Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This conversation was posted on January 17th 2020,It remains one of the best discussions I’ve come across on this subject:

After a harrowing discussion about humanity’s undeniable march towards a dystopian future, world-renowned thinker Noam Chomsky and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer move on to other pressing topics related to current events. Beginning with the issue that inspired the two-part interview, Scheer explains that an episode of his podcast “Scheer Intelligence” which featured Susie Linfield discussing her book “The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky” led to an ongoing exchange with Chomsky. The linguist, who has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, argues that “The Lion’s Den” and its chapter on Chomsky’s criticisms “is the most extraordinary collection of lies and deceit that I have ever seen.” 

Admitting that before his interview with Linfield, Scheer had not paid close attention to the chapter in question, the Truthdig Editor in Chief goes on to say that upon re-reading it, he found it incredibly “unfair.” 

“The people attacked in this book,” Scheer says, “are all attacked for daring to raise questions about the performance of [the Israeli state] and the Zionist experiment, particularly in its relation to the Palestinians and notions that many of us, myself included, who are Jewish had thought were built into a kind of universalism of the Jewish experience, and a concern for the other.” 

To Chomsky, the dilemma Israel poses to Jewish intellectuals such as himself who are concerned with the state’s future, has always been clear: criticize the state’s actions or remain silent in the face of decisions that would endanger it. The thinker’s criticisms take root in the 1970s when Israel rejects viable two-state solutions more than once, an inconvenient historical reality he argues Linfield “lies about like a trooper.” 

“If you care about Israel, what you tell them is you’re sacrificing security for expansion,” Chomsky argues. “And it’s going to have a consequence. It’s going to lead to moral deterioration internally, and decline in status internationally, which is exactly what happened. […] You go back to the 1970s, Israel was one of the most admired states in the world. […] Now it’s a pariah state. 

Chomsky uses the example of how support for Israel within the U.S. had shifted from liberal Democrats to ultranationalists and evangelicals as an illustration of a dangerous shift in Israeli policies that led to the terrible suffering of Palestinians and a moral decline within the Middle Eastern nation. The linguist’s conclusion, based on the biblical story of Elijah, is one that can be applied across the board when thinking of constructing an effective approach to politics, not just in Israel, but around the world.

“You don’t love a state and follow its policies,” says Chomsky. “You criticize what’s wrong, try to change the policies, expose them; criticize it, change it.”  

The discussion of Israel then leads to a broader conversation on the topic of “lesser evilism,” especially as applied to U.S. politics as voters face a presidential election in 2020 which could lead to President Donald Trump’s re-election.

“We’ve been living all these years,” Scheer argues, “with the illusion that there’s this lesser evil that somehow will make it better. […] I’m frightened out of my mind that it’s four more years of Trump; yes. However, do we really think that the Democrats are going to propose a serious alternative?” 

“There’s another word for lesser evilism,” Chomsky replies. “It’s called rationality. Lesser evilism is not an illusion, it’s a rational position. But you don’t stop with lesser evilism. You begin with it, to prevent the worst, and then you go on to deal with the fundamental roots of what’s wrong, even with the lesser evils.” 

That’s all there is to it, IMO. This idea that you will vote against Biden and enable Donald Trump is simply irrational.

While Scheer agrees with Chomsky about the imminent danger Trump poses not just to Americans, but humanity as a whole due to his suicidal approach to the climate crisis, the Truthdig editor in chief insists that it is precisely having read Chomsky’s works that instilled in him a profound fear “of what neoliberalism and what that opportunism breeds,” concluding that “it breeds a Trump.” Chomsky, on the other hand traces the hard-earned progress that has been made by organized movements throughout the history of the U.S., using the examples of Presidents Richard Nixon and Franklin D. Roosevelt as leaders who were forced to amend their policies and actions by political activists. 

“So even if there’s core, deep problems with the institutions, there still are choices between alternatives, which matter a lot,” says the MIT professor. “Small differences in a system with enormous power translate into huge effects. Meanwhile, you don’t stop with a lesser evilism; you continue to try to organize and develop the mass popular movements, which will block the worst and change the institutions. All of these things can go on at once. But the simple question of what button do you push on a particular day? That is a decision, and that matters. It’s not the whole story, by any means. It’s a small part of the story, but it matters.” 

When Scheer goes on to express his surprise to find in Chomsky a source of optimism, the latter gives him a list of reasons to remain hopeful, including the Green New Deal and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

I guess you can call Chomsky a neoliberal stooge who “just doesn’t understand” (and he is very old which we know renders him completely irrelevant…) but that won’t make it so. He is right.

