What in the world, you wonder? Well…
There was a Biden impeachment hearing today at which Hunter himself turned up making himself available to testify publicly again. The Republicans were … upset.
Here are the highlights:
Then Marge took the mic and Hunter got up and walked out.
The hearing is being run by circus clowns so why would anyone expect something other than a circus?
I keep hearing anecdotal reports of Republicans who are saying they will not vote for Trump this time. I don’t know if they aren’t being represented in the polls or what, but there’s a lot of it and since it’s coming from the GOP primary reporting it’s worth mentioning. This one from Jonathan Martin at Politico who followed the Haley campaign for a while and had this impression:
The most memorable feature of Haley’s otherwise forgettable gathering was not what she said but the nature of her audience — and how it explains why Trump is poised to win overwhelmingly in Iowa on Monday but will face the same general election challenges in 2024 he did in 2020.
I would have liked to see more discussion of that but this piece was about the GOP voters who are rejecting Trump. But it’s important that someone mention this general election dynamic, even in passing. Maybe he’ll develop that in a later piece.
I struggled to find a single attendee in the suburban strip mall tavern who was not a college graduate. Similarly, the day before, I couldn’t find a Haley admirer who showed up to see her in Sioux City who was not also a college graduate.
“She’s reasonable,” Jim Maine, a Waukee resident, said of Haley. “Originally I was favoring DeSantis, but he just hasn’t connected.”
Maine had no use for Trump, calling the former president “a jilted junior high boyfriend” who “makes up names for people.”
A retiree, Maine was an accountant for an insurance company — “pretty standard around here,” as he put it of Dallas County. Now, none of his neighbors “who voted for [Trump] the last couple of times are going to vote for him again.”
If it all sounds like a windup to a sort of cul-de-sac Pauline Kaelism — I don’t know anyone in our homeowners association voting for Trump! — well, that’s the defining story of today’s Republican Party. The GOP’s traditional, professional class base is eager to move on from somebody they find between embarrassing and appalling, but the party’s beating heart is now Trump-loving working class voters.
The old Republican construct of establishment-vs-conservative — one that DeSantis, in particular, is operating under as he runs to the right — is about as relevant to the Trump era as the Blackberry. The most consequential fault line in this race and in GOP politics broadly is based on class.
That’s how Democratic primaries have been covered, and rightfully so, for the last 40 years. The candidate able to emerge as the beer-track hopeful almost always emerges as the nominee while the wine-track hopeful is limited to pinot-sipping precincts (hat tip to Ron Brownstein for the terminology).
This race is scarcely different.
Haley and DeSantis are largely competing for the votes of Iowa’s upscale voters — DeSantis was in Waukee last week — while Trump is on course to roll with the overwhelming support of blue-collar Iowans.
It is, of course, a delicate topic anywhere, but even more so with voters who pride themselves on being Iowa Nice.
One couple at Haley’s event in Waukee was happy to discuss their support for her but asked I not use their names for what they had to say about the former president.
“All our friends who voted for Trump have moved onto other candidates,” said the husband, a retired banker from nearby Polk County, the largest jurisdiction in the state. “But they’re all Polk County people. You get out to rural Iowa, and you start talking to them …”
His voice trailed off as he talked in disbelief about how Trump’s felony counts only reinforce his support with such voters.
In separate polls conducted by the Des Moines Register and Fox Business last month, Trump had the support of 61 percent of Iowans without college degrees while his two main opponents were only in the teens or below.
And the reason why Haley has such high hopes in New Hampshire, particularly if Chris Christie drops out, is because the state is an outlier in the modern party: less religious, more educated and wealthier. She and Christie are sitting on the votes of a heavily upscale demographic, which if combined could make for a competitive race.
Consider the new CNN-University of New Hampshire poll there: Haley is now only down to Trump by single digits because she is soundly defeating him among voters there with a college degree and even more heavily among those with an advanced degree.
Haley’s challenge is that New Hampshire may only represent a false dawn, a blip before the primary returns to states with a downscale demographic more like Iowa.She may find hope in New Hampshire, but that would only tempt her to return home to South Carolina and discover that she’s Hootie and the Blowfish to Trump’s Taylor Swift.
Ouch.
I think he’s right about all this. New Hampshire is an outlier in the primaries and there’s little chance that Haley’s going to be able to gather enough delegates even if she does well in big states like California which is voting early this year.
But what’s important about this is the fact that these people are saying they won’t vote for Trump again in the general election. It would be preferable if they would hold their Republican noses and vote for Biden but if they want to stay home that’s certainly ok too.
Trump is not going to wear any better on this faction of the GOP. He’s going to alienate them even more because he is under 91 indictments and acts downright demented on the trail spewing Nazi rhetoric. I don’t know how many of these disaffected Republicans are out there but it only takes a few to make a huge difference in the swing states.
The idea that former President Donald Trump was performing his official duties when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” and then sat in his dining room watching them storm the building and refusing to do anything to quell the riot has always seemed to be a stretch. After he lost 60 of 61 court cases in which he tried to overturn the results of the election that he continued to exhort the top officials in the Justice Department to lie and say they had evidence of fraud hardly seems like a presidential duty either. And all the calls to local officials asking them “find” enough votes to change the outcome of their election wouldn’t normally be considered the job of a president. American elections, for better or worse, are processed by state and local authorities.
Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s lawyers had filed an appeal in the US District court arguing that everything he did in the post election period were part of Donald Trump’s official duties as President and therefore he should be given immunity for all of it which is ridiculous. But even more ridiculous, his lawyers didn’t really end up addressing that claim that in oral arguments before the court on Tuesday, instead focusing on a truly fatuous assertion that unless a president has been impeached and convicted by the US Congress he cannot be prosecuted for anything that happened during his term in office. This naturally led to some very unusual questioning by the judges:
I think even smart elementary school kids could see the holes in that argument. What if a president just resigned before the impeachment so that he would be immune from prosecution for his heinous acts? What if he decided to have enough members of the Senate killed as well so they couldn’t get to the two thirds majority required for conviction? Once you start handing out immunity from crimes unless they follow the very weak political process of impeachment you’ve pretty much said all bets are off and the president of the United States has a license to kill.
Basically Trump’s lawyer seemed to get backed into this ridiculous argument and couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. All he had to do was say that ordering a hit on a political opponent could never be part of a president’s official duties so such an act would not qualify for immunity. But then that would have brought the argument back to the also terrible but not completely embarrassing grounds on which they had originally wanted to make it — the absurd notion that Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were part of his official duties.
That original argument didn’t hold much water anyway. Judge Karen L. Henderson, appointed by George H.W. Bush, wasn’t impressed with the argument that Trump attempted to overturn the fully adjudicated, legal election because it is his constitutional duty to ensure that election laws are upheld. As she said, “I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate the criminal law.”
The original standard they are sort of basing this on was developed by the DOJ’s Office of Legal counsel to ensure that a president could not be criminally prosecuted while he was in office and over and over again as this has come up in various investigations and earlier impeachments, parties on all sides made it clear that any president who breaks the law could be prosecuted after his term was over. Why else would Gerald Ford have pardoned Richard Nixon or would Bill Clinton have entered into a plea agreement with the Office of Special Counsel when he left office? Did none of the lawyers involved have the Trump team’s sophisticated understanding of the US Constitution? Unlikely in the extreme.
Trump attended the arguments in person even though he didn’t need to. I suspect it’s partly because he thinks that glowering at the judges in his cases intimidates them. According to news reports he sat emotionless most of the time but scribbled what were likely instructions when the prosecution was speaking. He seemed very pleased when his lawyer made the irrelevant, political arguments that Trump is winning in all the polls, which is also a lie.
