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Month: January 2023

The impending debt ceiling crisis

“This would be unprecedented. This is not a “government shutdown” over budgetary disagreements. This is an intentional meltdown of the global financial system”

If you are unfamiliar with Republican GOP debt ceiling hostage taking, take a few minutes to watch this video with Norm Ornstein on the subject.

AEI Election Watch from Dave Troy on Vimeo.

I don’t think we need to wonder whether or not if they will do it. Yes, the Democrats would all vote to raise the debt ceiling and would only need to pick off 5 Republicans to make it happen. However, these new rules changes mean the crazies are in charge of what comes to the floor. It’s going to be a nightmare.

It’s been coming for a while

The rise of the far right has unfolded in plain sight. But many people didn’t want to see it.

During the Obama years I took a lot of grief for writing about Newt Gingrich and his leadership in the radicalization of the Republican Party. The criticism came from progressives. They thought I was focusing too much on the GOP when I should have been criticizing the Democrats. (I did criticize the Democrats plenty BTW.) But it greatly irritated quite a few people that I followed the developments on the right so closely because they just didn’t take it that seriously. That I kept going back to Newt was considered to be some kind of dodge.

If you go back and read this blog over the past 20 years you will see that I got a whole lot of things wrong. Tons. But I was right about this.

Here’s Robert Draper on Newt and the GOP NutHouse:

Newt Gingrich was disdainful.

After watching days of House Republicans failing to elect a speaker, Mr. Gingrich, the most famous of all recent G.O.P. House speakers, vented about the hard-right holdouts, among them Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

“There’s no deal you can make with Gaetz,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview Thursday night. “He’s essentially bringing ‘Lord of the Flies’ to the House of Representatives.”

In contrast, Mr. Gingrich said of his own speakership, which sought a revolt in the Republican Party and the way Washington does business, “We weren’t just grandstanders. We were purposeful.” He would be glad to show the current rebels how to do it, he said. “But anything that takes longer than waiting for their cappuccino, I doubt they’re interested in.”

History does not precisely remember it that way. It is true that Mr. Gingrich’s tenure from 1995 through 1998 produced several legislative accomplishments, including two balanced budgets signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. But to both Democrats and Republicans, the jut-jawed intransigence of House Republicans opposing Representative Kevin McCarthy’s ultimately successful bid to be speaker did not materialize out of nowhere.

Instead, Mr. Gingrich’s triumph in 1994 in wresting the House from a Democratic majority for the first time since 1952 was the starting point for the zero-sum brand of politics that mutated into the Tea Party movement, the grievance-based populism of the Trump era, and what was garishly displayed on the House floor in a raucous four-day speaker battle that ended in the small hours of Saturday.

Those mutations have culminated in a tissue-thin Republican majority, auguring legislative episodes likely long on melodrama and short on happy endings, thanks to cameo actors such as Mr. Gaetz who have already demonstrated their zeal to seize the spotlight from the new speaker. Such actors appear to interpret their roles as opposing anything that the Biden administration might support, including sending military aid to Ukraine and avoiding a default on government obligations by raising the federal debt ceiling.

The bitterly partisan stalemates of the Gingrich era may well have metastasized into a state of governance by chaos.

“They’re employing the old Gingrich argument that you don’t get any benefit from cooperation or compromise, only from confrontation,” said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, until recently the Democrats’ House majority leader. Mr. Hoyer, who was sworn into office in 1981, two years after Mr. Gingrich, recalled the Georgia congressman “playing to the anger and disaffection of people who Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ a few years earlier.”

“Those feelings predated Gingrich,” Mr. Hoyer said. “But he took extraordinary advantage of them, just as Trump did later and just as this crowd’s doing now.”

It was Mr. Gingrich, after all, who as a congressional candidate in 1978 told an audience, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” A decade later, Mr. Gingrich coached his colleagues to cast the opposition as “the loony left,” saying, “When in doubt, Democrats lie.”

A decade after that, in 1998, Mr. Gingrich oversaw a multimillion-dollar ad blitz focusing on Mr. Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, while also telling supporters, “I will never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic.”

Mr. Gingrich’s arrival in Washington in 1979 happened to coincide with the installation that same year of C-SPAN’s cameras inside the House chamber, enabling once-obscure members of Congress to reach a national audience with combative monologues that dragged on into the night. “Gingrich was the one who understood how to use the C-SPAN cameras,” said Mark Sanford, a Republican member of the 1994 class. “And I’d say that was one of the tools that over time helped coarsen the process and led to this increasing degree of militarism we’re seeing.”

