In my post below, Michael Steele hammers Democrats for trying to play nice with his former political party. An exasperated Steele says Republicans are “gonna shove those [bipartisan] plowshares up your behind!”
The MAGA GOP is playing “constitutional hardball,” clinically defined by Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law School in 2004 as:
… political claims and practices – legislative and executive initiatives – that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings. It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents’ victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.
In the age of kayfabe showmanship, bad faith argument, Republican faux outrage, and intimidation of politicians and private citizens by flying monkeys, Democrats are still trying to play nice with the likes of Stephen Miller (unlocked):
Mr. Trump may not complain about Mr. Miller, but he does occasionally poke at his obsession with immigrants — a hostility that goes far beyond Mr. Trump’s. In one meeting during the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump said that if it was up to Mr. Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller, according to a person with knowledge of the comment. Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, denied the account.
President Joe Biden comes from a time before constitutional hardball. In his final Oval Office interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Biden admits his party’s failure to loudly and proudly advertise their own accomplishments. Republicans loudly take credit for things they never did. Dermocrats need to up their game.
Biden on Trump’s name on stimulus checks: The mistake we made was, I think I made was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this… I’m not a very good huckster. I spent too much on the policy. Not enough time on the politics pic.twitter.com/PcgY7G4Jtf
We are dealing with four more years of mean-spirited hucksterism (and worse) from the incoming president and his anti-American lackeys. So suck it up, buttercups. Never give the suckers an even break.
Dems won’t win the 21st century with 20th-century politics
Tons of respect for Democrats in Congress who have served honorably and bring years of deep experience in legislative arcana to their jobs, and a passion for improving American’s lives. I still want the Democrats’ gerontocracy to go home. You’re living in the past. Make room for younger leaders with 21st-century political and media skills.
Former RNC chair Michael Steele says it better than I could. *
Michael Steele: They think we’re playing the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill kinda kumbaya moment. ‘Yeah, we skirmish here and there, but in the end we’re gonna have a little toast with some bourbon or some good whiskey and call it even.’ No, that’s not what this is…. I very much respect Hakeem Jeffries, very much excited about his leadership, but you do not hand over the gavel and say we’re putting down our swords and picking up our bipartisan plowshares? They’re gonna shove those plowshares up your behind!
The GOP has spent a generation plotting for this moment, Steele continues, trying to upend the structures put in place to try to govern. They’re not interested. Policy isn’t the goal, the narrative is.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Steele says of current Democratic leadership, “a political operation that is oxymoronic … they’re not an operation and they’re not political.”
He and @NicolleDWallace explained that Democrats have become part of the problem by ignoring that the norms are already gone and refusing to use what power they have left pic.twitter.com/XxkOh3biQK
Stop playing by rules that the other side has blown up.
Kristy Greenberg: I hear people say, ‘Well, that’s against the norms.’ But there are no norms. [Trumpublicans] are going to shatter the norms.
Nicolle Wallace (referencing The Sixth Sense): The norms are dead. And you’ve got one party that’s proud of it … but you’ve got the other party that still doesn’t know it.
* FYI, Bluesky vids still won’t play inside WordPress. Otherwise, I try to avoid X posts.
After the obligatory niceties and review of his accomplishments in office, President Joe Biden’s farewell address from the Oval Office got to the nub of it: America is at risk. That is, from “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.
More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.
The ultrawealthy and their enablers among the Republican Party have made no secret for decades that their goal is eradicating post-New Deal America and returning to the McKinley era of robber barons.
The movement’s grand ambition—one can no longer say grandiose—is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President. Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth—both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes—are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.
They reactionary rich were patient, Grieder continued, methodical. They “understand that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress. It’s a long march, they say. Stick together, because we are winning.” And well-funded. Extremely well-funded.
Biden the D.C. long-hauler might not have seen it in 2003, but he sees it now:
You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.
Just as the GOP teamed up with the religious right to usher in the Reagan era, the oligarchy greasing palms in Donald Trump’s America has teamed not only with Christian nationalists, but with autocrats, white supremacists and, as I’ve argued, rump-royalists who would rather be subjects than citizens. Not in McKinley’s America from the end of the 19th century, but in the Old South at the end of the 18th. (Someone must have drawn up a Venn diagram.)
Rachel Maddow reacts to President Biden’s final remarks from the White House, calling them “stark and sober” and saying they put a shiver down her spine. “This was a love letter to America for a outgoing president who is very worried about what he describes as oligarchy,” she added. #joebiden#presidency#oligarchy#donaldtrump#elonmusk#democracy#politics#news
This is serious, and it’s not as if any of it is new. Biden twice argued that to undo the new Gilded Age that the ultrawealthy must again be made to pay their “fair share” in taxes.
