Month: July 2023

Especially when it comes to migrant workers

I’m sure you’ve seen the horrific pictures of that cruel, spiked buoy barrier Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has unfurled in the middle of the Rio Grande. Luckily, the feds have decided to take action:

One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-stategovernors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually justto send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused.

But now the Justice Department has sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notifying him that the department will sue the state over the barrier if Texas does not commit to removing it by Monday afternoon.

“The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” reads the letter I obtained.

Many of Texas’ moves on immigration policyseem deliberately provocative. Abbott openly declared that the barrier in the Rio Grande was designed for “securing the border” by preventing migrants from “even getting to the border,” a declaration that Texas sees itself taking over border policy.

“The Biden administration is asserting its authority over the border, and rightly so,” immigration attorney David Leopold told me. “Texas has no business taking over federal immigration law, which is what they’re doing.”

In its letter, the Justice Department flatly states that the barrier obscures navigation of the Rio Grande in violation of federal law and that the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t authorize the move.

“Texas does not have authorization from the Corps to install the floating barrier and did not seek such authorization before doing so,” the letter states.

While the Justice Department’s letter does not accuse Texas of usurping its authority on immigration in particular, the move signals that the department is closely watching to see whether Texas’s future moves do violate federal laws, on immigration and across the board.

“If DOJ is forced to sue Texas, the law clearly favors the federal government which has authority over floating barriers in navigable waters,” Leopold told me. “My prediction is that a federal judge will order Texas to remove the barriers.” He added that the clear message going forward is that the administration “will not stand idly by.”

Sargent makes the point that all these stunts are performances for the Fox News rubes. There isn’t a big crisis at the border but they have to do everything they can to create pictures and stories that give that impression.

It’s sick.

The public isn’t seeing this … yet. But there are 16 months to the election. It may start to sink in with some of them:

 Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.

Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.

As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.

“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.

The analysts also doubled their original estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter, to 1.3% from 0.6%. Looking into next year, they raised their forecast for real GDP in 2024 by a tenth of a percent, to 1.4%.

“The narrative behind the numbers tells the story of industrial strength in the U.S,” Zentner wrote.

Morgan Stanley’s revision came at a pivotal time for the Biden White House. The president has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, touting his economic achievements. “Together we are transforming the country, not just through jobs, not just through manufacturing, but also by rebuilding our infrastructure,” Biden said Thursday during a visit to a Philadelphia shipyard.

The White House has dubbed this brick-and-mortar economic growth formula “Bidenomics,” a phrase originally used by Republicans to jab the president, who co-opted the term as a badge of honor.

It’s just like Obamacare. They keep thinking that these are insults when they are actually compliments.

Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families. https://t.co/w0CwdlCfO9

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 17, 2023

Gosh, I wonder why?

Who could have guessed that would happen?

Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves.

A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy. Their defections — which started in the spring and have continued this summer — are disproportionately responsible for DeSantis’ overall decline in the race, where polls show he now sits a distant second place to Trump.

In all three surveys, the governor now has barely half the support with college-educated white voters that he did when the year began, larger drop-offs than he suffered with other demographic groups.

The numbers reflect a pressing problem for the Florida Republican as he seeks to reset his campaign amid fundraising concerns and flagging poll numbers, challenging him to recover the lost support among voters who once made him Trump’s top rival for the nomination. The national surveys paint a troubling picture for his campaign, even as his allies insist that recent state-level polling already shows his candidacy regaining momentum.

A poll from decision intelligence company Morning Consult, for instance, found that DeSantis’ support had dropped 18 points among white college-educated Republicans, from 41% when the year began to 23% in mid-July, according to internal data shared with McClatchyDC.

A poll from market research firm Ipsos, meanwhile, found the governor’s support had been halved since mid-March, when it reported he had 39% among college-educated Republicans, according to data shared with McClatchy. The same survey, released this week, found he had dropped to 20% among those voters, a 19-point decline. (Ipsos’ survey did not distinguish between college-educated white Republicans and college-educated Republicans, although the difference between the makeup of the two groups is small.)

A publicly available survey from Quinnipiac University found the largest drop in support for DeSantis, with the governor going from 51% support in a February poll of college-educated white Republicans to 29% with them now — a 22-point decline. These voters abandoned DeSantis’ campaign at roughly twice the rate as Republicans without a college degree, a review of polling data found.