Though Mr. Gingrich and his two lieutenants, Dick Armey, the House majority leader, and Tom DeLay, the majority whip, preached ruthless partisanship, in the end, Mr. Gingrich was forced out of power by his fellow Republicans in 1998 after agreeing to a budget deal with Mr. Clinton. The party lost the House majority in 2006, “though frankly, even before then, the Gingrich faction did not feel that they had won when George W. Bush won, because they weren’t interested in his ‘compassionate conservatism,’” Mr. Hoyer recalled.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 thrust Mr. Gingrich back into relevancy. On the night of Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the former speaker gathered at a Washington steakhouse with a small group of desultory Republicans that also included a second-term congressman from California, Kevin McCarthy. It was Mr. McCarthy who, consulting his inner Gingrich, urged a hyperaggressive approach to Democratic control in Washington.

“We’ve got to challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign,” he told the steakhouse group that night.

Mr. Gingrich left the dinner feeling much encouraged. “You will remember this day,” he said to the others.

The seeds of the Tea Party movement were sown by discontents among a threatened white majority, or what Mr. Trump later called “the forgotten men and women of this country.” Initially framed as a nonpartisan call for fiscal discipline, the Tea Party avatars returned the Republicans to power in the House after the 2010 midterm election and quickly reverted to Gingrichian partisanship.

“The Tea Party movement was more about fighting the Obama administration, Pelosi and Reid,” said a member of that class, Representative Jeff Duncan, Republican of South Carolina.

But, as both an echo of what Mr. Gingrich encountered in 1998 and a harbinger for the present G.O.P. intramural brawling, several restive ultraconservatives set their sights on their elected leaders. In 2015, they effectively forced the resignation of Speaker John Boehner. Three dozen of them, including Mr. Duncan, formed the House Freedom Caucus, a band of hell-no fiscal hard-liners that seemed to exist mainly to inconvenience their party leaders until 2017, when that leader happened to be President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. McCarthy, who was then the House majority leader, predicted that the Freedom Caucus would not be able to stand up to Mr. Trump.

“There’s not a place for them to survive in this world,” he told me.

He was wrong. In a matter of months, the Freedom Caucus repurposed itself as a populist fight club of Trump mini-me’s, albeit one that did not always appear to be strategically sound. “The one problem I’ve had with the Freedom Caucus was that they didn’t often define in advance what a win looks like,” Mr. Duncan said. “At some point, you’ve got to be willing to get to a yes.”

Among their new members in 2017 was Mr. Gaetz, a freshman from Florida. Mr. Duncan wryly noted that Mr. Gaetz’s supporting cast in the revolt against Mr. McCarthy included 11 members who are either freshmen or have served only one term.

“They don’t know how to operate in the majority, and they’re just listening to what others say about these rules changes,” Mr. Duncan said. “And then when Kevin’s given them 90 percent of what they’ve asked for, they’ve moved the goal posts.” Ultimately, Mr. Gaetz did give way, slightly, to Mr. McCarthy in the 14th vote and again in the 15th final vote early Saturday, when he voted “present” both times, rather than no.

Until the fight over the speakership, Mr. Gaetz’s biggest ally in the House has been Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an unflagging Trump loyalist who this past week helped cajole the former president into putting his support for Mr. McCarthy in writing. In an interview Friday afternoon before the House reconvened for two more rounds of voting, Ms. Greene said that she decided to back Mr. McCarthy’s bid for speaker several months ago, when he signaled his willingness to support hard-line fiscal stances, including not raising the debt ceiling unless certain conditions are met.

She was less enthusiastic about the conduct of Mr. Gaetz and another member of the Republican “Never Kevin” brigade, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

“Kevin’s said these things in conference,” Ms. Greene said. “But Matt never goes to conference, and if Lauren Boebert’s ever there, she’s just sitting there tweeting on her phone.”

As the G.O.P. dissidents huddled Friday with team McCarthy in search of a deal that would dilute the new speaker’s power, Ms. Greene observed that this was exactly the kind of back-room scheming that the group purported to abhor. “It’s pure ego,” she said of the Never Kevin brigade.

Mr. Gingrich, for his part, takes a relatively cheery long view of his party’s machinations. “I ran three times before I won on the third race,” he said. “We spent 16 years in the House trying for the majority before we finally won it.”

And for the current G.O.P., he said, “we’re in a period where everything’s going to be very hard.”

There is a direct line from 1994 to today. It goes back even further, of course — Taft, Joe McCarthy, Nixon etc., but this was systematic institutionalizing of the radical right as a movement. And yes, the Democrats were feckless in the face of it for most of that time. In the early years they actually enabled them in many ways, whether through sympathy with some of their goals (deficits, deficits, deficits) or just so unimaginative that they couldn’t see what they were up against or, if they did, conceive of any way to fight it.

