeff sessions and appointed an unqualified toady who auditioned for him on CNN by trashing the Mueller investigation as the Attorney general of the United States.

And later that night his press secretary banned a White House reporter and tweeted out an Alex Jones doctored video to justify it.

It’s still only Thursday.

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And the

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“Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

Published by digby on November 8, 2018

“Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

by digby

Sadly, the New York Times has a particularly pertinent piece about guns in America today.

When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.

But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

A Look at the Numbers

The top-line numbers suggest a correlation that, on further investigation, grows only clearer.

Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.

Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
Factors That Don’t Correlate

If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.

A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.

Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.

Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
A Violent Country

America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.

Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.

But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to fully erase. Any individual can snap or become entranced by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood that this will lead to mass murder.

In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.

By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly. 

Beyond the Statistics

In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.

This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.

The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.

Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.

Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.

The Difference Is Culture

The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.

The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

Most people in this country don’t participate in gun culture. It’s a sub-culture but it’s tremendously politically powerful. And since the type of people who defend it are also armed they carry a little extra weight. The rest of us are all just potential victims.

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The sum of their fears by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 8, 2018

The sum of their fears
by Tom Sullivan


What keeps aging white Republicans up at night. Image: National Geographic, October 2013.

When in January David Frum typed, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy,” was he writing as a prophet or a historian?

“The rise of minority rule in America is now unmistakable,” says Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe.

Even as final votes are tallied, the GOP gerrymandering project (REDMAP) has ensured Republicans maintain control in many places with a minority of popular support.

Running in congressional districts declared unconstitutional, North Carolina Republicans held 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats on Tuesday with only 50.3 percent of the statewide vote. Because the late-August ruling came so close to midterm elections, the three-judge panel allowed the 2018 election to proceed, but ordered the illegal districts could not be used in 2020. State Republicans have appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

State Rep. David Lewis, a Harnett County Republican and architect of the existing redistricting maps, argued that because Democrats fielded candidates in 12 districts “it proves the seats were not drawn to keep them out of the process.” The News and Observer notes that has not always been Lewis’s position:

Lewis famously said in 2016 that the maps were drawn “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.”

In Wisconsin, less than a day after the election in which Democrat Tony Evers turned out incumbent Gov. Scott Walker, Republican state Assembly leader Robin Vos (R-Rochester) announced he would look at ways to limit the incoming governor’s power before he takes office:

“If there are areas where we could look and say, ‘Geez — have we made mistakes where we granted too much power to the executive,’ I’d be open to taking a look to say what can we do to change that to try to re-balance it,” Vos told reporters.

It is a trick Wisconsin learned from Republicans in North Carolina. Such an effort may not be strictly undemocratic, but as with gerrymandering neither does it reflect the wishes of a majority of Tuesday’s voters.

Daniel Block writes at Washington Monthly:

In 2016, Republican North Carolina Governor Pat McCroy lost re-election to Democrat Roy Cooper by 10,277 votes. Having failed to stop Democrats through democracy, McCroy and the GOP-controlled state legislature thwarted the voters’ will through other means. In mid-December—before Cooper took office—state Republicans hastily called a special session during which they rammed through legislation that deprived the governor authority over elections and appointments. The General Assembly merged the State Board of Elections and the State Ethics Commission into one entity and changed its appointment process to prevent Cooper from significantly altering the commission’s partisan balance. The legislature also required that the state senate confirm many of Cooper’s appointees. Finally, it reduced the number of government employees Cooper could hire and fire by more than 1,000, crippling the governor’s ability to change his staff’s political allegiance.

Some of those efforts have been blocked in court. Others remain in litigation. Previous NCGOP efforts to require identity cards for voting ruled unconstitutional, Republicans added a constitutional amendment referendum to this week’s ballot: “Constitutional amendment to require voters to provide photo identification before voting in person.” For or Against? they ask. Trust us. We’ll fill in the details before we lose our veto-proof majorities in January.

Republican efforts to void election results, purge voters, block registrations, erect hurdles to voting, etc., reveal a party that uses the Constitution as a fig leaf to cover naked power grabs.

Retiring Wisconsin state senator Dale Schultz told a local radio host in March 2014 he could no longer support the Republican party’s efforts to restrict voting. “It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” Schultz said. “I am not willing to defend them anymore.”

To guarantee their long-term viability, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes argues, Democrats must invest political capital in ensuring people have easy access to the ballot. The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer put it bluntly:

It has to be prioritized by Democrats because it’s increasingly a crucial part of the Republican strategy for maintaining political power. Their constituency is shrinking, and the way that they’re going to keep winning elections is not by being the majority, but by ensuring that the rules of the elections favor their constituencies so that they can win a majority even when they don’t have one.

