It’s been a tough week. Let’s have a drink and watch some adorable lion cubs, shall we?
We have to stop these awful people in November for the sake of the children and the animals. We just have to.
"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2020
Don’t assume the US can handle a pandemic anymore. Trump’s wrecking ball has been destroying our public health system:
The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, “What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?”
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is
The article goes on to describe all the efforts that were made under the Obama administration during the ebola outbreak in 2014. It was tremendous, with various departments of the federal government working hand in glove with the states and local governments.:
Bureaucracy matters. Without it, there’s nothing to coherently manage an alphabet soup of agencies housed in departments ranging from Defense to Commerce, Homeland Security to Health and Human Services (HHS).
But that’s all gone now.
In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.
Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail.
Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”
I wish I could understand why the right is so hostile to health care in general and public health specifically. Do they think it can’t possibly happen to them? Do they not love their children?
I guess it comes down to their suspicion of expertise that denigrates pointy-headed science as some sort of elitist cabal that is trying to keep them down? Honestly, I don’t get it. Even if you are a hardcore libertarian public health is something that requires scale and coordination.
Degrading the country’s ability to deal with a pandemic may be the single most destructive thing they’ve done.
New polling shows a growing sense of fatalism in America. That’s the ultimate victory of the fascist strain:
On impeachment, more Americans think it will hurt congressional Democrats politically than say that about Mr. Trump.
The country divides on the political impact impeachment will have on the president. Four in 10 say it won’t have much effect. Democrats are more inclined to think impeachment will hurt the president (39%) than help (11%). Half (50%) of Republicans think the impeachment matter will help President Trump.
On balance, more Americans say the impeachment trial is being conducted unfairly than fairly. Four in 10 say it’s too soon to say. Both Republicans and Democrats are inclined to think the trial is being conducted unfairly, particularly Republicans.
Also, this:
Fifty-seven percent approve the job the president is doing on the economy — the highest since he took office. Most who describe the condition of the economy as good say the president is at least partially responsible for that, including most Democrats.
I continue to wonder if the Democratic assumption that the economy is the source of all that ails America might sound a little bit like they are speaking in another dimension right now. It’s true that many are suffering and that must be addressed. But the majority of the country is not worried about the economy, they are worried about something else:
Nearly half of those who say the economy is in good shape view the state of the country negatively. Seven in 10 of this group — who feel positive about the economy but negative about the state of the country — disapproves of the job the president is doing overall.
While Mr. Trump enjoys a positive rating on the economy, his overall job rating and his marks on other issues are lower. Forty-three percent approve of the president’s job performance overall.
I guess we’ll see what the people are actually thinking come November. This is ultimately a referendum on Trump more than anything else and that number is not good for him 9 months from the election, regardless of whether the Democrats run as if the economy is in the ditch or not.
Never-Trumper Rick Wilson has a warning for Republicans, via twitter:
Every Republican senator needs to know some key, invariable facts:
The moment they vote to deny witnesses, they seal their own political fate.
The blow won’t just come from the Democrats or from outside groups.
It will come from Trump himself. Because the moment you deny witnesses, Trump will know his exoneration is inevitable.
And he will start bragging about it.
He will start talking about it. He will tweet about it.
And then as the evidence emerges in dribs and drabs, and as the facts you covered up become public, you own them.
You’re on the whole story.
He’ll laugh and let you all burn to the ground.
He’ll let you take the political damage, absorb all the radiation, and to lose more seats.
More importantly, like any criminal who forces someone to become an accomplice, he’ll know that you’re morally weak and mentally unable to ever resist him.
He’s an abuser, the Ike Turner of presidents, and no matter how many times you beg he still going to knock you around.
Finally, a favorite trope in advertising is — rightly — the “X cast the deciding vote.”
Y’all are looking at 3 votes for witnesses, tops.
You’re the deciding vote.
Wilson knows how Republicans think. He was one of the most vicious practitioners of the party’s dark arts for years.
He is right. Trump is the one who will stab them all in the back.
New reporting from the New York Times:
The newest revelations from the book by President Trump’s former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, put top aides in the room when Mr. Trump asked Mr. Bolton to help with his pressure campaign on Ukraine.
Mr. Trump gave the instruction, Mr. Bolton wrote, in the Oval Office in early May and in front of the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who is now leading the president’s impeachment defense.
The account supports testimony from witnesses who testified in the House impeachment inquiry, including Gordon D. Sondland, who said that “everyone was in the loop.”
This means Pat Cipollone is one unethical lawyer. Not that it matters. He’ll be a hero.
If you think this means any GOP Senator will change his or her mind, think again. Tim Alberta is a wingnut-friendly political reporter for Politico who wrote a sympathetic book about the Republican Party called, “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump “
Here’s how he explains the 79 year old Senator and ex-Governor, Lamar Alexander’s decision.
Basically, they are all pathetic, self-interested, cowards. No wonder they happily kowtow to the likes of Donald Trump. It relieves them of having to pretend they have any integrity at all.
For all the talk about the precedent of the Clinton impeachment, I think we can rest assured this precedent will not be followed in the coming days:
I don’t think anyone in the country ever believed that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to remove Donald Trump from office in his impeachment trial. When the president famously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, he wasn’t kidding, at least when it comes to GOP officials. He has an iron grip on his party.
From the first moment of the trial, it’s been obvious that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s only organizing principle was to prevent the hearing of witnesses and get the trial over with as soon as possible. John Bolton’s announcement that he was willing to testify before the Senate under subpoena presented a slight bump in the road, which McConnell finessed easily with his gambit to put off the issue until the end of the trial. When the New York Times reported that Bolton’s testimony would directly implicate the president, McConnell put the squeeze on any wavering GOP senators and as of Thursday night, it appeared clear that there would not be enough votes to allow him to testify.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who is retiring after this term, was considered most likely to be the necessary fourth Republican vote for witnesses. He issued a statement saying that while he believes the House managers had fully proved their case, he believes that the president merely acted “inappropriately.” In Alexander’s mind, there is no need to hear any other witnesses and the Senate doesn’t have the authority to remove Trump from office. That’s the closest anyone on the Republican side has come to admitting that the president did something wrong, so it apparently passes for political courage in the Trump era.
House managers have presented a meticulous case showing that the president has abused his power, arguing that to fail to hold him accountable would make him a de facto king. At first, Trump’s defense lawyers argued that he didn’t do it or that he was just a selfless corruption crusader. But when former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz took the podium he basically stipulated to everything the House managers have said, arguing that nothing can be done about it because abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. Two days later he doubled down on that argument saying, “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” In his mind, a president who believes it’s in the nation’s interest for him to be the president is free to do whatever will ensure his election.
Trump has said over and over again that he believes this as well. The House managers played a video of him saying that Article II of the Constitution means “I can do whatever I want” several times during the trial. That is hardly the only time he’s said such things.
During the Mueller investigation, for instance, Trump said many times that he had “the right” to pull the plug if he chose. Here said this to the New York Times just a year ago:
I’ve chosen to stay out of it. But I had the right to, as you know, I had the right if I wanted to to end everything. I could’ve just said, “That’s enough.” Many people thought that’s what I should do.
“Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China including bringing … your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” When leaving the White House for the G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters, “I have the absolute right to do that, but we’ll see how it goes.”
Or this, after Trump was revealed to have spilled classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office:
Or this one:
As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!81.7K4:35 AM – Jun 4, 2018Twitter Ads info and privacy74.9K people are talking about this
Donald Trump has been a fierce proponent of an unaccountable imperial presidency since before he took office. He announced during the transition that the president can’t have a conflict of interest and he could run his business and the country at the same time if he chose to. Even today he “jokes” about extending his presidency beyond the constitutionally limited eight years.
Like Louis XIV, he routinely suggests, l’état, c’est Donald Trump. Dershowitz was just defending his client, the man who would be king.
This also has loud echoes of the most disgraced president in history (until now), Richard Nixon, and his famous quote from his interviews with David Frost: “When the president does it it’s not illegal.” It’s worthwhile to note the context because while Trump’s impeachment concerns manipulation of foreign policy for his personal benefit, Nixon’s use of the concept applied to domestic policy.
Frost asked Nixon about the impeachment article relating to his abuse of presidential power, which had concerned a White House plan to use the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to quell dissident activity with “wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups.” Nixon had signed off on the plan but was thwarted by objections from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Frost: Would you say that there are certain situations … where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?
Nixon: When the president does it, it’s not illegal.
Frost: By definition.
Nixon: Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.
Frost: The point is: The dividing line is the president’s judgment?
Nixon: Yes, and so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate.
He added that the Congress has the power of the purse and that “trusted” members of Congress had been read in on some of the covert activity, as if that made it OK. Sound familiar?
Donald Trump almost certainly knows nothing of Nixon’s presidential immunity theory, but he has behaved in almost exactly the same way. Instead of his party stepping up to stop him, they are about to endorse his behavior.
Alan Dershowitz unimpeached Richard Nixon today. All Nixon was doing was obstructing justice and abusing power because he thought he was the best person for the USA to be POTUS. When POTUS does it… etc. Seriously, that was his motive! Agree with Alan and impeachment is gone!48.2K4:54 PM – Jan 29, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy15.5K people are talking about this
If Trump wins a second term, can there be any doubt that he will follow even more closely in Nixon’s footsteps and go after his political enemies at home? And unfortunately, we don’t seem to have leaders in the Department of Justice with the integrity of (checks notes) J. Edgar Hoover anymore.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, Congress enacted many reforms to preclude those abuses from ever happening again. We are now right back where we started, if not worse.
Jamil Smith over at Rolling Stone closes in on one explanation for Republicans’ willingness to kowtow to their God-king that I never quite put together:
This is about Republicans maintaining the ability to manipulate elections here at home. Trump, so desperate to win his election the first time, welcomed foreign interference along with the traditional domestic voter suppression his party offered. Pandora’s Box has been opened more widely than the president and the Republicans probably ever anticipated, and now they are willing to argue that Trump has the powers of an autocrat all so that they can maintain this ability to reach out to whomever they need to in order to win elections.
This is how reckless Republicans are with America, willing to give untold amounts of power to a man whom they still don’t fully understand in a frantic attempt to maintain their own grip on advantage in a country that has already elected a black president once and whose demographics are quickly turning against them.
I don’t know if Republicans really expected Donald Trump to win in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s campaign surely misread the tea leaves and her campaign was overconfident. She won the popular vote, yes, just not in the right places. That, after all, is how the electoral college game is played.
Trump’s campaign of white grievance won the presidency with two percent fewer votes than Clinton. When it became clear he won with help both from foreign interference and stateside voter suppression, the jostled pinball machines in GOP strategists’ heads lit up. Trump’s election wasn’t just dumb luck. It was proof of concept.
With demographics “turning against them,” Republicans have desperately sought means by which to maintain power as a minority party. Voter fraud vigilantes have been at that effort for decades. But since the late 1990s, with Fox News and social media helping to “catapult the propaganda,” they’ve built public support for and expanded the reach of photo ID laws. A smorgasbord of other suppression tactics has made voting harder even as voting rights activists struggle to fight back and work to expand the voting pool. Computers allowed the GOP to perfect gerrymandering techniques that allowed them to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The Trump administration has tried to rig the census to stick an even heavier thumb on the scales of democracy.
But what Trump’s ascendancy demonstrated was that his party could drop the dog whistles and campaign openly on preserving its white base’s position atop the social pecking order in a browning America. They could even request foreign help in doing it with seeming impunity. After Trump’s expected acquittal vote in the Senate today, we can strike the “seeming.”
Supposed Republican leaders dissolve into a gelatinous mass around Trump. The wannabe alpha dogs whimper and grovel in the presence of Trump’s unrefined id. I have argued for years that their vaunted principles are a mile wide and an inch deep. Their submission to Trump confirms it. To suite his need, White House counsel Pat Cipollone stood in the well of the Senate Wednesday night making up principles out of whole cloth.
What Trump offers Republicans is not a path out of the electoral wilderness, but a means to avoid exile there in the first place. That Trump’s way involves lying, stealing, and cheating matters not. That Trump’s way means setting alight our “government of laws and not of men” matters less than preserving the primacy of their shrinking fraction of the electorate. Trump’s way involves, in effect, paying protection (in immortal souls) to a local crime boss.
God Himself gave Trump’s followers this country and they mean to keep it. Or else burn it to the ground so no one else can have it. Where Jesus himself says otherwise, well, “sometimes Jesus is just plain wrong.” That’s not simply the reasoning of Trump’s evangelical base. It is the standard of argument offered by Trump’s legal defense and among his Republican defenders.
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If what we hear about the vote for witnesses is true, it’s likely we may have a 50-50 tie. Harry Litman discusses the role that the Chief Justice might play in such a scenario:
In fact, text, structure and history — all the legal tools of the trade — point strongly toward a substantive role at trial for the chief justice.
The Constitution speaks sparingly to the contours of an impeachment trial but specifies unambiguously that the chief justice must “preside.” The Senate rules, which incorporate this command, make no distinction between the chief justice’s role as presiding officer in this context and the vice president’s in all others. There is no apparent reason the presiding officer’s responsibility would include breaking 50-50 ties in one context but not the others.
A presiding officer presides; that means keeping order and moving proceedings along, at least somewhat analogous to the role of a district court judge. The reason the chief justice and not the vice president plays this role in an impeachment of the president alone is that the vice president would have an automatic conflict of interest. If the presiding officer had no substantive role to play, there would be no conflict. It’s precisely because the presiding officer might make substantive decisions that the chief justice must step in.
Finally, the chief justice played a substantive role in both previous impeachment trials of the president. Most notably, Chief Justice Salmon Chase twice broke ties in the Andrew Johnson trial.
For all these reasons, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told me he “agree[s] strongly that the role is not solely honorific or purely decorative.”AD
There is one glaring way in which Roberts’s duties will be different from his accustomed judicial role: His rulings are not final. In the Wild West world of the Senate as trier, a majority of the body can always impose its will. And all political precedent indicates McConnell would do exactly that if he felt it served the president’s purposes.
But by the same token, if Roberts casts the 51st vote in favor of, for example, the issuance of a subpoena to Bolton, there is no judicial recourse. (Trump could always try, of course, but the courts would swiftly rebuff him.) And in that event, it’s hard to see where and how the McConnell camp would secure 51 votes to overrule Roberts, whose vote carries an extra measure of stature and authority.
So as the trial looms, we should all be counting to three and in particular keeping eyes (and pressure) on Collins, Murkowski and Romney. They have it in their power to serve up important decisions to Roberts, which as things are developing may be the best the Democrats can hope for.
Roberts is the only person in that arena who has a lifetime appointment. He is insulated from the wrath of the Trump cult and he has the responsibility every day of his working life for weighing evidence and arguments and making a decision. This is the easiest ruling he would ever have to make on the merits. Of course the trial should have witnesses.
But I will be stunned if he does it. Beyond stunned. But never say never. And whatever he decides it will be quite a dramatic moment if it comes to that. Close to that moment when the Court announced that they’d put their thumbs on the scale for George W. Bush, proving once and for all that they were a bunch of partisan hacks. I suspect Roberts will remain true to that tradition.
Oh look, even as he’s being impeached for cheating in his upcoming election campaign, Trump’s minions are hard at work destroying health care:
The Trump administration is back with a new initiative that could make it harder for some low-income Americans to get health care.
Officials on Thursday told states that they can request major changes in the operation and funding of their Medicaid programs. Under the new arrangement, the outlines of which were first reported by Politico over the weekend, states would have more leeway to modify benefits and eligibility standards for some parts of the population. Last chance to become a HuffPost founding member!Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost’s next chapterBecome a founding member
In return, states would have to accept a more limited commitment of funds from the federal government.
In other words, if a state agrees to take less money they will have the right to punish their own citizens more freely. You’d think no state would want to do that. But, of course, many of them are run by Republicans so yes, they will likely be thrilled at the prospect of denying health care to people. Ever since Medicare was first enacted they’ve been hysterical on the subject.
This new financing option is a variation on what’s known as a “block grant,” which would end the federal government’s open-ended promise to finance Medicaid coverage for whoever needs it, however much it costs. Republicans have historically promoted block grants as a way to limit or reduce Medicaid spending, and many experts believe such proposals would lead to cuts in enrollment or benefits that would harm beneficiaries.
That potential has stirred up opposition and helps explain why Medicaid block grants have never gotten the support they needed to get through Congress.
With this new initiative, the Trump administration is trying to get around that political problem by using its executive authority to let states change Medicaid financing on their own. It’s the same approach that the administration has used to limit or scale back other politically sensitive programs, like food assistance, that serve low-income Americans.
The Trump administration on Thursday moved to drop the threat of punishment to oil and gas companies, construction crews and other organizations that kill birds “incidentally,” arguing that businesses that accidentally kill birds ought to be able to operate without fear of prosecution.
Conservation groups said the proposed new regulation from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which operates under the Department of Interior, would substantially weaken the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and put millions of birds in danger. The threat of fines and prosecution has, for decades, helped prod industries to take steps to protect birds, like affixing red lights on communication towers, they say.
This is the same president who claims to be against wind power because it kills birds.
They are working overtime now to destroy as much government protection for humans and animals as they possibly can. And it’s picking up speed.