That appears to have changed. There are still many policy arguments and tactical discussions to be had but they know that they must present a united front, from the blue dog faction to the democratic socialists, against the neo-fascists. After all, the entire Republican Party has made it clear that the far right is in charge. They just illustrated it for the whole world in living color this past week.

From the “When someone shows you who they are” files

The new Republican Congress has an agenda: revenge.

Because it is who they are, they are going after the president’s son.

Richard Painter, the law professor and former White House ethic lawyer tweets, “News flash: Hunter Biden is not president, does not work for the U.S. government, and does not appear to have any influence on the U.S. government.”

No matter. The GOP’s idea of doing the people’s work is to distract attention from their own moral turpitude and to exact retribution for Democrats’ efforts to hold Trump accountable for malfeasance in office. They mean to get under Uncle Joe Biden’s skin by attacking his son (The Guardian, emphasis mine):

“The right wing is licking its chops at the chance to go after him,” said Joshua Kendall, author of First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama. “The level of venom is going to be over the top and really, really dirty. The Republicans’ rhetoric might get so heated that it detracts from some of the actual behaviour.”

Republicans have been waiting a long time for this moment. After regaining control of the House of Representatives in last November’s midterm elections, they used their first press conference to promise to investigate the Biden administration and, in particular, the president’s allegedly errant son.

Stick around. They’re just getting started.

Coming Attractions: A Trump charging decision

News overlooked on Friday

Special Counsel Jack Smith (left) and the former president facing multiple criminal investigations.

This news was largely obscured Friday by the Republicans’ Speaker follies:

The special counsel investigating Donald Trump could decide whether to file criminal charges against him in just weeks after amassing a trove of new state documents concerning pressure to overturn the 2020 election, sources have told Bloomberg.

Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states.

“You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg.

Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden.

“Moving quickly” is good. A decision “in just weeks” is better.

First charges are likely to involve federal documents seized by the FBI last summer at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne told MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show” on Saturday (Newsweek):

“Well, I would guess that one is going to come pretty soon. I mean, let’s face it—that’s an easy prosecution,” she said. “You stole the documents. We’re asking for them. We ask you ‘pretty please.’ You said ‘no.’ You lied about it. You move them, and then we found them.”

Alksne said the case could likely be prosecuted “at any time,” but the DOJ still has work to do to craft its strongest argument, including fully identifying obstruction allegedly committed by Trump’s team.

“They also have to figure out, now that they have the documents, were they shared with anybody and what exactly happened with them,” Alksne added. “And that may take some time.”

Special Counsel Jack Smith has hired two prosecutors with longtime experienced in public corruption cases.

Ray Hulser and David Harbach, Bloomberg reports, “have prosecuted some of the most high-profile public corruption targets of both political parties in recent years, including cases against Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and former presidential candidate and Senator John Edwards.”

Trump continues his losing streak in court as he attempts to fend off the law (The Hill):

A New York state judge on Friday rejected a motion from former President Trump to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), allowing the case to proceed. 

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled the arguments from Trump’s legal team were frivolous and rejected an argument that the case is a “witch hunt.” 

James sued Trump and three of his adult children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump — in September following a three-year investigation into whether the former president inflated the value of his properties to his investors to get loans and deflated the value on tax forms. 

James is seeking a $250 million penalty and will ask the court to permanently bar all four from serving as an officer or director of any corporation licensed in New York state.

What was it the Rev. Martin Luthor King said about the arc of the moral universe?

May he be proved right sooner rather than later. Because, honestly, the universe seems not to have a great track record when it comes to bringing the rich and powerful to justice.

As Rachel Maddows’s “Ultra” podcast explains, in the largest sedition trial of the century held during the height of WWII, the Department of Justice could not deliver. The political forces aligned behind the alleged Nazi collaborators were simply too powerful:

Maddow: “We had reached the point where our legal remedies were inadequate.”

What John Rogge saw, what he had been up-close to in his prosecutions, was an entrenched ultra-right movement in this country, opposed to democracy, which saw violence as a legitimate means of achieving political aims. One that had support not only among some parts of the far-right media, but also among elected political leaders on the right.

He saw alongside that a criminal justice system that was simply unable to deal with that threat.

What do you do as a country when you are faced with that?

When you are up against those kinds of forces, trying to tear apart the very thing that makes you the country you are? How do you push back against it?

What’s more, the defendants brought to trial (it collapsed) in the 1940s were the smaller fry. The DOJ did not bring charges against the two dozen members of Congress implicated in advancing a fascist plot to overthrow the U.S. government. “Legal remedies were inadequate.” Moreover, civilian opponents of seeing the law applied equally to the elite today will resort to extra-legal remedies of the 2nd Amendment kind. Their political patrons have long not been shy about suggesting them.