None of the three surveys asked why DeSantis has lost the support of college-educated Republicans. But in interviews with non-partisan pollsters and Republican political operatives, some of them speculated that the governor’s decision this year to double down on a sharp-edged conservative agenda could have alienated voters who once viewed him as a more pragmatic, mainstream politician.

DeSantis earlier this year signed a law in Florida banning abortions six weeks after pregnancy, and during the campaign, he has sought to outflank Trump on LGBTQ issues while positioning himself as an “anti-woke” warrior eager to combat the political left in all sectors of society.

“College-educated Republicans were looking for an alternative to Donald Trump, and they initially thought Governor DeSantis, after his 19-point win in Florida, made for a good one,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster. “But the way he has run his campaign, constantly tacking to the right, has turned off many of those people who were initially attracted to him.”

Ayres emphasized that he thought DeSantis still had time to recover from his underwhelming start, arguing people who once supported him can be brought back into the fold with a smart strategy that included more moderate positioning. And some Republican operatives disagree that DeSantis’ more conservative tack is at the root of his drop in support, arguing that Trump’s own popularity, combined with an indictment in March that conservatives saw as wildly unjust, is more responsible for the shift than anything the Florida governor did.

DeSantis’ allies say they already see signs that his popularity has rebounded, dismissing the importance of national surveys instead of state-based polling in places with an early nominating contest. A survey released in New Hampshire this week, from University of New Hampshire Survey Center, found DeSantis receiving 23% support, up from 22% in April, while Trump dropped from 42% to 37%. The survey showed DeSantis earning the support of 12% of Republicans with only a bachelor’s degree, and 20% support of GOP voters with a graduate degree.

“You’re going to start to see this narrative continue to develop as more state level polling increases, particularly in those states where you see the impact of our ground game,” said an official with Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting DeSantis. But the official conceded that Trump had gained ground earlier this year after he was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury over allegations he illegally paid hush money to an adult film actress, a prosecution conservatives think is politically motivated. And indeed, while DeSantis’ support with college-educated sank, Trump’s standing with those voters improved markedly since the year began.

Morning Consult, for instance, found Trump’s support nationally with these Republicans improving from 33% to start the year to 46% by mid-July. Among all college-educated GOP voters, Ipsos found him improving from 31% in mid-March to 36% this week. And Quinnipiac showed him growing from 22% support in February to 34% in a survey released Wednesday. In all three surveys, Trump now has more support among college-educated voters than DeSantis.

Trump has always fared better among Republicans without a college degree than those with a degree, dating back to his 2016 candidacy when he shocked the GOP establishment and won the party’s nomination. His presidency, in fact, helped shift the party toward a more blue-collar constituency, facilitating an influx of those voters into the GOP’s fold while simultaneously pushing many college-educated men and women, including former Republicans, to start backing Democratic candidates.

Compared to GOP voters without a college degree, GOP pollsters say, college-educated Republicans are socially moderate and fiscally conservative, with some of them both repelled by Trump’s rhetoric and uninterested in his stated aim of making the party’s economic agenda more populist They might have expected a different approach from DeSantis, political experts say, and soured on him when he didn’t meet that expectation.

“College-educated voters tend to be more liberal,” said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst with Quinnipiac. “And DeSantis has gone right a good deal more than many expected him to do so.”

DeSantis’ support has suffered among Republicans without a college degree, too, though at lower rates than he has among those with degrees. Among non-college white Republicans, Morning Consult and Quinnipiac found DeSantis’ support dropping 10 and 11 points since the start of the year. Ipsos found his support among non-college Republicans dropping six points since March.

DeSantis’ overall standing in the GOP primary has declined markedly since the start of the year, according to an average of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com. The site has found his support dropping from about 37% to start the year to about 21% now. Some Republican strategists argue that amid such an overall drop, DeSantis’ standing with college-educated voters was bound to suffer, especially given that he had more of them to lose when the year began. And they question whether DeSantis’ loss of support among college-educated voters is really driving his overall decline.

GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, for instance, found that DeSantis and Trump were running roughly even with “very conservative” Republicans at the end of last year. The former president, however, had a 65-point edge with those same voters in June, according to a survey his firm conducted.

