Month: June 2021

The author of “On Tyranny”, Yale history professor and expert on democracy, Timothy Snyder writes that he had a dream he was in the Empire State building on 9/11 and knew the building was going to come down but nobody believed him.

Yeah. Not to hard to understand what’s going on there:

I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading.  President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged.  This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways.  The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections. 

The scenario then goes like this.  The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression.  The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states.  State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote.  The House and Senate accept that altered count.  The losing candidate becomes the president.  We no longer have “democratically elected government.”  And people are angry.

No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan.  It is right there out in the open.  The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform.  If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way.  The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one.  Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed.  This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021.  It will be worse in January 2025.

9/11 led us to the invasion of Iraq, the foreign policy disaster that marked our century.  1/6 leads us to a catastrophe on that scale, but inside our own country.  It is not at all clear that the plan to take power undemocratically will work, but it is clear that it will generate a lot of resistance.  African Americans are right now being told the absurd lie that the problem in America is that it is too easy for them to vote.  As the scenario plays out, all Americans will face an open denial of everything they have been told about their country. 

In such a scenario, it is not clear what the armed forces or civil servants would do.  Most likely they would fracture.  An oath to defend the Constitution is hard to honor when it is unclear what it means.  Both those who were stealing an election and those who were defending votes would claim that the Constitution was on their side. 

The Supreme Court would rule, but would anyone pay attention?  Those who have decided to overthrow democracy believe that the Court is on their side, which is why they are proceeding as they are.  If they were proven wrong in January 2025, it would be too late; they would not change course.  Those who are defending voting rights expect the Court to rule against voting, since that is what it generally does.  If the Court rules against voting in the setting of antidemocratic regime change, this will seem screamingly illegitimate to a very large number of Americans. No Court, no Constitution.  No Constitution, no rule of law.  No rule of law, widespread violence.  The collapse of the United States follows. 

When Trump told his big lie, the airplane hit the building.  What unfolds from there has a certain logic.  It can be stopped, but only if it is understood.  Everything happens fast.  It is so easy to look away, to imagine it was all an accident, to think that institutions will save us.  They will only save us if we save them first.

The anti-voter laws proposed and passed by Republican state legislatures around the country move the scenario to its next step.  Halting them might well be the only way to halt the scenario as a whole.  Businesses that want to avoid chaos between now and 2022 and prevent system breakdown in 2024 would be well advised not to donate to politicians who repeat the big lie and suppress the vote.

We have to act now.  This is what no one wants to hear.  We want to believe in American democracy.  We want to take pride in new laws, a growing economy, the end of covid.  I get all of that.  I want to feel that way too.  I have not yet figured out how to tell this story.  In waking life I feel as I did in the dream, facing those senior citizens.  I couldn’t convince a single one of of them.  And so I just stood in the doorway and kept talking.  And woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this.

Is this hysterical? I honestly don’t know. But I completely believe that this is a huge threat and that they may very well succeed in fundamentally altering our system in such a way that a real collapse could follow. We are in a crisis and our leaders are either complicit or paralyzed. It’s only a matter of time before large numbers of people see this whole thing as hopeless and check out of political participation allowing the extremists to rig the game for good.

I have one flicker of hope in all this. As I was watching Trump speak in North Carolina last night, seeing him do all his greatest hits and put some new songs in the set list, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if he disappeared? He sort of has already without his social media platforms. But the idea of him is very much alive and well and it’s that promise of him running again, getting revenge, putting the Big Lie right that is fuelling this GOP lunacy at the moment. Maybe it has a life of its own and is transferable to Josh Hawley or Mike Pompeo. But I have my doubts. It’s Trump’s presence hovering over the whole scene like an evil clown that’s keeping them all engaged.

As I watched him last night I realized that he’s aging. His voice is a little thinner. He looks more haggard. He’s put on weight. He’s not the same guy he was.

Donald Trump ageing out may be our best hope to preserve our democracy long enough to plug the holes and then rebuild it from the bottom up.

William Saletan at Slate wrote this last September. In light of the right’s new operation to slime Dr Fauci, it is suddenly very, very relevant:

Thanks to Bob Woodward, we now have audio recordings that prove what public records have shown: President Donald Trump deliberately played down the coronavirus as it swept through the United States. Trump says he did this to prevent a “panic.” But that excuse is even more damning, because it’s the same rationale he initially gave for China’s censorship of information about the virus. Suppressing “panic” was the core of a corrupt alliance between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The story Trump now tells, that the “China virus” caught him off guard, is a lie. He was well briefed and well aware, not just about the virus, but about China’s deception. As Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima reported months ago in the Washington Post, Trump’s briefers warned him “at the beginning of January” that the virus was spreading in Wuhan and the Chinese government was working “to conceal details of the outbreak.” For weeks thereafter, he was told that “China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll.” Woodward’s new book, Rage, reports that Trump’s head “popped up” when he was advised, in a briefing on Jan. 28, that the virus would be “the biggest national security threat” of his presidency.

Trump could have warned Americans. Instead, he teamed up with Xi. On Feb. 7, he confided to Woodward what he had just learned from an overnight phone call with the Chinese president. “We’ve got a little bit of an interesting setback with the virus going in China,” Trump told Woodward. “It goes through the air,” he said, and “it’s also more deadly” than “even your strenuous flus.” But in public statements that day, Trump didn’t talk about setbacks. He said China was working smoothly with the U.S. government, was managing the virus “really well,” and would take care of it. He tweeted that Xi “will be successful” and the virus would soon be “gone.”

During their phone call, Xi suggested to Trump that in April, warm weather would kill the virus. Trump could have run that idea by his own health officials, all of whom thought it was a bad assumption. But he didn’t. Instead, Trump began to peddle it as a talking point on Twitter, at rallies, and in speeches and interviews. It turned out to be fatally wrong. In late spring and summer, as states yielded to Trump’s pressure and allowed bars and restaurants to reopen, the virus rampaged across the United States, causing tens of thousands of additional deaths.

Why did Trump parrot Xi’s assurances, defend the Chinese government, and join it in shading the truth? One reason is that the two leaders shared an interest in looking as though they had the crisis under control. Another is that Trump wanted China to give American scientists more data about the virus. But there’s a third reason that goes to the heart of Trump’s fraud as a China hawk: He had cut a deal with Xi to get Beijing’s help in the 2020 U.S. election.

The evidence of this pact is straightforward. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, directly witnessed Trump asking Xi for help in getting reelected through a trade deal that included Chinese purchases of American crops. Trump signed the deal on Jan. 15. On Feb. 10, three days after his call with Xi, Trump boasted at a campaign rally that the trade deal would “defeat so many of our opponents.” In the early months of the virus crisis, Trump referred constantly to the deal and hailed China as a benefactor. He didn’t want to lose that income.

Trump bent over backward to defend China, including its censorship of medical data. On Feb. 13, two days after another call with Xi, Trump gave a radio interview to Geraldo Rivera. “We think, and we hope, based on all signs, that the problem goes away in April,” said Trump, “because heat kills this virus.” Rivera asked him, “Did the Chinese tell the truth about this?” “You never know,” Trump replied, but “if you were running it, you’d probably—you wouldn’t want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is, ’cause you don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump wasn’t just defending China’s censorship. He was saying he would have done the same thing. And for the next five weeks, he tried. He issued false assurances, told Americans not to believe alarming news reports, and bullied U.S. health officials into muting their concerns. On the morning of Feb. 26, he phoned Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, and threatened to fire Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, for scaring the stock market by talking candidly about the crisis ahead.

Later that day, Trump seized control of briefings on the virus and, in his first move, withheld information he had just been given about its spread in the United States. Messonnier, for the first time, read from a script that praised Trump by name and included political talking points. And Azar, testifying before Congress hours after his phone call with Trump, argued that the president, in contradicting Messonnier’s previous warnings, was just “trying to calm [the] public.” The health secretary likened control of information in the United States to control of information in China. As “we see in China,” he cautioned, “panic can be as big of an enemy as [the] virus.”

On March 19, Trump returned to the “panic” defense. But this time, instead of using it to justify China’s censorship, he used it to justify his own. “I wanted to always play it down,” he told Woodward, referring to the virus. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” On March 30, when Trump was asked on Fox News to respond to Chinese “disinformation” about the virus, he scoffed, “They do it, and we do it, and we call them different things.” He saw no difference between Chinese and American propaganda. If Xi was willing to fudge facts, so was Trump.

[…]

When Trump blames China for unleashing the virus and lying about it, he’s hiding his own complicity. He had a deal with Xi to get help in the election. To protect that deal, he worked with Xi to play down the virus. He adopted the Chinese president’s talking points, defended Chinese censorship, and tried, as far as he could, to emulate that censorship in the United States. Now Trump says he, too, was just trying to avert a panic. He’s not a victim of the Chinese Communist Party. He’s its apprentice.

Of course. It’s always a big mistake to forget that with Trump every accusation is a form of projection.

Back in March, Perry Bacon, then at 538, wrote an astute column about what makes Manchin tick and I think he had it right. It’s a long article worth reading, but the conclusion says it all:

[T]he Democratic Party’s fate is in the hands of a man who doesn’t owe the party anything, can’t support some of its agenda for electoral reasons and probably just disagrees with some of that agenda anyway. Much of the Democratic Party believes that the biggest problem in politics is that the GOP is becoming anti-democratic and that this anti-democratic drift is an emergency for the country. Manchin sees the Republican Party as including people he can work with and seems to think that the biggest problem in politics is that elected officials on both sides aren’t being bipartisan enough. This difference in views between Manchin and much of the rest of the party may be irreconcilable. But if they aren’t reconciled, Manchin’s view will win out, because he has a deciding vote and seems very much willing to use it.

He’s winning. And there’s not a lot the Democrats can do about it. It’s time for Plan B.

What’s Plan B?

Here’s a little reminder of the impact on real people’s lives when the Democrats are willing to take a party line vote for something vital and important:

More people than ever are getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, providing new proof of the law’s value even as its survival depends on a Supreme Court ruling that could come as soon as Monday.

Approximately 31 million people now get coverage through “Obamacare,” according to a report that the Department of Health and Human Services issued Saturday. In most cases, that means they’ve enrolled in newly expanded Medicaid programs or purchased subsidized insurance through HealthCare.gov or state exchanges like Covered California.

That figure is the highest ever and reflects a nearly 4 million-person increase in enrollment between 2020 and 2021, following four years when combined enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s programs was basically flat.

The surge is not especially surprising, given how many people lost incomes or jobs during the pandemic. One of the Affordable Care Act’s primary purposes is to create a safety net, so that people can get insurance ― and pay for their medical care ― even if they don’t have access to employer-based insurance or can’t afford premiums.

Also, the program as a whole is under new management. During his term in office, President Donald Trump worked with Republicans in Congress to repeal the program. Although they failed, the administration slashed funding for outreach and promotion, reflecting Trump’s open hostility to the program.

Joe Biden, who famously called the Affordable Care Act “a big fucking deal” when President Barack Obama signed it in 2010, has taken a very different attitude. One of his first actions as president was to establish a new “open enrollment” period that, with an extension, will go through August.

I’m quite sure that Joe Manchin wouldn’t have voted for the final passage of this bill back in 2010 because there was a handful of red state Democratic Senators who didn’t. But in those days, there was a big Democratic majority and they could afford to let some of these conservative Dems fall away and still win with 51 votes.

But you’d think today’s red/purple state Dems would learn from that exprience and realize that voting with the Republicans does you no good. Most red state Dems who voted against final passage lost their seats anyway. You might as well go out doing something decent for the people.

It takes guts to shake up the status quo against a wall of opposition. It looks like we aren’t going to see that any time soon, unfortunately. We have a couple of myopic weasels in the Democratic party backs by at least a handful of silent cowards.

As the article notes, the Supremes may just effectively repeal the law as early as this week, making all those people suddenly without health care. The case they heard was absurd but the mere fact that they agreed to hear it was unnerving. And the court is now fully packed with nihilistic extremists and we don’t know what they’re going to do. But if they do come up with an adverse ruling we have to hope that the Democrats have the will and the means to correct it. I honestly don’t know if they do.

Brian Kemp is the guy who ensured that Stacey Abrams could not win the Governor’s seat in Georgia by being both the Secretary of State who administered elections, even as he was running for Governor. In many ways it was a trial run for all the upcoming 2022 partisan manipulations of the vote. He was a pioneer.

But he couldn’t find a way to make the numbers work for Donald Trump and that makes him an enemy of the cult:

The outpouring of anger aimed at Gov. Brian Kemp seemed inevitable.

Some of the activists who filled the ranks at the Georgia GOP convention have faulted him for not seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat — and they expressed that displeasure on Saturday by bombarding him with a wave of boos throughout his brief speech.

The jeering was so loud it was difficult to make out much of what Kemp said during his remarks, at least from the back of the Jekyll Island Convention Center. Whenever the governor’s supporters cheered, opponents booed. Whenever Kemp’s opponents booed, supporters would try to drown them out with cheers.

Standing with his wife and three daughters, Kemp powered through his address, highlighting his support for anti-abortion legislation, his approval of a measure that imposed new voting restrictions and his aggressive reopening of the state’s economy during the pandemic.

And yet he avoided more significant pushback, such as a formal rebuke or “censure” from the thousands of delegates and alternates. And he got facetime with influential activists as he circled the convention center before and after the remarks, taking selfies and answering questions from attendees in between events.

Still, it was a far cry from the hero’s welcome that Kemp, the state’s first lifelong Republican governor since Reconstruction, received at the last GOP meeting two years ago. At that gathering in Savannah, Kemp mocked “C-List celebrities” who threatened to boycott Georgia over the anti-abortion law, as an adoring crowd peppered him with ovations.

He might still win. If he manages to pull off the nomination it’s likely they’ll all bite their tongues and keep him in office. They’re nuts, but not nutty enough to let the Democrats win.

But keep in mind that Kemp is actually a far right wingnut every bit as extreme as any Trump cultist and he’ll happily bend over backwards to help Trump or any designated stand-in. Trump has nothing to worry about from him.

With that in mind, consider the latest edict from Emperor Manchin:

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday defended his decision to vote against a sweeping voting rights bill and reiterated his opposition to gutting the filibuster, declaring in the strongest terms yet that he is not willing to change Senate rules to help his party push through much of President Joe Biden’s agenda.”I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, wrote in an op-ed published in the Charleston Gazette.

The implicit threat underlying those comments is a threat to switch to the Republican party just as West Virginia Governor Jim Justice did if they push him too hard. They won’t. There is more than a handful in the caucus who a re happy to let Manchin take the heat for their own desires.

Maybe he would end up being like Mitt Romney or Lisa Murkowski but Mitch McConnell would happily take that dynamic. After all, Mitt, Lisa and Susan always come through in the clutch. The Democratic “mavericks” aren’t quite as accommodating to their own party.

I suspect this spells the end of the Biden agenda. They might be able to pass a tepid infrastructure bill that basically takes money from other vital programs. But that’s about that.

So bring on the investigations, butchuz. You’ve got nothing else to do.

This is why tales of vast, hidden conspiracies are so consistently bogus. Conspirators blab. Used to be it was at the neighborhood bar after a few drinks. Now they do it sober and on camera for national audience.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last week told Steve Bannon his efforts in 2020 to stop vote-by-mail in Texas kept the state’s electoral votes in Donald Trump’s column.

Raw Story:

“Yeah, I think it’s certainly critical to my state and that’s why we fought off these twelve lawsuits,” Paxton said. “We had them in Houston, we had them in San Antonio, we had them in Austin — we had them in the counties where you have the most liberal judges. And it was a concerted effort, nationally, with lots of money going into it.”

“And just knowing that we had twelve lawsuits that we had to win. And if we had lost one of them, if we’d lost Harris County — Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,” he explained.

“Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation — we would’ve been on election day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election,” Paxton said.

Newsweek adds:

Notably, the Texas attorney general conflated mail-in ballots with applications for mail-in ballots in his remarks to Bannon. Harris County did not attempt to mail actual ballots to registered voters—just applications to request them if the individual voter wanted one.

Such details rarely get in the way of white people’s dark tales of less-white people “stealing” their votes (Underground railroading, Nov. 2014):

The issue is not really whether the invisible “those people” are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they’re targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.

Now is later. And it’s right out in the open.

No, the truth will not set you free. Nor necessarily get you elected.

Health care has dominated national debate for many cycles. But despite the popularity of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats consistently have undersold their accomplishments in that area. Not tooting your own horn in politics is like leaving money on the table. What voters don’t know you have done for them can hurt you. They have to be told. Again and again.

Which is why Democrats should put a bigger, brighter spotlight on the fastest rate of wage growth since 1983 (Business Insider):

For more than two months, businesses have faced difficulties in hiring. Data published Friday suggests employers are picking the simplest solution: paying workers more.

Average hourly earnings jumped $0.15 in May to $30.33, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its monthly jobs report. The increase is roughly twice as large as those seen before the pandemic and follows a $0.21 gain in April.

Employers desperate to rebuild their staffs are raising pay for hourly employees. McDonald’s, Chipotle and Bank of America announced pay increases in May.

Powering the tightness is a widespread desire among Americans to be paid more. The reservation wage — the average lowest wage at which people would take a job — skyrocketed through the pandemic for low-income workers and those without college degrees. 

Meanwhile, job openings soared to a record high in March as businesses rushed to rehire. Only 1.4 available workers exist for each opening, according to government data. That’s half of the 20-year average, and the ratio is trending even lower.

For the first time in decades, it’s workers — not jobs — that are in short supply. And while the labor market tightness has slowed the recovery somewhat, President Joe Biden has made clear it’s a tradeoff he’s willing to make.

What the administration is not doing enough is making clear the connection between labor supply and demand issues and higher wages. Because the only economic indicator paycheck workers truly care about is how much spending money they have in their pockets.

The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy is at a loss over why the Biden administration is not doing more to promote this news: “wages are rising at a rate not seen in years, and low-wage workers are benefitting the most.”

Cassidy writes:

The details were spelled out by the economist Jason Furman, who headed the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama. In a blog post written with Wilson Powell III, his colleague at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Furman pointed out that the adjusted wages for production workers and those in non-supervisory roles grew at an annual rate of 9.1 per cent in April and May, which is “faster than in any pre-pandemic two-month period since the early 1980s.” Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote on Twitter that, in the low-wage hospitality-and-leisure sector, the annualized rate of wage growth over the past three months has been seventeen per cent. Between March and May, the average hourly wage for non-supervisory workers in this part of the economy rose from $15.26 to $15.87, according to the jobs report. There were also notable wage pickups in retail and in transportation and warehousing.

After decades of slow and unequal wage growth, these developments are very welcome. But Biden didn’t dwell on them. Neither did Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, in her blog post about the jobs report. But these wage figures should be especially welcome to Biden, who has spoken repeatedly about the need to rebuild the economy from the ground up. “We want to get something economists call ‘full employment,’ ” he said at an event in Cleveland, last week. “Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract work. We want the companies to compete to attract workers.” Right now, the U.S. is nowhere near full employment: the total number of jobs is still about 7.6 million below where it was in February of 2020. But, because of the scrambling effect that the pandemic and pandemic-era policies have had on the economy, the labor market is behaving as if workers were scarce, with businesses like bars and restaurants obliged to compete for their attention rather than the other way around. And the effects are plain: higher wages.

As more people get vaccinated and schools fully open, and as supplemental unemployment benefits expire and more Americans reenter the job market, the balance of power between employers and employees may tip back toward employers, says Cassidy. But the uptick in wages already set will remain even if the upward pressure on wages subsides.

Even if that happens, though, the experience of the past few months will have demonstrated the potential advantages of maintaining a tight labor market, which gives workers the leverage that they need to obtain higher wages. As Biden stated in Cleveland, one of the goals of his ambitious economic proposals is to make this situation an enduring reality. “When it comes to the economy we’re building, rising wages aren’t a bug, they’re a feature,” he said. Insuring that they become a permanent feature of the U.S. economy won’t be easy, but it’s an eminently worthwhile goal. As the President continues his negotiations with Senate Republicans in the coming days about a possible compromise on infrastructure spending, he and his allies should be out there ballyhooing recent wage gains as a downpayment on what can be achieved in the future: a sustained period of strong job growth accompanied by strong wage growth. Now that would be something.

A good word, ballyhoo. Tell ’em how you’re going to help ’em; help ’em; then tell ’em how you helped ’em. Democrats need reminding not to forget the last part.

Gosh, I wonder what other shenanigans a January 6 Commission might have uncovered? I guess this is exactly why Mitch and his cronies didn’t want one. Who knows how many of their comrades are implicated?

 In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.

In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.

But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.

He needs to be hauled before congress to testify. So should Donald Trump, for that matter. They are both private citizens and have no good reason to refuse.

I suggest an 11 hour grilling. Let’s see how Trump holds up.