This is not a popcorn moment, but a deadly serious one.

And now for a little good news

Inflation is on the run

Not that this has penetrated the news media which just today was running scare stories about the price of eggs. But it’s real. This is from economist Alan Blinder:

Maybe we should start the new year with some good news: Inflation has fallen dramatically. No, that’s not a prediction; it’s a fact. With one month remaining in 2022 (in terms of available data), inflation in the second half of the year has run vastly lower than in the first half. In fact—and this is astonishing—it’s almost back down to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Even more astonishing, hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

Yes, there’s a catch or two or three, to which I’ll come back. But first the good news:

Over the past five months (June to November 2022), inflation has slowed to a crawl. Whether measured by the consumer-price index, or CPI, which most people watch, or the price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, which the Federal Reserve prefers, the annualized inflation rate has been around 2.5% over these five months.

Yes, you read that right. Yet hardly anyone has noticed this stunning development because of the near-universal concentration on price changes measured over 12-month periods, which are still 7.1% for CPI inflation and 5.5% for PCE inflation.

Normally, focusing on 12-month inflation rates is the right thing to do, for two main reasons. First, it guards against hyperventilation over “blips” in the inflation data, whether up or down. Second, it obviates the need for seasonal adjustment, since, for example, you are comparing prices in November 2022 with those in November 2021.

But when the inflation rate changes abruptly, 12-month averages can leave you watching recent history rather than current events. Today is one of those times.

As mentioned, the CPI inflation rate over the past 12 months has been an alarming 7.1%. But the U.S. economy got there by averaging an appalling 10.6% annualized inflation rate over the first seven months and a mere 2.5% over the last five. The PCE price index tells a similar story, though a somewhat less dramatic one. The 5.5% inflation rate over the past 12 months came from a 7.8% rate over the first seven months followed by a 2.4% rate over the last five.

Lest you think I’m performing numerical sleight-of-hand, the same phenomenon can and does operate in the opposite direction: Inflation can surprise you by leaping upward. It happened in 2021.

Between February 2021 and June 2021, the 12-month CPI inflation rate showed a rise from 1.7% to 5.3%. Bad enough. But if you took that 5.3% number apart, you would have seen that it came from a 3.3% annualized rate between June 2020 and January 2021 (seven months) followed by an 8.2% annualized rate between January 2021 and June 2021 (five months). Thus in June 2021, when it looked as if we had a 5% inflation problem on our hands, we really had an 8% inflation problem. (And the 12-month rate eventually peaked at 9% in June 2022.)

So is today’s true inflation rate a mere 2.5%, meaning that Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve can relax? Not quite. Now for the catches I promised earlier.

First, we’ve had this wonderfully low inflation rate for only five months. That’s longer than one or two months, which is why I’m writing this article. But it’s still too short a time to declare victory.

Second, if you concentrate instead on “core” inflation, which excludes food and energy prices, annual inflation over the past five months has run higher: a 4.7% annual rate for the CPI and 3.7% for the PCE. So the Fed’s fight against inflation isn’t over.

That headline inflation has dropped more than core inflation tells you that lower food or energy inflation played a meaningful role. In this case, it was energy. As measured in the CPI, energy prices have dropped 11% over the past five months, whereas they rose 27% over the previous seven. And perhaps this constitutes a third catch. With the war in Ukraine still raging and Iran in turmoil, maybe we can’t count on gasoline remaining at $3 a gallon.

Was the rest of the stunning drop in inflation in 2022 due to the Fed’s interest-rate policy? Driving inflation down was certainly the central bank’s intent. But it defies credulity to think that interest-rate hikes that started only in March could have cut inflation appreciably by July. There is an argument that monetary policy works faster now than it used to—but not that fast.

What did change dramatically was the supply bottlenecks. Major contributors to inflation in 2021 and the first half of 2022, they are now mostly behind us.

Peering ahead, the bottlenecks almost certainly won’t return. Another energy shock can’t be ruled out but looks unlikely. And the anti-inflationary effects of the Fed’s monetary policy are yet to come.

Altogether, the inflation future does indeed look brighter than the inflation past. Happy New Year.

I don’t think you needed to be an economist to understand that a lot of our inflation situation was caused by the global crisis called “the pandemic” which completely turned the world upside down. Nor did it seem all that surprising that it would at least somewhat right itself when the world went back to normal. I’m sure there are good reasons why the Fed apparently doesn’t want to accept what appears to be a soft landing and is instead working hard to ensure a recession. I’d hate to think it’s because they don’t think full employment is good for the economy and are trying to put employers back in the driver’s seat to drive down wages. They wouldn’t do that would they?