In an interview, Ruffini said he thinks Trump’s numbers were temporarily low after a disappointing midterm election last year, a time when he had done little campaigning and voters were upset the party hadn’t won control of the U.S. Senate majority. Those frustrations have gradually subsided since, he said. “You add on top of that something most Republicans see as a tainted and partisan prosecution, and it’s not hard to process what’s been happening here,” he said.

He’s tanking with everyone but it stands to reason that anyone who thought he would be a more moderate, pragmatic type of Republican have realized by now that he’s a hard right culture warrior and that’s about it.

Those college educated voters who have migrated back to Trump because he’s allegedly under siege from a partisan prosecutor need to go back to school.

It’s going to get worse:

A Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy was sentenced on Thursday to 90 days in jail after she pleaded guilty earlier this year to illegally concealing human remains.

The teenager, Celeste Burgess, 19, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, 42, were charged last year after the police obtained their private Facebook messages, which showed them discussing plans to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.”

Prosecutors said the mother had ordered abortion pills online and had given them to her daughter in April 2022, when Celeste Burgess was 17 and in the beginning of the third trimester of her pregnancy. The two then buried the fetal remains themselves, the police said.

Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. She faces up to five years in prison at her sentencing on Sept. 22, according to Joseph Smith, the top prosecutor in Madison County, Neb.

The police investigation into the Burgesses began before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

But the case gained greater attention after the court issued the ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, fueling fears that women, and those who help them, could be prosecuted for abortions, and that their private communications could be used against them.

At the time, Nebraska banned abortion after 20 weeks from conception. In May, Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a 12-week ban into law.

Greer Donley, an associate professor of law at the University Pittsburgh School of Law, said in an interview on Thursday that the case was a “harbinger of things to come,” as a flurry of Republican-led states have enacted abortion restrictions and more women in those states have sought abortion pills as a workaround.

“This case is really sad because people resort to things like this when they’re really desperate,” Professor Donley said, “and the thing that makes people really desperate is abortion bans.”

Nebraska Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, had commended prosecutors for enforcing Nebraska’s 20-week law.

The executive director, Sandy Danek, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. But she said in an interview last year that accountability should extend to providers that mail abortion pills to states like Nebraska that require an in-person physician to oversee medication abortions.

“This disturbing act may become more commonplace as the abortion industry continues to promote the do-it-yourself abortion where there’s no medical oversight for risks and complications,” she said.

Yeah, they really care about risks and complications.

There are many examples of various jurisdictions around the country in recent years jailing women for having abortions. And there are going to be more as these draconian abortion laws take hold. Miscarriages are going to be under scrutiny too. This is just the beginning.

Or is it the stupid contrarianism?

Tim Miller has put his finger on it. That’s all there is to modern “conservatism” (and, frankly, a certain segment of leftism too.)

Basically, the future of American politics is just a bunch of snotty little adolescent bitches saying whatever it takes to get a rise out of their enemies. Gosh I wonder if people with a more … serious agenda might take advantage of this moment?

It’s the GOP way

If you hadn’t heard, cruelty is the point. Government deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed” is no longer operative for the GOP. Democracy is no barrier to America’s authoritarian right getting its way.

Aside from insurrection, it does not get more blatant than this (NBC News):

Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district.

The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a second district that is approximately 40% Black.

[…]

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the redistricting map into law Friday night. A federal court will hold a hearing on the map Aug. 14.

Oh, the GOP is not done yet:

The Justice Department has notified Texas that it plans to file a lawsuit over Gov. Greg Abbott’s floating border barrier in the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing illegally.

The DOJ sent a letter to Abbott on Thursday demanding that Texas remove the buoys and razor wire along the Rio Grande by Monday, July 24, or legal action will be taken.

“The State of Texas’ actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” the letter read.

“The floating barrier at issue here is a structure that obstructs the navigable capacity of the Rio Grande … which is a navigable water of the United States within the meaning of the Rivers and Harbors Act. Texas does not have authorization from the Corps [of Engineers] to install the floating barrier and did not seek such authorization before doing so.”