I think of this as a political Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. If you really care about the Palestinian people, allowing Trump to win is the most harmful thing you can possibly do.

There is a reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all-but-openly campaigned for Trump against Biden in 2020. American policy in the Trump administration was a laundry list of gifts to the Israeli right:

-Drafting a “peace plan” with zero Palestinian input that would have, if implemented, actually ended the possibility for a real Palestinian state.

–Cutting Palestinians out of the negotiations over the so-called Abraham Accords, realizing the longstanding Israeli goal of severing diplomatic progress with Arab states from progress towards a sovereign Palestine.

-Recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria taken during the 1967 Six-Day War.

-Shutting off funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (which Biden almost immediately restored and then temporarily suspended again amid a scandal about its employees participating in October 7).

-Abandoning the decades-old US position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a peace agreement and eliminating longstanding restrictions on spending US taxpayer dollars in them.

-Moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the US mission to Palestine in the same city.

Is it any wonder this sentiment prevails in Netanyahu’s right wing government?

Are armbands coming?

Two things, both from The Atlantic.

If you are one of those people who cannot look at Stephen Miller without seeing him in a black uniform with a red armband, consider, he’ll have company if things ever come to that.

Adam Serwer on Wednesday pointedly called out wannabe goose-steppers in the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, of course.

“Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint,” Serwer begins:

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X,  “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.

But you know what he meant, just as the MAGA mob on Jan. 6 knew what Donald Trump meant by “fight like hell.”

The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer. The most likely outcome based on past precedent  would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.

See “But you know what he meant” above. When Trump began his presidency with his “American carnage” speech, he wasn’t describing reality but revealing his innermost desires.

Today at The Atlantic, George Packer laments what I’ve noticed for decades: a lack of learning curve on the protesty left. Commenting on those same student protesters, Packer writes:

In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?

I’ve wondered that since the 1970s. I wrote in a September 2005 column for the local paper:

Friends I describe as all-natural, vegetarian chain smokers have attended protest rallies since college. It’s a kind of hobby. They are probably in Washington right now, marching against the war in Iraq. Sometimes they would invite me along to protest [your favorite liberal cause here], promising it would be fun.

Sure. I can think of lots of things more fun than protesting foreign wars and abuses of power. Or listening to impassioned speeches with rhetoric so threadbare that you can close your eyes and imagine yourself at any street rally since 1966.

This weekend major U.S. cities will see protests against the conflict in Iraq. The usual cast of characters will be massing in Washington: squads of pall bearers with mock coffins, Grim Reapers, pets in drag, and clowns for peace.

Friends, would you please consider doing something effective for a change? If you like playing dress-up, there’s the Society for Creative Anachronism. For fun, rent a Jackie Chan film. We’ve watched you get arrested earning your merit badges in civil disobedience long enough to figure out that what’s really arrested is your political development.

It’s not that your issues aren’t worthwhile. Most are. And sure, protesting can be cathartic and promote a sense of solidarity with your tribe. You go home feeling better about the issues. But wouldn’t you rather go home having done something with half a chance of resolving them? If you want to effect change, you have to influence political leaders and win the hearts and minds of American voters.

Face it, America is not swayed by mass die-ins dramatizing the loss of life caused by war. Or by coeds dressed as “corporate whores” to satirize conglomerates prostituting after Defense Department dollars. Or by indoctrinating children through activist puppet dramas with all the subtlety of temperance plays.

How do I know? Because you’ve been staging these sideshows for decades and the red states keep getting redder. These are time-tested wastes of your energies and talents, public curiosities, local color on the news at six. I’d rather go bowling.

Packer chalks up the calcified format of these protests to the evolution of the post-liberal university since the 1960s.

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Still more charges for Trump confederates

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) is still investigating the 2020 fake electors scheme “to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office.” But as of Wednesday, she’s charged 18 people associated with the plot with felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery. The indictment caps off a year-long investigation into the fraudulent slate of Donald Trump electors sent to Congress after Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Similar schemes played out in Michigan, Georgia and Nevada.

Redacted in the indictment are seven names of individuals living outside Arizona. The Washington Post, however, identifies them as some of Trump’s closest allies and advisers:

Those indicted include former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Christina Bobb, top campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and former campaign aide Mike Roman. They are accused of allegedly aiding an unsuccessful strategy to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden after the 2020 election. Also charged are the Republicans who signed paperwork on Dec. 14, 2020, that falsely purported Trump was the rightful winner, including former state party chair Kelli Ward, state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, and Tyler Bowyer, a GOP national committeeman and chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of the pro-Trump conservative group Turning Point USA.

Trump himself remains unindicted in Arizona for now.

The effort was aided by Trump, the indictment said, who “himself was unwilling to accept that he had lost the election.” While the charges focus on the elector strategy, the indictment spells out various ways that Trump and his allies sought to pressure state and local officials to “encourage them to change” the election results. Trump allies initially put pressure on members of the Phoenix-area Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the indictment said. When it became clear that the GOP-led board would not alter the results, pressure was placed on members of the state legislature — namely then-House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) — who heard from Trump and other allies.

When that effort failed, Trump sought to appeal to then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), who ignored a call from Trump while certifying the state’s election results. That day, the indictment notes, Trump berated Ducey on social media for certifying the results.

Everything Trump touches gets indicted

The Post notes that this is the second round of charges so far for “Meadows, Giuliani, Ellis, Eastman and Roman, who were all indicted alongside Trump in Georgia last year. Ellis pleaded guilty in October to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia and has been cooperating with prosecutors.”

Notable omissions include Kenneth Chesebro, one of the progenitors of the elector strategy with Eastman. In October, he pleaded guilty in Georgia to one felony count of “conspiracy to commit filing false documents.” Also missing from the indictment is lawyer Sidney Powell. She pleaded guilty in Georgia to “six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.” One may surmise that Chesebro’s and Powell’s cooperation in the Arizona investigation kept them out of Wednesday’s indictment.

Trump is a Republican candidate for president again in 2024, even while on trial in New York and with criminal trials pending in three other jurisdictions. He is not running for president. He is running to keep from spending the rest of his life on trial or in jail. Trump is betting on the presidency empowering him to shut down federal investigations into himself and to exact revenge on his enemies. (Republicans like their twofers.)

This morning, Trump’s attorneys will argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that the president is and must be immune from prosecution for his actions in office. They do not expect to win. Their goal is to keep Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case from going to trial before the November election. Trump is charged with “conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.”

“We already pulled off the heist,” a source close to Trump told Rolling Stone. They were “literally popping champagne” when the court agreed to take the case in February and delayed hearing it until today. Do not expect a ruling from the conservative court until late June/early July. Beginning a trial before November is unlikely but not impossible.

The addition of charges in Arizona for which Trump, if elected, cannot issue pardons, will increase pressure on the newly indicted and re-indicted to cooperate with authorities in return for reduced charges. Trump’s deodorant will need to file for overtime. For which, by the way, millions of workers will soon be eligible thanks to a new rule issued by Biden’s Department of Labor on Tuesday.

Also Tuesday, Republican voters in Pennsylvania’s closed primary signaled their exhaustion with Trump by handing 16.6% of their votes to Nikki Haley who suspended her race after Super Tuesday (March 5). Trump sits in a New York courtroom while President Biden campaigns there and racks up union endorsements.

It’s going to be a long, hot summer for Team MAGA while Dark Brandon keeps cool in his aviators.

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Four years ago today

Q: You were asking your medical experts to look into sunlight and bleach as treatment. Were you being sarcastic?

TRUMP: No. No, no, no, no. To look into whether or not sun and disinfectant on the hands, but whether or not sun can help us pic.twitter.com/HeHBgL8BOC

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 24, 2024

He actually doubled down on his stupidity.

The Trumpers have already “won” the immunity case:

Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won. 

Three people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that many of the former president’s lawyers and political advisers have already accepted that the justices will likely rule against him, and reject his claims to expansive presidential immunity in perpetuity. Bringing the case before the court — after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., shut down their arguments on executive power — was a delaying tactic designed to push Trump’s criminal election subversion trial past Election Day this fall. The strategy paid off so much more than MAGAworld anticipated. 

“We already pulled off the heist,” says a source close to Trump, noting it doesn’t matter to them what the Supreme Court decides now.

Trump’s lawyers and other confidants had widely expected — and had told the former president as much — that the court maneuver would delay the election subversion trial, but perhaps only to around the summer. For months, Trump attorneys were actively preparing themselves and their client to face a trial, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the violent Jan. 6 assault at the U.S. Capitol, right around the time of the Republican Party’s nominating convention, the sources add.  

If the federal trial were to proceed during this election year, much of Team Trump had predicted it would be significantly more damaging politically to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee than, for instance, his ongoing criminal hush-money trial in Manhattan.

“We planned for that exhausting schedule and split screen,” says a person involved with the planning.

But the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which Trump built as president, came through for him in a way that many Trump advisers didn’t believe was probable. When news broke in late February that the court would take up Trump’s claims of vast immunity, Trumpland was so elated that a lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stone they were “literally popping champagne.” 

They are banking everything on his winning in November. I hate to tell them but if this unfolds the way they think, if he loses this case will go forward and he is going to be tried. They won’t be popping champagne when that happens.

It’s going to be up to the American people to beat him at the polls to hold him accountable. After that, the legal system should carry on and hold him accountable for his crimes.

What is he, three?

Philip Bump did a nice rundown of the “tortured” right wing rationalizations over Trumps criminal behavior. (gift link)If you don’t watch Fox you will be surprised at just how stupid it really is:

If last week is any guide, somewhere north of 2 million people tuned in to Jesse Watters’s prime-time show on Fox News on Monday night to hear him moan that Donald Trump was being tortured. That the treatment the former president was experiencing during his criminal trial in New York was equivalent to — or perhaps worse than? — that experienced by at Guantánamo Bay.

“Donald Trump, been on the move his whole life,” Watters told viewers after describing the purported leniency Democrats had offered those detainees. “Golf. Rallies. Movement. Action. Sunlight. Fresh air. Freedom. This isn’t lawfare. It’s torture.”

He played a clip of a podcast hosted by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen — expected to testify against Trump in the Manhattan hush money case — and whimpered about how unfair it was.

“The star witness, who went to prison for lying,” Watters said, “is torturing Trump and bossing the judge around.”

Both of those things are, in fact, happening in equal measure when Cohen says things on his podcast. Which is to say that neither is happening at all, for obvious reasons.

But Watters was simply building to his central point: that the Manhattan case was simply a function of a personal vendetta against Trump and not, per his own interpretation of state statutes, a violation of the law.

“There’s nothing wrong with the nondisclosure agreement,” Watters told the camera. Then: “Can you believe the Democrats still can’t get over the 2016 election? It’s now a crime to beat Hillary.”

That was the text on the lower third of the screen, too: “IT’S NOW A CRIME TO BEAT HILLARY.”

There’s more, much more, and you should click over to read the whole thing.

A few hours before Watters’s show, “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt dug a little deeper on this idea.

“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” she fretted. “What if they’ve done something like this in the past?” She offered a slippery-slope example: If someone “paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference.”

The short answer is no, of course: If you’re not actively a candidate, you’re not subject to campaign finance rules. But also, is Earhardt — who positions her Christian faith as a central element of her identity — really worried that guys who tried to cover up allegations of extramarital affairs with porn stars might be dissuaded from running for president? That’s the concern? That this unacceptably narrows the field of possible leaders of the country?

Trump has long benefited from his allies excusing or downplaying his behavior and comments. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of his wondering during a news conference whether we couldn’t inject light or disinfectant into people to combat the coronavirus — comments incorrectly distilled as his saying that people should inject bleach but fairly dismissed as unworkable and bizarre. Watters, like many others, has waved those comments away not by defending them but by criticizing the exaggerated criticisms of it.

For nearly nine years now, Trump has been the driving figure on the political right. Over that time, he and his allies have developed robust tactics for dismissing or sidelining criticism. We see them now deployed in a much more challenging context: against a criminal justice system that is predicated on distilling truth from fiction.

The cult will buy anything, obviously. But he’s in court now, with all kinds of rules (which he whines daily are unfaaaaaair!) that apply to all of us. The right wing caterwauling isn’t going to help him there.

Wow. You may have seen a short version of the North America Building Trade Union (@NABTU) video endorsement of Biden. The full video is incredible and absolutely devastating for Trump. They did not hold back. A must watch till the end. pic.twitter.com/stL7b7JazP

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 24, 2024

Except for the police unions, the unions are putting some real muscle behind Biden in this election:

The Bulwark’s JV Last with a very interesting historical observation:

In taking in the testimony of David Pecker, it is tempting to say that he was the Joseph Goebbels of the MAGA movement, but that’s not quite right. Pecker is much closer to Dietrich Eckart.

Let’s talk about this villain.

Dietrich Eckart was a German “journalist” who co-founded the German Worker’s Party, which was the precursor to the Nazi Party.

Eckart met Adolf Hitler in 1919 and saw in him a kindred spirit. They became friends and Eckart was something of a mentor. He believed that Hitler was the man to lead German workers to power. To that end, in 1920 he convinced some Nazi financial backers to purchase a tabloid newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (the “People’s Observer”).

Eckart became the paper’s editor and this former tabloid suddenly started functioning as the house organ of the Nazi Party. The Völkischer Beobachter was not sympathetic to the Nazi Party. It did not have goals and beliefs aligned with the Nazi Party.

It took direction from the Nazi Party.

Which is precisely what David Pecker started doing with the National Enquirer in 2015.

Here’s the Washington Post describing parts of Pecker’s testimony:

In mid-April 2016, the National Enquirer published a story alleging that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had been working with Lee Harvey Oswald in the days before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. This was a ridiculous claim . . . But Trump seized on it the following month after Rafael Cruz attacked him. . . .

Cruz’s “father, you know, was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s, you know, being shot,” he said in an interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” mixing up the details a bit. “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death?” he added. “Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

That story, it turns out, ran with the blessing of Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney-slash-fixer. . . .

Cohen would at times pitch stories, Pecker testified, and the magazine would share stories before they ran to get Cohen’s thoughts. Pecker insisted that he didn’t work with Trump on the stories; whether Trump was apprised of the stories by Cohen can be evaluated based on other evidence. . . .

From the witness stand, Pecker identified other stories targeting Trump’s primary opponents in that cycle: one about neurosurgeon Ben Carson—that the doctor essentially admitted—and one making a similar claim about an alleged extramarital dalliance by Sen. Marco Rubio.

How blatant was the fabrication process? This blatant:

Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked Pecker about the [Cruz-Oswald story’s] origins during the trial Tuesday in Manhattan. Pecker said that then-National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard and the tabloid’s research department got involved, and Pecker indicated that they faked the photo that was the foundation for the story.

“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald. And mashed the two together. And that’s how that story was prepared — created I would say,” Pecker said on the witness stand.

I want to emphasize this again, because it cannot be stressed enough: There is no precedent for this in modern American politics.

We have an ongoing debate here about whether Trump is the logical extension of existing trends in conservative/Republican politics, or something new. And obviously, the truest answer is both.

But it’s worth appreciating that Trump’s relationship with Pecker and the National Enquirer was a genuine innovation. Trump took the media model used by by authoritarian movements in twentieth century Europe and imported it to America.

It really could happen here. In fact David Pecker just testified, under oath, how he made it happen.

He goes on to add this, which really is creepy:

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a headline from this morning:

Luckily, they are both imbeciles.

Think about this:

In his first questions of the day, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch asked Turner to parse exactly how close a patient needs to be to death under Idaho’s law. He asked whether the law would permit an abortion in the case of a molar or ectopic pregnancy — both of which are nonviable and can be life-threatening — but deny one in a case where a patient would probably die at some point, but not imminently.

“It doesn’t matter whether it happens tomorrow or next week or a month from now?” Gorsuch asked.

“There is no imminence requirement,” Turner said. “This whole notion of delayed care is just not consistent with the Idaho Supreme Court’s reading of the statute and what the statute says.”

This is what these monsters are discussing in the Supreme Court today. They are actually turning over in their minds when it’s acceptable to let women die for their grotesque ideology. This whole argument is just horrifying.

From what we have learned, it appears that the Supreme Court majority believes that states have the right to completely deny health care to pregnant women, even if it means they will die.

Joe Biden’s the big winner — on policy anyway

Biden is so old he just got every dime of Ukraine aid and humanitarian relief he asked for despite Republican and Trump resistance and along the way he managed to flip the politics on immigration just for the hell of it.

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) April 24, 2024

While most of the country was riveted by recaps of Donald Trump’s sordid hush money trial on Tuesday, something amazing was happening in Washington: the US Senate debated and then passed the national security package that’s been consuming the capitol for the last six months. With a lopsided vote of 79-18 the bills with aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan among some other things will finally be behind us. Notably, there is no increased funding for the border because Donald Trump ordered the Republicans to reject it so that he can keep demagoguing the issue during the campaign. It’s a big win for President Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The GOP infighting has escalated in the wake of the House’s months long tantrum led by the far right extremists who seemed to truly believe that they could hold their breath until they turned blue and they would eventually get everything they wanted. Leading MAGA rebel Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., left town without calling for Speaker Mike Johnson to vacate the chair, demanding instead that he resign, which isn’t going to happen. Podcaster Steve Bannon and a couple of fellow right wing sad sacks, Thomas Massie,R-Ky., and Paul Gosar, R-Az., joined the call but it’s clear that however frustrated some of them might be there is no appetite for any more internecine fights, at least for the moment. And the rest of the party is obviously sick of the kooks.

GOP Sen. Tom Tillis of North Carolina pulled no punches, talking about Greene’s malign influence, calling her “uninformed” and “a terrible leader” and complaining that she’s “dragging our brand down.”

Senator Thom Tillis on Marjorie Taylor Greene: I think she’s uninformed, she is a total waste of time. She is a horrible leader. She is dragging our brand down… pic.twitter.com/CoUAoWO5gK

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 23, 2024

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales probably speaks for many in his party who are too cowardly to say it as plainly as he did when he called the wild extremists in the GOP “scumbags”

🔥GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales: “I serve with some real scumbags. Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties.”
pic.twitter.com/Z50B6lfgKs

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 21, 2024

They all might want to take a look at the big orange guy who’s actually pulling the strings but then even he’s turning his back on Greene and continuing to support Johnson, telling a radio host:

Look, we have a majority of one, OK? It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on NATO.

It was a bit low energy but it’s pretty clear that he’s not going to back any play to oust the speaker so Greene is sidelined, at least for now.

It’s been a bad run for Trump and for Greene these past few weeks. But you know who’s having a great run? President Joe Biden. His poll numbers are edging up but it’s still incomprehensibly tight considering how much policy success he’s had with a congress that is so dysfunctional. Somehow, he and the Democrats have made it work for them.

I think we’re all familiar with Biden’s big legislative wins in the first two years with the American Rescue Plan which set the table for a very positive economic recovery, the big infrastructure bill which is just coming online all over the country, the first major gun safety bill in decades, capping prescription drug costs for seniors and much more. And it was all done with razor thin majorities in both houses with most passed with bipartisan votes despite what is arguably the most toxic political environment since the 1850s. It was a remarkable feat but I think most observers assumed that was going to be the end of it when the Republicans managed to eke out a tiny victory in House in 2022. How could anything get done with Donald Trump pulling the strings and crazed right wing extremists dominating the caucus?

They had their fun with the Hunter Biden farce and the various “investigations” into the so-called Biden Crime family which have gone nowhere. And immigration has been a genuinely vexing problem that the GOP has exploited as they always do. But as it turns out, while the House Republicans ran around in circles causing chaos on a weekly basis, the important sausage kept getting made. And despite all the drama, the Biden White House ended up getting most of what it wanted without having to give up much of anything in return, at least in part because the Republicans wouldn’t take yes for an answer when concessions were offered.

The biggest achievement was avoiding a costly debt limit/government shutdown and I wouldn’t have bet that would happen. But former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the White House negotiated a spending deal that served as the excuse to take down McCarthy. (As it turns out it was really about McCarthy refusing to stop an ethics investigation into Florida gadfly Matt Gaetz, but that’s another story.) McCarthy’s successor Mike Johnson kept the spending agreement in place and fought off another attempt to shut down the government. Just this past month they passed the FISA extension backed by the White House and now the big national security package, the ugliest sausage making extravaganza ever.

It’s been such pandemonium that it was hard to see exactly what was happening but now that the smoke is clearing it’s obvious that the writing was on the wall when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave so many concessions to the crazies during that bizarre speakers’ race at he beginning of the term. Handing the keys to that faction was a major mistake because those people are maximalists for whom politics is all or nothing and they can’t accept that having a tiny majority in one house of congress makes that impossible.

In the end it took the House Democrats being unprecedentedly united, despite some very real tensions within their own coalition, and a willingness for some moderate Republicans to finally stand their ground despite dilly-dallying around for months. Majority leader Schumer, kept his majority together without the centrist divas causing any trouble for once. Not only that, Senate Republicans who haven’t completely gone insane refused to follow the House model and came through on the important issues as well.

But there’s no doubt that it took a very steady hand in the White House to stay the course and keep working the legislative levers to get the job done. It wasn’t pretty but under the circumstances the achievements are very big wins at little cost. Meanwhile the Republicans are reeling with internal strife while their leader sits in a courtroom every day facing a jury in his criminal trial for paying off a porn star. You can’t ask for much more than that in an election year.

Salon