Katie Porter FTW

Can I just say how impressed I was with the Democrats during that long Bataan Death March? Not that they had to do much except clap for Hakeem Jeffries over and over again but still, their unity and calm behavior really helped illustrate for the whole country what a circus freak show the right has become. This is how it’s done.

Trump’s still his daddy

Trump posted a video of McCarthy thanking the former president on his social media platform Truth Social, captioning it: “Thank you Kevin. It was my great honor.”

In the video, McCarthy, who was elected House speaker just past midnight Saturday morning after a historic deadlock, said he doesn’t “think anybody should doubt [Trump’s]

 influence” and that “he was with me from the beginning.”

McCarthy said he talked to Trump Friday night, as the former president and 2024 GOP hopeful helped him secure a victory—four GOP House members that had voted for Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Andy Biggs (Ariz) in the fourteenth round instead voted “present” in the final round, reducing the threshold needed for a victory.

Trump had suffered an embarrassment earlier in the week when many hardline conservatives—formerly Trump’s greatest supporters—ignored his call to support McCarthy after the fourth round of voting on Wednesday to avoid an “embarrassing defeat.”

Photos from the chamber also showed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a hardline MAGA Republican and Trump ally, passing a phone that was dialed to “DT” (presumably Trump) to Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.)—a so-called “never Kevin”—with Greene posting the photo on Twitter, calling it the “perfect phone call.”

Rosendale, one of six Republicans, including Biggs, Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Eli Crane (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Bob Good (Va.) who voted “present” in the fifteenth round—enabling McCarthy to become Speaker—appeared to wave off the phone call.

Despite Trump’s plea to far-right dissenters in the House to support McCarthy, several of his biggest allies refused to vote for him, with Boebert saying on the House floor that “my favorite president” needs to “tell Kevin McCarthy you do not have the votes and it’s time to withdraw.” Boebert changed her vote to “present” in the fourteenth round, after voting for Jordan, Hern and Donalds in previous rounds of voting. Gaetz also argued on the floor that Republicans “do not trust Mr. McCarthy with power,” while Good said he would “never” vote for McCarthy.

[…]

The California Republican said that by helping him secure votes in the House, Trump’s message was that “we have to focus on the economy and we have to focus on making our borders secure.” Without a speaker, the House, which flipped to the GOP in the midterm elections, isn’t able to swear in new members, make committee appointments or launch a series of investigations into the Biden Administration, Hunter Biden and the Department of Justice that House Republicans had indicated he would support as speaker.

Oy vey…

The American Nazi history

“Mr Republican” led the way

If you think this Nazi thing is new, even in the upper reaches of the US Government, think again. It’s not. This piece by Mike Lofgren in Salon takes a look at the most famous of all American isolationists, Robert Taft:

Readers may be familiar with Rachel Maddow’s explosive new podcast, “Ultra.” It tells the incredible story of a German spy who infiltrated Congress in 1940-41, inducing two dozen congressmen and senators to spread Nazi propaganda in floor speeches, op-ed columns and constituent mailings. Simultaneously, armed extremist groups began training for a violent takeover of the country. In many ways, the eight-decades-old story is a disturbing forerunner of the Trump era. 

Contrary to our nostalgic memories of unity, America was deeply divided over the war in Europe, military aid to Britain, and whether fascism was the wave of the future that we might as well submit to. While political division on the eve of entry into the war was not uniformly partisan (some prominent Democrats supported isolationism), the GOP was by far the party that stood for America First and strict noninvolvement in foreign conflict.

That members of Congress would willingly become conduits for Nazi propaganda shows that for some, sincere concern to stay out of war was not their only motivation. There was surprisingly strong domestic sympathy for Hitler and the fascist powers. Those who actively worked for Germany crossed the line into subversion and treason, but even mainstream proponents of isolationism showed a tolerant understanding for fascism that, decades later, seems either shockingly naïve or disgracefully callous.

It is easy enough to write off Father Coughlin or Charles Lindbergh for their overt antisemitism and admiration of totalitarian regimes. But there is one America Firster who to this day is almost universally celebrated by the GOP as a statesman exemplifying pure, principled conservatism: three-time aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Robert A. Taft. He was such a pillar of the GOP that he was dubbed Mr. Republican.

Taft’s Senate career spanned from 1939 to 1953. He came to Washington as America was recovering from a shattering depression, and then had to confront fascist militarism. After World War II, the country faced challenges from two former allies, the Soviet Union and Communist China, with the stakes raised by the existence of nuclear weapons. How did Taft respond to this decade of existential crisis?

From the moment he entered office, he campaigned relentlessly against the New Deal, cleaving to Herbert Hoover’s futile notion that rugged individualism and private charity would end the worst depression in modern history. In 1940 Taft wrote, “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever be from any activities of . . . the Nazi bund.”

