According to the source close to the campaign, the Trump family is worried that Parscale could turn on them and cooperate with law enforcement about possible campaign finance violations. “The family is worried Brad will start talking,” the source said.
In other words: There are totally campaign finance violations.
It's like a scene in a movie where an officer pulls over someone.
Officer: "Good evening, do you know why I stopped you?"
Person: "THERE'S NO DEAD BODY IN MY TRUNK."
I don't watch debates because I don't like A) dueling talking points and/or B) political theater. I can think of a number of different ways to test candidates as to their fitness for office besides trying to wedge a scripted zinger into a question on pre-existing conditions. You could argue that the current sad state of our nation is because we have confused reality television with reality. This is what allowed Trump to come close enough to sneak out a win in 2016.
Luckily, after a brief "bothsides" attempt at saying the debate was bad, most media outlets have acknowledged that the debate was bad, because of Trump.
I tend to agree with Josh Marshall and others who have noted that Trump is losing and anything that doesn't help that, hurts him.
As promised, the New York Times dropped another report on Trump's finances. This one lacks the easy hook of the $750 tax bill. Jon Chait does a nice job of simplifying and explaining why the combined reports paint the picture of Trump as a crooked conman.
As was reported back in 2016 and 2018, Fred Trump was a very successful builder in postwar New York, especially the outer borough on Long Island. I mean, he was a slumlord and all who violated fair housing laws, but he was legitimately rich. But he was also excluded from the Manhattan scene. His son Donald would be different. So he laundered money to his son, created a fake empire for him and launched him with every possible advantage into high profile Manhattan real estate.
Donald went bankrupt.
If he had just invested his dad's money in an index fund, he'd be much richer than he is today. Instead, he managed to lose money on gambling, which I didn't was possible. The image of the rich playboy developer, however, was now part of the cultural landscape. (Spy Magazine in the '90s ripped him to pieces.)
What yesterday's report shows is that Trump took his image and leveraged it into a series of Ponzi schemes, basically. The Apprentice was the keystone of his new fraudulent endeavors. He would use his reputation as a celebrity businessman to launch nakedly exploitive institutions like Trump University or the Trump Network. He would then borrow on those entities to buy golf courses (which are apparently money sinks).
There is then ample evidence that he used those golf courses to launder money. For whom? Well, he certainly was close to a lot of Russian oligarchs who need to keep their money from Putin. Especially in the '00s, Putin was stripping the oligarchs of their wealth and transferring it to his cronies (the oligarchs had largely supported Yeltsin). They needed some way to hide their money. Enter (probably) a desperate and unethical real estate guy in constant debt who was not averse to breaking the law.
All of this is why Trump has worked so hard to avoid releasing this information. All of this is why Trump has been so solicitous of Putin and other dictators.
Back in the 2016 debates, Clinton was asked to say something nice about Trump and she offered some anodyne statement about him loving his kids. If I had to say something nice about Trump, it's that he was - in a weird way - a hustler. He can't do hard mental or physical labor, but he has the emotional endurance to live on the razor's edge of insolvency while keeping a hundred plates spinning frantically as turns one liability into a future asset...that he will then turn into a liability which will become a future asset, mercilessly wrecking and ruining those who would get in his way.
Trump is a con man. There's a little larceny in every good salesman, but Trump's uniquely high profile persona and obvious narcissism has created a frantic series of Ponzi schemes...well, maybe not a Ponzi scheme, because Trump never pays out the early investors. It's a Trump Scheme. Borrow, strip the asset for money, declare bankruptcy, lather, rinse, repeat.
And yeah, 40% of Americans think he should have the nuclear codes.
The NY Times bombshell report on Trump's taxes is a typical Trumpistan story. There are several items that suggest criminal behavior. He is either defrauding the federal government or his lenders (or both). He is using bullshit loopholes to avoid taxes and (like his own father) funnel money to his children to avoid paying taxes on it. Without being able to clearly say it, the article suggests rank criminality.
It will not matter to the MAGAts. It will not matter that he's losing money hand over fist. It will not matter that he paid less in taxes than the plumber from Au Claire who has five Trump bumperstickers on his pickup truck. It will not matter to Congressional Republicans that they have consistently shielded a criminal from accountability.
It will obviously not matter to the plurality and perhaps majority of Americans who are ready to vote him out of office.
But it will matter to a sliver of voters who are (somehow) still undecided and the other sliver of voters who might just stay home.
Trump is losing, perhaps by as much as ten points. Every day that gets closer to the election that he can't make up that deficit is a day he's lost. Of course, every day closer to losing the election brings him closer to an accountability moment with the law. At some point there are diminishing returns in not breaking the law more. Given that his Attorney General is enabling his criminality, perhaps it's time to impeach William Barr, if for no other reason than to keep him busy and unable to ratfuck the election.
The short answer - hidden from most people apparently - is not much. Because of Murc's Law, many on the left assume that anything bad that happens in politics happens because Democrats allowed it or caused it to happen. The reality is that the GOP has the votes and they will confirm Amy Coney Barrett. As a result, marriage equality, abortion rights, contraception coverage, the Affordable Care Act and pretty much anything you want to consider progressive achievements of the last quarter century are on the chopping block.
The only proper response is to plan on ending the filibuster and adding at least two seats to the Court, but there's no need to telegraph that before the election. Right now, the public is overwhelmingly opposed to Trump filling this seat. They see the double standard for what it is. This has lead some Democratic strategists to say that Democrats should focus entirely on process arguments against her. Basically saying that this is a naked power grab and potentially even boycotting the hearings entirely.
I would argue that while they should make process arguments, they need to highlight some of Coney Barrett's positions. Legal access to abortion is largely popular with the public at large. Frankly, if Coney Barrett were to be confirmed and the Democrats were not to add two justices and the Roberts Court overturns Roe v Wade, it could be a case of the dog that caught the car. But Coney Barrett's views extend all up and down the culture wars. She's a Second Amendment fundamentalists as well as an anti-LGBTQ zealot.
The clear thing to hammer her on is her past stated opposition to stare decisis, a presumed deference to precedent. Most conservative justices pay lip service to the idea of preserving precedent. They usually go back on that when it suits their ideological preferences, but at least when trying to get confirmed you get the argument that they will only call "balls and strikes." Coney Barrett has argued that justices should, in fact, overturn established precedence when they feel strongly against it.
Rather than make inflammatory arguments attacking her (extremist) religious views, Democrats should focus on her willingness to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They could drag in Roe and Obergfell as they see fit, but the effort should be to cast Coney Barrett as someone who will overturn existing law and acts of Congress to suit a REPUBLICAN agenda. Make her a partisan, not a Catholic zealot.
Ultimately, unless some huge smoking gun comes out - like she calls Mormons cultists and Romney and Lee break from her - Amy Coney Barrett will be on the Supreme Court for the next four decades, pronouncing against laws that disagree with her convictions rather than the law and precedent. The only solution is to make it clear that this is who she is and therefore preemptively justifying the addition of two new justices in January.
I had my first day of classes after my compassionate leave ended today. I've peeked into a few of the Zoom classes, and Zoom is...bad. I think we all know that Zoom is bad, but we also know that there is no way to recreate the connection of in-person teaching and Zoom is the "least worst option."
It was also odd to be in a class with students in masks while I'm trying to learn names, but whatever.
What is proving to be very hard is hybrid teaching. In class, I have most of my students sitting in front of me, distanced, wearing masks, but I also have anywhere from 1-4 students Zooming into the class. Their educational experience is not likely to be a great one. Most learning happens on the student's time and in the student's mind. These students have basically been given way more responsibility for their education than most can reasonably handle. I can't imagine how the 9th grader from Singapore is acclimating to this model.
I will likely wind up teaching my classes, then having a separate session or two per week for my international students learning from home (where it's 12:30AM for them).