Because quite frankly they rejected democracy as a foundational principle long ago.

A little bit of progress to make you feel good about life

Published by digby on November 8, 2018

A little bit of progress to make you feel good about life

by digby

Nancy Pelosi:

I came to Congress when my youngest child Alexandra was a senior in high school and practically on her way to college. I knew that my male colleagues had come when they were 30. They had a jump on me because they didn’t have to, children to stay home. Now, I did what I wanted to do, I was blessed to have that opportunity to sequentially raise my family and then come to Congress. But I wanted women to be here in greater numbers at an earlier age so that their seniority would start to account much sooner.

Laura Clawson at DKos:

This week, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, at 29—and she will have peers. Abby Finkenauer, elected in Iowa, is less than a year older—she’ll turn 30 between the election and being sworn in. Lauren Underwood, elected in Illinois, turned 32 last month. Sharice Davids, Ilhan Omar, and Abigail Spanberger are under 40. Several other Democratic women in their early 40s were also elected to the House.

This means a generation of women are getting that early start that Pelosi’s male peers had, and will have time to climb up the House leadership or move to higher office—maybe the highest. And it means that Congress will feel a little less distant to a generation of young women voters.

The bench is full of young women phenoms. This is a very good thing.

The Great Divide is a luxury for when times are good

Published by digby on November 7, 2018

The Great Divide is a luxury for when times are good

by digby

This piece by Peter Beinert on our great divide is interesting:

Once upon a time, when Democrats campaigned on economic security, Republicans countered with economic opportunity. Democrats promised protection by government; Republicans promised liberation from government. But the libertarian, anti-government rhetoric of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in 2012 is long gone. Despite a booming economy, Republicans didn’t even campaign heavily on tax cuts.

In the Trump era, Republicans counter economic security with cultural security. Trump promised to protect Americans from Latino murderers and women who destroy men’s lives by alleging sexual assault. And, to a significant extent, it worked. By mobilizing his white, rural base, Trump matched Democratic enthusiasm in purple states such as Florida and Ohio and overwhelmed Democratic incumbents in red states such as North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri. It’s an old game: W. E. B. Du Bois famously called it the “psychological wage.” Instead of protecting white people from economic hardship, you protect them from the racial demons you’ve stirred up in their minds. And Trump is this era’s undisputed master of that game. He understood that as frightened as many Americans are of losing their health care, he—with the help of Fox News—could make them even more frightened of Honduran asylum-seekers. Now that the election is over, I suspect the caravan will disappear from Fox’s screens and Trump’s Twitter feed—until something like it is needed again.

Two years ago everyone was told by both parties that the economy was terrible. Today everyone says it’s great. The fact is that it was the same in 2016 as it is today — growing a bit faster actually. Unemployment is lower today but it was pretty low then. After the loss, the Democrats all became convinced that if they had just run more on the economy they would have won. Maybe. It seems to me that when the economy is doing well, people just overlay it onto other issues and in 2016, more Republicans felt conformtable enough to go back to voting for dumb Republican presidents on a tribal basis. And that spells “culture war.”

The current economic expansion is the longest in history and it’s getting stale. There’s a good chance that the economy will be slowing substantially by the time we get to 2020, which changes the calculation. You can’t count on that, of course. But I assume Democrats will be prepared to lay the fault at the feet of Donald Trump as they should. He takes credit on the upside, he will have to take the blame if it goes down.

As for the culture war — it’s always been with us. It’s very hot and the parties have sorted themselves on to either side. As long as Trump is around it will be. So, the Dems can’t avoid it even if they want to.

Beinert says the harsh truth is that racism works. It often does as we have seen. But not always. It’s a luxury vote for times when things are going well. When they aren’t many of those people decide their bottom line is more important than their bigotry.

Hey, somebody’s got to clean up the mess and the Republicans sure aren’t going to do it.

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What happens if Mueller is out?

Published by digby on November 7, 2018

What happens if Mueller is out?

by digby

If you are wondering about the implications of The Sessions firing, I recommend this piece by Marcy Wheeler from last week. I’ll just excerpt this piece of it which I think is probably what we are looking at:

House Democrats might follow the precedent set during Watergate—the last time that a president tried to thwart an investigation into election corruption by firing the Department of Justice officials conducting it.

Mueller’s activities thus far have been laid out in plea deals and highly detailed “speaking” indictments, which provide far more information about the actions involved than strictly necessary for legal purposes. But according to the regulation that governs his appointment, at the end of his investigation Mueller must also provide the attorney general with “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel.” Also upon completion of the investigation, if the attorney general overrules an action Mueller wanted to take, he or she must notify the chair and ranking members of the Judiciary Committee.

It’s not clear what, within the scope of the regulations, would happen to such a report in the scenario laid out here, where Mueller got fired on some trumped-up claim of improper action. The only thing that would necessarily get shared with Congress is the report on why the attorney general had overruled Mueller, which wouldn’t necessarily include details of what else Mueller had discovered. Indeed, Neal Katyal, the former Obama administration lawyer who wrote the special counsel regulation under which Mueller operates, recently advised Rosenstein to provide a report to Congress before a meeting with Trump at which he might have been fired.

But Rosenstein might not permit such reports under department regulations. Rosenstein has refused to share information on the investigation in the past, citing the Department of Justice policy on not confirming names of those being investigated unless they are charged. And thus far, even Republicans attempting to undermine the investigation have not sought investigative materials from Mueller, instead focusing on the FBI investigation up to the time when Mueller was hired on May 17, 2017. That’s partly because under rule 6(e) of grand jury proceedings, information can only be shared for other legal proceedings (such as a state trial or military commission).

Yet a Watergate precedent suggests the House could obtain the report if Mueller were fired.

A Watergate precedent may be the key to protecting the Mueller investigation.Pierre Manevy/Express/Getty Images
Some Freedom of Information Act requests have recently focused attention on—and may lead to the public release of—a report similar to the one Mueller is mandated to complete. It was the report done by Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, referred to as the “Road Map.” The Road Map consists of a summary and 53 pages of evidentiary descriptions, each citing the underlying grand jury source for that evidentiary description. In 1974, Jaworski used it to transmit information discovered during his grand jury investigation to the House Judiciary Committee—which then used the report to kickstart its impeachment investigation.

Before Jaworski shared the Road Map, however, he obtained authorization from then-Chief Judge John Sirica of the D.C. Circuit Court. In Sirica’s opinion authorizing the transfer, he deemed the report to be material to House Judiciary Committee duties. He further laid out how such a report should be written to avoid separation of powers issues. The report as compiled by Jaworski offered “no accusatory conclusions” nor “substitute[s] for indictments where indictments might properly issue.” It didn’t tell Congress what to do with the information. Rather it was “a simple and straightforward compilation of information gathered by the Grand Jury, and no more.” Per Sirica, that rendered the report constitutionally appropriate to share with another branch of government.

If Mueller—whose team includes former Watergate prosecutor James Quarles—were fired and he leaves any report behind that fits the standards laid out here, this Watergate precedent should ensure it could be legally shared with the House Judiciary Committee.

The question is whether he has to share it with today’s House Majority and what that means. Can they deep-six it? Do they have to share it with the minority?

In the Watergate case it was Grand Jury material kept under seal all these years. It was just released last week. Will it likewise have to be kept under wraps today? I’m not sure. After all, the Starr Report was released on the internet and they even released the tape of the president’s testimony. So who knows?

This is probably going to be the end of Mueller and it will all be left up to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees to unravel. And the Senate is saying if the Democrats do investigate their Dear Leader they are going to pull out all the stops to retaliate, possibly including more investigations into Hillary Clinton — which Matthew Whittaker, the new AG has said he believes must lead to an indictment.

Get ready. This is going to get ugly, no matter what.

BTW: Mueller and his team were very much aware that Sessions was going to be replaced probably by Whittaker. It was in the press. So presumably they have planned for it.

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“Tuesday’s results only widened the persistent gulf between those coalitions”

Published by digby on November 7, 2018

“Tuesday’s results only widened the persistent gulf between those coalitions”

by digby


The best analysis of last night’s results and what they portend for the future is, unsurprisingly, by Ron Brownstein:

On Tuesday, a divided America returned a divided verdict on the tumultuous first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Rather than delivering a “blue wave” or a “red wall,” the election produced a much more divergent result than usual in a midterm.

Democrats made sweeping gains in the House, ousting Republicans in urban and suburban seats across every region of the country to convincingly retake the majority for the first time since 2010. They also made a dramatic recovery in the Rust Belt states that tipped the presidency to Trump in 2016: Democrats won both the governorship and Senate races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the three bricks in the party’s “blue wall” that Trump dislodged to capture the White House.

But Republicans expanded their Senate majority across a belt of older, whiter heartland states, and crushed liberal hopes by denying victory to the three young Sun Belt Democrats who had captured the party’s imagination more than any other candidates in this election cycle. The Republicans Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz respectively defeated the African American gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke, the Texas Senate hopeful who energized party activists across not only the state but the country. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams, seeking to become the nation’s first female African American governor, trailed Republican Brian Kemp, but refused to concede while waiting to see whether the count of remaining ballots would force a runoff in December.

The combined results reconfirmed the deep lines of division etched in Trump’s narrow 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. The evening amounted to a simultaneous repudiation and reaffirmation of Trump from two very different Americas, and underscored the fundamental demographic, cultural, and economic changes reshaping America and its politics.

The results dramatized both the benefits and the costs of the electoral bargain Trump is imposing on his party. Behind his racially infused nationalism, the GOP is trading white-collar voters for blue-collar voters; suburban for rural; and younger for older. Those trends advantaged them in a Senate map centered mostly on white heartland states, and they also showed continued potency in Sun Belt battlegrounds such as North Carolina and Georgia, where overwhelming margins among working-class white voters allowed Republicans to overcome erosion in other categories.

In Senate races, Trump successfully mobilized his coalition to help Republicans oust Democratic incumbents in North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri, all states that he carried in 2016. Montana remained too close to call on Wednesday morning, though many analysts believed Democrat Jon Tester had a clearer path to victory. Trump’s coattails in the Republican victories were apparent: Exit polls conducted in Indiana and Missouri showed Trump’s approval rating at 50 percent or above in each, with the GOP candidates winning 86 to 88 percent of the voters who approved of him.

But for the first time in Trump’s national political career, the electoral costs of his approach also came due. House Republicans were swept away in urban and suburban districts, from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Virginia in the East, to Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Des Moines, and Kansas City in the Midwest, to Denver, Tucson, Orange County, and possibly even Salt Lake City in the West. Republicans fell even in suburb-heavy southern districts around Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Charleston, and possibly Atlanta that traditionally have leaned much more reliably red than similar areas in other regions.

All of these suburban seats were in places where voters are doing best in the buoyant economy, but widespread discomfort with Trump’s style and values ignited a huge backlash among college-educated white voters—primarily women, but also an unusually large number of men. The exit polls put Trump’s approval rating among college-educated white voters at only about 40 percent. Burdened by that verdict, Republican House members were swept away in fast-growing, economically dynamic metro areas.

In the midwestern states that were key to Trump’s victory in 2016, the Democrats rebounded, while also facing reminders of the obstacles they may face in reclaiming those states from Trump in 2020. Democratic Senators in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—all of whom were considered at risk after Trump carried their states two years ago—won comfortable victories. The party also reelected a governor in Pennsylvania, beat Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and took over for the outgoing GOP governor in Michigan. Still, Republicans comfortably held the Ohio governorship, and narrowly prevailed in Iowa.

In the Sun Belt, Democrats were frustrated by a string of relatively narrow losses. But the strong showing of Abrams in Georgia, Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona (whose race had not been called as of Wednesday morning), and, above all, O’Rourke in Texas could signal a revival of their competitiveness in those states. O’Rourke actually won more votes in Texas than Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential race, an incredible performance. At the same time, the dispiriting loss for Gillum in Florida underscored the difficulty Democrats face winning the state in a high-turnout election—an ominous sign for 2020.

These diverging results—big Democratic gains in the House and respectable advances in governorships offset by a strong Republican performance in the Senate—were rooted in the intense polarization around Trump. Exit pollsmeasuring the national vote in House races showed that Democrats posted big advantages among the groups most antagonistic to the president: young voters(they carried about two-thirds of those younger than 30 and three-fifths of those between 30 and 40), African Americans (about nine in 10), and Latinos (about two-thirds). Republicans in turn won about three-fourths of white evangelical voters and ran up a double-digit lead over Democrats among rural voters.

But the defining trend of the night—as throughout the Trump presidency—was the substantial gap between white voters with and without a four-year college education. That gap helps explain both the Democratic suburban gains in the House and the strong GOP performance in the Senate.

In the first decades after World War II, white voters without a college education consistently voted more Democratic than white voters holding a four-year college degree or more. That’s flipped in recent years, with Democrats at both the congressional and presidential level consistently winning a higher share of white voters with a college degree than those without one.

That inversion has intensified under Donald Trump. In both the 2010 and 2014midterm elections under Obama, House Democrats won only about one-third of non-college whites and about two-fifths of whites with a college degree. In 2010, Democrats ran six points better among college whites than non-college whites; in 2014, the gap was seven points. But in 2016, with Trump on the ballot, the gap roughly doubled to 13 percentage points, as House Republicans improved further with non-college whites and lost ground among college-educated whites.

On Tuesday, the gap between the two groups expanded further. Democrats carried only 37 percent of white voters without a college education (compared with 61 percent for Republicans). But Democrats won a 53 percent majority of college-educated white voters (compared with 45 percent for Republicans). Tuesday’s Democratic performance among white voters without a college degree improved just slightly from their weak showings in the 2010 and 2014midterms, when they carried only about one-third of them each time. But their showing with college-educated whites on Tuesday represented a big improvement from those two previous midterms, when they carried about two-fifths of them in each election, according to exit polls. This week, Democrats not only carried 59 percent of college-educated white women, an unprecedented number, but reached 47 percent among college-educated white men; they hadn’t reached even 40 percent among those men nationally in any House election since 2008.

That surge in white-collar support sparked the gains in suburban seats that produced the Democrats’ first House majority since 2010. But the persistence of Trump’s appeal with blue-collar voters, amplified by his frenetic and fear-infused final campaign swing, frustrated Democratic hopes in several districts with substantial rural populations that they had earlier hoped to capture, including seats in Kansas and Kentucky. Trump also helped Republican Ron DeSantis win the Florida governor’s race by following the same model the president employed to carry the state in 2016: big margins in small places, which allowed them to overcome commanding Democratic advantages in the urban centers. Rick Scott, whose Florida Senate race appears to be heading for a recount, benefited from this dynamic as well.

On each side there was some regional variation in this pattern. The Rust Belt Democratic Senators who won reelection in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan each pushed past 40 percent among white voters without a college education. That was hardly a commanding performance, but it represented at least some recovery from Hillary Clinton’s anemic showing in the same states in 2016—and it is sure to encourage Democrats who want to focus on recapturing those states as the most straightforward path back to the White House in 2020.

Conversely, the Democratic performance among college-educated whites in the South—who tend toward more conservative positions than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly on social issues—continued to lag. O’Rourke did capture just over two in five college-educated whites, which was a notable improvement over earlier Democrats in Texas (who have often struggled to win more than 30 percent of those voters), but it wasn’t enough to overcome Cruz’s distinct advantage among non-college whites, who gave him about three-fourths of their votes, according to the exit poll. Abrams, even more strikingly, lost over four-fifths of whites without a college degree, while attracting just a little over one-third of those with one. That was also better than Georgia Democrats had done in the past, but—pending the final ballot counting—not enough to win. The key to Gillum’s loss, a big letdown for Democrats, may have been his inability to win more than about one-third of college-educated white men (even as he won nearly three-fifths of white women with a college degree).

The parties are realigning dramatically. But because of our weird federalist system, the Senate and the electoral college are difficult even though the Democrats have a much larger coalition. A majority of states with more cows than people really, really, really like him. And there are a bunch of them.

If Democrats want to beat Trump they are going to have to choose someone who can transcend that divide in at least a few places.

Looming over all of this was the intensely divisive figure of Trump. As noted above, his approval rating stood at 50 percent or more in almost all of the states where Republicans notched important victories. But nationally, just 45 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance, while 54 percent disapproved, according to the exit polls. And while 88 percent of those who approved of Trump said they backed Republican House candidates, fully 90 percent of those who disapproved said they voted Democratic. The correlation between attitudes toward the president and the vote in congressional races has been growing in recent years. But among both Trump’s supporters and his detractors, the connection between attitudes about the president’s performance and the House vote on Tuesday night was the highest recorded in exit polls since at least 1982.

Those numbers quantify the outsized shadow Trump is casting on American politics. Even as suburban voters in major metro areas from coast to coast registered an emphatic statement of discontent with his direction and performance, the small-town, exurban, rural, and blue-collar areas that powered his victory reaffirmed their commitment to his cause. Tuesday’s results only widened the persistent gulf between those coalitions and set up even more intense conflict between them moving forward.

It is about him. But it’s also about his people. There are millions of them and they worship him. He can do no wrong.

It’s going to be hand to hand combat all the way to 2020. I hope people are prepared for that and the Democrats don’t wank ineffectually over internecine nonsense for months and instead concentrate on the big picture. There is no front-runner for the presidential race and I have no idea who the best candidate to win in 2020 will be. There are going to be a bunch of people running and we’ll get a chance to see them in action.

Personally, I’m hoping for a younger, fresh face without decades of baggage hung around his or her neck. Democrats need to focus on the future and cast Trump as the guy who wants to turn back the clock to a time that never existed. I think, at heart, that’s the real issue and it’s always good to have someone who embodies your message.

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