While asserting the need for a strong military Taft nevertheless fought tooth and nail against preparing that military. He opposed both the destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain and repealing the Neutrality Act. He also voted against the Selective Service Act at a time when the German Army, fresh from a lightning conquest of Western Europe, had 4.5 million soldiers when the U.S. Army numbered only 269,000

In early 1941, he opposed the Lend-Lease Act, saying “an invasion of the United States by the German Army is as fantastic as would be an invasion of Germany by the American Army.” The German Army didn’t reach America, but within a year, U-boats were prowling the eastern seaboard, sinking tankers and freighters almost at will. The rest of Taft’s statement was also bunk: less than four years after his speech, the U.S. Army was advancing towards the Rhine.

In 1940, Taft suggested that “totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle” were more dangerous than the Nazis. Eight months before Pearl Harbor, he said it was “simply fantastic” to believe that Japan might attack the U.S.

Eight months prior to Pearl Harbor, Taft stated, “It is simply fantastic to suppose there is any danger of an attack on the United States by Japan.” On Sept. 22, 1941, he said, “There is much less danger to this country today than there was two years ago; certainly much less than there was one year ago.” At the moment he spoke, the Wehrmacht was driving towards Moscow, Rommel’s Afrika Korps ruled the North African littoral, and Admiral Yamamoto was refining his Pearl Harbor attack plan

Many of us would be embarrassed to see our predictions read back to us later. But few deserve to be embarrassed as much as Taft. The man was a walking compendium of error. Even entry into the war did not cure his penchant for being wrong: wrong in a way that tended to absolve the enemy while condemning the U.S. government. 

Four months after Pearl Harbor, he stated, “We need not have become involved in the present war,” and even a year later, he publicly asserted that U.S. entry into the war was “debatable,” which it was not: Japan attacked U.S. territory and Hitler declared war on the United States, not the other way around. Taft, like Republicans then and now, attempted to make political hay over wartime inflation. At the same time, though, he was a relentless opponent of the Office of Price Administration, tasked with dampening price rises. That, he said, would rob the businessman or the farmer of their liberty of setting prices as high as they wanted.

Taft questioned Henry Stimson’s “competence” to run the Department of the Army and voted against confirmation — even though Stimson had previously been a secretary of war under Taft’s own father, President William Howard Taft, and was to prove an effective leader in World War II. Moreover, Stimson was a Republican, nominated by Roosevelt as a gesture of bipartisanship. Taft opposed him out of knee-jerk obstinacy.

In 1944, Taft opposed an administration proposal to enable voting by the millions of GIs overseas. As David Brinkley writes in “Washington Goes to War,” he offered obstructionist amendments to make the plan impossible to implement, but they were voted down. Brinkley relates that the senator complained that servicemen would be marched to the polling places and ordered to vote for FDR, presaging the current GOP’s obsessive psychological projection about vote fraud.

At war’s end, he criticized the Bretton Woods conference, from which emerged the financial institutions that laid the foundation for unprecedented prosperity in Europe and America. Almost 80 years later, a majority of congressional Republicans emulate Taft in opposing international organizations like the International Monetary Fund that have reinforced America’s status as the world’s leading financial power. Republicans are even now hinting that they might hold the country hostage over the debt ceiling increase, potentially plunging the world into financial crisis and triggering a sovereign debt default that could end the dollar’s reign as the world reserve currency. 

Then came Taft’s most controversial stand. He attacked the Nuremberg Tribunal for unjustly applying ex post facto law (the crime of aggression), and for being victors’ justice:

I question whether the hanging of those, who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people, will ever discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win. About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the 11 men convicted will be a blot on the American record, which we shall long regret.

In the trial, 11 defendants were indeed sentenced to hang, but seven others were given lesser sentences and three acquitted. As for the claim of ex post facto justice, Robert Jackson — the American prosecutor who believed aggression enabled all the other war crimes that followed — summed up the charge: 

And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law, if it is to serve a useful purpose must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law.

    While the charge of aggression was unprecedented (all precedent must begin somewhere), the convicted defendants were also found guilty of ordering or committing acts against military and civilian victims which were already proscribed by law. According to Kim Priemel’s “The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence,” the judges demonstrated independence from their governments, and the defendants (who were allowed counsel and able to present defenses) were seen as receiving due process. The evidence of their guilt was overwhelming.

    By that point, Taft’s positions were backfiring on him. His condemnation of the Nuremberg trials and opposition to military voting, in particular, may have torpedoed his chances for the Republican nomination in 1948. He may also have doomed the nominee, Tom Dewey, who was heavily favored to win the presidency. When President Harry Truman called Congress into extraordinary session in 1948, Taft blocked even innocuous bills, angering voters and inadvertently contributing to Truman’s upset re-election. 

