Month: June 2021

Twitter user Robert Black put it succinctly: Republicans don’t actually want the specific things they say they want.

Recent events, once again, back up that assessment. Jonathan Chait finds they have their diapers in a wad over the balance of power shifting in the direction of beleaguered low-wage workers. They claim to be the workers’ party except when it comes to actually taking workers’ side on conditions of employment.

“Giving low-income workers money is bad because that creates a disincentive to work,” they argue. “Regulating a higher minimum wage is also no good because that kills jobs. Government-subsidized health insurance or child care is also problematic, and encouraging the formation of unions to give them more bargaining power is totally unacceptable.”

Now, Covid-driven economic conditions have left short-staffed employers scrambling to attract workers in a labor seller’s market, forcing them to bid up wages. Turns out, the “workers’ party” hates that too:

This week, Chipotle announced it would raise its prices by 4 percent to cover the cost of paying higher wages. The National Republican Congressional Committee pounced with a press release attacking the Democrats for having engineered this catastrophe. “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage,” complained a GOP spokesman, “and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.”

They’re serious. Well, as serious as Republican flacks. Kylee Zempel of The Federalist is horrified that the fast food joint has “jacked up the price of [her] Chipotle order.”

Zempel is specifically angry that Democrats have engineered a tight labor market forcing Chipotle to raise wages: “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work,” she complains. “That’s what happens when the federal government steps in with a sweet unemployment deal, incentivizing workers do a little less labor and a little more lounging.”

Bloody peasants!

Why, Chipotle actually announced it would raise its average hourly wage to $15, Zempel raged, “the same dollar figure Democrats have pushed as a federal minimum wage.”

Chipotle is not alone, reports the Washington Post. Twelve employers the Post surveyed found when they raised their base pay to $15/hr., “It was like a dam broke.” Over 1,000 applications piled up in a week at Jacob Hanchar’s Pittsburgh ice cream shop:

Enrique Lopezlira, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on the low-wage workforce, said the stories were a sign, albeit anecdotal, that the market was functioning as it should in the face of excessive demand for workers.

“The more employers improve the quality of the jobs and the more they think of workers as an asset that needs to be maximized, the better they’re going to be able to find and retain workers long term,” he said.

Patrick Whalen co-owns a string of restaurants in Charlotte and Charleston, SC. As business increased in March, so did wait times for his understaffed eateries. And his negative online reviews:

After one of his managers told him that a line cook needed to borrow money to get groceries, Whalen was moved to reconsider wages at the company.

“It was just one of those moments where you just kind of stop and you say, ‘Is there a real problem in our industry?’” he said. “We always kind of knew it was there, but we didn’t really know what to do with it.”

Clearly, a financial genius.

Whalen raised starting pay from $12-$13/hr to $15 and added a “tip the kitchen” program. Applications poured in, and his restaurant group went from “about 50 to 60 percent staffed to nearly fully staffed” within three weeks.

Naturally, this situation is intolerable for the workers’ party, says Chait:

The putative objection to increasing the minimum wage is that employers would eliminate jobs because they don’t produce enough value to make that wage profitable. But now that employers like Chipotle are finding they can pay that wage, and the only cost is a rather modest increase in prices, it turns out some conservatives simply object to working-class employees making that much money.

When large chains pay employees so little that they qualify for government nutrition assistance, Republicans tolerate taxpayers picking up that tab. But when market conditions force employers to pay employees more, it is an outrage if any of those costs are passed along to consumers. Especially to Republican consumers. Now, you’re getting personal.

I’ve got an idea. We’ll call your burrito cost increase a user fee.

My God.

Happening now: Cathedral Bell Tolling for 600,000 COVID Deaths https://t.co/N95jpylSA1 via @YouTube

— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) June 10, 2021

A year ago today there was 110,000 dead. This number would have been unthinkable at that time.

The new Pew Poll shows that the world is relieved that the most powerful nation on earth is no longer being run by an orange nincompoop:

The election of Joe Biden as president has led to a dramatic shift in America’s international image. Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, publics around the world held the United States in low regard, with most opposed to his foreign policies. This was especially true among key American allies and partners. Now, a new Pew Research Center survey of 16 publics finds a significant uptick in ratings for the U.S., with strong support for Biden and several of his major policy initiatives.

In each of the 16 publics surveyed, more than six-in-ten say they have confidence in Biden to do the right thing in world affairs. Looking at 12 nations surveyed both this year and in 2020, a median of 75% express confidence in Biden, compared with 17% for Trump last year.

Chris Wray’s explanation of why the FBI’s Jan. 6 probe differs from the bureau’s response to last summer’s riots is worth a watch. His main (somewhat obvious) points:

1) An attack on the U.S. Capitol triggers more federal laws.

2) The Jan. 6 crowd gave the FBI a lot of layups.

You can see why he gets interrupted there: It’s a thorough and logical explanation that guts a key talking point on the right.

The notion that the feds treaded lightly last summer is really just plainly inaccurate. More than 300 defendants were charged in the course of four months. Some of the approaches were pretty experimental.

LIke what they did with this guy:

Amid the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against antifa, federal authorities in Tennessee have leveled charges against the bassist of an anarchist rock band after he posted Facebook images of himself holding a fake Molotov cocktail during a photoshoot back in May.

Justin Coffman, a 29-year-old from Jackson, is facing a federal charge of being a drug user in possession of firearms after a police raid on his home in June turned up two guns and Coffman allegedly admitted to smoking one or two grams of marijuana per day.

The Justice Department has used the same charge to go after white supremacists and neo-Nazis whose conduct didn’t constitute an obvious violation of any other federal statutes. That federal charge is relatively rare: One federal judge declared it “unusual,” and a federal public defender said he never saw federal prosecutors move forward on it during his entire 30-year career.

Coffman was also indicted by a Madison County grand jury and is facing several state charges: “possession of a hoax device,” which is a felony, and six misdemeanor charges for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. DOJ’s press release, which describes the mock Molotov cocktail as a “glass bottle containing a liquid substance,” makes clear it lacked the critical component: an accelerant.

The investigation began because Coffman “was posting photographs to his Facebook page and another page titled ‘The Gunpowder Plot’ that depicted him holding a Molotov cocktail near Jackson City Court building,” according to a federal affidavit by Jackson Police Department Officer Ashley Robertson, who is also a task force officer with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Coffman “was also seen at two protests against police violence in the day leading up to the investigation,” the affidavit states.

The Gunpowder Plot is Coffman’s band. Its Facebook page reads, “Punk rock that makes government buildings crumble from beneath.” A video features members in Guy Fawkes masks, and the page is generally supportive of anarchists and pokes fun at conspiracy theories about antifa. One meme using a popular “Distracted Boyfriend” format features a man (“conservatives”) lustfully staring at “made up stuff about Antifa” while ignoring “tangible proof of violent white supremacists.” Posts by the band, and by Coffman, are critical of both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.

A judge threw the case out saying that we don’t jail people for exercising their First Amendment rights. But they tried. Oh how they tried.

Originally tweeted by Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) on June 10, 2021.

According to the Washington Examiner, Republicans are getting nervous about the Senate talks on infrastructure. It quotes one of them saying what they are all thinking:

Senate Republicans told The Washington Times that they fear the White House will subvert the intentions of the bipartisan group — which includes Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and other more moderate Republicans — to falsely claim broad support for their roughly $2 trillion spending plan.

“The White House doesn’t seem to want a real deal, they weren’t willing to work with the Senate Republican leadership on something everyone can get behind,” said one GOP lawmaker who requested anonymity when discussing actions of fellow Republicans. “The majority leader is talking about going it alone regardless, so why give them a win?”

[…]

Most of Mr. Romney’s colleagues take a dim view of the effort. Mr. Biden‘s team, they warn, could strike a watered-down compromise on infrastructure just to be able to say they achieved a bipartisan deal. Mr. Biden could then get the rest of what he wants passed via budget reconciliation, a process that allows spending bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes.

I doubt that Mitch will allow them to get 10 votes to stop the filibuster. Moreover, they really don’t have to worry about an add-on reconciliation. And their close ally Emperor Manchin is highly unlikely to allow a reconciliation bill with more spending.

But I love the idea of it if the Democrats could pull it off. “Hey, thanks for the bipartisan win, Mitt! Now, watch this drive!”

Sadly, I can’t see it. Interesting that that the GOPers think they will though.

That’s what one expert calls the recipe for disaster that leads a democratic nation down the road to authoritarianism. The NY Times’ Tom Edsall speaks to a whole bunch of people who study the issue and it’s not reassuring:

Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities.

Republicans “see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in,” William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein. “It’s the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can.”

The actions of Republican state legislators to curtail absentee voting, limit days for early voting and seize control of local election boards have prompted 188 scholars to sign a “Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards,” in which they assert:

We have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures.

Among statutes Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed or are in the process of approving are “laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections” that

could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

The precipitating event driving the current surge of regressive voting legislation in Republican-controlled states is Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the widespread acceptance on the right of Trump’s subsequent claim that the presidency was stolen from him. The belief among Republicans that Trump is essential to their drive to slow or halt the growing power of nonwhite voters aligned with the Democratic Party has powered the broad acquiescence to that lie both by people who know better and by people who don’t.

Virginia Gray, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, argued in an email that for Republicans, “the strongest factors are racial animosity, fear of becoming a white minority and the growth of white identity.” She noted that Tucker Carlson of Fox News articulated Republican anxiety during his show on April 8:

In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.

Trump, Carlson and their allies in the Republican Party, Gray continued,

see politics as a zero-sum game: as the U.S. becomes a majority-minority nation, white voters will constitute a smaller portion of the voting electorate. So in order to win, the party of whites must use every means at its disposal to restrict the voting electorate to “their people.” Because a multiracial democracy is so threatening, Trump supporters will only fight harder in the next election.

Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, law professors at the University of Chicago, make the case in their 2018 paper, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” that in the United States and other advanced democracies, the erosion of democracy will be gradual and stealthy, not an abrupt shift to authoritarianism.

“Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay?” Huq and Ginsburg ask, and write:

There are two modal paths of democratic decay. We call these authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion to three institutional predicates of democracy occurring simultaneously: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. We show that over the past quarter-century, the risk of reversion in democracies around the world has declined, whereas the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is neither exceptional nor immune from these changes.

In an email, Ginsburg wrote that there are two forces that lead to the erosion of democracy: “charismatic populism and partisan degradation, in which a party just gives up on the idea of majority rule and seeks to end democratic competition. Obviously the U.S. has faced both forces at the same time in Trumpism.

From a different vantage point, Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, argues that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn in examining the consequences of Republican tampering with election administration, with one more dangerous than the other. In an email, Berman writes:

The downward spiral refers to attempts by Republicans to do two related things. First, effectively making voting more difficult by, for example, restricting voting by mail, shrinking voting times and places, adding ID requirements and so on. The second is injecting partisanship into the electoral oversight process. As potentially harmful as the first is, the latter is even more worrying.

In other circumstances, Berman argues, one could imagine “having a good faith debate about the conditions under which mail-in ballots are distributed and counted, whether ID should be required to vote and if so of what type, etc.”

But in the current contest, she says, “these concerns are not motivated by a general desire to improve the quality of our elections, but rather by false, partisan accusations about the illegitimacy of Biden’s victory and so good faith discussions of reform are impossible.”

There’s more and it’s not good. The consensus among those who study this sort of thing is that we are at a very dangerous moment. I think we all instinctively understand that. But this confirms our worst fears.

It is easy to get distracted by Republican theater. The positioning, the talking points, the disingenuous proposals, the phony demands for bipartisanship, etc. Twitter user Robert Black sums up the problem succinctly.

https://twitter.com/hurricanexyz31/status/1402401369340923904?s=20

But fixation on the Manchins and the McConnells and the GOP clowns narrows the view of what is possible for Senate Democrats with no votes to spare. Paul Waldman suggests lack of legislation to protect voting rights can be offset by massive organization. And expenditures in the billions for on-the-ground organizing:

This is exactly what Democrats need to do — and what in the past they’ve so often failed to do. Every four years, they seem to rediscover the importance of organizing, putting together new, often well-funded organizations meant to register voters and get them to the polls — then the effort fades away after the election, and they have to start all over again.

“Resources that support Democratic registration drives are driven by the four-year cycle,” Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who researches grassroots politics and works with a group devoted to expanding Pennsylvania’s electorate, told me.

The spigot gets turned on during a presidential election, then turned off. That’s why Democrats must do what they’re doing in Texas, not starting in 2024 but in 2021.

Democrats have new tools and allied organizations prepositioned to aid them that did not exist a few years ago. Waldman notes that Democrats spent $7 billion on the 2020 election, so the money is out there. But long-term planning is not their focus. Or their funders’ focus. Getting donors to put their money behind the kind of longer-term, off-year organizing efforts Stacey Abrams used to great effect in Georgia is not in their nature. The right thinks long term. Lefties want quick fixes and candidates to fall in love with.

Chris Hayes believes another way too address the impasse in the Senate with Manchin is to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act that Manchin does support. Such action will help fight Republican vote suppression (if not election-rigging), but not swiftly.

right, but I'm saying, ok, let's go with the John Lewis VRA as the backup, it's the same issue!

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 8, 2021

But restoring the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provisions — even applying them to all 50 states and territories — is not the same as outright banning vote suppression practices and gerrymandering of congressional districts with the For The People Act (H.R.1). Investigations and court challenges can take years. A Republican Justice Department could slow-walk legal actions against discriminatory laws in the several states or not initiate any.

Trust me. We just lived through ten years of litigation over Republican voter suppression measures in North Carolina. That Republicans kept losing did not stop them from running out the clock on an entire decade.

I’m starting to get very impatient with this Pollyanna nonsense about “changing Joe Manchin’s mind” about the filibuster as well s the utter bullshi about any of Biden’s agenda that his voters care about being passed on a bipartisan basis.

Mitch McConnell isn’t hiding what he’s doing and nobody should be fooled into thinking that Manchin is suddenly going to see the light:

A mere two days after Joe Manchin expressed confidence that Republicans would work with Democrats on voting rights legislation and that meaningful compromise was still possible in this bitterly polarized Washington, Mitch McConnell shot down the West Virginia senator’s bipartisan dreams.

First, McConnell announced that he would not support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which Manchin and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski have urged lawmakers to reauthorize. Manchin in an op-ed Sunday wrote that he opposed the For the People Act, the Democrats’ best opportunity to expand voting rights and protect the franchise from GOP broadsides, because it did not have GOP support—but said that he backed reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act and that he was was “encouraged by the desire from both sides” to do so. But McConnell, setting the tone for the rest of his caucus, made clear that this bill wouldn’t have Republican support, either: “There’s no threat to the voting rights law,” McConnell told reporters. “I think it’s unnecessary.”

Then, a team of McConnell surrogates led by Shelley Moore Capito—Manchin’s Republican counterpart from West Virginia—continued to take a hard tack against Joe Biden and his proposed infrastructure plan, torpedoing negotiations with the White House, despite concessions from the administration. Capito blamed Biden for ending the negotiations, and said in a statement that the breakdown “does not mean bipartisanship isn’t feasible.” But as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out last week, maintaining the illusion that a compromise is possible while doing everything possible to “[stop] this administration” is McConnell’s signature trick. “McConnell isn’t just trying to create the impression that the GOP Senate caucus wants a deal,” Sargent observed. “He’s also trying to get Democrats to keep chasing after this mirage.”

[…]

Manchin has been bested by McConnell before. In 2013, he expressed confidence in a gun control compromise he reached with Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey—only for his moderate reforms to fall short of the 60-vote threshold in what then-President Barack Obama described as a “shameful day” in Washington. And just last month, Manchin seemed taken aback when McConnell and the Republicans defeated legislation to establish a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. But it’s baffling that he appeared surprised: Why would the party responsible for the riot want it to be subject to a robust and independent inquiry?

The same is true of the voting rights legislation Republicans are poised to block, despite Manchin’s insistence that he can deliver 10 GOP votes to reauthorize the John Lewis bill: The party actively trying to roll back voting rights is not going to do anything to help protect them. Manchin’s inability to see that has already weighed down Democrats’ efforts to govern—and it’s only going to get worse as they move on big-ticket priorities that McConnell has preemptively condemned as “extreme left-wing provisions.”

“As you look toward what [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer] has in mind for June,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday, “it’s pretty clear the era of bipartisanship is over.”

Manchin is a fool. And McConnell is the gravedigger of democracy. That’s the dynamic and I see little hope of changing it.

This is the QOTD from a commenter at LGM. It’s in response to the DOJ’s decision to back Trump’s immunity claim against E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him for saying that “she isn’t my type” in response to her charge that he raped her years ago. It’s a gross decision as a matter of simple decency but even on the principle, which may be defensible in the abstract, it speaks to something very troubling that’s happening in the bigger picture:

I’ve been struggling to find the right words the last few days. The word “Weimar” keeps popping over and over in my head, though that’s not quite right.

I guess all I can come up with is that the Democrats have basically submitted to Trump. Not that they want him to win or be President, but the large majority of elected Democrats have all agreed to act like he was normal, real, legitimate. They don’t see any need or desire to act like there’s a real threat there. He was just a President.

The analogy here would be Nazi judges. People who were judges in the Weimar Republic, who were not Nazis when it started. But then Hitler took power and banned alternative parties, and the judges just…went along. They just continued doing their job, submitting to Nazi rule and acting on their behalf, because ultimately their job was to be judges, nothing more.

We talk all the time about how we can’t let Trump be normalized, but he has been. And the highest levels of Democratic governance are not just letting it happen, but actively abetting it. Why are they doing this? I dont know. It’s hard to say. But the recent escapades of people like Manchin has made be belief that many, many liberal and democratic leaders are stupid and shallow people. They have better values than their fascist counterparts, but not all that much else.

I don’t know how else to put it. It can’t be more discouraging. Lots of people get on me, yell at me about “oh, so what’s your plan genuis!” I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a solution. All I can do is observe what’s happening and note that we will be annihilated because of it. Politically, of course. But maybe people will die because of the coming fascist onslaught. And we’re just watching it come.

I would just say that we have already lost 600,000 of our fellow Americans, the majority of them because we had an authoritarian crackpot in charge when a major global crisis hit. We all watched it, stunned at how many Americans decided to treat it as a cheap political trick (especially the president) seeing as a slow motion disaster that we still haven’t fully grasped as the disaster it really was. And it’s not over…

I have spent a lot of time up San Luis Obispo California and have often considered moving there. It’s one of my favorite places in the world, wine country, beautiful beaches, nice people. I can’t tell you how much it hurts my heart to see that Trump cultists and their friends from out of state have turned what was once a sort of centrist/liberal Democratic enclave into one of those grotesque racist towns that ended up running a formerly popular election official out of town because of Trump’s inane Big Lie.

In a surprise move, San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Tommy Gong on Friday announced he’s resigning his position and leaving the area — exactly one month after enduring hours of election misinformation and racism at a Board of Supervisors meeting.

[…]

Gong first began seeing signs of election misinformation spreading locally in March, when he received a request from the Republican Party to perform an audit of the county’s voting system.

This would have involved “providing physical access to the county’s voting system components and imaging the hard drives,” a May 4 county staff report said.

Residents can request recounts up to five days after elections are certified, but Gong didn’t hear from the Republican Party until months later.

“There were already telltale signs of what was going to happen, you know, leading up to (May 4),” Gong said. “Certainly you know we had the request for the forensic audit. And I would say even in the discussions with them — a little bit threatening is not the right term — but it was, I guess, (they) attempted to try to sound a little bit intimidating, so I knew something was coming, I just didn’t know what.”

[…]

After he declined to allow the audit, Gong started hearing local Republican Party radio ads spouting conspiracy theories and mentioning him by name, telling voters to call into the May 4 Board of Supervisors meeting and express their concerns about the county’s election system.

Many of the issues the party brought up — including voter identification laws and limiting mail-in voting — were things controlled by California lawmakers, not county clerk-recorders.

“Here I am driving to work one morning this spring and this comes out,” Gong said. “Oh boy, you know, they’re really on a rampage for this. And, you know, again, nothing that I have any control over, but yet they’re trying to make a big stink about this. But that’s what made it disparaging in that way.”

During the meeting, Gong and his staff sat through hours of calls from voters reading scripted comments full of conspiracy theories and pushing for state-level changes he can’t implement. Some even called for hand-counting of ballots, which hasn’t occurred in the county for more than 60 years.

“I don’t have any control over that,” Gong said. “So yeah, this is disheartening to, to educate and guide their followers on something that I don’t have any control over, and yet I’m held accountable to it. So that’s the unfortunate thing as part of just the misinformation that’s getting circulated around.”

[…]

During the meeting, one caller made an explicitly racist comment asking if Gong is “a member of the Chinese Communist Party.”

“It was interesting because we were hearing all of the scripted comments and everything, and your mind kind of goes numb as you’re listening,” Gong said. “That one did stick out, I will say. I was like, ‘Did I hear that right?’ You know, (it) was a little surprising. And my staff was with me, and it was like, ‘Oh yeah, wow.’”

Gong grew up outside of Modesto, where his family ran a local chain of grocery stores. When he was going into kindergarten, Gong’s mother warned him that children may “call you names” or make racist comments.

Hearing the racism at the meeting made Gong think back to that time.

“When I ran for public office and was elected, the first Asian American to be elected to countywide office in SLO, it brought me great pride and a glimmer that we were progressing as a society,” Gong said in an email. “When that comment was made during the (Board of Supervisors) meeting, it brought me back 50 years ago with the pettiness, questioning if we actually made progress or not.”

It’s happening everywhere, not just in red states. I keep hoping that all this craziness is some sort of temporar reaction to the pandemic and Trump but I just don’t know.

Gong says that he he’s leaving to be nearer his family in the Bay Area and I assume that’s true. You can’t blame him wanting to have them near when this stuff is going on.