House Democrats led by Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro sent a letter to President Biden on Friday decrying Abbott’s actions. A Texas kayaking and canoeing company has also sued Abbott over the river barrier claiming the buoys “represent a hateful policy that intends to create the impression that Mexicans, immigrants, and Mexican Americans … are dangerous.”

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Abbott has made fear of immigration central to his political messaging. He is now faced with the reality that Biden’s parole process for migrants at the southern border has dropped unlawful entries by almost 70% since it went into effect in early May, meaning that border agents have more time to patrol and are making it harder to enter the U.S. unlawfully. 

Abbott’s barrier seems designed to keep his messaging amped up, accompanied as it is by allegations that troops from the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety have been ordered to push migrants, including children, back into the river and to withhold water from those suffering in the heat. There are also reports that migrants have been hurt by razor wire installed along the barrier.

Abbott responded to the DOJ’s letter: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.” 

Abbott denies allegations that his agents pushed migrants back into the river.

It is notable that, for all their talk about law and order, the Republican-dominated legislature of Alabama and the state’s Republican governor have just openly defied the U.S. Supreme Court, which is hardly an ideological enemy after Trump stacked it to swing to the far right.

The Republican governor of Texas is defying both federal law and international treaties. After rampant scandals, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court refuses to adopt an ethics system that might restore some confidence in their decisions. And, aided by his loyalists, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is threatening mob violence if he is held legally accountable for his behavior.

The rule of law is no longer a constraint on the Trumpian right, as it never was for its namesake. MAGA Republicans’ vaunted principles were all for show, as should have been obvious before Donald Trump’s rise. Their support for law enforcement held only so long as police stuck to enforcing the law punitively and prejudicially against people they considered unworthy of its protection. How dare anyone apply the law equally to them?

From the Nixon pardon to Iran-Contra to “enhanced interrogation,” Republicans have excused their own law-breaking. “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy,” David Frum predicted in January of 2018 long after the horse was out of the barn.

Behold.

Biden quietly reverses decades of antitrust policy

A schoolteacher friend from the Boston area once dismisssed the “Taxachusetts” smear. She liked the services Massachusetts provided for her and her child. She did not mind paying for them. Imagine that.

Franklin Foer examines the fetish — for fetish it is — behind making efficiency the highest good in setting business policy and practice. There is more to life than low, low prices. Not that federal policy since the Reagan era recognizes that. Or the Chicago school of economics.

The Joe Biden administration has been quietly resetting federal policy on mergers, on antitrust and economic concentration. Since the Reagan administration stopped enforcing antitrust laws, Foer explains, “the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference.”

Readers don’t need this explained to them. They’ve lived it.

Foer goes on (The Atlantic):

Why did the Reaganites do this? They were in thrall to the idea that the highest, in fact the only, valid goal of economic policy is efficiency—defined narrowly as the maximum output for the lowest prices. And they believed that Big Business was inherently efficient. They were devastatingly successful at entrenching that view. For two generations, their version of efficiency became the driving logic of competition policy (and other areas, including trade), regardless of the party in power. Concern for how monopoly power might affect workers, small-town businesses, or even democracy itself dropped out of the analysis. The Obama administration’s 2010 guidelines, for example, exempted even more mergers from review and praised corporate deals for their “potential to generate significant efficiencies and thus enhance the merged firm’s ability and incentive to compete.”

But a small merger here and a small merger there and pretty soon you have “monopoly power over time.” It both limits consumer choice and places a heavy thumb on the legislative scale. The result is even more clout for corporate oligarchs and less for workers and consumers. Democrats’ acceding to the Reagan efficiency agenda left workers feeling betrayed.

I’ve written before that “efficiency” is like “shareholder value.” When the word starts cropping up around the office, flesh-and-blood consumable resources had better update their resumes, stock up on antacid, and learn to get by with even less sleep.

Like my teacher friend, Bidenomics understands that there is more to life than efficiency.

One of the most overlooked features of the Biden administration has been its willingness to challenge the efficiency fetish. The merger guidelines are its most frontal assault to date. In the view of Biden’s antitrust officials, Washington’s turn toward efficiency—a word that doesn’t appear in any antitrust statute—substituted the preferences of libertarian economics professors for the laws that Congress actually passed. The new guidelines seek to undo that. They don’t reject economic analysis. But their guiding theory is that corporations ought to be prevented from acquiring the kind of power that enables abuses, even if econometric models promise some sort of efficiency gain.

