Month: December 2022

The end of the year is soon upon us and it’s time to count our blessings. One of my greatest blessings, besides my stalwart spouse and two great cats, is you, the loyal readers of this site. Being able to do what I love for these past 20 years is an amazing privilege and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Speaking of blessings, I confess that I was a little bit surprised that the House Ways and Means Committee decided to release Trump’s tax returns yesterday. If there’s a committee that can usually be counted on to play it safe, it’s them But they did it and we will now be privy to the records to which we should have been privy since that man rode down the escalator insulting immigrants like he was at a drunken birthday party in Queens circa 1952. Or maybe 1852. We may not know exactly how much money the pathological liar really has but we know he hasn’t paid his fair share of income taxes. Maybe his cult doesn’t care about that but plenty of Americans do.

These things shouldn’t be so hard. If the Republicans actually cared the slightest about “character,” which they screeched about for decades, they would not have elected Trump. They have the nerve to evoke God and Christianity at every turn even as they defend that cretinous scofflaw. It’s been an eye-opener, to say the least. The number of true Christians on the right can fit into a small broom closet.

The next two years may be the most tumultuous years yet. There is a lot going on in the world, what with war on the edge of Europe, China in turmoil and possibly incubating new COVID variants among the millions of their citizens who are now succumbing to the virus with the lock downs lifted, the economy still in flux and the batshit Republicans doing everything they can to make America break again.

I hope you’ll stop by here frequently as we try to deconstruct all this in real time and hopefully synthesize it into understandable information. If you would be willing to help us do that, we would be most grateful.

You can support our work by using the address on the left sidebar of hitting one of the buttons below. And thank you.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Back in February of 2019, then-President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee that his former employer had once shown him a big refund from the IRS and told him “he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”

It turns out that the man who once claimed in a presidential debate that not paying any taxes made him “smart” was right about that. The IRS is stupid, or at least lazy and incompetent. It let Donald Trump off the hook for years.

On Tuesday the House Ways and Means Committee finally broke its silence and announced that after years of legal battles and delays it would release Trump’s tax returns to the public, as they are authorized to do by the same law Republicans invoked when they investigated the IRS back in 2014. That probe, which was supposed to show that the IRS had targeted conservative organizations, actually made clear that the agency had targeted progressive groups as well. But this investigation looks like it exposed a real scandal. The only question is whether the IRS will take the fall for this entire mess or whether Donald Trump will finally be fully exposed for his egregious pattern of tax evasion.

The committee released a report on its findings Tuesday night, as did the Joint Committee on Taxation, which delved into some of the details of the returns themselves. The first big takeaway is that the IRS, which is supposed to audit all presidential tax returns under the Mandatory Presidential Audit Program, never even got around to looking at Trump’s. It was only after the committee began its inquiries in 2019 that the IRS finally opened an investigation of Trump’s 2016 returns, even though it had been tasked by that time with auditing him from 2015 through 2018.

That’s very strange, to put it mildly, and it certainly validates the committee’s stated premise for opening the case. Its members are now recommending that the Mandatory Audit Program, which has been in place since the Carter administration, be codified into law.

John Koskinen, who was IRS commissioner during Trump’s first year as president, told the New York Times that he knew nothing about all this. The committee’s report obliquely suggests that it might be a good idea to vet individual agents more carefully, mentioning the “substantial discretion an I.R.S. revenue agent possesses in conducting the audit of presidential returns and the absence of guardrails to ensure that such employee is not subject to undue influence by a president or his representatives.” After all, such an agent might turn out to be a Trump loyalist, like Beverly Hills tax attorney Charles P. Rettig, who defended Trump’s decision not to release his tax returns in a 2016 op-ed — after which Trump appointed him IRS commissioner.

So what we now know is that the IRS did not even begin its mandatory audits of Trump’s taxes until 2019 and has completed none of them. So the returns the committee finally has in its possession are missing the backup information that would routinely have been requested of any return under audit to prove the legitimacy of its claims. So there are many unanswered questions about the validity of Trump’s numbers, although we already about his sleazy tax avoidance schemes through the myriad lawsuits and criminal proceedings he has faced, as well as voluminous reporting by the New York Times and others.

Back in 2018, the Times reported on a trove of Trump family financial documents, including tax returns of Fred Trump, the ex-president’s father. Fred had evidently gone to huge lengths to pass large sums to his children through dubious or outright illegal methods, mostly to evade paying taxes over many years. His son has apparently followed that tradition for many years. That issue has come up both in the investigation of these tax returns and in the recent criminal case against the Trump Organization, in which the family business was found guilty of nine criminal counts including tax fraud. It also features prominently in the New York attorney general’s civil case against Trump and three of his adult children. 

In 2020, the Times came into possession of more Trump tax returns, including some of those the committee will be release this week. The story they told was pretty stunning:

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Perhaps the most intriguing detail in that story was that Trump was in fact still embroiled in an audit from 2009, with the IRS questioning the validity of a $72.9 million tax refund he received after declaring huge losses. If the IRS eventually ruled against him, the Times reported, he could end up owing more than $100 million. So here’s one thing we can say for Trump: When he said that his taxes were still under audit throughout his presidency, he was telling the truth, That audit long predated his presidential campaign, however, and he never had any legal reason or legitimate excuse for not releasing his returns to the public. 

But it’s clear enough why he didn’t want to. The story those returns clearly tell is of a man who publicly bragged that his businesses were hugely successful even as he claimed massive losses. He was afraid of being seen as the phony he is and was worried, reasonably enough, that the audit would expose him as a tax cheat who owed the government $100 million that he probably doesn’t have.

This has always been a potential political vulnerability for Trump. Polling in the summer of 2020 showed that 66% of Americans believed he “should release his tax returns from earlier years,” and 68% said that “Americans have a right to see each presidential candidate’s financial records before the election.” Fortunately for Trump, there was so much distraction with the pandemic during the 2020 campaign that the New York Times exposé never really penetrated the public consciousness.

There was a fair bit of hand-wringing among the chattering classes on Tuesday night over the committee’s party-line vote to make Trump’s recent returns public, which is just daft. There should be no question that any president must release their tax returns for the years they serve as president. which accounts for those the committee intends to release. This is the man who refused to divest himself of his businesses the whole time he was in the White House, which is also massively unethical. If Trump was hiding something during his tenure, as he pretty clearly was, the public has a right to know about it. After all, he’s running again. I think we can feel fairly confident that he’ll never come clean voluntarily.

The committee’s report also shows that something is very wrong at the IRS, which appears to be understaffed and unqualified to deal with big-money malefactors’ labyrinthine financial schemes. That can theoretically be fixed by staffing up the agency and recruiting people who know what they are doing and have enough oversight so there’s less chance of corruption and cronyism. Perhaps the bigger problem is with the tax code, which favors rich cheaters like Donald Trump (and many others) who pay next to nothing in income taxes while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet and pay our fair share. We don’t know yet whether Trump actually committed tax fraud on his personal tax returns. But there can be no doubt that much of what he did that was legal was deceitful and unjust. 

If you’d like to support this old blog to keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.

Does the 14th Amendment’s Sec. 2 means what it says?

“We swear oaths on the Constitution. We are taught every word; indeed, every comma counts,” writes Michael Meltzner at The American Prospect. Except when they don’t. Until they do:

This month, a special three-judge federal district court, and the Supreme Court eventually, will be asked to resurrect 135 words of the Constitution that have never been enforced, even though they were specifically intended to ensure all Americans could vote free of only the most minor government regulation.

Though few even know of its existence, Section 2 of the 14th Amendment is perfectly clear. It provides that, if any state abridges the franchise of males over 21, “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,” that state loses the equivalent population numbers counted to determine representatives in Congress. Subsequent amendments to the Constitution erased the gender and age limitations, but the core meaning of Section 2 remains intact.

Whole lotta abridgin’ goin’ on out there. And as I’ve noted before, going unchallenged by that Section 2 provision. That is until Citizens for Constitutional Integrity v. Census Bureau. Lots of attention to the 14th’s due process and equal protection clauses, yes. But Section 2 was included for a reason, Meltzner explains.

Without it, former Confederate states would enjoy greater representation in Congress brought by the elimination of the three-fifths clause. Yet it would mean former rebels would wield disproportionate influence on legislation if they could prevent former slaves from exercising the franchise.

The result was a provision that by its terms applies to almost any means of disenfranchisement, not just racial. Think limiting voting sites and hours, doing away with drop boxes, and many more. In the pending lawsuit, plaintiff’s lawyer Jared Pettinato, a nine-year veteran of the Department of Justice, gives an example of how the provision would work. It is alleged in the suit that Wisconsin’s strict photo ID law, which former GOP staffers have acknowledged was intended to disenfranchise Democrats, results in abridging the votes of some 300,000 voters, approximately 9 percent of the state’s registrants. If Section 2 were applied as intended, Pettinato argues that Wisconsin would lose a congressional district due to this disenfranchisement, a seat that New York, for example, would gain.

With one exception, efforts to end disenfranchisement by applying Section 2 have yielded little except frustration. Unlike today, the Census Bureau in 1870 hadn’t the tools or the manpower to come up with the necessary statistics on how many individuals were intentionally denied the right to vote that year, and it therefore abandoned the effort. Occasional moves over the years by individual legislators were defeated. Once Jim Crow took hold, Southern states were left free well into the 20th century to adopt property and educational tests that made registration impossible for even those Blacks who tried to vote, despite threats of violence or loss of employment. Poll taxes were not finally banned until 1956.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) brought a case in the mid-1960s based on Section 2. Judge Carl McGowan deferred to invoke a Section 2 remedy, citing the recently adopted Voting Rights Act of 1965 as likely to address the issue of disenfranchisement. But, he added, “it is also premature to conclude that Section 2 … does not mean what it appears to say.” That was then, decades before the Roberts Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling.

As I noted, the 15-page Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA) working its way through the North Carolina state legislature at the time underwent an overnight metamorphosis:

[T]he North Carolina State Senate dumped in a laundry list of voter suppression provisions that ballooned HB 589 into a 57 page collection of the most restrictive voter suppression regulations since the Jim Crow era. All of this while at the same loosening campaign finance restrictions on politicians. Apparently the Republican Supermajority felt that the voters of North Carolina needed to be regulated, but for politicians to be kept under the government thumb was just too much.

Efforts like that are among “a startling return of efforts in some states to suppress the franchise,” Meltzner writes. “A vital Section 2 would stop them. The upcoming case before the three-judge court will ultimately decide if the words of the Constitution will be given life or rendered obsolete.”

Don’t hold your breath for originalists on the Roberts Court to grasp that the 14th Amendment’s Section 2 means what it says.

Happy Hollandaise everybody. If you would like to help support us for another year you can do so with through the address on the left sidebar or with the buttons below. Thank you!

“Our long national nightmare” was simply postponed

“Be careful what you wish, as you might get it,” tweeted would-be Tom Swift from his electric car. It has been clear since before the Jan. 6 insurrection that one of Donald J. Trump’s two base skills has been for conning people. The other is for evading justice.

Trump now appears on the eve of receiving the well-deserved lump of legal coal in his stocking many of us had on our Christmas list. But what will be the consequences for the U.S. if he gets it?

Odds makers who in February estimated Trump’s chances of avoiding prosecution at 63 percent now calculate a 71 percent chance he will be indicted before the 2024 election. The odds of a trial and conviction are likely incalculable.

Prosecuting Trump for his manifold legal sins will be a tragedy for democracy, argues The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last. Abuse of criminal prosecution may lie in our future. But prosecution may be our least bad option. Consider them:

• • The government chooses not to prosecute: which incentivizes future attempts to overturn elections and legitimizes the stoking of political violence.

  • The government prosecutes and loses: which both legitimizes the stoking of political violence and antagonizes the passions of more than a third of the country.

  • The government prosecutes and wins: which creates open season for using the government to pursue political enemies, throws the 2024 Republican primary into disarray, and turns Trump into a martyr for his movement.

Those of us who’ve screamed warnings about Trump since before his election may feel vindicated, Last writes. But so what?

Thanksgiving is past, but we have two things to be thankful for. First, Last explains, the administration’s hands-off approach. President Biden kept his distance from the case — “Barely mentioned it.” Attorney General Merrick Garland handed it over to a special counsel.

Second, in lieu of a special commission that Republicans disallowed, the January 6th Committee’s handling of the investigation was as exemplary as the Trump administration’s and its supporters’ behavior was not. The committee “was diligent in finding and documenting evidence. It contributed a large amount of new information to the public record. Its members avoided histrionics and sought to depoliticize its work.” The two Republicans on the committee sacrificed their seats in service to their country.

Would that President Gerald Ford had not short-circuited the operation of justice in 1974 with his preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon. “The House of 2022 is doing what the House of 1974 should have done,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Monday. The Ford pardon held consequences Nixon should have borne instead of posterity. It sent a message that “presidents can live in a sort of free-fire zone and do all sorts of things and ultimately not pay for it.”

Had Nixon faced investigation and indictment, Trump, then 28 and fighting charges of race bias in managing New York rental properties, may have taken little notice. But decades of Nixon’s lasting ignominy may have given the would-be Howard Roark pause before risking his real estate empire to the kind of public scrutiny threatening to bring it down today.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Ford said upon taking office in August 1974. It was not. With his preemptive pardon of Nixon the next month, Ford simply postponed it.

Ford might have spared us the Trump administration and the turmoil likely before us. The consequences of the pardon were foreseeable.

Ah, but we were so much older then….

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… in order to own the libs

Greg Sargent has the story. You’ll enjoy the Republicans’ rationale for supporting it. It’s hilarious:

The omnibus spending bill has been released, and buried inside it are provisions that would reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs how Congress counts presidential electors. Trump’s effort to subvert his presidential reelection loss exploited many weaknesses in the ECA that would be fixed if the omnibus passes, as expected.

Strikingly, all this is happening with little noise from right-wing media or MAGA-loyal lawmakers. A bipartisan group of senators negotiated these reforms for months with the support of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and they will likely be backed by many or even most GOP senators. Trump himself has been surprisingly mute.

Yet the fact remains: GOP senators who support these ECA reforms are implicitly acknowledging the ugliest realities of what Trump attempted in 2020. They are acknowledging the true nature of the threat that Trump or an imitator might pose in 2024.

Just about every main ECA reform in the omnibus responds directly to what Trump did. It would clarify that the vice president’s role in counting electors is ceremonial. (Trump pressured his vice president to halt the count.) It would raise the threshold for Congress to nullify legitimate electors. (Trump got dozens of Republicans to object to Joe Biden’s electors.)

Reform would also combat state-level subversion. Trump pressured GOP state legislators to appoint sham electors for himself, so reform would essentially require governors to certify electors in keeping with state popular vote outcomes. It would create new avenues to legally challenge fraudulent electors and require Congress to count electors that are validated by the courts.

It is often said that reformers must avoid fighting the last war. But these reforms also fight the next one. If a GOP state legislature appoints a losing candidate’s electors in 2024, and the GOP-controlled House counts them, under current law that could produce a stolen election or serious crisis. ECA reform will make that much harder to pull off. MSNBC’s Ari Melber has described the need to legislatively “Trump-proof” our system, and here the description is apt.

Why is all this happening? One reason: This is an easy way for Republicans to do something about the Trump threat. It’s highly technical and doesn’t require direct condemnation of Trump himself. Attaching reform to the omnibus avoids a stand-alone vote on it, which could subject Republicans supporting it to more attacks.

Republicans also have a way to explain it to voters. In a key tell, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) argued in the Louisville Courier Journal this week that reform would disarm the secret liberal plot to dismantle the electoral college, which would be easier to do (he claimed) if liberals can show the electoral count is prone to exploitation.

In short, Republicans can argue that ECA reform will Own The Libs. Similarly, in coming days you will hear Republicans insist that it will prevent Vice President Harris from subverting the next electoral count and helping steal the 2024 election from Republicans.

They’re so cute. I’m sure their more educated voters see through this and just don’t care because they know J6 was so messy and unpopular so whatever their leaders need to say to keep the rubes from getting riled up is a-ok with them. But it’s nonsense, of course. They know there is a possibility that Trump or another of their MAGA nuts might try something like this again and they know it’s not good for the party so they’re selling it as a way to control Democrats — who’ve never done anything like this and likely never would because their constituency isn’t that stupid. I guess if they’ve got Rand Paul lying in order to excuse their vote to tighten up the rules it’s good news.

I’m not saying that Dems couldn’t contest an election in the future. They’ve done it before using legal means. But the only party that’s profited from outlandish legal theories and irregular tactics to tilt elections their way is the Republican Party, They got the Supreme Court to intervene on their behalf in 2000 and staged an insurrection in 2020.

But don’t worry, if they want to do something like it again, they’ll figure out a way. They have a battalion of lawyers working on new and innovative ways to destroy the democratic process all the time. If it’s close they’ll do whatever is necessary — and it will be much easier in the future since Trump has brainwashed half the Republican Party into believing that Democrats do it all the time.

Happy Hollandaise everybody. If you would like to help support us for another year you can do so with through the address on the left sidebar or with the buttons below. Thank you!

Elon Musk used to be a rather typical soft libertarian tech weirdo, eccentric but basically socially liberal. He didn’t seem to be someone strongly attracted to the fascist right although he did whine from time to time about the supposed “illiberal left.” Obviously he’s changed. He’s a full-blown wingnut conspiracy theorist now.

I was doing some research and came across this article from last spring which I’d totally forgotten about that looks to be the turning point for him. It is from last May:

Earlier this week, Elon Musk took to Twitter to make a series of announcements. “Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months,” he wrote early Wednesday afternoon. Later, he informed his followers: “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold …” A few hours after that, he tweeted emoji of a face with a tongue hanging out and a box of popcorn, i.e., the international symbol for “sitting back and waiting for drama.”

Viewed in isolation, these tweets didn’t seem that odd—Musk has been bashing liberals for some time now, and it’s not at all surprising that a known troll would try to preemptively claim that any attacks against him were coming from his political enemies. But now, with the benefit of context, they make even more sense, and make the richest man in the world look like a massive creep.

That context came on Thursday night when Insider published a story reporting that SpaceX, the company founded by Musk in 2002, paid a flight attendant $250,000 in 2018 to settle a sexual-misconduct claim against him. According to reporter Rich McHugh, the attendant, who worked as part of the flight crew for SpaceX’s corporate jet fleet, had accused Musk of “exposing his erect penis to her, rubbing her leg without consent, and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage.”

Apparently, it has been proven that he ended up paying the woman $250,000 ensuring her silence with an NDA but the story was revealed by a friend she shared the story with at the time.

He’s just another spoiled, snotty overgrown child with too much money playing with people for his own amusement. And when he doesn’t get his way, well …

If you’d like to support this old blog to keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.

Ron Brownstein takes a look at some of the reasons why nobody should be making any predictions at the moment about the 2024 election:

Whether the GOP nominates Trump again in its 2024 presidential primaries – a dynamic that in turn will be powerfully influenced by whether he faces a criminal indictment and how GOP voters react if he does – looms, in my view, as the most important “known unknown” for 2024.

That’s not the only important “known unknown” likely to influence 2024, though. Presidential races have become such vast and encompassing competitions that a list of such “known unknowns” could stretch indefinitely. What I’ve done below is try to identify five that, at this point, appear that they could be the most significant. I’ve ranked them in rough order of my estimation of their likely impact on the eventual outcome. And they begin with the fateful decision about Trump hurtling toward the GOP.

1. How does the Republican nomination fight play out? If Republicans nominate Trump again in 2024, no other factor on this list may matter much. For many voters, such an election might reduce to a binary choice: whether or not they would again entrust Trump with control over the federal government. Democrats are confident enough of the answer that most are rooting for Trump to win the nomination.

Trump’s strengths and weaknesses in the 2024 GOP nomination fight, in key respects, resembles his situation in 2016: now, as then, he’s facing resistance from most Republicans with at least a four-year college degree, but polling well among Republicans without one. One key difference from 2016 is that more of the party elite – including elected officials and fundraisers – are openly resisting Trump, fearing that Democrats are right in their prevailing belief he cannot win again. Partially for that reason, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, if he runs, may be better positioned than any of Trump’s 2016 rivals to consolidate the GOP voters skeptical of him (though he’s hardly guaranteed of success in that).

The possibility that Trump could face a criminal indictment – either on the evidence the January 6 committee detailed on Monday or separate investigations from the Justice Department on his stockpiling of classified documents and the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney on his efforts to overturn the election there – adds another new wrinkle. Veteran conservative strategist Bill Kristol, now a staunch Trump critic, says he initially worried that a backlash from rank-and-file GOP voters against any indictment might boost Trump; now Kristol believes it will only compound the sense he carries too much baggage to win another general election.

If DeSantis or another alternative beats Trump, the GOP will confront a pair of bookended risks. One is that Trump openly disparages and undermines the eventual nominee – in the most extreme case by launching a third-party general election bid. The other is that the eventual winner beats Trump only by, in effect, out-Trumping him in on culture war issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun control, immigration, the coronavirus response and other issues. (DeSantis has already given indications he may pursue that strategy.) That could leave the nominee little (if any) more marketable than Trump himself in the white-collar suburbs from Pennsylvania to Arizona that have trended sharply away from the GOP since his emergence.

2. How do voters assess the economy? Democrats defied history in 2022 by running unexpectedly well even though about three-fourths of voters expressed negative views about the economy, according to exit polls. But that’s not an experiment any Democrat would want to repeat in 2024.

Voter attitudes about the economy in 2024 will likely hinge on their reaction to the trade-off the Federal Reserve Board is imposing through its repeated interest rate hikes: lower inflation for higher unemployment and less growth. At its December meeting, the Fed forecast that inflation would ease significantly in 2023 (and decline further through 2024) but unemployment would tick up to 4.6% across both years and overall economic growth would slow sharply enough to leave the economy on the edge of recession through next year.

There’s some evidence more Americans would prefer that to the opposite conditions that have prevailed over the past two years: robust growth and an extremely strong job market coupled with the highest inflation in four decades. In a CBS poll earlier this year, far more adults cited inflation and high gas prices than the unemployment rate as the reason they were unhappy about the economy. “Something approaching 100% of the electorate experiences the high cost of living and a much smaller fraction experiences unemployment or even job insecurity at any given time,” says Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster and strategist. “So, if you had to pick your poison, an economy with a lower cost of living and a slightly higher rate of unemployment, is probably more manageable.”

Still, that’s not guaranteed: when an October CNBC poll asked directly whether the Fed should prioritize reducing inflation or protecting jobs, a slight plurality picked the latter. In any case, almost all political analysts agree that more important to the election’s outcome than the absolute level of those economic indicators will be whether they are improving or deteriorating, particularly in the spring and summer of the election year, when many voters lock in their verdict on the economy. The classic example came in 1984, when Ronald Reagan’s 49 state landslide was fueled by a rapid decline in unemployment, even though it still exceeded 7% on Election Day.

3. Do voters consider Biden still up to the job? Before the midterm election, the key question surrounding Joe Biden might have been whether he would face a serious primary challenge, which often has foreshadowed defeat for an incumbent president. But the Democrats’ relatively strong showing in the midterm has virtually eliminated that possibility and left the president “very clearly in a pretty good place” within the party, notes Garin.

Yet, despite the Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance, the midterms showed warning signs for Biden among the broader electorate: a solid majority in the exit polls said they disapproved of his job performance, and two-thirds of voters said they did not want him to run again.

Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, three other presidents who faced widespread discontent early in their presidencies, saw their approval rating rise as they neared reelection when attitudes about the economy improved. If inflation recedes, that same current could lift Biden (whose approval rating already has ticked up since his party’s midterm showing). What’s unknown is how many voters, even if they feel better about the economy, still will consider Biden too old (he’ll turn 82 shortly after the 2024 election) or diminished for the office. Any visible health problem between now and then would obviously exacerbate those concerns.

Most Americans now appear to view elections for the White House and Congress less as a choice between two individuals than between which party they want to set the nation’s direction, a dynamic that will limit the political impact of judgments about Biden’s personal capacity. But, even in such an increasingly parliamentary environment, Biden will likely need to convince a critical slice of swing voters that he can effectively perform the job before they reelect him to it.

4. Can either party reverse the electoral trends benefiting the other? On balance, the 2022 election reaffirmed the basic lines of demographic and geographic division between the parties evident in the 2020 results.

Relative to 2020, the Democrats’ performance eroded at least somewhat among most key groups – not surprisingly in a midterm while they held the White House, especially against the backdrop of a four-decade high in inflation. But, overall, the party mostly preserved the same coalition of voters who turned out in decisive numbers to oppose Trump in 2018 and 2020 – young people, people of color, college-educated White voters, secular and LGBTQ adults, and residents of the largest metropolitan areas, with women in each group usually leaning more markedly toward them.

Behind that coalition, Democrats beat every Trump-backed Senate and gubernatorial candidate in the five states that decided the 2020 election by flipping to Biden after backing Trump in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. Those winning Democratic candidates all prevailed by bigger margins than Biden did two years earlier – a stunning divergence from the usual pattern of the president’s party losing ground in midterms.

Those results suggest the shift of white-collar suburbs in those states away from the GOP means Democrats enter 2024 with an edge, though not an insurmountable one, in the Electoral College. The other good news for Democrats: Millennials and Generation Z, who continued to back them in large numbers, will comprise well over-two-fifths of eligible voters in 2024 and likely, for the first time, exceed the baby boom and older generations among actual voters, according to calculations by the non-partisan States of Change Project. “The Republicans really are talking to an older shrinking population,” says Brookings Metro demographer William Frey, who helped calculate those projections. “It is still big in a lot of places, but it is now being countered by this youthful and more diverse population and they are going to pay a price if they don’t adjust their policies and messaging.”

The key demographic unknown for Democrats may be whether they can continue to inspire the relatively higher turnout among the younger generations that have boosted them over the past three elections. The key unknown for Republicans in 2024 may be whether they can regain ground in the well-educated and racially diversifying suburbs of the five Trump-to-Biden states.

Some Republican strategists see a model in Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s relatively stronger performance in the Atlanta suburbs after a term in which he advanced a staunchly conservative agenda (including signing a six-week abortion ban) but demonstrated his independence by rejecting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election there. Georgia showed that the suburban voters now rejecting the Trump-stamped GOP “can go back and forth depending on the quality of the candidate and the kind of campaign they run,” says long-time GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

5. Does the Republican-majority House do more damage to Biden – or to the GOP? The incoming GOP majority has already set a confrontational course toward Biden. It has promised an array of investigations (starting with the business activities of his son, Hunter Biden, and potentially including the treatment of the January 6 insurrectionists), warned that it may impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (as well as possibly other officials) and already laid plans to threaten a default on the federal debt to demand cuts in federal spending, including potentially Social Security and Medicare.

These are all causes that could energize the GOP base for 2024. And a sweeping dragnet of House investigations might unearth uncomfortable revelations for the Biden Administration about its handling of the border, its dispersal of funds from the infrastructure and climate change bills, or other issues.

But Democrats are strikingly confident that on balance the narrow GOP House majority will do more damage to the Republican brand by instigating political fights distant from the daily concerns of most Americans and by elevating divisive figures like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Jim Jordan of Ohio who are poised to reinforce the image of Trump-affiliated extremism that hurt Republicans in 2022. Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist who was the most prominent public skeptic of the “red wave” theory in 2022, previewed that line of attack on Monday when he tweeted a list of controversies swirling around Trump and the Republican Party and declared: “GOP all MAGA, all the time.”

Other “known unknowns” could send ripples through the 2024 campaign-including a decisive outcome (that favors either side) in the Ukraine war, Supreme Court decisions on election rules and the crime trends in major cities. And even these prospects don’t exclude what Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns” – the possibilities “we don’t know [that] we don’t know,” as he put it then. Uncertainty is unavoidable in a contest as consuming as a modern presidential race. But, even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outcome of the five “known unknowns” listed above decide the outcome.

I would also say that the pandemic picking up in China is also a known unknown that could affect the world on a public health level (variants have a huge new under-vaccinated opportunity) and in terms of the world economy. If China is seriously impacted, we all will be.

Also, there are all the unknown, unknowns. Anything — and I mean anything can happen. 2016 proved that.

Happy Hollandaise everybody. If you would like to help support us for another year you can do so with through the address on the left sidebar or with the buttons below. Thank you!

https://twitter.com/bungdan/status/1605228411395330060

Shamelessness is their superpower. Hypocrisy is a dead concept.

“Defund the police” became a smear used against Democrats back in 2020 after the George Floyd protests but it was only a group of activists who said it in the heat of the moment. Democratic politicians never said it. Here you have the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee saying that he wants to defund the FBI, the federal government’s largest law enforcement institution.

And he is a Republican.

Did you ever think you’d see the day?

It’s going to be a real three ring circus in the House next year. Shadow Speaker Marge Green is already laying out the agenda.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Thank you all very much for your support this year. I’m so grateful to my loyal readers. It makes all these days spent reading about frightening political developments worthwhile!

And some days are goo. Yesterday, the January 6th Committee held its final meeting and issued an Executive Report outlining the findings it will release in the 1000 page full report that’s coming on Wednesday. Oh, and they also referred former president Donald Trump to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Another first for Trump. He truly is special.

The next year is going to be spent watching the Special Counsel, waiting for any signs that they are planning to indict Donald Trump. Since he’s running, I’m sure they are aware of the need to make a move sooner rather than later.

I am personally very, very wary about making any predictions about this. The Mar-a-Lago case seems like a slam dunk and the January 6th case is obvious to me. But that does not mean the DOJ will decide to indict on any of it. Trump is actually fairly wily when it comes to legal matters and has slithered out from accountability for years by being just vague enough that they can’t quite nail him. And he is a master at delay,

And let’s not forget just how risky all this is. Trump still has millions of followers, many of them brainwashed and violent. He will not hesitate to set them loose and after January 6th, I think we know what that means. It will only take a handful of them to do something horrifying. You have to know that this factors into any decision the DOJ will make.

I think the risk is worth it but I’m not so sure the government will agree. And that’s because I think they may be counting on the election to take care of him, meaning that he will be defeated at the ballot box in 2024 and that will be that. In fact, I’m fairly sure that’s what the political establishment has counted on from the moment he won in 2016.

How’d that work out for us? Yes, he lost in 2020, but it was close in the electoral college and half the country believes the election was stolen, the GOP has become a batshit insane authoritarian cult and he’s still out there looming over our politics for at least another two years.

We are still living in Trump’s world whether we like it or not. He may be politically wounded but he’s not dead yet. Don’t look away.

We’ll still be here following every twist and turn. As tempting as it is to drop out and stop paying attention, it’s just not responsible as long as this man is in the game. And even if he goes down the spawns of his toxic MAGA movement aren’t going anywhere. They’re just a slicker version.

If you’d like to help us keep doing the work of immersing ourselves in the details day in and day out so you don’t have to, you can support us by using the address on the left sidebar or hitting one of the buttons below.

Thank you so much for caring about this stuff. If we all stick together we might just get through this bizarre, surreal time without losing it all.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Don’t believe the hype. Especially this early.

I enjoyed this piece by Charlie Sykes this morning about the various “next big things” of politics past. He’s so right:

The cool kid betting has Florida’s Ron DeSantis in the pole position. But don’t count on it, because these things always look better in the perfervid imaginings of pundits and consultants.

History suggests — actually it shouts at us — that there is many a slip twixt the hype and an actual candidacy.

Just ask President Fred Thompson. Or Rick Perry. Or Gary Hart. Or Jeb (!) Bush, Ed Muskie, Wesley Clark, Scott Walker, or America’s Freaking Mayor.

It’s worth remembering that, at one time, they were not just contenders — they were front-runners. And then stuff happened.

**

President Fred

My favorite example is Fred Thompson, who was everyone’s favorite dark horse for five minutes in 2007. You forgot about that, didn’t you?

In March 2007, CNN reported: “Thompson’s star rises with GOP.”

Roughly two weeks ago, Thompson said he was considering a run for president. Since then, he has skyrocketed out of nowhere to rank third among GOP White House hopefuls in a new USA Today/Gallup poll published Tuesday.

The poll shows former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani with 31 percent, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, with 22 percent, and Thompson with 12 percent of the vote.

Politico was still bullish on Thompson in June.

If you were running for president, whose shoes would you rather be in today: Mitt Romney’s or Fred Thompson’s?…

Thompson, who hasn’t even formally declared his candidacy, is just putting together an organization and has yet to even set foot in Iowa or New Hampshire. But his acting and political careers have made him the hot candidate of the moment, as shown in recent national surveys where he is either tied with McCain for second or alone in that spot….

As late as September 2007, Thompson was still the new hotness.

McLean, VA – As Fred Thompson prepares to address the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference later today, recent polls show Fred Thompson tied or leading in three early primary states: Michigan, South Carolina and Florida.

Then he announced. And disappeared from American political history.

President Wesley

For a moment there in 2003, Democrats thought they had found their Great Hope in General Wesley Clark.

PRINCETON, NJ — The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll shows Ret. Army Gen. Wesley Clark’s entry into the race for the Democratic nomination has for the moment greatly changed the campaign’s character. Just days after announcing, Clark has almost a 10-percentage-point lead over all other candidates for the nomination. Additionally, Clark tends to fare better among the leading Democratic candidates in hypothetical head-to-head matchups with President George W. Bush…

Yeah. No.

President Rick

What better launching point for the presidency than the governorship of Florida or Texas, right? Jeb Bush thought so. And so did Rick Perry.

But the reality didn’t live up to the hype.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry launched his presidential bid in August, a late arrival to the already crowded Republican field. Within weeks, he had spiked in the polls — but that was before he started to debate. A string of poor nationally televised performances started Perry’s descent. He sealed his fate in November with an infamous “oops.” After a disappointing fifth place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Perry headed home to Texas for a quick reassessment. He skipped New Hampshire altogether. In last-ditch South Carolina, Perry called it quits two days before the primary.

The folks at Fivethirtyeight chronicled Perry’s fancy dive:

As the above chart shows, Perry entered the 2012 Republican primary as a contender. He was leading in the polls before he self-immolated and was forced to quit the race with just a few percentage points of support.

President Scott

This one is a bit closer to home since Scott Walker was my home state governor (and we go waaaay back). I admit that I was always skeptical about a Walker presidential bid, but others were all-in.

He was still in the political green room when he surged to front-runner status. In February 2015, CNN reported:

Walker is leading a crowded field of potential presidential candidates in Iowa with 25% of likely Republican caucus-goers throwing their support to Walker in a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

New York Magazine recounted what happened next.

[After] a single speech in Iowa, the Wisconsin governor became “Jeb’s most formidable opponent,” a “conservative who can win big battles,” and the key to “the GOP’s bright, fearless future.” Then in July, Walker finally announced that he was entering the 2016 race, and everything started to go downhill…

But, before the end, Walker was repeatedly crowned the front-runner. Here’s Jim Geraghty in the National Review in late February:

No, Really, Scott Walker is the Frontrunner.

Quinnipiac polls likely Iowa Republican Caucus participants and finds Wisconsin governor Scott Walker leads the pack with 25 percent; 13 percent for U.S. senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, 11 percent each for physician Ben Carson and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and 10 percent for former Florida governor Jeb Bush. No other candidate is above 5 percent, and 9 percent are undecided.

Things were still looking rosy in April:

The billionaire Koch brothers, who plan to spend $900 million to advance conservatives in the 2016 campaign, revealed that Walker was their favorite candidate. The governor didn’t get an official endorsement, but David Koch told donors that “When the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” they would back him.

In June, this was the main story in the Drudge Report:

In July, he formally announced:

Some outlets ran stories such as “How Scott Walker Will Win” and “Six Reasons Why Scott Walker Will Be Elected President,” but the Times raised the possibility that Walker’s shift to the right on issues like same-sex marriage, immigration, and ethanol subsidies to maintain his lead in Iowa was making him appear inauthentic and costing him elsewhere in the nation.

By September:

CNN polls puts former frontrunner in bottom tier with less than 0.5%

“Walker’s collapse is especially stark,” said the network’s report on the survey. “Celebrated by conservatives – in the party’s base and its donor class alike – for his union-busting efforts in Wisconsin, Walker at one point led the field in the key early voting state of Iowa.”

Walker now enjoys just 1.8% of support among Republicans, according to a polling average by RealClearPolitics. A separate NBC survey on Sunday found his support had dropped from 7% to 3% since last month and that only 1% now believed he would ultimately be the Republican nominee.

President Rudy

Speaking of the spectacular collapse of a pre-game favorite…. “Rudy Giuliani once had a real chance of becoming president – and he blew it.”

Giuliani, still riding a wave of good feeling from his handling of the 9/11 attacks, was raising serious amounts of cash, and was the best-known of the Republican candidates. He had a very real chance of succeeding George W Bush.

It’s hard to imagine now, but at the end of 2006, Giuliani was the most popular politician in the country. In March 2007, after Giuliani formally announced his White House campaign, he was the early favorite to win the Republican primary contest, with 44% support nationwide. (John McCain, the eventual nominee, was second with 20%.) Giuliani maintained that lead throughout the year, and raised the most money.

Armed with a campaign slogan that read like the responses to a word-association examination – “Tested. Ready. Now” – Giuliani seemed destined to represent the Republican party in the November 2008 election….

You know the rest.

Exit take: Even for an experienced pol — the governor of a major state or mayor of NY —running for president is like moving from t-ball to the Major Leagues.

So, predictions are always — always — risky.

There really was nothing like the frenzy around the Great Whitebread Hope of all time, Scott Walker. The Kochs were all in and had waved off all the other donors. Everyone just assumed he was a shoo-in. Then, in most spectacular fashion, he just imploded and crashed to earth almost overnight. It was spectacular.

It’s best to just keep your eye on everyone right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen two years out. Think about 2014 when everyone was expecting Walker or Perry to run away with the nomination. Nobody even had an inkling about Donald Trump.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.