    As might be expected, he voted against confirmation of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, saying it was “a waste of money” that was “more likely to incite war than to deter it.” 

    As for standing on principle, however wrongheaded, a quality that qualified him for grudging admiration even from critics, that trait was sometimes malleable. In 1950 Taft blamed the UN for not averting the Korean war, saying, “We were sucked into the Korean war, as representatives of the UN, by a delusion as to a power which has never existed under the Charter.”

    Yet Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s reckless pursuit of the North Koreans to the Yalu River, which brought Chinese intervention and a wider war, worked a change of heart in Taft. Now he was not only for the war, but when MacArthur insubordinately attacked President Truman’s policy and advocated use of nuclear weapons, Taft stated this on the Senate floor after Truman made the correct decision to fire the general:

    President Truman must be impeached and convicted. His hasty and vindictive removal of Gen. MacArthur is the culmination of series of acts which have shown that he is unfit, morally and mentally, for his high office. The American nation has never been in greater danger. It is led by a fool who is surrounded by knaves.

    That the legendary anti-interventionist Taft supported a vain martinet whose tirades included lobbying for nuclear war suggests he might have been less than a rock-solid man of principle. The fact that the 1952 presidential campaign was nearing makes us suspect that he may have sought to exploit MacArthur’s popularity to get the presidential nomination. But it was not to be: His record was too blemished.

    Why dredge up this ancient history? It tells us not only that some political golden age of ur-Republicanism, just like all retrospective utopias, never existed, but that the icons of those myths were flawed, sometimes badly so. It also suggests that the Republican Party, apart from intermittent post-World War II periods of bipartisanship, never really changed.

    This history tells us that some political golden age of ur-Republicanism never existed. The Republican Party, apart from intermittent post-World War II bipartisanship, never really changed. Robert Taft was the larval stage of what exists today.

    It is true that today’s GOP has sunk to unprecedented depths, crossing the threshold from a quasi-normal political party to an authoritarian movement and leader cult. On Jan. 6, 2021, a majority of House Republicans defended violent insurrection against constitutional order. The party’s reliance on reflexive negativity rather than constructive alternatives and its knee-jerk propensity to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted have been features ever since the onset of the Great Depression. Robert A. Taft is not an alternative to the current GOP; Mr. Republican was simply the larval stage of what exists today. 

    The negativity and obstructionism that we witness daily from the GOP is straight out of their old playbook for contesting the New Deal and crucial areas of World War II policy. The positioning on issues is also much the same: Taft decried Roosevelt and Truman as warmongers, but turned on a dime to extol MacArthur, a general so imperious he was called the American Caesar. Likewise, current GOP issue positioning largely depends on whether a Democrat or a Republican is president.

    Sentimental constructs like the “Greatest Generation” paint a false picture of unity during World War II. It is often hard to distinguish where the bitter-end isolationism of the highly influential press moguls William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick ended and sympathy for fascism began. It requires no speculation about Henry Ford, one of the richest and most influential Americans of the time: he was awarded (and happily accepted) a medal from Hitler.

    There also are grounds for questioning whether, beneath the posturing about liberty and the Constitution, Taft had a sneaking sympathy for fascists, albeit not as overt as Lindbergh’s. Denouncing the Nuremberg Trials as a gross miscarriage of justice fairly begs for explanation, as in the decades following the only critics of the tribunal were outright neo-Nazis like Harry Elmer Barnes or David Irving. This tarnishes his reputation and makes one wonder if he deserves inclusion in the Senate reception room’s “famous five” collection of portraits of great senators, perhaps the Senate’s greatest honor.

    Likewise, did Taft really believe the New Deal was a bigger threat than Nazism, or was that a hollow rationale to camouflage a belief that Germany might as well rule Europe? We can similarly suspect that when Republican opponents of aid to Ukraine say they vote no for the absurd reason that helping Ukraine against Russia somehow means appeasing China (an ally of Russia), sympathy for an authoritarian dictatorship might be their real motivation. 

    That Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the keynote speaker at the recent CPAC convention only heightens the suspicion. A substantial overlap between Republican opponents of aid to Ukraine and those defending an attempted overthrow of constitutional government on Jan. 6 is hardly coincidental. Republicans have signaled the possibility of cutting off aid to Ukraine, an act which would have grave implications not only for Europe but would indicate U.S. unreliability throughout the world. If Republicans abandon Ukraine, it would sabotage the deterrent effect of any security guarantees to Taiwan against China, the country the GOP claims to take seriously as a threat. 

    The substantial overlap between Republican opponents of aid to Ukraine and those defending an attempted overthrow of constitutional government on Jan. 6 is hardly coincidental.