More-to-life guidelines issued by the Biden administration suggest that “government scrutinize how mergers might hurt workers, not just consumers.”

The weakness in steering policy by executive-branch decisions rather than through legislation is that guidelines issued by one administration may be overturned by the next. On the other hand, “bureaucratic policies also have the potential to stick, if skillfully conceived. They can manage not just to survive legal challenges, but to become enmeshed in the culture of the civil service.”

We’ll see if that happens with Biden’s changes. Another four years would help. It might almost be enough for workers to notice the difference.

Foer concludes:

Critics will also argue that the new framework is divorced from economic reality and warn that it will result in higher prices. In fact, efficiency-focused antitrust appears to have failed under its own terms: The leading analysis to date finds that mergers have been more likely to raise consumer prices than lower them. But on some level, to focus on price effects is to miss the point. Efficiency was the coldest metric for evaluating a merger. It reduced Americans into the stylized economic caricature known as the “consumer,” treating cheap goods as our highest and only aspiration. The new guidelines inject a bit of humanity back into the calculus. And they suggest that the ultimate question for government shouldn’t be whether something is efficient, but whether it’s right.

Last summer in The American Prospect, Sen. Sherrod Brown called for Democrats to champion workers again. I summarized:

Brown calls out the greed that drove American companies there to relocate first to the South, then to Mexico, then offshore in the name of “efficiency”—business-school-speak for “pay workers less.” What businesses became more efficient at was destroying people’s lives and desiccating once-thriving towns. This, especially for “people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.”

Once again: the economy should serve people, not the other way around. Humans should be holding the corporate leash, not wearing the collar. But that’s not how our corporate overlords see things.

“We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again,” Brown wrote. “We must sharpen the difference between us—historically, America’s party of workers—and the party of big business.”

“Scranton Joe” is making that happen. Problem is, will anyone notice?

The White House cat thinks she owns the place

From NY Magazine:

When discussing life in the White House during another town hall in July 2021, [Biden] remarked, “It is very hard to get comfortable.”

While you might think the addition of a cat would make the White House feel more like a home, it seems that hasn’t solved the problem. In January 2023 the president revealed that his new cat Willow is adding to his discomfort.

“Willow may walk in here any time now. She has no limits,” Biden said. “You think I’m kidding, I’m not. Especially in the middle of the night when she climbs up and lays on top of my head.”

Of course she has no limits. She’s a cat.

Remember this?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign is planning a reboot, top campaign officials said, with a significant shift on messaging, events and media strategy.

Expect fewer big speeches and more handshaking in diners and churches. 

There will be more of a national focus than constant Florida references. 

That was just a couple of days ago.

Today:

DeSantis: We are going to launch an inquiry about bud light and it could lead to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida pension fund pic.twitter.com/iAkaknc0fm

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 21, 2023

He an’t help himself. He’s still chasing the culture war fanatics.

It isn’t a strategy. It’s him.

The US House held a “hearing” yesterday featuring “Democrat” RFK Jr. It was, as you might expect, a total shitshow.

Some highlights. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said he compared COVID policies to the Holocaust. He got very indignant, denying it:

PatriotTakes has also uncovered RFK Jr. suggesting doctors are inclined to become tyrannical, citing genocidal Nazi doctors. https://t.co/GTiY5vLeKb

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) July 20, 2023

He is a wack job. And so are his biggest fans — MAGA Republicans:

Jim Jordan shouts out his "good friend" Dennis Kucinich, who is sitting behind RFK Jr pic.twitter.com/QMn0gp1zcL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2023

Plaskett: "I'm appalled and just so troubled by colleagues I have to work, that these are individuals who would bring a witness who promoted a video that compared the Covid vaccine to the Tuskegee trials." pic.twitter.com/QqiAJcoVeq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2023

Chip Roy: "I'm grateful that we have the opportunity to have a polio vaccine, but … " pic.twitter.com/PJFq231ZmA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2023

Connolly to RFK Jr: "You are here for cynical reasons to be used politically by that side of the aisle to embarrass the current president, and you're an enabler in that effort today. And it brings shame on a storied name that I revere." pic.twitter.com/ocKOUZ25SN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2023