Trump also just likes to be a part of the story so he can pound home to his followers that he is being persecuted for their crimes. But it didn’t work out so well for his this time. The court house required him to enter in the back and there were no cameras in the hallways or out front so he had to retreat to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to hold his little post-hearing press briefing. He expressed his firm conviction that “as president you have to have immunity, very simple” and said that there would be “bedlam” if the courts didn’t buy his argument, obviously signaling his flock to stand back and stand by. He concluded with this:
We’ll probably get the District Court opinion quite soon and then it will be on to the Supremes for Trump’s appeal, should they decide to accept it. In the meantime, there will be plenty of Trump Trial action in the next few days. The second E. Jean Carroll defamation case begins next week (in which, incidentally, the US Appeals Court from the 2nd circuit refused to rehear Trump’s earlier “immunity” argument on Monday.) And closing arguments in his fraud trial are scheduled for Thursday. Trump announced that he will be giving the closing arguments himself in that case, ostensibly because he knows the case better than anyone. I assume he got his law degree from Trump University.
As we watch these legal cases really start to take off it’s both reassuring that it seems as though rational people are in charge of the proceedings and nerve wracking considering that Trump’s main strategy — to delay the process as long as possible — may end up working simply because the judicial system is not built for speed. He’ll try to wrap up the primaries as early as possible and officially become the presumptive nominee and then claim that the political process must supersede the legal process until the election is over.
He doesn’t care if his lawyers make fools of themselves in court just as long he can push off the trial date as long as possible. In that sense reason may be winning the battles at every turn, just as they did with the election cases in 2020. But Trump could end up winning the war.
And a tad more discipline, just maybe?
Associated Press this morning from the West Bank: Video appears to show the Israeli army shot 3 Palestinians, killing 1, without provocation
Washington Post this morning from the West Bank: Settlers killed a Palestinian teen. Israeli forces didn’t stop it.
Associated Press Dec. 18: In Israel’s killing of 3 hostages, some see the same excessive force directed at Palestinians
Associated Press Dec. 15: Israeli military opens probe after videos show Israeli forces killing 2 Palestinians at close range
The response to the horrific Hamas terrorist murders is to turn Israel into a pariah state?
What sort of America do you want? That question will not appear on fall ballots but will be there nonetheless alongside whether we continue the American experiment in democracy.
Gover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, famously hoped to return conditions in these United States to those of the late-Gilded Age McKinley administration (1897 – 1901). Upton Sinclair savaged conditions in the American meatpacking industry in “The Jungle” a few short years after McKinley.
Today’s second Gilded Age MAGA Republicans are onboard.
Indiana state Rep. Joanna King (R) this week introduced a bill that would exempt children at least 14 years of age and who have completed the eighth grade from attending school to work (with parental permission) on a farm during school hours.
King is treading a wider path blazed last March by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas (BuzzFeed):
Under the new law, children under 16 no longer have to get permission from the state’s Division of Labor to get a job, nor will they need to have their age verified or submit things like their work schedule for a permit. In addition to no longer needing to get a work certificate, children won’t need their parents’ consent.
Sanders’s communication director, Alexa Henning, told BuzzFeed News in an email that the permit was “an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.”
The law’s sponsor said the law was prompted not by local businesses, but by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida think tank, wrote Gene Lyons of the Chicago Sun-Times. He was less than approving:
This isn’t about the white, suburban kids Sanders gathers around her for photo ops. She recently signed a bill funneling state money to private school vouchers, surrounded by a crowd of children without a single Black or brown face in evidence, lest anybody fail to get the message.
Led mainly by Republican legislators, at least 10 states including Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and New Hampshire have considered rolling back child labor laws, ostensibly to address labor shortages, WGBH reported in October:
“[Nationwide] we’re finding kids in automobile factories on the floor of a packing house, or some chicken processing plants and in other manufacturing facilities, in seafood, in lots of industries where we really haven’t seen children working in decades,” said David Weil, Brandeis University professor and a former administrator for the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Department of Labor. “And now we’re finding them in significant numbers and in very dangerous conditions, so it’s unfortunately a real return to the past.”
[…]
“We’re seeing a coordinated multi-industry push to roll back labor standards, and what that’s really reflecting is industry’s desire to maintain and expand their access to pools of low wage labor,” said Jennifer Sherer, director of the State Worker Power Initiative at the Economic Policy Institute. “And in this case doing that in a really disturbing way that can expose children to hazardous conditions or long, excessive hours that we know based on research, can put kids in a high risk category for their grades slipping.”
Let’s be clear: Democrats want an American economy that serves you. Republicans want an America in which you serve the economy.
To that end it is not enough that undereducated children be put to work in fields, factories and slaughterhouses. Women must birth more babies even if it kills them.
Evan Koch opines today in the Coeur d’Alene Press (Idaho):
This past week Sen. Chuck Winder (R-Boise) said that abortion contributes to Idaho’s workforce shortage.
Winder told the Idaho Statesman, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers. There’s a reason, it’s not just the low birth rate. It’s the number of abortions that have occurred.” (https://bit.ly/GOPQuote)
Winder, who speaks for his party, believes women should produce more babies to create more service workers.
Relaxing child labor laws, forced birth for addressing a shortage of “service workers,” and Lyons’ comment about bills funneling state education funds away from public schools takes me back to a persistent memory. I’ve referred to “royalists” among us who, while professing their love of America and freedom and all that, exhibit an attitude toward governance that’s more feudal than modern. Their condemnation of liberal “elites” is a bit of projection, isn’t it?
Driving the first time through a Beverly Hills neighborhood decades ago, I was suprised to see beat-up pickup trucks parked in front of so many grand homes. It took a moment to realize they belonged to groundskeepers and gardeners. Service workers.
Since then it has always seemed that the conservative attitude toward education spending has been this: How much education do waiters and gardeners need anyway?
“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” — Nebraska social worker Grace Abbott, 1938
Get a load of the latest “policy” proposals on immigration coming from Stephen Miller and the extreme white nationalists:
AS HE CAMPAIGNS on a pledge to lead an unprecedented crackdown on legal and illegal immigration, former President Donald Trump has vowed to invoke an 18th-century wartime law to help fuel his massive deportation operations. According to three people familiar with the policy deliberations, Trump, his advisers, and allies have been developing legally dubious justifications and theories to give Trump what he would ostensibly need to wield the archaic law as a weapon against the undocumented if he’s elected president again.
If Trump were to try to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for this purpose, it would almost certainly provoke court challenges, since the law is meant to target the actions of foreign governments and regimes during wartime, not alleged criminals, gangs, or non-state actors. One source familiar with the plans — a lawyer who has counseled Trump over the years — tells Rolling Stone the legal justifications under consideration by the ex-president and his associates are “very convoluted and crazy to me.”
This attorney adds, “I really don’t know how you get away with this in court.”
Still, the former president and some of his closest allies are determined to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and put these legal theories to the test, should Trump retake the White House. Trump’s public remarks on the matter have presented little detail about how, exactly, he and his government-in-waiting would circumvent the glaring legal obstacles. The three sources shed light on some of the twisted legal justifications being cooked up by Trump and his inner sanctum.
Last year, right-wing lawyers and policy advocates repeatedly spoke directly to Trump, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, and others in the MAGA elite about these ideas and generally received positive feedback, the people familiar with the situation say. One of the sources read to Rolling Stone from a written memo that had been circulated in the upper ranks of Trumpland, outlining how Trump in a second term could “get this done,” the source says, stressing that this would be supposedly “all legal.”
Hitler’s deportation policies were all “legal” too. And yes, it’s all about deportation:
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act is a key component of the multi-pronged immigration and southern-border clampdown that Trump is planning. The law, first passed in 1798, grants presidents the authority to remove foreign nationals over the age of 14 from countries where the United States is either engaged in a declared war or subject to “invasion or predatory incursion” by their country of origin.
The text of the law presents a number of problems for the would-be mass deportation plans, which opponents would likely attempt to leverage in federal court. Congress has not declared war on any country since World War II, much less on any of the Latin American countries whose citizens Trump would like to deport. Nor has any foreign country invaded the U.S. since the post-war period.
But the sources say a second Trump administration would, for instance, argue in court that cartels, gangs, and drug dealers in Latin America have, essentially, co-opted and corrupted their governments to such a degree that the criminals represent effective state actors. Trump and his senior officials would present documents and evidence that these foreign nations — including Mexico and El Salvador — have lengthy track records of corrupt high-level government and law-enforcement officials being on the payroll of and working with drug cartels and violent criminal groups.