Though of lesser international stature than Biden, historian Rutger Bregman made the same case five years ago, not into a camera but into the very faces of the world’s economic elite.
Give Trump’s cabinet nominees this much: they were thoroughly coached for their confirmation hearings.
Whenever a Senate committee member this week asked Fox News weekend co-anchor Pete Hegseth (nominee for secretary of defense) to answer allegations of drunkenness or whatever, his default answer was “anonymous smears.” Over and over. Despite senators telling him to his face that the committee has documents naming the people, including Fox co-workers, who made those allegations.
Kelly: "Which is it — have you overcome personal issues, or are you the target of a smear campaign? It can't be both. It's clear to me that you're not being honest." pic.twitter.com/u3ofsH4VJQ
When Democratic senators on Wednesday asked Pam Bondi (nominee for attorney general) if she agreed with positions taken by her prospective employer (Donald Trump), the former Florida attorney general defaulted multiple times to variations on “I’m not familiar with the statement.”
To date, no Democrat has as I suggested asked any Trump nominee if they had reason to doubt their qualifications for the job, and if they did, why they accepted anyway.
But another question that came up a couple of times in Bondi’s hearing was whether she would admit that President Trump lost the 2020 election. Hegseth and other Trump supporters have similarly refused to say so.
Bondi claims she is not familiar with Trump's statement describing January 6 criminals as "hostages" pic.twitter.com/SNPsNms1DG
It must appear to the casual observer, and especially to MAGA Republicans, like a “gotcha” question, a trap to draw Trump’s ire. Everyone knows that Trump refuses to admit he lost. To salve his bruised ego, he still claims the election was stolen. Trump considers it a sign of fealty and obeisance, like kowtowing to the emperor, that his subjects agree. To the likes of Hegseth and Bondi, the question must feel like an anti-inquisitor’s demand to renounce the MAGA faith. But for people pursuing the responsibility for upholding the U.S. Constitution and the republic it is more meaningful than that.
Asking a Trump cabinet nominee — yes/no — whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is not a “gotcha” question. It’s a test. Do you have the spine, the personal integrity, to disagree with your future boss when he’s wrong or demands you do something improper or illegal?
Pam Bondi doesn’t have a spine. Nor does Pete Hegseth, though he may have faced bullets in combat.
Bondi, Hegseth, MAGA Republicans in elected office, and the foot soldiers at Trump’s rallies have mistaken bluster for courage. The more they double down on the former, the more obvious it is that they lack the latter. And they’ll never admit it. They’re lying to themselves and to us.
Their refusal marks them as subjects, not citizens. They have no business serving in a democratic republic. But then, that’s not Donald Trump aim for this country, is it?
WNC and Los Angeles have to wonder if federal disaster recovery funds will dry up after Jan. 20. (Yes, he is that vindictive. He’ll sell it as looking strong)
We here also know that the news will soon move on and the focus of the MSM will be Trump’s White House.
MAGA will “fight for Trump.” Will Dems fight for us?
Former D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone almost died defending the U.S. Capitol from the violent MAGA mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone told Huffington Post earlier this month. “I believe democracy in this country is dead, and it died when the Supreme Court granted the president of the United States immunity for official acts and then failed to define what the fuck official acts are.”
Unofficial acts by Trump’s followers committed against Fanone and his family continue four years later. To the point that he doesn’t report many of them to the police:
Someone threw a brick at his mother’s home a little over a month ago, he said. Fanone said there was another incident where his mother was raking leaves in her front yard and a man “pulled up and threw a bag of shit on her.”
Jack Smith will be watching his back for a long time.
After the Department of Justice released special counsel Smith’s report on the Jan. 6 insurrection on Tuesday, Greg Sargent spoke with historian Julian Zelizer about his recent piece in The New Republic .
If you believe Trump’s bullshit about destroyed and deleted information, his innocense and his landslide, he’s got a “university” in Manhattan to sell you. Sargent observes that Trump’s tweet gloats, I got away with it.
Michael Podhorzer at his substack confirmed Fanone’s assessment. The high court shielded Trump from prosecution and enabled him to run again for office (and win) by neutering the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Podhorzer wrote, “In any other country, we would understand that as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.”
The Republican Party decided Trump was their best vehicle for maintaining power, said Zelizer. (Just as Christian nationalists have decided he’s their path to restoring their political and cultural dominance, I’d add.)
Zelizer advised Democrats in his piece “to “to embrace the power of partisan polarization.” Trump’s victory was narrow (despite his boasts):
Over the next two years, the party will have one shot to block the radical retrenchment of core government policies, the erosion of cherished American values, and the aggressive exercise of presidential power. They will need to use all the procedural and financial weapons available to keep their own members in line and to reward those who stand firm in their opposition, all the while communicating a compelling message through new media to win back voters before 2026.
There are a lot of ifs behind that recommendation.
And Democrats are really struggling, even with signs of the fight, to figure out what they’re going to do in the next couple years. Just all this added together with the fact he won reelection despite what Smith had been investigating says positive things for his political standing at the moment. But at the moment is different than in a year. And that’s part of what we’ll watch how it plays out.
[…]
Democrats not only have to be strong, but one of the things they can do is create very small fissures in the House Republican caucus, for example, and it will cause immense problems for the Republicans to be able to do anything.
There is a lot of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand to that assessment. But Democrats’ prospects are hampered by their own conflict-averse inertia. We saw some fight on Tuesday out of Democratic women during the Senate Armed Services Committee questioning of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s impossibly unqualified nominee for secretary of defense. It won’t be enough.
What Hegseth and Trump’s other nominees represent is not just the collapse of competence and the Republicans’ rejection of ethics, American values and democracy itself. It is their embrace of might making right.
David Hogg, candidate for DNC first vice chair, writes in a FB ad that “the people making decisions for the Democratic Party care more about keeping their jobs than about fighting for us.” Do they even retain the muscle memory? What worries me most right now is how much Fanone’s experience demonstrates that Trump’s MAGA brownshirts over the long haul are more willing to “fight for Trump.”
As Congress begins confirmation hearings today for Donald Trump’s candidates for key federal posts, I offer simple questions Democrats should ask each.
When Donald Trump nominated you, did you consider saying no because you felt unqualified for the job?
If not, why not?
If yes, why did you accept anyway?
Hell, I’m no more qualified for these posts that Trump’s “look good on TV” nominees.
"What is the Trump team’s rebuttal to Hegseth’s lack of management experience? As incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told The New York Times last week, 'That’s what staff is for.' ”TERRIFIC! How do I apply to be CEO of Apple? thehill.com/newsletters/…
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) of Louisiana said Monday “there should probably be conditions” on any federal aid package to help California recover from the devastation wrought by apocalyptic wildfires.
Johnson criticized the response of California’s state government, claiming it amounted to dereliction of duty.
“Obviously, there has been water resource management, forest management, mistakes, all sorts of problems, and it does come down to leadership, and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty, and in many respects,” he said. “So, that’s something that has to be factored in.”
Mr. Speaker, as Arlo Guthrie once said to the sergeant, “you got a lot a damn gall” to talk about California’s water resource management, unspecified “problems,” and dereliction of duty.
Large portions of Louisiana parishes, particularly around New Orleans, obviously lie below sea level. Much of your state’s coastline is slowly sinking into the sea. Louisiana keeps its feet dry and protected from flooding by over 3,000 miles of levees, nearly three-quarters installed and maintained with federal tax dollars. (BTW, Californians contribute 14 times as much to the federal treasury each year as Louisiana.) Since 1932, Louisiana has lost “an area nearly twice the size of Rhode Island.” Presently, Louisiana and its state and local leaders lose 25-35 square miles of land each year to the sea.
Lost, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps you can explain that? If not now, the next time you ask for disaster assistance for your state. Or perhaps you’d prefer to ask your bronzered savior to extend his, um, staff, to keep the Gulf of America at bay.
Lack of self-awareness is also a conservative superpower.
Update: Not to put too fine a point on it.
🔥 WATCH: Jon Stewart shreds @senatorhagerty’s cruel hypocrisy about conditioning aid to California Jon is absolutely right that Bill demanded immediate strings-free aid when Tennessee was in need, and that the senator is utterly and completely without shame.Full: www.threads.net/@thetnholler…
D.C. National Guard Military Police, Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. on June 2, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Revé Van Croft, 715th PAD)
Donald Trump talks tough about deploying troops in the streets. Why? For the same reason he muses about “acquiring” Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Trump, Alex Shepard believes, “is driven almost entirely by his desire to appear strong—or, more to the point, his fear of looking weak. This is why he picks senseless fights with smaller allies while avoiding brawls with the strongmen he so greatly admires.”
Yes, Greenland may have significant resources, but as we pointed out last week, that’s not really why Trump wants it. That’s about Trump’s obsession with size (The New Republic):
As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)
Deploying shock troops in the streets is Trump’s idea of looking big and tough in front of real strongmen like Vladimir Putin. But America’s military doesn’t want the job (Politico):
According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
On Nov. 18, two weeks after the election, Trump confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
One fear is that domestic deployment of active-duty troops could lead to bloodshed given that the regular military is mainly trained to shoot at and kill foreign enemies. The only way to prevent that is establishing clear “rules of engagement” for domestic deployments that outline how much force troops can use — especially considering constitutional restraints protecting U.S. citizens and residents — against what kinds of people in what kinds of situations. And establishing those new rules would require a lot more training, in the view of many in the military community.
“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked former defense secretary, Mark Esper, according to Esper’s memoir.
Michael Hirsch writes that given Trump’s demonstrated procilivities and his intent to staff the Trump 2.0 administration with yes-men, Pentagon professionals worry that Trump might demand that soldiers be deployed to advance his political interests. Several retired military officers are discussing it with friends on active-duty.
Anthony Pfaff, a retired colonel who teaches military ethics at the U.S. Army War College, says that domestic crowd control “is not something for which we have any doctrine or other standard operating procedures. Without those, thresholds for force could be determined by individual commanders, leading to even more confusion.” Read: dead civilians.
Some lawyers and experts in military law say a great deal of confusion persists — even among serving officers — over how the military should behave, especially if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and calls up troops to crush domestic protests or round up millions of undocumented immigrants. In most cases, there is little that officers and enlisted personnel can do but obey such presidential orders, even if they oppose them ethically, or face dismissal or court-martial.
Trump has already pardoned soldiers convicted of war crimes. What might he do to soldiers who disobey when he issues a criminal order? How many enlisted personnel might not know the difference in the heat of the moment, especially when Trump gets to decide what’s legal under the Insurrection Act? And federal judges he appointed back him up?
“The basic reality is that the Insurrection Act gives the president dangerously broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force,” says Joseph Nunn, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s an extraordinarily broad law that has no meaningful criteria in it for determining when it’s appropriate for the president to deploy the military domestically.” Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act says the president must cite insurrection, rebellion, or domestic violence to justify deployment; the language is so vague that Trump could potentially claim only that he perceives a “conspiracy.”
Lawyer up
While some within the miltary community are urging troops to “lawyer up,” Politico reports, that’s no shield. “The fact is, if an order is legal then members of the armed forces have to obey it even if they find it morally reprehensible,” advises Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap (Ret.), presently of Duke Law School, of orders known as “lawful but awful.”
Again, all this is academic for an an elisted man, in the heat of the moment, standing in the street with an M4 and facing protesters or rioters.
This entire, hand-wringing debate would be academic had voters chosen wisely on Nov. 5 and not reelected an amoral horrorshow found guilty of 34 felonies and accused of more.
The New York Times is more specific about the death toll:
The Eaton fire has killed 16 people, making it one of the deadliest in California’s history, and at least eight people have died in the Palisades blaze. Another 16 people have been reported missing in the areas of the two fires, and officials have warned the number of fatalities is likely to rise.
An amputee and his son with cerebral palsy were among the 24 deaths in the fires raging around Los Angeles. The father was found at his son’s bedside.
One victim told a relative that he did not want to evacuate. He died trying to fight the blaze that consumed his home of more than 50 years.
Another victim, an 85-year-old woman, refused to leave her home as the fast-moving Palisades Fire approached, preferring instead to stay behind with her beloved pets. A former child star from Australia also was among those who died, as well as a Malibu resident and surfer who was called a “magnet for people.”
The piece goes on to provide details on half a dozen who died in the fire. It concludes ominously, “This is a developing story and will be updated.“
Hurricane Helene survivors know the drill too well. Over 100 died here in Western North Carolina last fall, over 40 in Buncombe County. Asheville Watchdog, “a free, local, not-for-profit” project of national journalists who retired here, published a long “Lives we lost” series.
Los Angeles news outlets are already preparing theirs and adding to them.
Two points.
A private drone flown in the vicinity of the Palisades Fire collided with one of two Canadian CL-415 Super Scooper firefighting planes, damaging its port wing and taking it out of action for repairs. CBS News reports:
California state officials said there have been at least 40 incidents where unauthorized drones have forced firefighters to pause air operations since the wildfires broke out last week. Crews battling the blazes have used air tankers to dump thousands of gallons of flame retardant, and super scoopers, as well as helicopters, to drop water over the blazes.
“When people fly drones near wildfires, fire response agencies often ground their aircraft to avoid the potential for a midair collision,” the FAA writes on its website. “Delaying airborne response poses a threat to firefighters on the ground, residents, and property in nearby communities, and it can allow wildfires to grow larger.”
Photo via FBI.
Don’t be an idiot. You’ll also go to jail for it.
Secondly, Angelenos have to be worries (as we are here) that under a Trump administration disaster relief funding will quickly dry up. The costs will be in the hundreds of billions. Trump and MAGA Republicans in Congress enjoy seeing perceived opponents suffer (Mother Jones):
In an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Newsom told NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff that he is worried about Trump revoking the federal disaster aid that President Biden has promised California for the next 6 months—a threat that Trump, in fact, has made and carried out multiple times in the past.
