Month: June 2021

The assault on democracy that’s taking place all around the country in various state legislatures has come boldly into focus in recent days and not a moment too soon. Democrats across the nation are begging the national government to step in and do something to protect our electoral system. And in a stunning irony, the Republican response is to use the federal government’s most undemocratic institution’s most undemocratic rule to prevent that from happening.

On Tuesday, Republicans invoked the filibuster to prevent the Senate from bringing S.1, the For the People Voting Rights Act, to the floor for debate, effectively killing the bill. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin had even cobbled together a compromise, giving Republicans a bunch of goodies they have wanted for a long time, including national voter ID and federal permission to purge the voter rolls, just trying to tempt them into even allowing a debate on the issue.

It did no good.

Manchin couldn’t even coax one of his “good Republicans” to vote for it. His bipartisan crusade is 0 for 0 so far. Before the vote on Tuesday, Sen. Rafael Warnock, D-Ga, described the GOP’s shamelessness perfectly:

“What could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to protect minority rights in the society?”

Mother Jones’ Ari Berman elaborates:

Congressional Democrats’ signature voting rights bill, the For the People Act, is set to be defeated on Tuesday by the very anti-democratic system it’s meant to reform.

The 50 Democratic senators who support the For the People Act (or least Sen. Joe Manchin’s compromise proposal keeping some key elements of the bill while excluding others) represent 43 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators who oppose it, according to data compiled by Alex Tausanovitch of the Center for American Progress. Yet because of the 60-vote requirement to pass most legislation, 41 Republican senators representing just 21 percent of the country can block the bill from moving forward, even though it’s supported by 68 percent of the public, according to recent polling.

It is certainly true, as Republicans are quick to proclaim, that progressives and liberals have used the filibuster to stop GOP legislation in recent years as Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell, R-Ky, escalated the use of the process to an unprecedented frequency in order to entrench his minority party’s chokehold on legislation. But not since the Dixiecrats all defected to the Republican Party when they rebranded themselves as the official white supremacy party 50 years ago have Democrats used the filibuster to subvert the electoral process.

Reminiscent of his smug declaration that he would break his own rules if he had the opportunity to steal another Supreme Court seat (which he did), a dead-eyed McConnell flatly replied:

“I’m ok with the states sorting this stuff out. So, regardless of what may be happening in some states, there’s no rationale for federal intervention. They’ll figure it all out. They’ll go to court. They’ll determine whether there’s any rational basis for this. That’s not unusual in this country.”

I guess all those death threats against election officials are the sign of a healthy democracy working like clockwork.

McConnell’s comments were eerily reminiscent of the old states’ rights arguments against desegregation and universal suffrage. Some things never change. This was how they “figured it out” in the states before “federal intervention” 55 years ago:

It is no coincidence that it was after the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court declared the Voting Rights Act effectively dead that states run by the white supremacist party are back to their old tricks. (Remember, one of the Big Lie’s fundamental tropes is that urban cities with large Black populations — Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Atlanta — all cheated to deny Trump his rightful place as the president of white America.)

In the big picture, this latest assault on democracy is not only a throwback to the days of Jim Crow, although it certainly is that. In this era of disinformation and propaganda, they are also encouraging the idea that our system relies on nothing more than an exertion of power and winning by any means necessary. The vote on Tuesday shows that McConnell and his party, including the so-called “moderates” are all in on that part of the program too.

If what it takes to win means that they have to let states that are important to preserving minority power put QAnon conspiracy theorists and MAGA fanatics in charge of the electoral system, well that’s just how it has to be. Sure, these new rules and laws will eventually wend their way through Mitch McConnell’s handpicked federal judiciary. And in a few years, some of them will probably be overturned if only to keep up appearances. But expecting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the man who wrote the despicable opinion overturning the Voting Rights Act back in 2013, to do a 180-degree shift on this issue seems highly optimistic.

There is still a way around all this, of course.

The Democrats could eliminate the filibuster and pass this bill. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s plan to hold a whole bunch of votes like this one to illustrate the folly of pursuing bipartisanship in the hopes that it will persuade the filibuster fetishists to change their minds. After Tuesday’s vote, Manchin almost said Republicans were being unreasonable (shock!) by failing to even consider his compromise, so maybe Schumer’s plan will work?

We’d better hope so. The Republicans are hard at work in the states to ensure that the Democrats are ousted from power by any means necessary. They better use it while they have it or they are going to lose it for good. 

Salon

Philip Bump at the Washington Post wonders how long Trump will tolerate his minion’s popularity:

For most of the summer of 2015, Donald Trump was leading the field of Republicans vying for the party’s presidential nomination. By August, though, he faced a new threat: Neurosurgeon Ben Carson had emerged from the pack behind him to surge into second place. By the end of October, Carson had nearly caught Trump, gaining support as Trump flatlined. In Iowa, polling showed Carson taking the lead.

Trump went on the offensive.

At an event in Iowa, he mocked a story Carson liked to tell about having tamed his temper through his faith. That story included a claim from Carson that he had tried to stab a friend, only to strike the friend’s belt buckle. During his speech, Trump wiggled his own belt to mock the alleged incident.

“He hit the belt buckle. Anybody have a knife? Want to try it on me? Believe me, it ain’t gonna work,” Trump said. “You’re going to be successful, but he took the knife and went like this and he plunged it into the belt and, amazing, the belt stayed totally flat and the knife broke.”

“How stupid are the people of Iowa?” he added, breaking somewhat from traditional efforts to woo voters. “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?”

Carson soon faded, probably less because of Trump’s belt than the sudden salience of terrorism following a major terrorist attack in Paris. But Trump still lost Iowa, coming in second to Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).

So, of course, Trump attacked Cruz. This was the moment the “Lyin’ Ted” nickname was born. Trump argued that Cruz had dishonestly tried to win votes or had committed outright fraud. He briefly demanded that Iowa hold new caucuses.

As you may be aware, this was not the last time that Trump made similar claims after losing an election.

The point, though, is simple: Nothing frustrates Trump more obviously and viscerally than coming in second. Which is not great news for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

For months, DeSantis has been the focus of speculation about the 2024 Republican nomination contest. He has been adept at navigating the politics of the coronavirus pandemic (including managing to overstate his success without much pushback) and at leveraging culture-war fights to maintain the media spotlight. He signed new restrictions on voting in the state during a segment on “Fox & Friends.”

But despite that, it was still consistently the case that Trump was outperforming him in (very early, very sketchy) 2024 primary straw polling. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, DeSantis was the top pick of attendees — only when Trump was excluded from the competition. Over the weekend, a straw poll conducted at the Western Conservative Summit gauging views of potential 2024 candidates again had DeSantis in the lead. This time, though, Trump was one of the trailing competitors.

Straw polls are only slightly more useful than wearing an anti-meteorite helmet, sure. But, again, Trump is not one to let even a random poll like this slide.https://9325b6d4439473a69396fdf50a55a923.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Consider what happened in April. After a political action committee affiliated with former Trump adviser John Bolton touted polling suggesting Trump’s grip on the party had weakened, Trump’s team pushed back hard. This broadly unimportant question in the moment — how much fealty did Trump engender — was something Trump simply couldn’t allow to stand without contest. He has also repeatedly trumpeted polling like that survey at CPAC, as surely as he once began his 2016 primary rallies by listing the recent polling showing him in the lead.

Trump has clearly been watching DeSantis in the rearview mirror for a while. On multiple occasions over the past few months, he has made passive-aggressive comments meant, in his unsubtle way, to diminish DeSantis’s standing. There was the time in April he suggested DeSantis would be a good running mate, a classic politician move aimed at showing dominance. In an interview with Fox Business earlier this month, he repeated that kindly offer.

During that same interview, he pointedly reminded America of who had once helped whom.

“I was at the beginning of Ron,” Trump said. “I was the first one to endorse him when he came out as a congressman that a lot of people didn’t know. My endorsement helped him tremendously. And I know him very well. He’s a great guy.”

There was no real way that Trump would have been able to maintain the same fervent level of support he enjoyed as president once he left office. That’s simply not how politics works. So, as long as Trump continues to harbor a desire to reclaim his position in three years, he runs the risk of comparing unfavorably with other potential candidates. That includes ones like DeSantis, who get to enjoy public attention by virtue of their positions.

Trump didn’t have a position to leverage in 2015, either. So he deployed what he had at his disposal to tear down his opponents: personal, emotional attacks. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before he tries to figure out how to similarly tear down the governor of Florida.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’ve been wondering this myself for some time. There is no way that Trump is going to put up with DeSantis getting all this attention. He’s just incapable of it.

He’s going to blow.

Democrats seem to have shifted on voter ID requirements for voting. Even Stacey Abrams seems to have softened on the idea given that Sen. Joe Manchin’s voting reforms proposal includes it, albeit in fairly liberal way. Former President Barack Obama does not see anything “particularly controversial” in it. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) told the Post, “I don’t know anybody who believes that people shouldn’t have to prove that they are who they say they are.”

Washington Post:

The Democratic shifts are in part a strategic effort to win broader support for their voting rights push while seeking to put Republicans on the defensive. Voter ID laws have proved popular despite Democratic arguments that they amount to voter suppression, and some activists have concluded that they do less to suppress the vote than they initially feared.

In 2013 (IIRC), North Carolina Democrats called registered Democratic voters lacking DMV accounts and found that most had other forms of ID acceptable under the restrictive Republican bill being challenged in court.

The Post reports Manchin’s compromise allows for ID requirements but broadens what qualifies:

Manchin’s proposal, in contrast, would allow a broad range of documents, including items such as utility bills, to serve as identification for voting purposes. It would also make Election Day a federal holiday and ban partisan gerrymandering, among other things. The plan was immediately rejected by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republicans.

There is little question that leading Democrats’ tone has shifted on the voter ID issue. Abrams and others have long assailed ID rules as a means of disenfranchising voters of color and other disadvantaged groups, since they are least likely to have photo IDs or other government-issued documents. They also argue that there is no evidence that ID requirements prevent election fraud.

The ACLU has called voter ID requirements part of an ongoing strategy to roll back decades of progress on voting rights. Activists have lumped the most onerous identification requirements with bills that make it a felony to give water to people in long voting lines or shuttle people from mostly Black churches to polling places.

The problem is that Republicans’ “common sense” narrative on ID requirements has gained traction.

A Monmouth University poll released Monday found 80 percent of adults supported a photo ID requirement. While support for voter ID requirements peaked at 91 percent among Republicans, 87 percent of independents and 62 percent of Democrats also backed the idea.

Some conservatives say Democrats are now revealing their hypocrisy by suddenly accepting, for strategic reasons, measures they had long decried as racist and slammed Republicans for supporting.

Manchin’s inclusions essentially neuter the ID laws on the books. That won’t win any support from Republicans.

Democrats’ issue with ID requirements is not simply the relative success of their suppressive impact but their antidemocratic intent. Women and minorities would feel the most impact, North Carolina’s state Board of Elections estimated. The GOP treat even their own own sisters, wives, and daughters as acceptable casualties in their effort to shrink the electorate if that is what it takes to win.

But now, democracy itself is in their sights as they pass laws in the states not only to suppress turnout but to allow legislatures to overturn elections. These are perilous times.

"Republicans will never help voting rights because their political power depends on disenfranchising millions of Americans." — @danpfeiffer simply laying out TRUTHhttps://t.co/c4djomSqVx

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) June 23, 2021

Everyone knew the Senate procedural vote Tuesday would fail. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has signaled repeatedly his opposition to the For the People Act (H.R. 1 or S. 1), and to any Democratic initiative, really. With the filibuster rule still backstopping Jim Crow with help from Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (and other moderate Democrats for whom they provide cover), there would never be 10 Republicans willing to provide the 60-vote margin needed to have even a floor debate on the bill.

“Make no mistake about it: it will not be the last time that voting rights come up for a debate in this Senate,” Chuck Schumer said following the 50-50 vote. “We are going to explore every last one of our options. We have to. Voting rights are too important.”

In 1963 I believe this was called "states' rights." Interesting to hear it come from Maine instead of Mississippi https://t.co/09bplLOggd

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) June 23, 2021

CNN’s Stephen Collinson questions why President Joe Biden did not put more White House effort behind passage even though it wouldn’t have mattered if he had:

Instead of taking on Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Republicans, who showed the capacity to throttle Biden’s legislative plans at any time, the President decided to prioritize other goals, like a bipartisan infrastructure deal and other policy aims he views as closer to the American people. It’s a gamble that puts him in the position of needing a big win on infrastructure to justify his decisions.

Biden does not want to telegraph just how weak his legislative position is with a high-profile smack down, even on an issue as crucial as voting rights. And Democrats have signaled that this was a show vote, one in a series, to demonstrate Republican unwillingness to work with Democrats and to build pressure for eliminating or modifying the filibuster rule.

Yes: Read this several times.
Exposing the illogic of the current version of the filibuster was the point of today’s vote. Manchin & Sinema need to find a way to a brand of the filibuster that does not block Congress’ 14th & 15th Amendment obligations to enforce voting rights. https://t.co/KouPBrL67p

— EJ Dionne (@EJDionne) June 23, 2021

For his part, Biden may be gambling that “It’s the economy, stupid” is still a viable election strategy in an era of supercharged partisanship. A large-scale injection of federal money and jobs into the economy in the form of infrastructure spending could produce the oomph needed to hold Democrats’ congressional majorities in 2022 and to secure another Electoral College win for Democrats in 2024. By that theory, Democrats running on what they have done for you should produce more votes for them than running on what Republicans have done to you.

Despite a global pandemic and prior Republican election suppression efforts, voter turnout in 2020 was the highest since 1900, enough to turn out a Republican incumbent president and in January to elect two Democratic senators from Georgia.

Yet, voters are a fickle lot. Biden’s old-school gamble is that without Donald Trump to drive turnout on both sides, Americans will vote their pocketbooks again in 2022, and in enough numbers to offset the voting obstacles Republicans throw at them. By 2024, Trump and the Trump Organization could be on trial or worse.

But Republican efforts to suppress the vote in several states are also supercharged since November, augmented by legislation aimed at allowing GOP-led legislatures, in theory, to overturn the will of the voters when Republicans lose. If any red state has the political will to test those powers in 2022, there is no telling how Americans will respond in 2024.

Biden needs a big win on infrastructure. His voters need their rights protected as much as their children fed and their bills paid. Right now, neither looks promising and McConnell is the one wielding the veto.

Democrats and the White House have to decide, as E.J. Dionne tweeted, whether their obligations to defend the 14th and 15th Amendments outweigh their need for favorable midterm results. “It is never a good bet to bet against the American people,” Biden says. He’s betting that if he can pass his infrastructure plan, the rest will take care of itself.

Like most bullies, Trump couldn’t take being laughed at. In fact it made him really angry. Remember that Obama making fun of him for being cheap reality TV star is considered by some to be the catalyst for his decision to run in 2016.

And he certainly didn’t like it when he became president and people all over the country were laughing uproariously at his idiocy:

It was the middle of Donald Trump’s presidency, and he was—yet again—mad at Saturday Night Live. And he wanted the federal government to help him settle the score.

In March 2019, the then-president of the United States had just watched an episode of the long-running, liberal-leaning NBC sketch comedy series (it wasn’t even a new episode, it was a rerun), and grew immediately incensed that the show was gently mocking him.

“It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side,’” Trump tweeted, long before he was banned from Twitter for inspiring a violent mob. “Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows. Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?”

It was, on its face, a ridiculous question and threat, as SNL is obviously satire, and therefore a form of protected speech in America that pissed-off commanders-in-chief have no authority to directly subvert. However, then-President Trump went farther than simply tweeting his displeasure with the late-night comedians and SNL writers’ room. The internal discussions that followed, between the former leader of the free world and some of his political and legal advisers, once again underscored just how much Trump wanted to use the full weight and power of the U.S. government to punish his personal enemies.

According to two people familiar with the matter, Trump had asked advisers and lawyers in early 2019 about what the Federal Communications Commission, the courts systems, and—most confusingly to some Trump lieutenants—the Department of Justice could do to probe or mitigate SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.

They didn’t act on it. Until recently, I would have added “needless to say” but recent revelations about how some of his minions were willing to go much further than we ever would have dreamed made me realize just how weak our democracy is and how easily the constitution can be subverted in the hands of the wrong people.

This is a silly example of presidential overreach. But then, Donald Trump is a silly example of a president. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.

Kyrsten Sinema is a worse problem than Joe Manchin. This is because she is incoherent. Here’s Greg Sargent:

If and when Republicans refuse to allow any debate of the Democrats’ voting rights legislation on Tuesday, there will be a hidden silver lining: It will finally force the Senate to engage in the grand argument over the filibuster that many of its denizens have ducked for so long.

As one of the last Democratic holdouts against filibuster reform, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is making big news with an op-ed in The Post laying out her rationale. Some of its central pronouncements have already been debunked: Despite her claims otherwise, the filibuster does not facilitate moderation or bipartisan cooperation.

But there’s an even more fundamental flaw in Sinema’s argument: Defending democracy and the filibuster simultaneously, in the terms that Sinema herself employs, is simply incoherent to its core.

Sinema’s own treatment of these questions inadvertently serves to reveal that a choice must inevitably be made between the two — and that Sinema is choosing the filibuster over defending democracy.

The core of Sinema’s argument is that “we will lose much more than we gain” from ending the filibuster. Sinema opposes doing this even for the narrow purpose of passing the sweeping voting rights reforms that already passed the House:

“To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to pass the For the People Act (voting-rights legislation I support and have co-sponsored), I would ask: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see that legislation rescinded a few years from now and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law or restrictions on voting by mail in federal elections, over the objections of the minority?”

That truly is frightful. Imagine a world in which legislative majorities could pass voting restrictions over the objections of minorities!

Oh, wait, we already live in that world. In state after state after state, voting restrictions of all kinds are being passed into law by Republican-controlled legislative majorities, over the objections of minorities. Crucially, this is happening almost exclusively on partisan lines.

I’ve concluded that Sinema simply doesn’t know what she’d talking about. Jonathan Chait agrees:

Earlier this month, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, speaking to reporters, laid out a thoroughly ahistorical defense of the filibuster. To be fair to Sinema, her initial error, crediting the filibuster to the Founders (who in fact rejected it, only for it to emerge by mistake decades later) is a common one, and she was speaking extemporaneously.

Today, Sinema has a second shot to explain her thinking in a Washington Post op-ed. But her revised filibuster rationale, despite having the benefit of premeditated thought and editing, still relies on utterly false grounds.

Sinema’s central argument is captured in the headline “We have more to lose than gain by ending the filibuster.” She warns that a majority-rule Senate would allow Republicans to easily roll back any Democratic policy gains:

And, sometimes, the filibuster, as it’s been used in previous Congresses, is needed to protect against attacks on women’s health, clean air and water, or aid to children and families in need …

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to expand health-care access or retirement benefits: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to later see that legislation replaced by legislation dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services?

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to empower federal agencies to better protect the environment or strengthen education: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see federal agencies and programs shrunk, starved of resources, or abolished a few years from now?

Almost every specific example she cites here as a possible or actual grounds of defense by the filibuster cannot be protected by the filibuster.

The reason is that the Senate has work-arounds for the filibuster. One is for confirmation of judges or executive-branch appointments. The other is for bills that change taxes and spending. The latter, called budget reconciliation, can be passed with 51 votes.

Almost every program Sinema cites above is a spending program that can be defunded through budget reconciliation: women’s health, aid to children and families in need, health care, Medicaid, Medicare, women’s reproductive services, funding for federal agencies to protect the environment and education. Several of them have been targeted in budget reconciliation bills.

Budget reconciliation rules do exempt Social Security (an exemption that is itself yet another of the Senate’s arcane, idiosyncratic distinctions that serve no logical purpose — why should Social Security alone have a protection that, say, Medicare and Medicaid don’t?). Likewise, regulations (such as clean air and water) can’t be repealed through budget reconciliation, though their enforcement can be defunded, or simply curtailed through administrative neglect, neither of which is subject to filibustering.

Given that Republicans could roll back any of the vast array of federal programs cherished by Democrats with a majority in both chambers and the presidency, why didn’t they do it either of the last two times they enjoyed full control of government?

The answer points to the essential fallacy of Sinema’s reasoning. Nearly all those programs are popular — so popular that even Republican voters would blanch at attacks on them. Republicans suffered grievous political damage when they attempted to defund Obamacare. (That episode points to yet another asymmetry of the filibuster — a law that required 60 votes to enact could have been destroyed with a mere 51.)

She’s not the only one I’ve heard say this. Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC the other day that the Democrats had stopped all kinds of “bad things” during the Trump years with the filibuster.

But that’s silly. If Mitch McConnell had really wanted to pass any of those things it’s not only the case that he could have used those work-arounds (which he did with the tax cuts) he would have certainly eliminated the filibuster to do it. He even defied Trump’s constant exhortations to get rid of it, not because he cares about the “institution” but because he didn’t want his crazies to have the opportunity to pass a bunch of crazy stuff that would be horribly unpopular.

He is about maintaining power, period, and if he thought that eliminating the filibuster would help him you can be sure he would have done it. In fact, he did, by eliminating the filibuster for judges, his Holy Grail.

The Republican agenda is to stay in power by any means necessary so they can roll back as much of the safety net as possible and deliver for their rich donors. That is it. The rest is all culture war kabuki. They believe that by packing the courts, rigging the electoral system in their favor and blocking the Democratic agenda is their best bet to achieve that goal. If it ends up in civil war, they’re fine with that too.

Sinema is a fool. A dim, fool who thinks she’s going to be the Maverick McCain of her era. Not true. She is going to be the Jesse Helms of her era and there were no big state funerals or Navy fly-overs for that guy.

Lol. This breathless report from Axios is just so perfect:

Inflation is on everyone’s mind, as prices for goods and services have jumped over the last few months. But many of the market participants and company executives who are talking about inflation are also admitting that it may not be that big of a deal.

Hookay.

Here’s Krugman from his newsletter today:

Leisure suits went out of fashion more than 40 years ago. High inflation stopped being a problem only a few years later. Yet while you rarely see warnings about the imminent return of disco style, hardly a year goes by without dire predictions that ’70s-type stagflation is coming back. Today’s column is about how the case for fearing runaway inflation has collapsed over the past few weeks.

But I didn’t have space to talk about why such fears have received widespread publicity, even though they were always on very shaky ground. Of course, one reason people are talking about inflation is that some prices have shot up in the past few months. But I don’t have the sense that inflation worriers are really arguing that soaring prices of used cars and lumber are harbingers of a return to double-digit inflation. Instead, they’re treating the background of price hikes as a kind of Greek chorus to reinforce their claim that we’re repeating the mistakes of the 1970s. The question is why invoking the specter of the 1970s evokes such terror.

Not that the ’70s were a good time economically. The great post World War II boom ended circa 1973, introducing a long period of sluggish gains and often declines in median income. But the ’70s don’t stand out as worse in that respect than several other periods. Real income growth under Jimmy Carter was better than it was under George Bush the elder; the Gerald Ford and Carter era as a whole was better than the reign of George Bush the younger. And none of the economic travails of the period matched the suffering of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath.

True, there was that inflation, although incomes by and large kept up. Still, by the numbers, it’s hard to see why we still scare children by telling them that if they’re bad, they’ll end up back in the 1970s. What’s all that about? Part of the answer is that the economic troubles of the ’70s came along with other bad news. Crime was still on the rise; inner cities were decaying; we lost the war in Vietnam. These were pretty much entirely separate stories both from one another and from the economic malaise, but they tend to merge in historical memory.

But here’s the thing about historical memory: It tends to be selective, and what gets remembered often reflects elite agendas. To take an infinitely more important subject than mere economics, how many white Americans were ever taught about the 1921 Tulsa massacre? I know I wasn’t. And so it is with economic history. You very rarely hear about the bleak economic mood of the early 1990s, a time of falling incomes, deindustrialization and widespread fear that the United States was losing out to foreign competitors. Somehow that episode got dropped from the curriculum even though Bill Clinton got elected by campaigning against the Bush economy.

But harping on the troubles of the 1970s serves a political purpose. To this day, I keep reading declarations that Carter-era stagflation is an object lesson in the terrible things that happen if taxes and spending are too high. There’s actually no evidence that big government had anything to do with the economic problems of the time; soaring oil prices caused by wars and revolutions in the Middle East were probably the biggest factor, plus irresponsible monetary policy (undertaken in part to help Richard Nixon win re-election).

Still, the legend of ’70s stagflation as the market’s way of punishing America for being too liberal lives on; for influential forces in our political discourse, it remains a story too good to check. The relevance to our current discourse is obvious. Democrats with a progressive agenda have taken control of the White House and, barely, Congress. Of course, there are widespread declarations that we’re about to relive (cue scary music) the … 1970s. Well, I’m not scared. Unless there’s a real possibility of a return to disco-era fashion, which would be terrifying.

I was a young person during the 70s so I experienced it as a time of being young and poor (as most people do) and basically, sex and drugs and rock and roll. Politically, is was a cynical, dark time but it was a helluva lot better than today. Krugman adds this, which made me laugh:

Hardly anyone talks about the lessons of the ’80s, which aren’t what you think.

German selective memory is even worse: Everyone knows about the hyperinflation of 1923, but nobody knows about the disastrous deflationary policies that actually destroyed democracy.

The ’70s were economically troubled but culturally innovative.

The ’70s economy was better than portrayed, but the food was as bad as you remember.

I can vouch for that last one. And my God was it bad in the UK. Horrible.

Far-right talk radio host Michael Savage took conservatives’ latest moral panic to a bonkers new level during a Monday night Newsmax appearance, warning that the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools is akin to “exactly what was done to the Jews in Germany” and is the “road to the death camps” for white people.

Republicans and right-wing media have been mired in a months-long freakout over critical race theory, an obscure legal academic framework that conservatives now use as a catch-all term for any racial-equity training or anti-racist school curriculum. At the same time, NBC News recently reported that the battle over CRT that has invaded local school boards is largely an astroturfed effort funded by well-connected national political organizations and right-wing activists.

Prior to interviewing Savage on Monday night, Newsmax hosts Steve Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino griped that the left was trying to deny that critical race theory exists while claiming they” have the receipts to prove” that it is “permeating all of our culture and our schools.” They then turned to Savage, a provocateur long known for his inflammatory and offensive rhetoric, as their expert on the subject.

After taking issue with NBC News anchor Chuck Todd dismissing the right-wing outrage over CRT, saying he’d like to “reach through the screen and smack him in the face,” Savage then delivered an overheated diatribe about how the schools are literally abusing white kids.

Newsmax guest says critical race theory is "the road to the death camps," adding "attacks on white people is exactly what was done to the Jews in Germany in the '30s" pic.twitter.com/jus8XSqz2Q

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) June 22, 2021

That’s from the Daily Beast.

I would laugh if it weren’t so sickening. The right has always been addicted to victimization but this evocation of Nazi Germany — in which the white supremacists portray themselves as the Jews! — is mind-boggling. They have worked themselves into such a frenzy that some of their brainwashed cultists now believe that teaching about slavery and Jim Crow in middle school (which is NOT CRT, but you knew that) is akin to rounding them up and throwing them in concentration camps.

It seems like only yesterday that asking people to wear masks during a pandemic was worse than being put in a gas chamber. Their desperate need to be victims is bottomless.

.

Ben Smith of the New York Times revealed in his column the other day that all the Village scribes have Tucker Carlson on speed dial and they chat with him frequently on the qt about everything. He is one of the most talkative sources in DC apparently.

This is despite the fact that he is almost single-handedly killing democracy. He is a liar. But apparently, he’s someone the DC press corps relies on for “scoops” and gossip, apparently not taking his grotesque, fascist propaganda seriously.

David Frum questioned the relationship in this piece for the Atlantic:

In November 2018, The Washington Post published a disturbing headline: “‘They Were Threatening Me and My Family’: Tucker Carlson’s Home Targeted by Protesters.”

The Post story quoted the prime-time Fox News host at length. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door,” Carlson claimed. “It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat … They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation … They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”

Even more alarming, according to the Post, “A woman was also overheard in one of the deleted videos saying she wanted to ‘bring a pipe bomb’ to his house, [Carlson] said.”

Other prestige media sources echoed the Post’s story. NBC headlined its article: “Antifa Group Chants Outside, Vandalizes Fox Commentator Tucker Carlson’s Home.” The CNN communications team, NPR’s Scott Simon, and the CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert all condemned the reported home invasion. “Fighting Tucker Carlson’s ideas is an American right. Targeting his home and terrorizing his family is an act of monstrous cowardice. Obviously don’t do this, but also, take no pleasure in it happening. Feeding monsters just makes more monsters,” Colbert wrote on Twitter.

Over the next week, further reporting cast significant doubt on Carlson’s version of events. The police report mentioned nothing about a cracked front door—and photographs showed the door entirely undamaged. The police report did not mention a pipe bomb, either. The writer Alan Pyke, who watched the event, published an account of a considerably less exciting incident that lasted only 10 minutes before the protesters departed. You can read that account here.

[…]

Why did Carlson’s exaggerations—if exaggerations is the right word—gain such instant credence? Carlson’s own lawyers have argued in court that he regularly speaks in ways that are “loose, figurative, or hyperbolic.” Carlson’s descriptions of events—including outright accusations of criminal conduct by named individuals “would not have been taken by reasonable listeners as factual pronouncements but simply as instances in which [people like Carlson] expressed their views over the air in the crude and hyperbolic manner that has, over the years, become their verbal stock in trade.”

Yet when this flagrantly unreliable narrator narrated his own story, people across the media spectrum responded as if his personal narratives could be relied upon. Again, why?

A story yesterday by The New York Times’ Ben Smith pulls back the curtain on part of the answer: One of America’s leading racial provocateurs is also one of the media world’s preferred sources of gossip from inside pro-Trump world. “I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him,” Smith writes. “But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, ‘a great source.’” Smith indicates that The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender and CNN’s Brian Stelter are two of those 16. And, despite Smith’s demurral, the story clearly conveys that he himself was a 17th.

As Smith makes clear, transactions between journalists and sources occur because they benefit both parties. Smith emphasizes one such benefit: protection. He quotes a “Washington journalist in [Carlson’s] orbit” as saying, “‘If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you.’”

One way to read the Ben Smith story is as a remorseful decision by one of the journalists who did business with Carlson to yank some of the protection bestowed by the transaction. But such transactions provide another benefit too, and this one cuts across the story Smith tells: Carlson’s “information” also buys him credulity. When reporters call Carlson for uncheckable anecdotes about his conversations with former President Trump, they make the following calculation: I know he regularly lies to his fans on television, but he would not lie to me on the telephone. 

The evidence of that November 2018 incident at Carlson’s D.C. house suggests that the calculation is radically wrong.

Almost two years later, Carlson again tried to score points by claiming that he was being endangered in his own home. The New York Times, he said on television, was planning to report his home address—with the deliberate intention of exposing his family to harm. “If one of my children gets hurt because of a story they wrote, they won’t consider it collateral damage. They know it’s the whole point of the exercise: to inflict pain on our family, to terrorize us, to control what we say. That’s the kind of people they are.” Then he named the supposed reporter of the supposed story on air, showing a photograph of that reporter, and also named a New York Times photographer and editor as accomplices to the paper’s hurtful plans.

The Times replied from its Twitter account that it had never intended to publish Carlson’s address(es)—and that Carlson had known that fact before he went to air. Carlson also knew that his fan base has a high propensity to harass and threaten people he names as his enemies. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

And yet even now, reporters pretend they are in control of this dangerous game. They are not. People who turn to an untrustworthy narrator for fabulous anecdotes get … untrustworthy anecdotes. The door was not cracked. No one threatened Carlson with a pipe bomb. The Times did not plot to terrorize Carlson’s children. And the self-aggrandizing, self-exculpating story just dispensed to the journalist looking to add a splash of color to the otherwise sinister record? If you can’t check the story, check the source.

It’s all just a game to them, apparently. Tucker gave them some juicy tidbits and they paid him back by passing on his bullshit, victimization stories. He’s one of them.

Think about that.

President Barack Obama in a tele-town hall Monday gave remarks on the For the People Act impasse in Congress:

“Republicans in the Senate are lining up to try to use the filibuster to stop the For the People Act from even being debated,” Obama said during a tele-town hall with former Attorney General Eric Holder and grassroots activists about the bill, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will put to a procedural vote Tuesday to take up the measure. That motion is not expected to receive the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to the bill.

“Think about this: In the aftermath of an insurrection, with our democracy on the line and many of the same Republican senators going along with the notion that somehow there were irregularities and problems with legitimacy in our most recent election, they’re suddenly afraid to even talk about these issues and figure out a solution on the floor of the Senate,” Obama said.

“That’s not acceptable,” he added.

Republican should have to stand before the people of the United States and explain why they support gerrymandering that allows incumbents to “choose their voters, rather than the voters choosing their elected officials.” They should have to publicly defend how making it illegal to hand water to voters in line in Georgia has anything to do with “ballot security” and preventing fraud as elusive as Heffalumps and Woozles. They should debate publicly why the Jim Crow filibuster (especially the silent filibuster) is in keeping with the best traditions of popular sovereignty.

But Republicans don’t want to, says Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, whose group is applying pressure to at least debate the For the People Act in the Senate. He set the scene Monday night for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow:

Now the next step in this process is we have to debate whether there will be a debate. That is what the vote is tomorrow. The vote tomorrow is not the For the People Act. The vote tomorrow is whether the Senate consider the For the People Act.

And here`s what we are pretty darn sure is going to happen — Mitch McConnell and the entirety of the Republican Caucus is going to say, nope, we don`t want to debate voting rights. We do not want to debate voting rights despite the avalanche of voter suppression happening across the country, we don`t want to debate that. And that`s the filibuster. They`re going to use the filibuster to kill it.

Now, we do not expect the filibuster tomorrow. That is not what we expect. Instead what we expect is for the bill to tabled then. The Democratic caucus is going to go into a room by themselves, talk to each other, then they`re going to go on recess.

They`re going to go on congressional recess. They`re going to go back home to their districts over the Fourth of July holiday. And then they`re going to figure out what they`re going to do when they come back.

And, look, politicians have a very scientific method for figuring out what they`re going to do. They lick their finger, they stick it up into the air, and they see which way the wind is going to blow. And that`s how they`re going to determine what happens in July.

And if we are successful in changing the way the wind blows over the course of July 4th recess, they are going to take this up again. They`re going to amend the filibuster and they`re going to pass these voting rights reforms.

And pigs will fly. Sorry, I don’t see it happening. THAT DOES NOT MEAN we do not try. You cannot win if you don’t show up to play. You forfeit. So, get busy defending democracy.

“Whatever else we may argue about, the one thing we should agree on the bedrock idea that we as Americans have been taught to take pride in, this is the fact that we’re a democracy,” Obama said.

“The issue of voting rights might not set off alarms for most of us,” but “the violence that occurred in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th should remind us we can’t take our democracy for granted,” he said.

Perhaps our opponents should be called Unreal Americans™ instead. They certainly have little interest in defending the real foundations of the U.S. government.