I've loved teaching, for all its faults and foibles. For the first time, I don't know if I would do this if I had a choice not to.
So, everyone is freaking out about Trump somehow stealing the election through brute force, or not leaving office in January. Most of those fears are both overblown and yet very real. This article is pretty good at explaining both positions.
Some of Trump's bluster about not accepting the result is just bluster. He's a decompressing narcissist who look like he is going to get trounced at the polls. He wants everyone to doubt the outcome for two reasons. First, he needs to assuage his babybrain that Americans actually love him (at least "real" Americans do) and therefore any electoral result is by definition fraudulent. Second, he wants to discourage people from voting. (Ironically, I would guess that his attacks on electoral security will motivate Democrats and depress his own voters.)
Republicans have mostly dismissed his bluster as bluster, but it's also pretty clear that Bill Barr is a real threat to the election. However, elections are not run by the federal government, they are run by the states. The ability of the Justice Department to interfere with actual voting is very, very small. What's more, the critical states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have Democratic governors and Attorneys General. The apparatus of government in those critical states should prevent coordinated attacks on election security.
There are two nightmare scenarios. First is the very real threat of violence by Trump supporters. Both at polling stations and elsewhere. Most of their tough talk is just more bluster, but it only takes one guy with a van full of pipe bombs to create a real tragedy.
The other concern is the ability of key states to process ballots. Critical states can accept mail-in/absentee ballots after election day. In particular, PA, MI and WI, the "Blue Wall" that Trump pierced last time. Polling has Biden ahead in all those states, but there is an excellent chance that they won't have all the votes counted by Wednesday morning. The critical states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin can't start processing absentee ballots until the morning of election day, whereas Florida can start processing (but not counting) absentee ballots 22 days before election day. This is why Florida can be called on election night. Georgia can verify the ballots before election day, but only count them ON election day.
Ideally, the Blue Wall states could pass a law allowing ballots to be verified and processed (but not counted) before Election Day. Given the GOP control of the legislatures on those states, it's unlikely.
What this means is that the Blue Wall won't necessarily have their numbers solidified on Election Night and possibly for a few days after. If Biden wins those states by over 5 points, it might not matter. If he wins in person voting, his lead will likely grow over the course of several days. The alternative is much worse, that Trump wins in-person voting and Biden slowly edges ahead over the course of the next couple of days.
That's Trump's argument about the ballots and the "fraud" of absentee ballots. I doubt the Courts will act to stop the counting in time to seal his win and most of the mail-in/absentee ballots should be counted by Wednesday afternoon.
Hopefully, Biden wins Florida and North Carolina on election night and is winning the balloting in the Blue Wall before they finish up counting the absentee votes. Trump's only plan is for a nationwide Florida2000 scenario, where it's close enough for him to cheat out a win with a friendly Supreme Court ruling. I think the timeline of that is very hard for him to pull off, but it's not an impossibility.
Basically, vote. Like your democracy depends on it, because it does.
I think Scott Lemieux is right here. The problem is that Breonna Taylor was killed by the legal system we have put in place to win the "war on drugs," not the individual actions that occurred on the night of her death. No-Knock Warrants need to be outlawed except in the most compelling of cases (like a SWAT team charging a potential hostage situation or where an armed gang is known to reside). The argument should always lean AGAINST issuing such warrants.
As we saw with Taylor's death, the police used one of these warrants - legal under existing law - to barge into her apartment in the middle of the night. Her boyfriend returned fire - also entirely within his rights given the castle doctrine. The police returned fire - also within their rights of defending themselves.
And a completely innocent young woman is dead because of it.
Drugs are bad, but not all drugs are equally bad, and drugs crimes are part of the systematic racism of our criminal justice system. White suburban potheads get community service and suspended sentences. The ex-girlfriend of a drug dealer gets killed in her own bed by a hail of bullets.
