He said it was a hoax in the very beginning. He’s come full circle.
"what digby sez..."
Month: October 2020
Trump made this ridiculous comment in the debate this week:
I don’t know if somebody went to Wall Street. You’re the one that takes all the money from Wall Street. I don’t take it. You have raised a lot of money, tremendous amounts of money. And every time you raise money, deals are made. I could raise so much more money. As president and as somebody that knows most of those people, I could call the heads of Wall Street, the heads of every company in America, I would blow away every record. But I don’t want to do that because it puts me in a bad position. And then you bring up Wall Street? You shouldn’t be bringing up Wall Street. Because you’re the one that takes the money from Wall Street, not me. I could blow away your records like you wouldn’t believe.
He’s repeating this absurdity at his rallies now, as a way of excusing the fact that the bottom has fallen out of his fundraising. It could not be a bigger lie. In fact, it’s a laie that requires a major audit of all federal spending and contracts should the Democrats win.
On a Friday evening in late September, President Trump huddled with high-dollar donors, lobbyists and corporate executives in a private room at the hotel he owns in Washington, where attendees took turns pitching the president on their pet issues.
Trump was there to raise big money for his reelection effort. The price of admission: as much as $100,000 per person to get in the door.
For his guests, it was a chance to make the most of what has emerged as a signature feature of Trump’s Washington: the ability of wealthy donors to directly lobby the president.
One talked to him about solar panels; another about business loans, according to two people who participated and, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions. At least one guest was told by Trump to follow up with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, conveniently seated nearby.AD
One attendee’s plea on behalf of an obscure railway project in Alaska in need of federal approval appeared to get immediate results.
Just after midnight, mere hours after the campaign fundraiser, Trump tweeted that it was his “honor to inform you that I will be issuing a Presidential Permit for the A2A Cross-Border rail.”
“Congratulations to the people of Alaska & Canada!” he added, noting that the state’s congressional delegation was supportive of the move. The presidential permit was officially issued three days later.
Trump’s rapid action after the Sept. 25 fundraiser — one of dozens of high-dollar donor events he has headlined while in office — emblemizes how much he has abandoned his 2016 pledge to “DRAIN THE SWAMP.”
In the closing weeks of that election, Trump led cheering supporters in chants of that slogan, promising that he would completely disrupt the culture of Washington. He warned of the power of lobbyists and political donors who he said effectively bought off elected officials. He told voters he was uniquely prepared to take on the issue, because he knew personally as a contributor how the system worked.AD
“When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2015.
But during his four years in office, Trump has taken few steps to clean up Washington. He has instead presided over a norm-shattering expansion of private interests in government.
The government has had to spend money at Trump’s private hotels as his family has traveled around the globe. Trump sidestepped rules that had been designed to prevent nepotism, allowing his son-in-law to serve in a top government role. He has touted companies run by supporters and allies who received government contracts. His administration has allowed former lobbyists to serve in jobs in which they have oversight of policies that affect their former employers.
Among the five pledges Trump made to “drain the swamp” and curtail the influence of lobbyists in a major campaign speech in October 2016, a Washington Post review found that he sought to address only two, through an executive order in January 2017 — which contained a major loophole.
Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the government watchdog group Public Citizen, had initially expressed cautious optimism about Trump’s ethics pledge in 2017. He now says the president has worsened Washington’s profiteering culture in nearly every way.
“The whole administration has taken Trump’s tone — self-dealing, self-enriching, enriching your friends and families — that’s smart, if you listen to Trump,” he said.
This next is important. I tried to convince people of this from the get but the media kept believing that Trump was talking about corruption and cronyism when he talked about “The Swamp.” No.
Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that the president has followed through on his promises, casting “the swamp” as those who have opposed Trump’s agenda.
“President Trump has fought tirelessly in his effort to make Washington accountable to the American people — that can be seen not only in his government ethics reforms, but also in his push to drain the swamp of its tired, failed, recycled ideas, such as working to end endless wars, tearing up disastrous trade deals that shipped our jobs overseas, rolling back burdensome regulations and expediting permit approvals, and putting an end to uncontrolled immigration,” he said. “And that is why the Swamp has fought so hard against this President every step of the way.”
“The Swamp”, The Deep State” it’s all the same thing: anyone who opposes Trump and believes in the rule of law. I would have thought that was obvious. In fact, I wrote about it a bunch of times. Here’s one Salon piece about all of his corrupt practices with foreign governments alone:
Those are just a few examples out of dozens in the Trump era that prove his promise to “drain the swamp” was preposterous. What we now understand is that what he and his administration meant by that was not to root out corruption but rather to root out career federal officials who refused to break the law or betray the country on behalf of Donald Trump.
… when you’re evaluating what got us Donald Trump in the first place.
There were many reasons, but this was right up there.
And also remember that these were not the only ones who reacted this way. And it was that attitude that allowed them to indulge their universal loathing for Hillary Clinton and give Trump a fighting chance.
I’m just saying … be careful of the Villagers. They still have a LOT of power.
The Trump White House is not even trying to contain the coronavirus pandemic. This is beyond belief. Beyond irresponsible. It is inhuman.
Don’t imagine the response if a Democrat took this approach. Imagine if Dwight Eisenhower did. Even then, he had to fight a Texan leading his own Department of Health, Education and Welfare who “disputed suggestions that the distribution should be regulated or managed by the federal government or that it should be compulsory.” In her view, that was a “back door to socialized medicine.” Eisenhower prevailed. Oveta Culp Hobby resigned.
While it waits for an effective vaccine, the Trump administration finds it acceptable that you get the coronavirus and don’t die.
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Hey, you! Wanna save the country? How often do you get to save a country?
You don’t want to miss this. As a bonus, you get to stomp an asshole. Dozens, actually. All you have to do is VOTE.
Seriously. Bring everyone you know. They don’t want to miss this. They may not know it yet, but this is the “portals” scene from Avengers: Endgame.
Portals opening
Younger voters raised on such fare are showing up in human waves. Early turnout numbers are staggering.
Six times, eight times, 19 times the turnout among this group in 2016. And not just in Florida, North Carolina, and Michigan. Here’s even more from Tufts University:
Still more from the Washington Post as of 7 a.m. ET this morning:
New York began early voting on Saturday. It’s not close to being a swing state. Handing its 29 electoral votes to Joe Biden is a forgone conclusion. Yet 93,000 turned out in New York City alone. Lines wrapped completely around blocks and doubled over themselves. Some voted then cried.
Now then, do not trust an early lead. This is no time to back off, DocDawg (of Daily Kos) warns North Carolina Democrats. Republicans are not going to stay home. Or as I warn volunteers, Republicans bat last.
Still, this tsunami of left-leaning voters has Republicans worried (Politico):
Democrats have opened up a yawning gap in early voting over Republicans in six of the most crucial battleground states — but that only begins to tell the story of their advantage heading into Election Day.
In a more worrisome sign for Republicans, Democrats are also turning out more low-frequency and newly registered voters than the GOP, according to internal data shared with POLITICO by Hawkfish, a new Democratic research firm, which was reviewed by Republicans and independent experts.
The turnout data does not mean Donald Trump will lose to Joe Biden. Both sides are bracing for a close race and a giant wave of Republicans to vote in person on Nov. 3. Yet the turnout disparity with new and less-reliable voters has forced Republican political operatives to take notice.
“It’s a warning flare,” said veteran Republican strategist Scott Reed.
Someone (Obama?) the other day responded to those who believe voting doesn’t change anything. Overall turnout when Obama was elected in 2008 was just over 60 percent. We’ve never seen what happens when 80 or 85 percent of Americans vote.
I’ve argued since 2018 that voters 45 and under are where Democrats’ untapped strength lies. If they vote, they run this place. Maybe not overnight, but soon. Universal health care, green energy, etc.? Enough power applied in the right spots at the right time can make those things happen.
“This is our moment”
Stuart Stevens, Republican consultant and senior advisor to the Lincoln Project, believes the Republican Party he spent his life assisting has surrendered its legitimacy. Democrats may not be perfect, he writes, but have “remained far truer to aspirational American values than the compromised, moral disgrace that is the party which endorsed Roy Moore and welcomes the dangerous lunacy of QAnon.”
Stevens writes at The Bulwark that Democrats should seize the day and not hold back:
In these last two weeks, I would plead with Democrats to change that mindset and banish the timidity. If I ran the Democratic party, here’s what I’d be telling my troops:
We are going to crush Donald Trump and the sickness he represents. There are more of us than there are of them. We are right. They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.
Too much? Stevens doesn’t think so:
Do not hesitate to swagger. These last two weeks belong to you. Years from now you will look back on these last days as some of the best in your lives. An evil was unleashed in the country you love and you rose to smite it. You will slay this dragon.
Trump is collapsing and his allies of convenience are panicked.
They should be. We are coming.
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Don’t say I didn’t warn you. From my 2008 review of The Trial of the Chicago 10:
I understand that Steven Spielberg is currently in pre-production on a dramatized version of the story, written by Aaron Sorkin and tentatively titled The Trial of the Chicago 7. Rumor has it Sacha Baron Cohen will play Abbie Hoffman, which is a perfect match on many levels (if someone can prove to me that his alter-egos “Ali G” and “Borat” don’t have deep roots in the political guerilla theater of the 60s, I’ll eat my Che cap). With the obvious historical parallels abounding vis a vis the current government’s foreign policy and overall climate of disenfranchisement in this country, I say the more films about the Chicago 7 trial that are out there, the merrier.
Flash-forward 12 years. I’d venture to say that the “historical parallels” between the Nixon and Trump administrations are even more pronounced in 2020 than between the Nixon and Bush Jr. administrations in 2008, not to mention the “overall climate of disenfranchisement in this country” (which is widely considered to be at an all-time low). And I still say “…the more films about the Chicago 7 trial that are out there, the merrier.”
Spielberg saw something shinier, but The Trial of the Chicago 7 has emerged from the other side of Development Hell largely unscathed, with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin now in the director’s chair and Sacha Baron Cohen sporting Abbie Hoffman hair (funnily enough, Cohen has also unleashed his new Borat film-in time for the upcoming election).
For you young’uns, here is the back story: In September 1969, Abbie Hoffman and fellow political activists Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner were hauled into court along with Black Panther Bobby Seale on a grand jury indictment for allegedly conspiring to incite the anti-Vietnam war protests and resulting mayhem that transpired during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. What resulted is arguably the most overtly political “show trial” in U.S. history.
No, your calculations are correct…there were originally “8” defendants, but Bobby Seale was (for all intents and purposes) “banished” from court early in the proceedings after heated verbal exchanges with presiding judge Julius Hoffman. After draconian physical restraint methods failed to silence him (Seale was literally bound, gagged and chained to his chair at one point), Judge Hoffman had him tossed out of the proceedings altogether.
His crime? Demanding his constitutional right to an attorney of his choice, for which he eventually served a 4 year sentence for contempt. The remaining seven defendants’ outspoken defense attorneys, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, also rubbed the judge the wrong way and were cited for contempt (although they never served any time).
The trial dragged on for months, resulting in each of the seven being acquitted of conspiracy. Two defendants were acquitted completely; and the remaining five were convicted of “crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot”. However, all the convictions were reversed by a U.S. appeals court in 1972 (the Justice Department wisely decided to let it go at that point). None of the seven served time for the contempt charges.
Contextually, there was a lot going on with that trial; from a dramatist’s point of view there are any number of angles to riff on. On the most superficial level, there is the political theater aspect of the proceeding…an opportunity that wasn’t lost on a couple of the more flamboyant defendants (i.e., self-proclaimed “Yippees” Hoffman and Rubin) who took the ball and ran with it (much to the chagrin of exasperated Judge Hoffman, who was dispensing “contempt of court” charges like Halloween candy by the trial’s end).
But there was also something broader in scope and more insidious at play here; namely, the “war” that President Richard M. Nixon had all but declared on America’s counterculture, which he perceived to be his greatest nemesis (his “enemies list” is legend). More specifically, Nixon was wielding the Justice Department as a truncheon to beat down and suppress the antiwar movement (or “radical Left protesters”…if you will).
If certain elements sound depressingly similar to 2020, that is an opportunity that wasn’t lost on Aaron Sorkin. I am aware of detractors who feel Sorkin wields his prose like a truncheon in The Trial of the Chicago 7. Negative reviews I’ve read tend to whinge on about how he belabors those historical parallels…but that is precisely what I like about it.
A great cast helps. As I noted earlier, Cohen is an inspired choice to play Abbie Hoffman. In the guise of his alter-egos Ali ‘G’ and Borat, Cohen has used elements of political guerilla theater rooted in the ethos of 1960s activist street performers like The Diggers and the San Francisco Mime troupe. Likewise, Hoffman himself frequently staged rallies using guerilla theater techniques, most notably in 1967 when he and fellow activist Allen Ginsberg joined thousands of anti-war protesters in an attempt to “levitate” the Pentagon.
Jeremy Strong (so good as the coke-addled heir in HBO’s Succession) is excellent as Hoffman’s main partner-in-disruption Jerry Rubin. Frank Langella makes a convincingly cantankerous Judge Julius Hoffman. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is on hand as Federal prosecutor Dick Schultz (who has taken issue with the film’s portrayal of himself and elements of the trial) and Michael Keaton plays it straight in his cameo as Ramsay Clark. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (featured in HBO’s Watchmen) is a standout as Bobby Seale.
In addition to Cohen, the impressive UK contingent of the cast includes Mark Rylance as defense attorney Kunstler and Eddie Redmayne as activist Tom Hayden. Interestingly, Sorkin focuses on a yin-yang clash of methodology between Hayden and Hoffman throughout the trial. In my 2009 review of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, I observed:
It is this part of the story that I found most fascinating. It demonstrates how (although doesn’t go to any length to explore why) such radical groups inevitably self-destruct by becoming a microcosm of the very thing they were railing against in the first place; in this case, disintegrating into a sort of self-imposed fascistic state that became more and more about internal power plays and individual egos instead of focusing on their original collective idealism.
This aspect of the story strongly recalls the late German filmmaker Rainier Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 political satire, cheekily entitled The Third Generation, in which he carries the idea of an ongoing disconnect between the R.A.F.’s core ideals and what he portrays as little more than a group of increasingly clueless, bumbling middle-class dilettantes who bear scant resemblance to the original group of hardcore revolutionaries, to ridiculous extremes.
By playing up the Hoffman vs. Hayden “more radical than thou” stalemate, Sorkin is doing something similar here—pointing out how messy “revolutions” can get; in this case as demonstrated by the disparity of backgrounds and approaches taken by each the (originally) eight defendants. While all shared a common idealism and united cause, several of them had never even been in the same room before getting lumped together and put on trial as a group of “conspirators” by their government. Dystopian nightmare fuel…but the good news is our justice system worked, and the convictions were reversed.
Then again, as many have said—American Democracy (borne of revolution, mind you) is “messy”. So far, our checks and balances have kept it from collapsing. But we have come “this close” many times. At least twice in my lifetime…during the aforementioned Nixon administration (which ended in his resignation as a result of the Watergate debacle) and right here and now. But there is a time-proven way to keep it shored up:
Get out the vote.
(“The Trial of the Chicago 7” is currently playing on Netflix)
Previous posts with related themes:
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
On mad kings, Mueller’s report, and Altman’s Secret Honor
More reviews at Den of Cinema
—Dennis Hartley
I have been writing this for so long now that I’m worn out from it. The Republican game has been the same for a very long time now: gin up phony scandals, throw it all at the wall until people think there must be a fire because they’re choking on all the smoke. The confusion, chaos and resultant exhaustion are the point.
But it’s good to see people who are important saying the same thing. If people don’t recognize what they’re up against, it will never change.
This piece by Ann Applebaum in The Atlantic is getting a lot of response. She debunks one particular byzantine scandal being churned up in the right wing mediverse at the moment about which she has some personal knowledge. And offers this analysis:
… In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are also providing the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night’s debate to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works. A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.
As Americans learned during the 2016 presidential campaign, an email dump is an ideal source for this kind of raw material, not least because email communications are so often informal. When people speak or write to one another privately, they make jokes, they test out ideas, they use language they would not use in public. This does not necessarily make them duplicitous: All of us speak differently depending on whether we are talking to our friends, our families, or a large auditorium filled with strangers. In many languages, these different kinds of conversations require distinct forms of grammar.
But just as the misuse of grammar can make someone sound illiterate, a note meant for one person’s eyes can look jarringly out of place when it appears in, say, a newspaper. The change of context alters not just the weight of what was written, but the meaning. This is what happened in 2016 to the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee by Russian intelligence and released by WikiLeaks. Those messages contained no actual scandals either—only the miasma of scandal. And that was all that mattered. But her emails was an effective phrase precisely because it was so amorphous. It was an allusion to a whole world of unnamed, unknown, and, as it turned out, fictional horrors.
Time and experience have taught many who work in the media to understand all of this better. In 2016, American journalists weren’t yet attuned to the many ways in which masses of irrelevant, hacked material could be used to waste their time. Now they are. That’s why relatively few people, other than Tyrmand (who must have a lot of time on his hands, considering how much of it he has wasted on me), have devoted much effort to the study of Bevan Cooney’s Gmail account or the material supposedly found on the waterlogged laptop. Yet these stories, which have miraculously appeared within a few days of each other, nevertheless have a purpose.
To begin with, these revelations are clearly timed to give the president something to talk about, other than the coronavirus, over the last two weeks of an ugly election campaign. By making wild references to the characters who have emerged in emails and texts, Trump hopes to undermine Joe Biden’s most important electoral asset: the impression, shared by even those who don’t like the former vice president, that he is a fundamentally decent person.
They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute “news.” Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will, over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham’s monologues. The extraordinary and completely unsupported insinuation, made by Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, that child pornography was found on Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop also looks like an unsubtle attempt to persuade the followers of the QAnon cult to fold this story into their dreamworld as well.
As my colleague Franklin Foer has written, the email drops may also be a kind of psy-op, a cruel provocation designed to bully Joe Biden by hitting him in his weakest spot. Having lost a young daughter to a car accident and an adult son, Beau, to brain cancer, the senior Biden is known to be particularly sensitive about Hunter, his only living son. Voters got a glimpse of the pain he feels during the first debate, when Biden responded to Trump’s false declaration that Hunter had been dishonorably discharged from the military: “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” he said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
In that instance, Biden recovered. Next time, he might not. By bringing up Hunter’s name over and over again, the Trump campaign may hope to make Biden emotional, or make him stumble, just as it hopes to provoke his stutter, or at least a gaffe.
By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history. Their use of this tactic is not remotely subtle. Last summer, Donald Trump Jr. was in Indonesia to promote two Trump-branded properties; Eric Trump has traveled to Uruguay; Donald Trump himself has stayed at his own properties more than 500 times as president, using his presence as a form of advertising. And yet, days after authorities approved plans for a new Trump golf course in Scotland, Eric Trump took to Twitter to declare that “when my father became president we stepped out of all international business.” Only in the fantastical world of Fox can anyone hear that statement and not laugh out loud.
Last but not least, this kind of story also serves to provide employment, or at least activity, for rudderless, aimless, angry people such as Tyrmand. […]
This trajectory is not unusual. Laura Ingraham herself has followed the well-trod path by which acolytes of Reaganism become accessories to ratfucking. So has Tyrmand’s colleague Schweizer. He co-edited a book, published in 1988, called Grinning With the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan; later, he wrote a book with former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Now he is focused on Cooney, Archer, and the other characters in the Foxworld universe.
None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don’t have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it. As the gap widens further between the reality lived by most of the public and the “reality” presented by people such as Ingraham and Tyrmand on Fox News, they will need to generate even more noise and even more activity if they are to keep their audience’s attention. This fantasyland is now the business model of Fox and Breitbart, and it will be with us for a long time, whatever happens on November 3.
Yes, this is true and it’s been true for avery long time. If I may just share a little bit of something I wrote back in 2007, taking the mainstream media to taks for its complicity. It’s just one of many on the same theme I’ve been flogging for the last two decades. This. Is. Not. New:
These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?
Will things change this time? Finally?
Hope springs eternal …
He didn’t die, which is the only thing that matters. Everyone who gets sicker than him or dies is just another loser.
There are about a quarter of a million American losers and counting…
And by the way we know he spread it to his debate team, throughout his staff and to all those fools who showed up at the White House to celebrating the theft of a Supreme Court seat. And they aren’t the only ones he’s spread it to:
As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake.
The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.
Trump is a superspreader.
This is from November 1st, 2016. Remember it when the Republicans start rending their garments over Democrats wanting to expand the court. And then tell them to go to hell:
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., told Republican supporters Saturday he would try to keep a vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court empty for four years if Hillary Clinton is elected president, a shift from his position in February.
Burr, who is in a tight contest for re-election with Democrat Deborah Ross, made the comment in a surreptitiously recorded conversation in Mooresville first reported by CNN. He backed away from it somewhat in a statement Tuesday.
The Saturday conversation is the same one in which Burr joked about whether a photo of Clinton on the cover of American Rifleman, a magazine published by the National Rifle Association, should have a bulls-eye on it. Those remarks have been widely reported and condemned, and Burr apologized Monday.
The Supreme Court was reduced to eight members in February when Justice Antonin Scalia died. Burr said then and when President Barack Obama nominated appellate court judge Merrick Garland to the court in March that the decision on Scalia’s replacement should wait until after the presidential election to give the American people the chance to weigh in.
But in Saturday’s meeting in Mooresville, Burr said, “If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that four years from now we’ve still got an opening on the Supreme Court.”
Burr told supporters that an eight-member court would mean some rulings by lower courts like the one Garland sits on would stand as is, “But I think on the things that are important to the country, there’s a better chance that the lower court or the appellate court will get the right answer before it gets to the Supreme Court.”
Ted Cruz and even the sainted John McCain joined in that call.
And remember this as well, which I personally believe had an effect on the outcome in 2016. A lot of people were exhausted at the mere thought of what the GOP was planning to do:
Senior Republican lawmakers are openly discussing the prospect of impeaching Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency, a stark indication that partisan warfare over her tenure as secretary of state will not end on Election Day.
Chairmen of two congressional committees said in media interviews this week they believe Clinton committed impeachable offenses in setting up and using a private email server for official State Department business.
And a third senior Republican, the chairman of a House Judiciary subcommittee, told The Washington Post he is personally convinced Clinton should be impeached for influence peddling involving her family foundation. He favors further congressional investigation into that matter.
“It is my honest opinion that the Clinton Foundation represents potentially one of the greatest examples of political corruption in American history,” said Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who leads the Constitution and Civil Justice subcommittee. “Now that perspective may be disproven, time will tell. But given that conviction on my part, I think all options are definitely on the table.”
Don’t think they wouldn’t have done it.
This is one reason why they defended Trump as they did. They assume that everyone is just as corrupt and venal as they are so ignored the actual facts revealed over and over again about Donald Trump. They lost their patriotism and love of country a long time ago and now see it as nothing more than a partisan death match.
They will have learned nothing from the Trump experience. Let’s hope Democrats have recognized that and will act accordingly.
It’s the democracy, stupid:
The Trump presidency has brought American democracy to the breaking point. The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat.
In this, he has been aided and abetted by a Republican Party that has fallen into the grips of white nationalism. The Republican base and its white Christian core, facing a loss of its dominant status in society, has radicalized, encouraging party leaders to engage in voter suppression, steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and tolerate the president’s lawless behavior. As a result, Americans today confront the prospect of a crisis-ridden election, in which they are unsure whether they will be able to cast a ballot fairly, whether their ballots will be counted, whether the candidate favored by voters will emerge victorious and whether the vote will throw the country into violence.
Yet if American democracy is nearing a breaking point, the crisis generated by the Trump presidency could also be a prelude to a democratic breakthrough. Opposition to Trumpism has engendered a growing multiracial majority that could lay a foundation for a more democratic future. Public opinion has shifted in important ways, especially among white Americans.
According to the political scientist Michael Tesler, the percentage of Americans who agree that “there’s a lot of discrimination against African-Americans” increased from 19 percent in 2013 to 50 percent in 2020, driven in the main by changes in the attitudes of white voters. Likewise, a Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of Americans who believe that the country needs to “continue making changes to give Blacks equal rights with whites” rose from 46 percent in 2014 to 61 percent in 2017.
Polls also show that Americans overwhelmingly reject President Trump’s positions on race and that they increasingly embrace diversity. Last year, about two-thirds of Americans agreed with the statement that immigrants “strengthen the country,” up from 31 percent in 1994. And according to Pew, the percentage of voters who believe that “newcomers strengthen American society” rose from 46 percent in 2016 to 60 percent in 2020.
America’s emerging multiracial democratic majority was visible this summer in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The killing set off what may be the biggest wave of protest in United States history. An estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans took to the streets, and protests extended into small-town and rural America. Three-quarters of Americans supported the protests in June, and large majorities — including 60 percent of whites — supported the Black Lives Matter movement. These numbers declined over the course of the summer. As of September, however, 55 percent of Americans (and 45 percent of white Americans) continued to support Black Lives Matter, levels that were considerably higher than ever before in the movement’s history. This is why Mr. Trump’s efforts to resurrect Nixon’s “silent majority” appeals appear to have failed. The majority — seeking not a heavy-handed return to America’s racially exclusionary past but steps toward its multiracial democratic future — continue to sympathize with the protesters.
Not only do most Americans disapprove of the way Mr. Trump is handling his job, but an unprecedented majority now embraces ethnic diversity and racial equality, two essential pillars of multiracial democracy.
Yet translating this new multiethnic majority into a governing majority has been difficult. Democracy is supposed to be a game of numbers: The party with the most votes wins. In our political system, however, the majority does not govern. Constitutional design and recent political geographic trends — where Democrats and Republicans live — have unintentionally conspired to produce what is effectively becoming minority rule.
Our Constitution was designed to favor small (or low-population) states. Small states were given representation equal to that of big states in the Senate and an advantage in the Electoral College. What began as a minor small-state advantage evolved, over time, into a vast overrepresentation of rural states. For most of our history, this rural bias did not tilt the partisan playing field much because both major parties maintained huge urban and rural wings.
Today, however, American parties are starkly divided along urban-rural lines: Democrats are concentrated in big metropolitan centers, whereas Republicans are increasingly based in sparsely populated territories. This gives the Republicans an advantage in the Electoral College, the Senate and — because the president selects Supreme Court nominees and the Senate approves them — the Supreme Court.
Recent U.S. election results fly in the face of majority rule. Republicans have won the popular vote for president only once in the last 20 years and yet have controlled the presidency for 12 of those 20 years. Democrats easily won more overall votes for the U.S. Senate in 2016 and 2018, and yet the Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats. The 45 Democratic and two independent senators who caucus with them represent more people than the 53 Republicans.
This is minority rule. An electoral majority may not be enough for the Democrats to win the presidency this year either. According to the FiveThirtyEight presidential model, if Joe Biden wins the popular vote by one to two points, there is an 80 percent chance that Mr. Trump wins the presidency again. If Mr. Biden wins by two to three points, Mr. Trump is still likely to win. Mr. Biden must win by six points or more to have a near lock on the presidency. Senate elections are similarly skewed. For Democrats today, then, winning a majority of the vote is not enough. They must win by big margins.
The problem is exacerbated by Republican efforts to dampen turnout among younger, lower-income and minority voters. Republican state governments have purged voter rolls and closed polling places on college campuses and in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have passed laws making it more difficult to register or vote.
Minority rule has, in turn, skewed the composition of the Supreme Court. Under Mr. Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh became the first two Supreme Court justices in history to be appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and then be confirmed by senators who represented less than half the electorate. Amy Coney Barrett is likely to become the third.
In America today, then, the majority does not govern. This disjuncture cries out for reform. We must double down on democracy.
This means above all defending and expanding the right to vote. HR-1 and HR-4, a package of reforms approved by the House of Representatives in 2019 but blocked by the Senate, is a good start. HR-1 would establish nationwide automatic and same-day registration, expand early and absentee voting, prohibit flawed purges that remove eligible voters from the rolls, require independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional maps, and restore voting rights to convicted felons who have served their time. HR-4 would fully restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court’s Shelby County vs. Holder ruling in 2013.
Doubling down on democracy also means reforms that empower majorities, such as eliminating the Senate filibuster. The filibuster, which was rarely used during much of the 20th century, has turned into a routine instrument of legislative obstruction. There were more Senate filibusters over the last two decades than in the previous eight. All meaningful legislation now effectively requires 60 votes, which amounts to a permanent minority veto.
A democratic reform agenda should also include an offer of statehood to the District of Columbia and to Puerto Rico, which would provide full and equal representation to nearly four million Americans who are currently disenfranchised. And it should include elimination of the Electoral College. The House last voted in favor of a constitutional amendment in 1969, but the proposal died in the Senate, at the hands of old segregationist interests. (As Senator James Allen of Alabama put it: “The Electoral College is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”)
Not only would ending minority rule be inherently democratic, but, importantly, it would also encourage the Republican Party to abandon its destructive course of radicalization. Normally, political parties change course when they lose elections. But in America today there is a hitch: Republicans can win and exercise power without building national electoral majorities. Excessively counter-majoritarian institutions blunt Republicans’ incentive to adapt to a changing American electorate. As long as the Republicans can hold onto power without broadening beyond their shrinking base, they will remain prone to the kind of extremism and demagogy that currently threatens our democracy.
There is ample precedent for democratic reform in America. A century ago, like today, the United States experienced disruptive economic change, an unprecedented influx of migrants and the growth of behemoth corporations. Citizens believed that their political system had become corrupt and dysfunctional. Progressive reform advocates like Herbert Croly argued that Americans were living in a democracy with antiquated institutions designed for an agrarian society, which left our political system ill-equipped to cope with the problems of an industrial age and vulnerable to corporate capture.
The response was a sweeping reform movement that remade our democracy. Key reforms — then regarded as radical but now taken for granted — included the introduction of party primaries; the expansion of the citizen referendum; and constitutional amendments allowing a national income tax, establishing the direct election of U.S. senators and extending suffrage to women. American democracy thrived in the 20th century in part because it was able to reform itself.
Critics of reform assert that counter-majoritarian institutions are essential toliberal democracy. We agree. That’s what the Bill of Rights and judicial review are for: to help ensure that individual liberties and minority rights are protected under majority rule. But disenfranchisement is not a feature of modern liberal democracy. No other established democracy has an Electoral College or makes regular use of the filibuster. And a political system that repeatedly allows a minority party to control the most powerful offices in the country cannot remain legitimate for long.
Democracy requires more than majority rule. But without majority rule, there is no democracy. Either we become a truly multiracial democracy or we cease to be a democracy at all.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (@dziblatt), professors of government at Harvard, are the authors of “How Democracies Die.”
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