    Republicans’ willingness to hold hostage America’s full faith and credit in 2023 is based on their alleged concern about the deficit — but only when a Democrat holds the presidency, a reflex that goes back to Taft. The goal is to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare, arguably the country’s two most successful anti-poverty measures, one of which was proposed by FDR almost 90 years ago. In a sense, the GOP has never ceased running against Roosevelt and the New Deal.

    As this is being written, our country is without a functioning House of Representatives. Twenty legislative terrorists from the GOP are holding their own leader, Kevin McCarthy, hostage in order to receive plenary powers to run the institution according to their whims. The overlap between these members and supporters of both the Jan. 6 insurrection and a Ukraine aid cutoff only increases fears that they would abandon Ukraine and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States from no deeper principle than the nihilistic urge to break things.

    In 1940, the Wall Street Journal asserted that “our job today is not to stop Hitler,” the dictator whom the editorial claimed had “already determined the broad lines of our national life at least for another generation.” Note that the Journal, then as now the flagship of “respectable” conservatism, not only consigned Europe to Hitler’s domination, but America as well, and for the following 30 years. The title of the editorial, “A Plea for Realism,” is a reminder that in some quarters, “realism” means abandoning democracy and submitting to force.  

    As the Second World War passes from living memory, it is apparent that democracies on both sides of the Atlantic have forgotten its frightful lessons. Right-wing political parties in Europe and America have lurched towards racial populism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and have even tried to push antisemitism back into the realm of acceptable views. It is hardly coincidental that, once again, there is a major war in Europe.

    If someone who had followed the debate over aid to Britain in 1940 were magically transported to the present, he would have little difficulty getting oriented to the global situation, both in its military precariousness and in the threat of advancing dictatorship. And if he heard Josh Hawley or Rand Paul proclaiming America First on the floor of the Senate, he could be forgiven for hearing the voice of Robert Taft.

    Everything old is new again. Listen to what the right wingers are saying about Putin and Ukraine. The echoes are profound.

    Hakeem Jeffries’ barnburner

    We’ve got us a communicator

    If you weren’t up late last night or were out partying or something you probably missed Hakeem Jeffries’ speech after the vote making Kevin McCarthy speaker.It’s a good one.

    Let’s hope he’s as good at organizing the Democrats as he is a speaker. If he is, he will be a successful leader.

    The Insurrection Caucus

    Is the Obstruction of Justice Caucus

    Why is this unsurprising?

    Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave away the store he’s so desperate to manage. Here’s what CNN reports he promised GOP extremists in exchange for their votes:

    • A McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats.
    • The House will hold votes on key conservative bills, including a balanced budget amendment, congressional term limits and border security.
    • Efforts to raise the nation’s debt ceiling must be paired with spending cuts. This could become a major issue in the future when it is time to raise the debt limit to avoid a catastrophic default because Democrats in the Senate and the White House would likely oppose demands for spending cuts.
    • Move 12 appropriations bills individually. Instead of passing separate bills to fund government operations, Congress frequently passes a massive year-end spending package known as an “omnibus” that rolls everything into one bill. Conservatives rail against this, arguing that it evades oversight and allows lawmakers to stick in extraneous pet projects.
    • More Freedom Caucus representation on committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee.
    • Cap discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels, which would amount to lower levels for defense and domestic programs.
    • Seventy-two hours to review bills before they come to floor.
    • Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor.
    • Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government.
    • Restore the Holman rule, which can be used to reduce the salary of government officials.

    Kyle Cheney scrutinizes the proposed GOP bill to establish that Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

    Those provisions did not appear in earlier versions, Cheney notes.

    Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) adds, “A Jim Jordan drafted document allowing for the interference into ongoing criminal investigations is what got Scott Perry, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Andy Biggs — all of whom sought pardons — to allow McCarthy to get a gavel.”

    “I would like it be presented as the scandal it is,” Wheeler continues. “But have very little hope in the competence or integrity of many congressional reporters.”

    I’m already looking for any deus ex machina than can spare the republic from the MAGA arsonists before the battle over raising the debt ceiling spawns a global financial crisis this fall. Jack Smith is one, possibly. Fulton Co., Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis certainly has the potential for putting a significant kink in some of their erections. As someone noted on MSNBC Friday, on the order of 6-9 House members die or resign each session. With the GOP’s five-seat margin in the House, a combination of deaths, resignations and defections could flip control. I’m reaching; Democrats held their majority with the same margin over the last two years. But one can dream. These are extraordinary times.

    Extremist times. And the GOP’s extremists seem not to have gotten the voters’ message that they’ve run out of patience with the MAGA clown show threatening the republic. And, hoo-boy, did they just put on another this week.

    The Force of self-awareness is not strong with them: