Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I think we’ve all probably pored over Timothy Snyder’s little booklet “On Tyranny: 20 lessons for democracy” more than a few times over the past few years. (If you haven’t, get it. It’s worth it.) Anyway, I was intrigued by this piece by William Saletan for the same reason:

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

1. Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
2. Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
3. Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
4. Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
5. Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
6. Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
7. Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
8. Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
9. Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
10. Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
11. Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
12. Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
13. Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
14. Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
15. Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
16. A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
17. Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
18. Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
19. It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
20. It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.

This is part of Saletan’s super interesting deep dive into what happened to Lindsey Graham. It’s not about what a servile fool he is — he is used as a representative for the entire Republican party:

Many other journalists have written about Graham and Trump. Most of them have focused on the personal relationship between the two men. They examine the ways in which Graham’s evolution was distinctive.

I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work?

We need to answer these questions because the authoritarian threat is bigger than one man. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency destroyed the myth that the United States was immune to despotism. Our institutions and the people who run them are vulnerable. We have to confront these vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with them before our democracy is threatened again.

So why focus on Graham?

First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.

It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.

The verdict found him guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll to the tune of over 5 millions dollars. The verdict was unanimous (which it does not have to be in a civil trial) and the jury included at least one MAGA wingnut who admitted that a far right youtuber was his main source of news, which says something.

Trump was not found guilty of rape, however. According to legal commentary on MSNBC, it was probably because while she clearly knew he penetrated her with his fingers, she felt something else but she couldn’t see if it was his penis. (Fingers don’t count in a rape charge, I guess.)

He has been found guilty by a jury of sexual battery and defaming his victim. This is how the right is dealing with it:

Minutes after Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, a Newsmax guest calls it a "major win" for Trump: "Don't worry about the money. Whether it's $4 or 5 million, that means nothing to Trump. He did not want to be labelled a rapist" pic.twitter.com/nzwyJUbl5O

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) May 9, 2023

Trump hasn’t gotten the memo:

Here’s how Trump’s Christian followers are dealing with it:

This piece by Dan Pfeiffer in the NY Times makes the case. This has got to stop:

After months of unity, some Democrats, reverting to their natural state of disarray, are breaking ranks to pressure the president to the table. A poll from Echelon Insights showed that voters support the idea of negotiating over the debt limit.

Mr. Biden’s strategy is undoubtedly risky. But from the perspective of someone who had a front-row seat inside the White House to the last two debt-limit standoffs between a Democratic president and a Republican House, Mr. Biden’s refusal to negotiate on the debt ceiling is the best strategy. Facing an urgent deadline and a daunting political context — with the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, joined to an unstable, far-right bloc of Republican representatives who limit his maneuverability — the president can ideally find a way to extend discussions around the debt ceiling and fiscal issues. Otherwise, he will have to find a way around the House.

The president must know that Mr. McCarthy is not a negotiating partner who can be trusted to deliver. The speaker’s fate is in the hands of representatives — including many House Freedom Caucus members — who have shown very little willingness for compromise or good-faith negotiation. With their threats to plunge the country into default for the first time in its history, they can plausibly be seen as a threat to the nation’s economy and its stability as a global financial power.

That puts severe limits on the terms of any discussion about the debt ceiling. Still, Republicans won control of the House in the midterms. They have a legitimate voice in any debates over the country’s fiscal future. Mr. Biden should negotiate with Mr. McCarthy over the budget and other fiscal matters and propose a process for doing that — but first, Mr. McCarthy must remove the threat of imminent default.

President Barack Obama confronted similar scenarios twice. In 2011, he spent months negotiating with Speaker John Boehner to strike a “grand bargain” that would help solve America’s longstanding fiscal problems. But Mr. Boehner couldn’t deliver his caucus in support of the framework, and the nation hurtled toward default. With only a few days to go, negotiators were able to strike a smaller agreement that satisfied no one, left both sides angry about the result and was damaging for the country. The United States’ credit rating was downgraded for the first time in the nation’s history, and borrowing costs for the government went up.

Mr. Obama’s approval rating slumped, even dipping below 40 percent in Gallup polling. Our internal polling in the White House showed the president losing re-election handily to a generic Republican. A painful lesson was learned: Negotiating with the ticking clock of a global financial collapse was a losing proposition.

In 2013, Republicans tried to leverage the debt limit again — this time they targeted his signature legislation by pushing to defund the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama declared that as a matter of principle, he would not negotiate over the debt limit. It was Congress’s job to lift the debt limit, he said, and Republicans would do it or take the blame for sparking a global recession. From the White House, we watched the G.O.P.’s poll numbers go into the toilet. Their polls must have shown the same thing, because they eventually abandoned their demands and passed a clean debt limit bill.

Republicans are at it again, targeting a signature piece of legislation — this time, the Inflation Reduction Act — and demanding draconian spending cuts.

Mr. Biden was deeply involved in the decision-making during the Obama-era debt limit fights. He knows what is at stake. His re-election campaign will undoubtedly rely in part on his record of bipartisan accomplishment in the first two years. His reputation as someone willing to compromise with the other side is a political asset.

Refusing to negotiate with Mr. McCarthy is off brand. But even if the optics of Mr. Biden seeming obstinate are bad, they pale in comparison with the devastating consequences of default. Sure, the public is likely to blame the House Republicans for pushing us over the cliff. That’s what our polling showed in 2011 and 2013. But after the dust settles, the incumbent president running for re-election will pay the political price for the dire economic consequences.

The only politics that matter is avoiding default — and Mr. Biden’s approach is the best way to do that. It also offers Mr. Biden a chance to highlight two qualities that he will likely run on in 2024: He’s a man of principle, but he’s also a sensible man who can get things done.

The biggest impediment to negotiations is that, with Mr. McCarthy, the president faces a weak negotiating partner. That said, Mr. Biden should have two objectives. The first is to make sure the debt limit is extended through the election so that we are not right back in this precarious position next year.

To get that, he will need to work with Mr. McCarthy to find a framework for fiscal negotiations. Perhaps that means drawing Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, into the process. Mr. McConnell has repeatedly said he has no plans to get involved and that it was up to Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Biden to work out a deal. But in the past, deals with Mr. McConnell’s imprimatur were able to garner enough Republicans to succeed in the House and save face for a Republican speaker.

This will not be easy. The House Republicans might be too far right to be part of a deal. After all, any deal between the president and the speaker will still require a majority of the House and at least 60 Senate votes. It’s frankly very hard to see a deal or deals that could have Mr. Biden’s support as well as the support of a majority of House Republicans — especially since Mr. McCarthy has made it clear that, to continue his speakership, his strategy is to stay in the good graces of the Freedom Caucus and other MAGA Republicans.

Still, the most important reason to avoid entering into negotiations over the debt limit itself goes beyond politics. It is why, in 2011, Mr. Obama pledged never again after trying to negotiate with the Republicans. Allowing the Republicans to use the threat of default as extortion could cripple the remainder of Mr. Biden’s presidency.

This time it’s spending cuts and work requirements for Medicaid recipients. What happens when the debt limit comes up again next year? Will the Republicans demand a federal abortion ban? A pardon for the Jan. 6 perpetrators?

Another option reportedly under consideration by the White House is whether the president can use the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt limit. Even if he can, it would surely be a break-glass moment: Invoking the 14th Amendment could buy a little time to keep paying creditors, veterans’ health benefits, Social Security and the like. But it would put the fate of the global economy in the hands of the courts, and it’s not clear how the markets would react to that uncertainty.

The 2023 debt ceiling crisis seems much more dangerous than the ones President Obama dealt with when I worked in the West Wing. A lot is going to happen in the next few weeks, but if Democrats want to avoid default and once again save the nation from radical Republicans, their best bet is sticking with President Biden and calling the Republicans’ bluff.

It’s risky no matter what. But empowering these loons will only lead to worse. They have shown over and over again that nothing will appease them.

One of the Georgia fake electors says he was just doing what Trump’s lawyers told him to do:

Lawyers representing David Shafer, the embattled chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, are arguing their client should not be charged with any crimes for his actions following the 2020 election because he was following advice provided by attorneys working for former President Donald Trump, according to a letter sent to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis last week.

Specifically, Shafer’s attorneys say their client was relying on “repeated and detailed advice of legal counsel” when he organized a group of “contingent” electors from Georgia and served as one himself, thus “eliminating any possibility of criminal intent or liability,” according to a copy of the May 5 letter.

The letter, which was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, comes as Willis and her team of prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are planning to make an announcement on possible charges against Trump or his allies later this summer.

Shafer, who sources previously told CNN could be among those indicted when Willis makes her charging announcements, has come under scrutiny for his role in the effort to put forward alternate slates of electors to block the certification of the 2020 presidential vote.

In their letter to Willis’s office, Shafer’s lawyers say he was “given very direct, detailed legal advice on the procedure he should follow, and he followed those instructions to the letter.”

“I believe that any fair-minded person, with possession of all the facts, would conclude that Mr. Shafer and the other presidential elector nominees acted lawfully and appropriately,” the letter adds.

I suppose that doesn’t implicate Trump specifically, but we know he was heavily involved in Georgia, don’t we? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this really does implicate Rudy Giuliani who ran the Georgia legal gambit. Bring popcorn.

BtW, they’re still nuts:

Even though Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp romped to an easy reelection victory last fall, a faction of Georgia Republicans loyal to former President Donald Trump are still trying to give him the boot.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the Georgia Republican Assembly is proposing a new plan that would give the state party the right to block candidates from running for office as Republicans if they are deemed insufficiently loyal.

What’s more, the group has made clear that its targets include not only Kemp, but also Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused former President Donald Trump’s pleas to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“If the candidate has shown himself to be a traitor to the principles of the party, then the party can vote to exclude him from qualifying at the next election,” Nathaniel Darnell, a GRA leader, said in justifying the new rule.

Don’t repeat the mistakes of 2016

Yes, it’s Mike Allen. But remember how wrong we were in 2016. No way was America crazy enough to elect Donald Trump as president:

Call it the Trump Law of Inverse Reactions: Everything that would seem to hurt the former president only makes him stronger.

Why it matters: Trump’s grip over Republicans seems stronger than ever — and chances of beating President Biden are as high as ever.

Allen checks off the Trump investigations, the 34 felony indictments, the expected indictments, the rape trial and the rest, like he’s Arlo Guthrie ticking off the 24-8×10 color glossy pictures, etc. And that’s not to mention the two impeachments. (Allen doesn’t.)

And still Trump is the frontrunner for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination.

What we’re hearing: For the first time in a long time, top Republicans and Democrats are telling us the same thing, in the same words — Trump looks impossible to beat for the Republican nomination.

• And if Trump is the GOP nominee, he could have a better-than-coin-flip chance of moving back into the White House. A Washington Post-ABC News poll out Sunday had Trump leading Biden by seven points — outside the margin of error — in a theoretical rematch.
• A stunning finding in that poll: Even though majorities think Trump should face criminal charges, 18% (!) of those who want him arrested still back him over Biden.

The bottom line: Here’s another echo of 2016. Beltway and establishment Republicans are fantasizing that something magical will make Trump go away — instead of deploying a coordinated effort to supplant him.

You know how that worked out last time.

The 18% have gone down the rabbit hole, turned the hole inside out, flattened reality and formed it into a Möbius strip. They are beyond saving. What of the rest of us?

“Trump far surpasses Biden in being seen as having the mental sharpness and the physical health it takes to serve effectively as president,” reports ABC News. Yes, and quartz crystals soaked overnight in water energize it into a renewable, nonpolluting fuel.

I underestimated the lunatics in 2016:

“Do you think Trump can win?”

One after another nervous Democrat asked that as Nov. 8, 2016 approached. No, I reassured them. Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have been a mess viewed from our redoubt, but a Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster. As crazy as Americans can be, they were not that crazy.

Then I greeted voters outside a nearby polling place on Election Day. A smiling woman wearing a thick, black shawl in seventy-degree weather offered Republican voters a list of “pro-life, pro-Israel, constitution and liberty” candidates. Occasionally, she raised her arms and talked to the cloudless sky.

Talks To The Sky’s candidate won that day. Get busy beating him/them.

Culture wars are real ones

We should have taken her more seriously. It was the summer of 2018 when a Twitter user named Amanda Blount inadvertantly launched a viral meme mocking Alex Jones’ claim that Democrats were planning to launch a second civil war over the July 4th holiday to unseat President Trump. Mimicking the Ken Burns miniseries, lefties had a field day with #secondcivilwarletters.

My Dear John,

The war isn't going as planned. Our supply trucks are limited. I'm out of wine and sunscreen. The enemy burned all the books and there is no place to recharge my Kindle. The only music is an old CD of Justin Bieber. – All is lost. #secondcivilwarletters

— Amanda Blount 🇺🇸🌻 (@amandablount2) July 2, 2018

Since then, “every accusation is a confession” has gained traction on the left. What conservatives accuse the left of doing is often what the extremist right is actually doing. A second civil war by “patriots” could look like the scattered, low-grade terrorism actually playing out across the country every day.

Jeff Sharlet’s “January 6 Was Only the Beginning” appeared in the July/August 2022 issue of Vanity Fair. But hearing his audiobook reading in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War” delivers more punch. He lived it. He was there. At a Sacramento rally for MAGA martyr Ashli Babbitt. At Glad Tidings, a “militia church” in Yuba City afterwards, to hear David Straight, a guy from deep down the MAGA/QAnon rabbit hole, deliver the faithful the true facts:

Hillary, we learn, has secretly already been executed. You’ve seen her since? Green screens. There are, we learn, two United States: the one that “lives in our hearts” and the wicked one in Washington. Trump’s not only still president of the real one, he’s the 19th president, because most of the others since Lincoln, including Honest Abe, were illegal. 

[…]

We learn that by signing our birth certificates, our mothers unwittingly made us slaves. Yes, slaves. It goes back to the 14th Amendment. You may think that’s the one that ensured the rights of formerly enslaved people—“equal protection of the laws.” That’s what they want you to think. “It’s not your fault,” Straight says. You were fed fake news. Critical race theory. You don’t know that the 14th Amendment made you—true American “you”—a slave.

Listening to Sharlet’s narration the other day creeped me out. The suspension of disbelief at Glad Tidings to Straight’s ravings parallels the mysticism in vogue at 90s New Age conventions I studied. The empowering thrill of possessing secret knowledge delivered by “internationally recognized” grifters. There were crystals and unspecified “energies,” angels and aliens (benign and malign), UFO cranks, and outlandish tales of dark conspiracies lapped up without question by attendees who checked their brains at the door. I witnessed it 30 years ago. Except New Agers weren’t stockpiling guns, ammo and body armor.

Revisit Digby’s Monday post, “The Education War.” Jonathan Chait does not name-check Seven Mountains Dominionism in “Indoctrination Nation,” but that’s the source of the right’s “existential need to use their political power to seize the commanding heights of the culture,” as Chait puts it. Because in their view, the enemy (that’s you) “permanently controls the cultural high ground.” Thus, “Republicans lose even when they win.”

Culture war is not a metaphor. Neither is “slow civil war.”

If you want to understand what’s wrong with out politics, look no further than this chart

YouGov survey:

The only news the right fully trusts are propaganda outfits, Breitbart, The Federalist, Fox News, OAN and Newsmax. Astonishingly, more Democrats than Republicans trust right wing rags like the National Review, Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller.

These people are living way down deep in the wingnut rabbit hole and they have completely lost touch with reality.

Biden may have no choice

There’s a lot of talk these days about Biden citing the 14th amendment to unilaterally lift the debt ceiling if it comes down to that. (Actually it’s just him directing the treasury dept. to pay the bills the government has incurred.) I thought you might be interested in this analysis of the subject by legal expert Garret Epps:

John Perry, a wealthy patriot, boosted the American war effort in 1918 by subscribing to the Fourth Liberty Loan. For $10,000, he bought a bond payable in 1934 “in United States gold coin of the present standard of value.” By Perry’s calculation of the price of gold, that meant that in 1934 he was entitled to a payback in the value of $16,931.25.  

Unfortunately for Perry, U.S. dollars were no longer backed by gold in 1934, and there were no legal gold coins. Among the effects of the Great Depression was radical deflation—as money got scarcer, those who still had dollars could buy more goods and services than before the crash. So, on June 5, 1933, Congress passed a Joint Resolution declaring such “gold clauses” invalid. Congress resolved that from 1933 on, “gold clause” or not, U.S. bonds were repayable only by legal tender. Perry thus would get $10,000 in paper money.  

Perry did what any self-respecting wealthy patriot would do when his country is in extremis—he sued the government. When his case reached the Court, an opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes stated that, sure enough, the government was obliged to pay the bond: 

The Fourteenth Amendment, in its fourth section, explicitly declares: ‘The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, * * * shall not be questioned.’ . . . We regard it as confirmatory of a fundamental principle which applies as well to the government bonds in question, and to others duly authorized by the Congress, as to those issued before the amendment was adopted. Nor can we perceive any reason for not considering the expression ‘the validity of the public debt’ as embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations. 

Great news for Perry—except that the Court then went on to hold that the debt owed Perry was, in fact, payable in 1934 paper dollars, not the value it would have in gold coins. Legal tender is legal tender, and gold wasn’t it anymore. 

We can draw two lessons from this now-obscure case. From the opinion, we glean that, even seven decades after the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, its requirement that the public debt “not be questioned” bound the government in all its obligations.  

From the larger circumstances of the case, however, we can glean another. As constitutional historian Gerard Magliocca laid out in a fascinating 2012 article, a contrary decision by the Court—requiring repayment in the value of gold—might have been a near-death experience for the Court and the Constitution. That’s because President Franklin Roosevelt, convinced that returning to the gold standard would plunge the economy even further into depression, had already determined that he would not follow a Supreme Court decision reaffirming the gold clause.  

Roosevelt and his staff had prepared a “fireside chat” script that would have said, “To stand idly by and to permit the decision of the Supreme Court to be carried through to its logical, inescapable conclusion would so imperil the economic and political security of this nation that the legislative and executive officers of the Government must look beyond the narrow letter of contractual obligations, so that they may sustain the substance of the promise originally made in accord with the actual intention of the parties.” In effect, he said that however the courts read the Constitution, a conscientious president would not carry through any decision that would wreck the nation.  

As the clock ticks off the remaining minutes before the United States suffers a politically engineered default on its debt, I desperately hope that the Biden administration has learned both lessons of Perry. First, default on the debt (which would occur if Congress does not raise the “debt ceiling” provided by statute) is flatly forbidden by the Constitution. Second, a President must sometimes contemplate defying the other branches to save the country from disaster.  

I have been writing about the debt ceiling for the past 12 years, and my position, once dismissed as a fringe theory, has now gone mainstream. (Just this week, the redoubtable Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who scorned the argument in 2011, has clambered aboard the anti-repudiation bandwagon. I am now awaiting an apology from former Representative Barney Frank, who in 2011 accused me of believing Elvis is still alive.) For those who just tuned in, I’ll explain quickly: the interest due on U.S. bonds does not come from new spending but from money already appropriated by Congress and spent by the executive branch. Failure to raise the “debt ceiling” will not reduce the national debt by one penny; it will force a default on existing debt, the first ever. That will, in turn, decimate the credit of the U.S. government, tank the domestic economy, boost interest rates worldwide as investors demand guarantees against future defaults, and, because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, spark a worldwide financial crisis like that of 2008 and even perhaps a downturn like that of the 1930s. It will also violate Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment, which (as the Perry Court noted) provides that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, . . . shall not be questioned.” 

If, that is, the president obeys the debt ceiling. I hope that he is following Roosevelt’s example—that the executive order setting it aside has already been written for signature if needed, along with a speech explaining it to the nation. Congressional fecklessness—caused by an extreme Republican caucus with the slimmest majority in only one house—cannot supersede the Constitution. The case for presidential authority in the face of actual default is much stronger than Roosevelt’s would have been. Biden has a constitutional text he can cite.  

In the current case, there’s some reason to hope that the Supreme Court would choose to stay out of any dispute over the lawfulness of repaying the debt. To begin with, who would have what the courts call “standing to sue”? Standing is supposed to arise from an “injury in fact,” meaning some harm the challenged action is having that is particular to this particular plaintiff or plaintiffs. “I don’t agree with this,” “I think it’s unconstitutional,” or even “Let’s go, Brandon!” are not supposed to be enough to generate standing.  

But as with so much else, all bets are off in the aggressive post-Trump Supreme Court. The majority has shown that “standing” can be manufactured when they don’t like something the government is doing. In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the climate policy case, red states were allowed to challenge a 2015 climate policy that had never gone into effect and could not ever go into effect because of changes in the energy industry. (The majority reasoned that those sneaky bureaucrats at the EPA might at some point start to think about doing something in some way similar, so the case was on.) In a current case pending this term, 303 Creative v. Elenis, the Court has permitted a Christian web designer to challenge a state civil rights law on the grounds that, at some point, she might decide to offer wedding website design services. If she did decide to offer them, a same-sex couple might ask her to do one, and if they did ask her, and if she refused because designing pages for same-sex couples would violate her faith, and if the law were then applied to her, this would provide an injury. So, it is quite possible the conservative supermajority could decide that Brandon needed a good slap across the face and thus manufacture standing for some red state attorney general or right-wing advocacy group to challenge Biden’s upholding the full faith and credit of the United States.  

That brings us to the next somber contingency: The rise of Republican extremists is forcing the nation into a crisis not paralleled at least since 1937. If the Court becomes a party to this high crime, Biden should be prepared to defy its order to default.  

Those are foreboding words to type. For someone like me who has spent a career studying the workings of the Constitution, contemplating a step outside it is a bit like trying to imagine one’s own death. Would one, in good conscience, advise a president in this situation to refuse to obey the Court?  

I discussed the question in general terms with Louis Michael Seidman, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law at Georgetown Law Center. In 2013, Seidman published a small book, On Constitutional Disobedience, which steps outside the ordinary framework and assesses the argument for and against regarding the Constitution as binding on present-day actors. Seidman didn’t offer any opinion on my Section 4 theory. But for a president who agrees with me, paying the debt would not be disobeying the Constitution—it would be obeying it and insisting that doing so supersedes the intervention of any other branch. “If you believe in obeying the Constitution,” he said, “obeying the Supreme Court might be constitutional disobedience.”  

The debt ceiling should be eliminated. The bills will be paid, period. If the Republicans want to blow up the world economy I’m sure they can find a way to do it but there’s not reason to make it easy for them.

He was also a Nazi

We know now that he was a white supremacist incel. Here’s one of his posts on social media:

It sounds like some kind of joke. (He even mentions that Hitler got Germany out of an economic recession!) But it’s not. This guy’s social media is full of stuff like this. He hits all the talking points.

I hope that monster “Libs of Tik Tok” feels good about herself today. She really helped save the children last weekend.

“Seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power”

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt wants to shut down public television station OETA in part because of a scene from Clifford the Big Red Dog. (Watch it at the end of this video.) pic.twitter.com/lQGk0FnEgE

— David Heath (@davidhth) May 1, 2023

The right has been attacking public education as long as anyone can remember. It’s usually about unions or dumbing down and losing to the Chinese or something like that. But as Jonathan Chait writes in this excellent article about what’s actually happening in today’s right wing assault on education, they have now decided that academic freedom is for losers — they are convinced that it’s time to completely take over American education and indoctrinate children into right wing ideology.

The article is long so I’d recommend that you read it in full if you can but suffice to say that Chait makes many good points about the historical antecedents of various attempts to dominate education and points out that there are excesses on the left as well as right. (Of course he does.) But he seems to have taken a hard look at this and finally realized that enemy in this war isn’t the kids who want trigger warnings and safe spaces but the authoritarian extremists who have decided it’s time to use state power to force educational institutions, even private ones, to carry their party line — or else.

An excerpt:

Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.

More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.

Education has become an obsession on the political right, which now sees it as the central battlefield upon which this country’s future will be settled…

In the spring of 2021, Richard Corcoran delivered a fire-breathing speech at Hillsdale, a right-wing Christian college in Michigan, touting the agenda he had helped implement as education commissioner in Florida. When an audience member asked how he had been able to find common ground with people who disagreed with him, Corcoran responded, “I have fought … There’s no negotiation. I don’t think antifa wants to sit down and have a conversation with me about how can we make this society better.” Corcoran went on to compare America’s disputes over education to “the warring in the streets” in Germany before World War II between the Nazis and the communists. “The war will be won in education,” he vowed. “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.”

[…]

Media coverage of the Republicans’ education crusade has largely treated it as a messaging exercise. A New York Times headline from earlier this year, “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand,” reflects the cynical assumption that this is mostly a way for him to rile up the Fox News audience. One progressive pollster recently told The Atlantic that for Republican voters, liberal control of schools “is a psychological, not policy, threat,” even as their elected officials strike back with policy. Some Democrats have mocked Republicans for pursuing arcane obsessions that fail to connect with voters’ concerns. And it’s true the voters are not driving this crusade: A recent poll found only 4 percent of the public lists education as the most important issue. Politico reports that “mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months” have found Republican book bans to be utterly toxic with swing voters.

You might wonder why Republicans would throw themselves into such a risky venture. The answer is that they aren’t looking to enrage their base or get their face on Fox News. They have come to believe with deadly seriousness that they not only must but can seize control of the ideological tenor in American schools, from the primary to the university level. If accomplishing this social transformation carries a near-term political cost, they are willing to pay it. And to imagine that they will fail, or grow bored and move on, and that the education system will more or less remain the same as it ever was, is to lack an appreciation for their conviction and the powers they have at their disposal to realize their goal.

[…]

The Republican Party emerged from the Trump era deeply embittered. A large share of the party believed that Democrats had stolen their way back into power. But this sentiment took another form that was not as absurd or, at least, not as clearly disprovable. The theory was that Republicans were subverted by a vast institutional conspiracy. Left-wing beliefs had taken hold among elite institutions: the media, the bureaucracy, corporations, and, especially, schools.

This theory maintains that this invisible progressive network makes successful Republican government impossible. Because the enemy permanently controls the cultural high ground, Republicans lose even when they win. Their only recourse is to seize back these nonelected institutions.

“Left-wing radicals have spent the past 50 years on a ‘long march through the institutions,’” claims Manhattan Institute fellow and conservative activist Chris Rufo, who is perhaps the school movement’s chief ideologist. “We are going to reverse that process, starting now.”

Many institutions figure in Republicans’ plans. They are developing proposals to cleanse the federal workforce of politically subversive elements, to pressure corporations to resist demands by their “woke employees,” and to freeze out the mainstream media. But their attention has centered on the schools. “It is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture,” writes conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten.

Or, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis has said in his most revealing comments on the issue, “Our K–12 schools are public institutions that are funded by our taxpayers. And so that line of thinking is saying, even though they’re public institutions, the people that are elected to direct those institutions have no right to get involved. If the left is pursuing the agenda. So basically, we can win every election and we still lose on all these different things. That is totally untenable. So these are public institutions, and they have to reflect the mission that the state of Florida has in our case, not just K–12, but also higher education.”

In other words, they are once again diving into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole to keep their rubes aggrieved and engaged. The ultimate goal of these authoritarians is obvious. As Chait says elsewhere “seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power.”

He goes on to list some of the absurdities in the bills the Republicans are rushing to pass. You can see one example of their thinking in the video at the top. This extends to the university level where they are now threatening institutions with defunding, and replacing administrations with far right ideologues if they fail to toe the line.

Chait also discusses the Orbán connection which is real and dangerous. DeSantis has been following that playbook to the letter and now Trump and the rest of the Republicans are on board. They will take it national the first chance they get:

Orbán’s example has shown the government’s power over the academy can be absolute. DeSantis is simply the first Republican to appreciate the potential of this once-unimaginable use of state power to win the culture wars. Even before DeSantis’s plan has passed, Republicans in North Carolina, Texas, and North Dakota rushed out bills to eliminate tenure for professors.

Trump, racing to catch up with DeSantis on the education issue, has vowed to eliminate federal funding for any school promoting critical race theory, “transgender insanity,” or “any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” He promises to fire existing college accreditors and appoint new ones who will implement his ideological dictates, and to back up this threat by imposing confiscatory taxes on the endowment of any university that resists.

Conservatives as a whole have fled from any pretense of respecting academic freedom. “To complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with” public universities “is, in effect, to complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with the government that they run,” editorialized National Review, neatly sweeping away any concern that a Republican state could ever go too far in dictating content to its universities.

With DeSantis and Trump now vying for supremacy with a boot on the neck of American education, the Republican Party appears to have quickly settled on this strategy. There is not any assurance that the campaign to control the ideology of the schools will remain confined to the public sphere. Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have put forth a bill that would deny federal funding to public and private universities that promote CRT concepts.

And what has been revealed in these early days of the Republican plan to conquer the academy merely represents the powers of state governments. Should Republicans win control of the White House and Congress, they would have far more authority at their disposal. Federal research dollars and tuition subsidies give the federal government leverage over every institution of higher learning, public and private alike.

There is little sign Democrats have grasped the ultimate ambitions they are confronting. When DeSantis began pushing through yet another expansion of his restrictions on gender instruction — a bill that would, among other things, require “certain materials” facing objections by any parent to be removed before they were vetted — his opponents dismissed it as mere pandering. Democrats “see it as an attempt by DeSantis to excite the conservative base and, ultimately, win the GOP 2024 presidential nomination,” reported Politico.

This pat assumption fails to appreciate that seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power.

When Republicans last had control of government, admiration of Orbán was confined to a marginal fringe of right-wing intellectuals, and the whole idea of imposing their will on schools had yet to be invented. It was well into his final year in office before Trump glommed onto the issue. Trump called the George Floyd demonstrations “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” That is when he brought Rufo in for a visit and began ranting on the campaign trail about the “wokes” in the classroom. In November 2020, to counter the narrative of “The 1619 Project,” Trump created a “1776 Commission,” which released its report on Trump’s penultimate day in office.

This futile departing gesture seemed at the time to signify the superficiality and ridiculousness of the Republican interest in the subject. But now members of the party elite have fully invested themselves in this objective. They have only just begun to explore their powers, and their statements on the matter recognize no theoretical limit as to how far they might go. In retrospect, Trump’s late embrace of the crusade to purify the schools was not a fleeting interest but a new turn, the first shots fired in what we now see is a full-scale war.

Democrats had better wake up. Yes, much of this is a cynical power grab but some of it is a true believers desire to ensure their worldview is dominant. And at this point it doesn’t matter which is which. Education is just the first step.

I haven’t really done justice to the piece so you need to read it to get the full gist. The fact that it’s Jonathan Chait, a writer who has been wringing his hands over left wing excesses, particularly in education, for years just makes it more powerful. It’s important that people understand the real stakes in this culture war. The right’s offensive could be catastrophic and that’s mainly because they are treating the culture war as a real war while the left sees it as some form of therapy. I wouldn’t bet on the latter beating the former.