The administration would further claim, according to the sources, that members of cartels and gangs in the U.S. are therefore engaged in an invasion on behalf of foreign narco-states — enabling Trump to use the authorities of the Alien Enemies Act, which in text appears to apply strictly to foreign governments attacking the U.S.
By using the Alien Enemies Act, rather than existing immigration enforcement authority, a future Trump administration could “suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding,” Miller explained during a September talk-radio appearance. Once migrants are relieved of their right to due process and appeals, Trump could more easily carry out a mass deportation operation of the scale he has outlined in campaign speeches.
Analysts don’t think it would pass legal muster. But who knows? I don’t think it’s worth taking a chance, do you?
Did you think he wouldn’t go there?
Paul Krugman makes an important point today that I’ve been dying for someone with a big perch to make about the economy. The constant media refrain that the “American public” is deeply dissatisfied with everything, especially the economy ,does not tell the whole story:
The economy is good, but Americans feel bad about it. Or do they?
The more I look into it, the more I’m convinced that much of what looks like poor public perception about the economy is actually just Republicans angry that Donald Trump isn’t still president.
Last year was a very good one for the U.S. economy. Job growth was strong, unemployment remained near a 50-year low and inflation plunged. Some reports I’ve seen suggest that this favorable combination was somehow paradoxical and contrary to economic theory. In fact, however, it’s exactly what textbook economics says to expect in an economy experiencing an improvement in its productive capacity.
[…]
Furthermore, the source of the positive supply shock is obvious: The economy finally got past the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Working out those disruptions took longer than almost anyone expected, then happened faster than almost anyone expected, but there’s no great mystery here. If some prominent economists denied that such a thing was possible, well, that’s their problem.
What is a mystery is why the improving economy hasn’t been reflected in public perceptions. There have been some fairly elaborate analyses of the divergence between economic fundamentals and consumer sentiment, but here’s a simple version:
The blue line is the economic sentiment index that has been produced for decades by the University of Michigan. The red line is the “misery index,” the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, inverted so that up means improved conditions. Until a few years ago, these two measures generally moved together. But despite an uptick in the most recent numbers (not shown), consumer sentiment remains at levels that in the past were associated with severe recessions, very high inflation or both.
As I and many others have pointed out, consumers’ behavior doesn’t match the grim answers they give pollsters: Actual consumer spending remains strong. Still, where is that negative assessment coming from?
Now, Michigan isn’t the only game in town. Another long-running survey, from the Conference Board, paints a more favorable picture, especially for perceptions of the present situation as opposed to expectations. And there’s a newer, internet-based survey, from Civiqs; I am by no means an expert on economic surveys, but Civiqs seems to be using fairly sophisticated methodology.
And their results on economic views by political affiliation look broadly in line with those found by Michigan for “current economic conditions.” The difference is that the Michigan numbers, which are based on a small sample, are very noisy, while Civiqs uses a bigger sample plus statistical wizardry to produce “smoothly trending estimates.” I wouldn’t bet my life on the Civiqs estimates, but in what follows I’m going to use them to suggest that one of the factors everyone knows is affecting consumer sentiment — partisanship — may be even more important than most economists realize. Indeed, weak consumer sentiment may be almost entirely about MAGA.
It has been obvious for a while that views of the economy have become increasingly partisan. It’s also clear that this partisanship is asymmetric: Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say that the economy is good when their party holds the White House and bad when it doesn’t.
But the Civiqs charts show this asymmetric partisanship especially clearly. Here are their results for self-identified Republicans:
Republican assessments of the economy soared when Donald Trump took office. Even during the pandemic recession, when unemployment rose to almost 15 percent, Republicans had a more favorable view of the economy than they did in the Obama years. And when Joe Biden came in, almost all Republicans declared that the economy was bad — a view that has barely budged in the face of good macroeconomic news.
Democrats are not Republicans’ mirror image. Here’s what the Civiqs numbers look like:
If you squint hard, you might see some decline in Democratic economic optimism around the time of Trump’s election, but it’s small. Democrats did feel better about the economy after Biden won, but the economy actually was improving as we recovered from the Covid shutdown. And Democrats’ economic sentiment thereafter followed economic fundamentals, declining as inflation rose, then improving as inflation came down.
What about independents? Never mind. True independents, voters without partisan leaning, barely exist; data for independents is basically an average of voters who think like Democrats and voters who think like Republicans.
What I find most interesting about Democrats’ numbers is what we don’t see: a clear drag on sentiment from the level of prices. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence — and innumerable posts on social media — to the effect that Americans are upset about how much things cost rather than the inflation rate over the past year. But that’s not obvious from the Civiqs chart on Democrats, who are roughly as positive about the economy now as they were in Biden’s early months, before the big price increases of 2021-22.
I’m not prepared to completely dismiss the issue of the overall price level, which is backed by academic research as well as anecdotes. But as I said, it’s not obvious in the survey data.
So maybe we should at least entertain the hypothesis that the historically anomalous behavior of consumer sentiment reflects the historically anomalous nature of the modern G.O.P., two-thirds of whose supporters believe — based on no evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen. Maybe economic polling, like everything else with this crowd, is all about MAGA.
If that’s really true, the political implications are somewhat ambiguous. Poor economic sentiment may not weigh on Biden because it’s being driven by people who would never vote for him anyway. On the other hand, this interpretation suggests that most of the political upside of an improving economy may already be baked in, since Democrats have already accepted the good news, while Republicans never will.
In any case, the general point is that you just can’t interpret surveys of economic sentiment, or for that matter anything else, without taking into account the fact that the modern G.O.P. bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of past years, or for that matter any political party in modern U.S. history.
This does not surprise me in the least, neither does it surprise me that the media is happy to elide this distinction and pass on the gloom and doom as if it represents the whole country. Pundits commonly casually assert that both parties are equally partisan when it comes to objective assessments of the economy and other issues and it just is not true.
MAGA is dragging down the numbers because they worship Donald Trump and he lost. That’s what this is. And it really shouldn’t take a genius economist to say it.
“A president has to have immunity. And the other thing was, I did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong.”
The argument before the panel on the DC circuit was held this morning and it doesn’t sound like they were buying it:
Former Manhattan prosecutor Karen Agnifilo took to CNN Tuesday to discuss a moment in Trump’s presidential immunity hearing when his trial lawyers were confronted with past statements made in his impeachment hearings in January 2021.
“Clearly, Trump’s arguments in other forums are coming back to haunt him,” Agnifilo said. “You cannot be inconsistent and disingenuous when you are speaking to the court.”
Agnifilo was responding to a question from host Kaitlan Collins, who noted Trump’s impeachment lawyers said presidents could be criminally prosecuted.Skip Ad
The former prosecutor then argued that the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit would take into account past legal forums before they ruled on the two protections Trump wants to claim.
The first being that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution and the second that a former impeachment triggers double jeopardy, the rule that says a person can’t be tried twice for a single crime.
“What I thought that the appellate court did a really excellent job here was narrowing the issues down,” Agnifilo said. “At the end Judge [Florence] Pan got Mr. [Dean John] Sauer, who represents Trump, to concede there is no absolute immunity here.”
It will go to the Supremes of course. But according to some of the brighter legal eagles, if the DC Circuit rules against Trump it’s a real possibility that they might just let it stand. Boy will Trump be mad if that happens. But they would be wise to do it.
If the high court wants to maintain even a shred of credibility, they will rule against this immunity claim. But that might make them also rule against the 14th Amendment claim. They are a political entity even if they pretend not to be.
They can say those two decisions split the difference. It won’t make anyone happy but there’s nothing they can do about that. They’re playing for history.
If you want to go deep on this, this analysis of potential timelines from Just Security is very helpful.
By the way, here’s Trump vowing revenge if he wins the election:
This should be in every ad, print, digital and TV, for the next 10 months.
“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president, I just don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”
Oops:
By the way: