Month: April 2021

Professor Peter Dreier wrote this for TPM cafe and I think it’s spot on:

Whomever wrote Biden’s speech gets an A. It was essentially a laundry list of progressive ideas — but it didn’t feel like a laundry list because it included lots of morally uplifting transitions and personal connections, despite a handful of clichés about “America can do anything if we work together.”

The President delivered it with passion and without verbal slip-ups. He made the most of the occasion. A CNN poll found that 71% of viewers said that the speech made them feel more optimistic about the country’s direction.

Biden’s ideas — on voting rights, prescription drug prices, health-care reform (getting closer to Medicare for All, but not quite), immigration (including embracing the DREAM Act), workers’ rights and labor law reform, the $15 minimum wage, gun control, addressing violence against women, pre-school, free community colleges and increased Pell grants for college students, climate change and green jobs, combatting racial profiling by police and “systemic racism” (is this the first time a President has used that phrase in a speech to Congress?), U.S. relations with Russia and China, child care, paid family and medical leave, pay equality for women, infrastructure, confronting COVID-19, LGBT equality (“To all transgender Americans watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave, I want you to know, your President has your back”), raising taxes on the 1% (families with incomes over $400,000) and big corporations, and more — were far to the left of anything an American president has proposed in recent history. In March, Biden signed the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. A few weeks ago he released his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan. Wednesday night he added another $1.8 trillion in new spending for workers, families, and children.

That’s a lot. And who knows if he will be able to much of it passed but damn, think of the positive consequences for the American people if he does.

Dreier addresses the common comparison with FDR:

Many commentators will compare Wednesday’s address to several speeches that President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave outlining his bold and pathbreaking New Deal agenda. In 1932, FDR beat the incumbent, Republican Herbert Hoover, with 57.4% of the vote. Although FDR ran for president in the midst of the worst economic disaster in America’s history, he did not campaign on a platform of progressive ideas. He was cautious and vague about his plans. His New Deal agenda evolved between his election in November and his inauguration in March 1933. A growing wave of mass protest — by workers, the jobless, farmers, consumers, and students — provided a backdrop to FDR’s increasing willingness to adopt progressive policies, including Social Security, a wide-ranging public jobs program, the minimum wage, the right of workers to unionize, unemployment insurance, subsidies to struggling farmers, the 8-hour workday, tough regulations on banks, a rural electrification plan, and public housing, among others. Getting his New Deal agenda through Congress was only possible because the Democrats had an overwhelming 60-36 majority in the Senate and a 311-117 majority in the House of Representatives — margins that increased in the 1934 mid-term election.

Biden took office in the midst of a double-whammy of an unprecedented COVID epidemic and the resulting worst economy since the Depression. Like FDR, he was viewed as a centrist, particularly compared with other candidates like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He beat the incumbent Republican Donald Trump with only 51.3% of the popular vote and 57% (306-232) of the Electoral College vote in an election that, despite the pandemic and efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote, saw one of the largest turnouts (66.7%) in modern history. But in contrast to the Roosevelt election of 1932, Biden’s political party won a narrow majority in the House (222-213), while splitting the Senate 50-50, an even divide only made possible at the last minute by the surprise victory of two Democrats in Georgia. In a highly polarized Senate, only the tie-breaking vote by Vice President Kamala Harris gives Biden any breathing room, assuming he can persuade all 50 Democrats to support his legislative agenda.

So, is Biden destined for failure? Maybe. But not necessarily:

First, Biden’s progressive agenda, including those points he outlined in his Wednesday speech, is made possible by a new surge of energy on the Left. Included in that resurgence are the campaigns of Sanders and Warren, as well as other prominent leftists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the wave of activism by groups including Indivisible, the labor movement, the 2017 women’s march, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers, that changed the national political debate and pushed the Democratic Party to the left. It was also made possible by the 2018 “blue wave” election and the 2020 victories of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. (Kudos to Stacey Abrams). Despite the narrow Democratic margins in the House, the Progressive Caucus — with close to 100 members — is larger than it has ever been. Moreover, last year voters catapulted a growing number of progressives into office for mayor, city council, district attorney, county sheriff, state legislature, and other bodies, including more than 100 members of Democratic Socialists of America.

Second, Sanders or Warren could have given Biden’s speech. They would have pushed further — a wealth tax and Medicare for All, for example — but Biden has embraced most of what these two progressive icons proposed during last year’s campaign. But had either of them won the Democratic primary and then the presidency, it is highly doubtful that they could have gotten the traction that Biden has gotten. (I say this as someone who supported Bernie in 2016 and Warren in 2020 and was initially skeptical of Biden.) Paradoxically, Biden is a better messenger for this progressive agenda than Sanders and Warren because he was not viewed as a progressive. As a result he has the kind of power of evangelical preachers who say, “I was once a sinner like you and now I’ve been saved.” Smartly, Biden doesn’t acknowledge his transformation. He just lets people see him evolve.

Third, much of Biden’s appeal and success so far is due to being the opposite of Trump. Most Americans were exhausted by four years of having a narcissistic, corrupt, and white supremacist president who cared little about governing and viewed the White House as a subsidiary of his business operation. Biden evokes “normalcy,” although nothing he has proposed is normal.

Still, there are landmines. Dreier points out that there are members of the left who will not be satisfied regardless and if one of the little royals (Manchin, Sinema, Kelley…) decide to block all this, the entire party will be derided as a failure by both sides no matter how popular the agenda is. He’s right about that, unfortunately. The media will play a big role in that as well.

He also wonders if this current schism between corporate America and the newly minted “populist” right (aka “racist”) GOP portends a bigger and more significant fracture on the right. I wonder about that too. And, there is the Trump effect as well. Who knows where that’s going?

I think Biden is doing the right thing. It’s worth a try. Obama had the opportunity, with a much bigger majority in the congress and much greater support in the country and he banked his first term on getting GOP support and the “Grand Bargain” style rather than pushing through a real progressive agenda. Maybe he had to do that for a variety of reasons. But Biden is going another way. He seems to have learned over all those years in the government that you don’t get anywhere by going small or trying to appease the unappeasable. And right now, the GOP is unappeasable so he might as well shoot the moon.

I think the next hundred days are going to be very interesting. I have no predictions. I’m just hoping for the best.

Pres. Joe Biden gives a dandelion flower to First Lady Jill Biden ahead of their departure on Marine One from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. https://t.co/xBkZeoWrn9 pic.twitter.com/QxdZjZk577

— ABC News (@ABC) April 29, 2021

Not a big thing. But worth noting that the president and his wife are normal people, unlike the bizarre freakshow of the last four years. I don’t know if it matters to average citizens that the leader of the country is a normal human being it should matter if they’re not.

Today Pence is slated to make his first big post Trump administration speech in South Carolina, presumably to begin his presidential campaign (except without saying it because Daddy might get mad.)

This must have made him feel great this morning:

Former President Trump on Thursday said he would consider tapping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as his running mate should he make a comeback presidential bid in 2024. 

“Well, he’s a friend of mine. I endorsed Ron. And after I endorsed him, he took off like a rocket ship,” Trump said Thursday morning on Fox Business, referencing DeSantis’s 2018 race. “He’s done a great job as governor.”

“A lot of people like that — I’m just saying what I read and what you read, they love that ticket,” Trump added. “But certainly, Ron would be considered. He’s a great guy.”

Trump has not yet definitively said if he will run for president again, keeping a slew of possible GOP presidential hopefuls wary of crossing the party’s most popular figure. He kept up the anticipation Thursday by saying he’s “100 percent” considering mounting a bid.

DeSantis’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Trump’s remarks. However, the Florida governor has been touted by Republicans as a potential presidential candidate in 2024 should Trump not run.

DeSantis has garnered plaudits from across the GOP over his refusal to impose strict restrictions on schools and businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. He also won new fans after her vociferously rebuked a faulty “60 Minutes” report that included allegations of favoritism by the governor’s office. 

A survey run by Tony Fabrizio, who did polling work for Trump’s 2020 campaign, showed last month that DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence are the two front-runners in a list of potential 2024 Republican candidates that does not include Trump.

Should DeSantis run, he’d also likely have a massive leg up in a general election in Florida, a key swing state that has tilted toward Republicans in recent cycles.

Beyond DeSantis’s 2024 prospects, Trump’s comments Thursday also mark the latest indication that he would not tap Pence as his No. 2 should he run in three years.

Trump has repeatedly lambasted Pence for what he sees as insufficient efforts to overturn the results of the November presidential election when he oversaw Congress’s certification of the Electoral College tally.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Trump tweeted from his now-suspended account during the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.

Trump isn’t mentioning Pence as a possible running mate. There’s no chance he will be. And I very much doubt there’s a chance he’ll be anything else either. Trump wouldn’t endorse him and there just isn’t any possible constituency for the doormat who couldn’t successfully usurp the constitution.

And DeSantis had better watch his step if he has any ambitions to be president either. It’s possible Trump may not run (I think he will) but he’s got to be the one to anoint the nominee. They’d better not get ahead of Dear Leader.

Eric Levitz summarizes five themes from President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night:

Briefly:

1) If Biden gets his way, you won’t have to “learn to code.”

On Wednesday night, Biden charted a middle ground between the social democracy of FDR and the meritocratic liberalism of his former boss. In the years since Obama’s presidency, the notion that America can educate its way back to shared prosperity has fallen out of favor in elite policy circles. While expanding access to higher education remains a top policy goal of the Democratic Party, this is no longer seen as an adequate response to inequality or middle-class decline. And for good reason: The skills gap is a myth, and most of the fastest-growing occupations in the U.S. do not require a college degree. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ eroding support among non-college-educated Americans has become the party’s defining political challenge.

When Biden talks jobs, he is talking working-class ones for those Americans who feel left behind by the economy.

2) If you don’t want to soak the rich, you want to screw the middle class.

In his address, Biden offered a simple rejoinder to his tax plan’s skeptics: Either you oppose my popular spending initiatives, or you support increasing the deficit, or you want to raise taxes on the middle class:

So how do we pay for my Jobs and Family Plans? I’ve made clear that we can do it without increasing deficits. Let’s start with what I will not do. I will not impose any tax increases on people making less than $400,000 a year.  It’s time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to pay their fair share…When you hear someone say that they don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthiest 1% and on corporate America – ask them: whose taxes are you going to raise instead? 

Taxing the rich is popular. Biden is heading off the deficit hawks at the pass and signaling to median voters that he is there for them.

Biden hailed his American Rescue Plan as a bipartisan based on its strong support among Republican voters, even if every Republican in Congress opposed it. Last night Biden headed off complaints that his new initiatives would not get bipartisan support in Congress, Levitz explains:

3) If you’re not with him, you’re against American global supremacy.

Later in the address, Biden sought to turn the GOP’s own caterwauling about China against it. The president affirmed the notion that the U.S. and China are locked in a (zero sum?) competition for economic and geopolitical dominance. He then cast his proposed investments in American infrastructure and green technology as indispensable to victory in the great power competition — and suggested that Republicans who oppose such policies are putting America second:

We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century … I applaud a group of Republican Senators who just put forward their proposal. But, the rest of the world isn’t waiting for us. Doing nothing is not an option. We can’t be so busy competing with each other that we forget the competition is with the rest of the world to win the 21st Century. 

In other words, why do my Republican opponents hate America?

4) If your favorite Democratic policy doesn’t pass, don’t blame me.

If you believe we need a secure border – pass it. If you believe in a pathway to citizenship – pass it. If you actually want to solve the problem – I have sent you a bill, now pass it. 

From “gun control to police reform to the PRO Act to immigration,” Biden name-checked it, writes Levitz. In other words, if immigration is your top issue, put up or shut up.

Finally, if the nation’s first pandemic State of the Union address lacked pizzazz, well….

5) If you reelect me, I’ll keep you bored and well-fed.

Yet the speech was not boring in the sense that its contents were irrelevant to the median American’s interests. Like a lecture on personal finance, Biden’s remarks were dull but potentially useful, or at least clearly intended to be of use. And this is ultimately Bidenism’s dispensation: Stick with Joe and you’ll be pleased with your bank account, and bored with your political system.

That is already happening. If you reconfigure your ACA policy, you’ll get what Levitz means about your bank account in a concrete way. Also, if you received too much in ACA subsidy last year because you underestimated your income in November-December 2019, you’ll be thanking Democrats when you do your 2020 taxes. Check for tax software updates.

Pre-internet, I called the Government Printing Office looking for a C.I.A. world map I’d read about. They didn’t have it, said the woman on the other end of my touch-tone.

“You need to call DMAODS,” she said.

Excuse me?

“Defense Mapping Agency Office of Distribution Services,” she explained.

Silly me.

Acronyms and jargon lose people not steeped in it. My sister once worked in a Washington, D.C. law office. She kept a reference book of government acronyms on her desk the way you might carry a phrasebook when visiting a foreign country.

Ahead of President Joe Biden’s speech Wednesday night, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield agreed. There is one hard rule Biden enforces on his speechwriters: no acronyms.

“It violates his rule of ‘anybody should be able to read this or hear it and understand what I’m talking about’ … He’ll cross it out immediately,” Bedingfield told Politico. “Biden charges people who write for him or communicate for him with ensuring that they’re never condescending to the reader or to the listener,” she said.

That plain-spoken style is part of Biden’s appeal out in Trump country.

Sean Illing of Vox called James Carville for his take on Biden’s first 100 days. Carville went off on lefty jargon and “wokeness” as part of Democrats’ messaging problem in parts of the country they lose.

Carville tells Vox:

We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.

Democrats need to win more votes in Trump country:

Here’s the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.

It is why, for example, a Democrat holds the North Carolina governor’s mansion on the strength of the urban vote, yet Republicans control the legislature and another ten-year redistricting cycle. They rule the countryside.

Biden picked up votes in rural America because “he’s not into ‘faculty lounge’ politics,” Carville explained.

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

Dump the jargon-y language, Carville insists, “This ‘too cool for school’ shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.”

That is exactly why I insist progressives stop complaining about people voting against their best interests. It’s godawful messaging. 

Even standard political jargon. Watch a new volunteer’s eyes glaze over the first time they hear “GOTV.” They think it is a hot, new cable series they’ve missed. Much other trendy jargon on the left sounds as foreign as churchy language evangelicals use to identify their own among the heathen.

On the bookshelf above the desk here is a paperback from 1992 by David Kusnet, President Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter from 1992 to 1994: “Speaking American.”

It may be time again to review it.

Look at these Trumpers getting a taste of what Black and Brown America have to put up with:

At routine status hearing for Jonathon Mellis, a continuance or 45 days for discovery purposes. The detained defendant spoke up with an emotional statement to Judge Sullivan about jail conditions. “I just got a chance for an hour in the yard and witnessed grown men crying”.

“The way we’re being treated here is not normal. Every officer looks at us with hate in his eyes. We love them so much, and they have this hate for us.” He made charges of adulterated food, and more that I wasn’t able to write down. Judge expressed sympathy, but that’s it.

It should be noted that he’s charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers.

While I feel that guard mistreatment of prisoners is obviously wrong, I’m mindful of the MAGAt position on people who do wrong things, courtesy of the Dilbert Guy.

Originally tweeted by M & M Enterprises (@sfoguj) on April 28, 2021.

I’m guessing some cops didn’t see this as being a great indication of how much they are “loved” by Trumpers:

Officer Michael Fanone tells @donlemon it’s been very difficult to see elected officials whitewash what happened on Jan. 6.

He was stun-gunned several times and beaten with a flagpole during the Capitol attack.

Watch part 1 of his first in-depth interview: pic.twitter.com/4LzuJcfztl

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) April 28, 2021

“Thousands of rioters came to the Capitol hellbent on violence and destruction and murder”

Watch part 2 of @donlemon ‘s interview with Officer Michael Fanone: pic.twitter.com/rZ1Yw67gy4

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) April 28, 2021

Oh look. Mitch McConnell, the gravedigger of democracy, greatest obstructionist in history, is whining that Joe Biden hasn’t unified the country by passing the GOP agenda:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday pronounced President Biden’s first 100 days a massive disappointment and accused the president of breaking his campaign promise to bring the nation together in the wake of a tumultuous 2020.

McConnell ticked through what has become a familiar list of Republican grievances with Biden: his decision to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline; passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan without any Republican votes; introduction of H.R. 1, a Democratic proposal to overhaul the nation’s election laws; the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan; and his handling of the migrant surge at the southern border.

“President Biden pledged he would be ‘A president for all Americans’ with plans to repair, restore and heal,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning, noting that Congress remains closely divided with a 50-50 Senate and a slim Democratic majority in the House.

“But the first hundred days have left much to be desired,” McConnell said. “Over a few short months, the Biden administration seems to have given up on selling actual unity in favor of catnip for their liberal base, covered with a hefty coat of false advertising.”

This is the trap of promising to be a unifier, which Biden certainly knew since he’d dealt with it during the Obama administration. He’s trying something different by insisting that he’s unifying the country, not the congress. Maybe it will work with some people but I’m afraid it probably won’t change the fact that congressional battles are still going to be hand-to-hand combat. And I don’t think we’ve even begun to see how that’s going to play out.

The looney lawyer is in trouble:

Federal investigators in Manhattan executed search warrants early Wednesday at the home and office of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who became President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, stepping up a criminal investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, three people with knowledge of the investigation said.

The investigators seized Mr. Giuliani’s electronic devices and searched his apartment on Madison Avenue and his office on Park Avenue at about 6 a.m., two of the people said.

Executing a search warrant is an extraordinary move for prosecutors to take against a lawyer, let alone a lawyer for a former president. It is a major turning point in the long-running investigation into Mr. Giuliani, who as mayor steered New York through the Sept. 11 attacks and earlier in his career led the same U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan that is now investigating him.

Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, called the searches unnecessary because his client had offered to answer questions from prosecutors, except those regarding his privileged communications with the former president.

“What they did today was legal thuggery,” Mr. Costello said. “Why would you do this to anyone, let alone someone who was the associate attorney general, United States attorney, the mayor of New York City and the personal lawyer to the 45th president of the United States.”

Right. Of course. He’s much too important to be held to the same legal standards as the little people. How absurd.

Rudy has said that the SDNY would never prosecute him because he “knows” them and they know him. And I think that probably would have been true if he’d even made half an effort to be subtle about his behavior. But his hubris knows no bounds and he just did whatever he wanted.

And, of course, he had a friend in the highest place:

While investigating Mr. Giuliani, prosecutors have examined, among other things, his potential business dealings in Ukraine and his role in pushing the Trump administration to oust the American ambassador to Ukraine, which was the subject of testimony at Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.

As he was pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens, Mr. Giuliani became fixated on removing the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, whom he saw as an obstacle to those efforts. At the urging of Mr. Giuliani and other Republicans, Mr. Trump ultimately ousted Ms. Yovanovitch.

As part of the investigation into Mr. Giuliani, the prosecutors have explored whether he was working not only for Mr. Trump, but also for Ukrainian officials or businesses who wanted the ambassador to be dismissed for their own reasons, according to people briefed on the matter.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, it is a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the United States government at the request or direction of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department.

The prosecutors have scrutinized Mr. Giuliani’s dealings with Yuriy Lutsenko, one of the officials who helped Mr. Giuliani and his associates in their dirt-digging mission while also urging them to work to get the ambassador removed.

Among other things, the prosecutors have examined discussions Mr. Giuliani had about taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in apparently unrelated consulting business from Mr. Lutsenko, which resulted in a draft retainer agreement that was never executed.

Mr. Giuliani has said he turned down the deal, which would have involved him helping the Ukrainian government recover money it believed had been stolen and stashed overseas.

As the investigation heated up last summer, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Manhattan were preparing to seek the search warrant for Mr. Giuliani’s records about his efforts to remove the ambassador, but they first had to notify Justice Department officials in Washington, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Federal prosecutors must consult Justice Department officials in Washington about search warrants involving lawyers because of concerns that they might obtain confidential communications with clients. The proposed warrant for Mr. Giuliani was particularly sensitive because his most prominent client was Mr. Trump.

Career Justice Department officials in Washington largely supported the search warrant, but senior officials raised concerns that the warrant would be issued too close to the election, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Under longstanding practice, the Justice Department generally tries to avoid taking aggressive investigative actions within 60 days of an election if those actions could affect the outcome of the vote.

The prosecutors in Manhattan tried again after the election, but political appointees in Mr. Trump’s Justice Department sought once more to block the warrant, the people with knowledge of the matter said. At the time, Mr. Trump was still contesting the election results in several states, a legal effort being led by Mr. Giuliani, those officials noted.

It puts his efforts to overturn the election in a slightly different light, doesn’t it?

Oh and by the way:

F.B.I. agents on Wednesday morning also executed a search warrant at the Washington-area home of Victoria Toensing, a lawyer close to Mr. Giuliani who had dealings with several Ukrainians involved in seeking negative information on the Bidens, according to people with knowledge of that warrant, which sought her phone.

Ms. Toensing, a former federal prosecutor and senior Justice Department official, has also represented Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch under indictment in the United States whose help Mr. Giuliani sought.

The federal authorities have largely focused on whether Mr. Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs, who at the time were helping Mr. Giuliani search for damaging information on Mr. Trump’s political rivals, including Mr. Biden, who was then a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Lol!

I have thought for a long time that it wasn’t at all improbable that the first woman president would end up being a Republican. I know that seems absurd considering the right’s patriarchal ideology and their strong reliance on ultra-conservative, white evangelical voters. But it isn’t. After all, some of the most successful anti-feminist activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly, were women with important public careers, even when that was extremely unusual in American society. As we now know, Republican adherence to the tenets of “traditional family values” is much more malleable than anyone suspected. After all, GOP “base” voters remain big fans of the dishonest, profane, crude, thrice-married ex-president to this day. 

I wrote about this for Salon a couple of years ago, suggesting that while former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley looked perfect on paper — an experienced Southern politician, a person of color, the child of immigrants, even a respected member of the Trump administration — she was not likely to be that first Republican woman nominated for president. I’m afraid that person-of-color, child-of-immigrants thing is a serious liability for a white nationalist party.

Haley left the administration on good terms and has tried to walk a fine line between being someone the suburbs could vote for as a mainstream candidate while also pandering to Trump’s whims. But it’s pretty clear at this point that the best she could hope for would be to become his 2024 running mate. Recently, she declared that she wouldn’t enter the race if Trump did, which shows what a bind she’s in.

But there is a different path, and it’s being taken by another Republican woman, who I also wrote about back then: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. I characterized her at the time as “a white woman who’s an authoritarian nationalist with a Republican establishment pedigree a mile long,” which makes her a very good fit for the modern GOP. I also suggested that she “eagerly marches in lockstep” with Trump, based on her clever tactic of letting him take the heat for the crude racism the base craved, while she went after his enemies with a complementary set of attacks.

At the time, Trump had just directed the four members of the “Squad” to go back where they came from, prompting the usual denunciations from the Democrats and the press. Cheney got into a protracted back and forth with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York over the latter’s use of the words “concentration camp,” fatuously implying that AOC was being antisemitic. Then she took to the microphone to offer this:

.@Liz_Cheney 🔥🔥🔥

"Our opposition to our socialist colleagues has absolutely nothing to do w/their gender, religion, or race. It has to do w/their policies

They're wrong on socialism

They're wrong when they fail to recognize this is the greatest nation that has ever existed" pic.twitter.com/GW6kUswZ46

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) July 16, 2019

As I pointed out then, Republicans complaining about this, while serving the man whose inaugural address is commonly referred to as “American Carnage” — and who has insisted for 40 years that the U.S. is a loser nation, run by fools who have made it the laughing stock of the world — is so dissonant it makes your head spin. But there she was, subtly distancing herself from his crudest commentary but nonetheless joining in the dishonest assault.

Cheney made little mention of Trump in those days. She didn’t condemn the racism, that’s for sure. In fact, she ostentatiously voted against an “anti-hate” piece of legislation, reportedly mystifying GOP leaders who had proposed it. It wasn’t until Trump lost the election that she spoke up.

Today Liz Cheney is widely hailed as the Last Good Republican, repeatedly defying Donald Trump and standing solidly in front of the GOP caucus daring them to dethrone her. Her leadership post was threatened after her comments about Trump’s culpability and her vote to impeach him for the events of Jan. 6. She survived because the caucus took the vote on a secret ballot, betraying the fact that a substantial majority of House Republicans were on her side but were simply too cowardly to say so in public, thereby raising her reputation as the brave maverick even more.

Just this week at the Republican retreat in Florida (they still need to be near Dear Leader, evidently), Cheney and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy locked horns once again over Trump and the events of Jan. 6. Politico reported that it was virtually all the attendees were talking about, which says something about the state of the party in itself.

McCarthy wants Cheney to shut up about Jan. 6. He’s doing everything in his power to shut down any meaningful inquiry into the matter by insisting on throwing in a kitchen sink’s worth of poison pills. She disagrees, and thinks it needs to be thoroughly and impartially investigated. He’s begged her to stop criticizing Trump and she refuses, saying that support for Trump’s bogus challenges to the 2020 election should disqualify any 2024 GOP presidential nominee. That puts a lot of people on the sidelines, in particular Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, both of whom voted not to certify the electoral votes — after the Jan. 6 insurrection — along with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who backed Trump’s ridiculous lies to the hilt.

This week Cheney herself refused to rule out a 2024 presidential bid, and it’s obvious her strategy is to run on her new reputation as the tough conservative woman who stood up to Donald Trump. It’s not a bad plan. Cheney understands politics and realizes that her only hope for the presidency is to be the anti-Trump, in the hopes that his star fades or he decides not to run and she can emerge as the GOP standard-bearer who might be able to lure back some of those suburban women and college-educated white men who had been staunch Republicans until the Trump circus came to town. It may not work, but it makes sense for someone to make that bet. 

But let’s not get carried away with tributes to her great integrity and courage. After all, she’s just saying what we should expect any elected official to say if the entire Republican Party hadn’t turned itself into a cult of craven Trump sycophants. I have no idea if Liz Cheney truly believes what she’s saying. Maybe she does. But it doesn’t change the fact that she is also a far-right hawk who, just like her father (who is said to be her most trusted adviser), has never met a war she didn’t eagerly back, a military budget she didn’t want to hike or a tax she didn’t want to cut. She’s as hardcore conservative as it’s possible to be. Being her daddy’s daughter that includes being completely comfortable with illegal domestic surveillance, torture and unilateral military action. (Her father was also, you might recall, perfectly willing to usurp the Constitution to maintain his own power, so her paeans to democracy ring just a bit hollow.)

If you want a president who combines the worst aspects of Dick Cheney and Margaret Thatcher, then you’ll love President Liz Cheney. And if you think that’s an improvement over Donald Trump, it really isn’t. 

Salon

This makes me sad. I’m not a religious person but I know Joe Biden is and I know his faith is deep and very important to him:

When U.S. Catholic bishops hold their next national meeting in June, they’ll be deciding whether to send a tougher-than-ever message to President Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians: Don’t receive Communion if you persist in public advocacy of abortion rights.

At issue is a document that will be prepared for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops by its Committee on Doctrine, with the aim of clarifying the church’s stance on an issue that has repeatedly vexed the bishops in recent decades. It’s taken on new urgency now, in the eyes of many bishops, because Biden — only the second Catholic president — is the first to hold that office while espousing clear-cut support for abortion rights.

Such a stance, by a public figure, is “a grave moral evil,” according to Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, who chairs the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities and believes it’s necessary to publicly rebuke Biden on the issue.

“Because President Biden is Catholic, it presents a unique problem for us,” Naumann told The Associated Press. “It can create confusion. … How can he say he’s a devout Catholic and he’s doing these things that are contrary to the church’s teaching?”

The document, if approved, would make clear the USCCB’s view that Biden and other Catholic public figures with similar viewpoints should not present themselves for Communion, Naumann said.

In accordance with existing USCCB policy, it would still leave decisions on withholding Communion up to individual bishops. In Biden’s case, the top prelates of the jurisdictions where he frequently worships — Bishop W. Francis Malooly of Wilmington, Delaware, and Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C. — have made clear that Biden is welcome to receive Communion at churches they oversee.

The document-in-the-works results from a decision in November by the USCCB’s president, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, to form a working group to address the “complex and difficult situation” posed by Biden’s stances on abortion and other issues that differ from official church teaching. Before disbanding, the group proposed the drafting of a new document addressing the issue of Communion — a project assigned to the doctrine committee.

The committee has not released details about its work. Naumann said the matter will be discussed at the USCCB’s meeting in June and the bishops will vote on whether the committee should continue working on the document so it could be publicly released later.

A two-thirds majority would be needed for work to proceed, Naumann said. But even critics of the initiative, such as Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, predict the endeavor will win overwhelming approval…

American Cardinal Raymond Burke has broached the possibility of Catholicism’s ultimate sanction. He says politicians who “publicly and obstinately” support abortion are “apostates” who not only should be barred from receiving Communion but deserve excommunication.

I won’t say what I’m thinking about a church that covered up pedophilia among its priests for decades — maybe centuries — and yet has the nerve to claim moral authority to do something like this.

These people aren’t religious leaders. They are political actors. And it’s sick.