Add to this, we are a society pathologically infected with guns. The police ARE probably right to fear for their lives because a vocal minority of us insists that any restrictions of firearms is a crime against humanity.
A racist war on drugs, the travesty of no-knock warrants, a dangerous society swimming in guns...all these forces converged on Ms Taylor's apartment that night and killed her.
I get why people are angry that the officers will largely escape consequences for killing her, but the focus should not be on those officers, but on the drug war and the erosion of civil rights that led to her death.
So, this happened. Trump hinted that he won't necessarily abide by a peaceful transfer of power. Given the norm-shattering nature of his presidency, this has set people's hair on fire. "OMG, he's going to launch a coup!" We also have a story about Trump's planners trying to come up with a plan for state legislatures to award Trump their state's electoral votes, bypassing the will of voters. Like what is happening with the Supreme Court, the Constitution does allow for state legislatures to award their Electoral College votes - that's in fact how it happened in the first few decades of the Republic.
However...this is an astonishingly implausible plan. It MIGHT work in Wisconsin, because of how heavily gerrymandered it is, but Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina all have Democratic governors that could make this action very hard. If Biden wins the first three states on that list, he's president. And while Democrats and Republicans currently hold each other in complete contempt, it's a stretch to say that even odious apparatchiks like Mitch McConnell would support a coup. McConnell has his judges.
If Trump loses clearly, much less in a landslide sweep, then it would be impossible for state Republicans to make any sort of plausible argument about the legality of switching their state's electoral college vote. In fact, multiple Republicans, including Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and, yes, Mitch McConnell have come out and say that all sides must abide by the electoral results.
However, the clearest path out of this is a massive blue wave that captures Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina.
While there is legitimate concerns over whether Republicans still believe in democratic governance, much of that has been of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge category. They will make it incredibly hard for minorities to vote - see Florida and Georgia - but they haven't embraced the full-on Jim Crow anti-voting violence. They are also unlikely to.
So what's going on? Some of this is just that Trump is always best understood as a Twitter troll, as Shitposter in Chief. These statements of his represent a number of things.
First, he wants chaos and he doesn't want you to vote. He wants you to despair that any of this will matter. This is the sort of psychological vote suppression that worked for him in 2016. Sure, he was a grotesque ignoramus and serial sexual assaulter, but Hillary Clinton was a corrupt politician and harridan. For various reasons, this is unlikely to work this time around, mostly because Joe Biden is obviously immune to the misogyny that destroyed Clinton, but also because...holy shit, Trump. Even Brooklyn trust-fund Socialists like Walter Bragman are stumping for Biden.
Second, he's losing. Survey Monkey dropped a bunch of garbage polls today. They aren't partisan like Rasmussen/Trafalgar, they are just shit. Don't look. Biden isn't winning Virginia by 15, North Carolina by 8, Montana by 4 and losing Nevada by 2. That's bonkers... but look at most of the other polls and we see the following: Biden has a consistent 7+ point lead in the polling averages. Most polls have him over 50% in Michigan and Wisconsin and getting close to that in Pennsylvania. (It should be noted that in 2016, the polls accurately captured Clinton's vote shares in those states, it just underestimated the share of Trump's votes.)
Trump knows he's losing. So, like the whiny little bully he is, he's going to start whining and complaining about non-existent voter fraud. Remember, narcissists are incapable of external corrective steps. Any rejection of them is illegitimate. Still, he can see the polls and no doubt some poor schmuck, probably Bill Stepien, has been drilling it into him that he's losing. Since he's a pathological narcissist, he can't accept that. Public displays of anger towards him are incredibly humiliating. The recent disastrous town hall showed what happens when confronted with reality. He craves the safe space of his Volkstrum rallies to the reality that a majority of Americans hate his gut (his disapproval rating average is 53% and that includes Rasmussen).
Look, it's absolutely right to be worried that the GOP will embrace some harebrained scheme to keep Trump in office. But it's also worth noting that most Republican elites hate him as a much as they fear his voters. Once Trump loses, his power over them dissipates. They've got their judges. They've got their tax cuts. They've got the example of 2010 to look back on and hope that they will once more ride grievance to control of the House. Their incentives to go along with a coup are very slim.
The possibility of launching a civil war are too real to ignore.
Freaking out over every Trumpist scheme to destroy the Constitution isn't productive or mentally healthy. Vote. Make sure your voice is heard. The absolute most likely outcome is a reasonably decisive Biden victory. Trump slinks away like the empty suit he's always been.
But, yes, if they try and subvert the will of the electorate, then the future of the United States is in jeopardy.
Back when he was Flavor of the Month, Pete Buttigieg put forward a largely-overlooked plan to remove the Supreme Court from partisan politics. Given the current climate, it's worth looking at again.
Buttigieg's plan would be to create a 15 person court. Five of the justices would be picked by Republicans and five by Democrats. Let's stop there and consider the first problem. The Constitution expressly gives the President the power to appoint judges, so we would have to amend the Constitution. Right there, it's likely a fatal plan, but perhaps if Democrats pack the Court in January, all sides can come to an agreement that we need to de-escalate and disarm. Presumably, the Congressional leadership of each party would pick the five judges from each party.
This has also been criticized for making judges expressly partisan, when they are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law. Dude, please.
The final five jurists (or maybe three...whatever) would be picked by unanimous consent by the current justices. They would be picked two years in advance (presumably you could create a ranked list and if anyone was unable to serve, the next person on the list would take their place) and serve for one term. Again, it would require a Constitutional amendment to allow the judges to pick the other judges.
The flaw here is precisely the opposite of the "flaw" that justices should not be expressly partisan. Judges ARE expressly partisan, for the most part. How will Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan agree on a slate of jurists? If the nonpartisan judges have to be approved by all ten of the partisan judges (or at least, say, eight) how could that possibly work?
The express politicization of the Court largely began during the New Deal, when - though not for the first time - conservative justices killed political and economic reforms. The difference between FDR and, say, Teddy Roosevelt was that FDR was willing to change the Court for the same reasons Grant did: to get results that better reflected the popular will of the ruling party. It backfired, but eventually, FDR and Truman dramatically changed the direction of Court. Even Eisenhower accidently pulled the Court to the left by making Earl Warren Chief Justice. What followed is often called the Rights Revolution, whereby the Court embraced civil rights, women's rights, rights of the accused and the right of one person, one vote. "Impeach Earl Warren" signs blossomed across rural America.
Nixon and Reagan inaugurated the Republican push to alter the political composition of the Courts, and right now we are on the verge of a return to Gilded Age jurisprudence that could destroy everything from civil rights to marriage equality to ending almost any government regulation. Seriously. And all of this was done by the minority party. Bush did not win the popular vote, but placed John Roberts on the Court in 2003 and obviously Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and whatever theocratic hellspawn Trump is about to unleash on us were placed by Trump.
The Court has become a political body and Buttigieg's plan attempts to address that by creating the idea of a neutral swing constituency. An additional problem is that a neutral reading of stare decisis and a respect for precedent largely locks in certain rulings that both sides won't like. Ridiculous challenges like the one against the Affordable Care Act will die quick deaths. Terrible campaign finance decisions like Citizens United will remain enshrined.
In the end, I think Biden - presuming he wins and has a Democratic Senate - should add two justices to make up for Merrick Garland and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That preserves Roberts as the swing vote. It addresses the theft of the two seats by an illegitimate president. Long term, maybe the Buttigieg plan could be adopted, but for now, it's time to play hardball.
It is fashionable for those left of center to define Trump as a fascist. Trump is not yet a fascist, though it's unclear whether that's his desired end state. The reality is that there is a wide variety of authoritarian regimes in the world, and outright fascism is very rare. There is an argument that North Korea is actually a fascist state, but otherwise, there are no fascist states currently in existence.
Currently the US enjoys the following.
-For the most part we have free and fair elections. True, states like Georgia and Florida engage in soft vote suppression, but voters are not beaten from the polls by police and elections do happen. Check out 2018. That totally happened.
-We have a free press. While there is incessant moaning of bothsides journalism, the fact is that Trump's press coverage has been abysmal for years. Trump's efforts to stifle the press have failed. Instead, he has elevated non-factual news outlets like OANN and Breitbart. Creepy and damaging, but not the suppression of a free press.
-We can protest. While there were moments like Trump's clearing of Lafayette Square and his efforts to import his good squads into Portland, for the most part, people have been able to protest. They have not be able to riot, but they're not supposed to.
What Trump is endeavoring to do, however, is still scary without being Hitler. Trump is following in the footsteps of other illiberal authoritarians like Putin, Orban, Duda, Duterte and Erdogan. Their affinity for each other is clear. Now, that crowd of rogues all took power in countries with weakly institutionalized democracies. All of them were autocracies as recently as the 1980s.
But as Chait notes in the linked piece, a second Trump term could sufficiently erode the two centuries of democratic norms that have sustained this country. The Supreme Court pick is obviously getting the most attention right now, and rightly so. The ability of a minority of the country to elect a president, control the Senate and then control the Courts of a generation is deeply troubling to the idea of democratic legitimacy, so much so that the Republican Party is moving away from abiding by democratic norms.
If Biden wins a comfortable win, carrying not only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia or Texas AND Democrats win a net of 4 seats, then maybe we will likely see a return to the normal partisan dysfunction in Washington DC. Maybe the Democrats have a great night and win Senate seats in ME, NC, GA, IA, CO, TX, AZ and MT. They axe the filibuster, pass real legislation and return functionality to our government.
If Trump wins - especially an election reeking of fraud - I don't think the United States survives as we know it. I'm not an alarmist. I've studied the long arc of history. But if he wins, it's time to break the country up. Maybe the Northeast joins Canada and the Pacific Coast becomes its own country. I don't know. But Trump's re-election is a legitimate threat to the viability of the American experiment.
Putin must be laughing his ass off.
I agree with everything Josh Marshall says here.
You use the threat of expanding the Court to prevent a corrupt seizure of judicial power by the GOP. "You can have a 5-4 Court, but if you try and get to 6-3, it will be 7-6 before you know it." Marshall is also right that this should not be Biden's position. It should be Schumer, Pelosi and Blumenthal - among others - who bring this message to the possible GOP Senators who need to hear it. I'm guessing the list is down to Romney, Toomey, Portman and maybe Grassley. You need two of those.
Marshall is also right that this is not about abortion rights alone, though the GOP would like to cast it that way to motivate evangelicals. It's about the survival - and potential expansion - of the ACA. It's about future voting rights and environmental legislation. A 6-3 Court packed with Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh and some other troglodyte potentially undermines the New Deal, much less the Great Society or any other new legislation. Chait is right to say that Biden's angle should be that if Trump appoints Ginsburg's successor, insurers will be allowed to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. Healthcare is still a winning issue for Democrats with working class white voters.
And, too, Marshall is right that eliminating the filibuster, adding DC and potentially Puerto Rico as states is a non-negotiable position. I would add that enlarging the House should also be a priority so that gerrymandering and the electoral college ratfuckery are harder to pull off.
Paul Campos writes a good piece explaining how the Federalist Society works to recruit and "train" young lawyers. As he explains, it starts by appealing to a certain ambition in young lawyers - an already ambitious group as a rule. You appeal to some high-minded ideals about law and its proper role in society. You define liberal jurisprudence as inherently outside your definition about what is "good law." It's Cleek's Law again. You don't rush right to "libtards bad, conservatives good." You work your ways towards it,
At some point, motivated reasoning takes hold. "I couldn't possibly have been duped into believing that the Federalist Society is just a bunch of amoral hypocrites in the service of great wealth and forced birth. Therefore they don't believe that and liberal justices are trying to undermine the rule of law." Once you've taken up residence in that headspace, it's remarkably hard to exit.
This phenomenon is true for most movements, and yes, it exists left of center, too. The further you move from the center, the more extreme your positions, the most you rely on this motivated reasoning to justify your positions. This is how you get people on the far Left saying it's OK that Ginsburg died, because neoliberal hacks are the same, no matter what their role on gender issues or other issues. The difference between Ginsburg and whoever Trump picks to replace her is marginal when seen from the vantage of true believers. Similarly, on the Right people really do believe QAnon and the Biden will confiscate your guns and kill God and make you gay marry and force you into re-education camps. Whether they really, really believe that or simply accept that it's true because it justifies voting for a manifestly awful human being isn't really relevant. Some ARE true believers, others are simply pot-committed to this increasingly extreme and deranged political movement currently operating at the Republican Party.
People marvel that self-proclaimed evangelicals are supporting a manifestly un-Christian, immoral cretin, but that's not how they define it. They are committed to the idea that Democrats will make you abort all the white babies so that black and brown babies will take over the country and lesbian school teachers will make the few white babies left hate God. It's an article of faith for them. The fact that they or their kids went to school under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama isn't important. Evidence isn't important. All they need is anecdotes that don't even need to be true.
I think it's pretty clear that 40% of the American people are lost to reason as they seek to justify to themselves the fact that they voted for a conman four years ago. His manifest unfitness for office is simply a lie that their faith cannot admit.
I hope Joe Biden gets this. I'm pretty sure Kamala Harris gets it. Most likely result of November is a Biden win a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate. They will need to add Supreme Court justices if Trump is able to fill Ginsburg's seat. That will be very contentious and tough to read what Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema will do in that situation. There is no reaching across the aisle when the other side of the aisle thinks your outstretched hand has the blood of trafficked children on it. Internalize that.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death is the calamity that we've all seen coming since Trump pulled off his inside straight in 2016. Should she have retired when she got her pancreatic cancer diagnosis? Obviously, in retrospect, but given that we've been dreading to see her name trending in the news for almost four years, I think everyone can acknowledge that she took a huge gamble of the extraordinary legacy that she built by staying on.
The new saga will be whether Trump can replace her before he presumably loses his election on November 3rd. Of course, Neil Gorsuch is on the Court because Mitch McConnell said - in 2016 - that "we can't fill a Supreme Court seat in an election year." This was, of course, bullshit, and McConnell has already committed to filling the seat.
It's worth noting that McConnell's primary skill as a legislator is not his ability to actually pass legislation or get his caucus to unify around an unpopular position. He couldn't repeal the ACA. He has not been able to get another round of Covid relief passed. He is not, actually, very good at his job. Since pretty much all the Republicans in the Senate are on record as having supported keeping Merrick Garland off the bench in 2016, they will have to be exposed as - gasp - hypocrites, if they confirm someone between now and January 3rd, presuming Democrats win the White House and Senate.
In order to stop Trump and McConnell from filling the seat, Democrats will need four GOP Senators to break with their party and uphold the same "principle" that they expressed in 2016. So far, Lisa Murkowski is the firmest "no" vote on a new justice. Susan Collins has said she won't vote until we know who wins the November 3rd election for president, but I don't trust Collins very much.
So who's left? Mitt Romney has been aloof from this issue, but he's a possible objection on principle and his deep antipathy for Trump. I think a Trumpist firebrand nominee would be a hard sell for Romney. Chuck Grassley has said he would not support confirming someone in an election year, and Grassley has enough gravitas to resist Trump. Cory Gardner is facing an almost certain electoral defeat so it's unclear whether he will abide by a concept of fair play or simply sell out. There are other Senate institutionalists like Lamar Alexander, Ben Sasse and Rob Portman - possibly Pat Toomey - who might also have qualms about such naked hypocrisy. There is also the potential that they could use the lame duck session after the election, but Mark Kelly - should he prevail the way polls say he will - can be seated immediately, as his is a special election.
The other issue is that if they pursue such a horrific double standard, it opens the door to Democrats adding 2-4 more justices to the Court. The number of Justices was last increased in the Grant administration for expressly partisan reasons, though FDR got pilloried for trying to increase the number of Justices, the landscape is quite different than it was in 1937. The Court is much more obviously a product of partisan politics and I think the Democrats could easily justify two more judges to replace Garland and Ginsburg. Whether they embrace four is another question.
Also, there is the nature of the Senate itself as a slow moving institution. There are many ways to gum up the works, but one in particular is interesting. Before considering any other business, the Senate must resolve any impeachment matters before them. Given that there are an almost endless number of Hatch Act violations in the Trump Administration, the House could literally send a new article of impeachment every three or four days to keep the Senate tied up.
Republicans - especially the few non-crazy ones left - have a dilemma: Their party created a "rule" over Merrick Garland. If they violate this rule, then the Democrats can justify breaking any other norms and rules in order to rectify the situation. Do Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Ben Sasse and Lamar Alexander want to be co-conspirators in the destruction of the Senate as a deliberative body? If they support Trump in this, they will effectively do so.
Finally, there is the question of which side would be more animated to vote over this issue and why? Trump's base will crawl over broken glass to vote for him already, as we know. And the anti-Trump plurality will do the same to vote him out. Will the partisan shitshow over Ginsburg's successor turn them against Republican hypocrisy or will they vote against a Democratic party obstructing the president from appointing a justice? I'm guessing there are already pollsters trying to figure that out.
Democrats need to be clear that if the Republicans engage in naked partisanship - even more so than in 2016 - then there will be repercussions should Democrats win the trifecta in November.
I didn't post on 9/11, because of family issues, but I touch on the fetishization of 9/11. I don't mean sexual fetish, but the other fetish: an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
For many Americans who don't live in the NYC area, 9/11 was actually a magical event. It was when they could feel perfectly good about being American, they could freely hate another group of legitimately evil people, they felt a sense of national unity and purpose that has since evaporated and they got to feel like they were living in a shitty Michael Bay movie. Every September, they get to role out their "Never Forget" posts on social media and furiously rub the fetish, hoping for the magical spirit to emerge and grant them moral clarity.
Anyway, New York City saw 10 times the death from 9/11 because of Covid-19, and a lot of the "Never Forget" crowd are going to happily trot off to the polls and vote for the guy who let it happen. A virus doesn't give you a villain to hate, unless you're willing to look at the Oval Office.
So, Donald's at it again. He only know how to fuck one chicken, so he's going to keep fucking that chicken all the way through election night and likely afterwards.
"That chicken" is the endless culture wars that have fueled the rise of Fox/OANN/Breitbart's hegemony over the GOP agenda. So many people have expressed outrage that 40% of Americans can support a manifestly unfit blob of Adderall, flopsweat, foundation makeup and hairspray as president. If you think a presidential campaign should be a job interview with the American people, supporting Trump makes zero sense. Unemployment is high, the pandemic is raging, Trump is Putin's little puppet, our respect around the world has collapsed, racial anger rages through our streets, the West is on fire...I mean...yeah, it shouldn't be close.
What the "job interview" model misses is that the 40% who support Trump are not looking for a chief executive to manage the country's affairs; they are looking for a gladiator in the culture wars. They are looking for a war chief to lead a counterattack against all the terrible things liberals are doing to the country.
Trump's assault on Clio, the Muse of History, is part and parcel of his campaign strategy. The culture war is "that chicken." Now, I happen to know just a little bit about American history and the teaching thereof. The article mentions the AP US kerfuffle of a few years back. Conservatives freaked out because the "course framework" didn't mention people like Ben Franklin or James Madison, but mentioned people like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois. The problem was that they never understood the framework to begin with and what is was intended to do. You can't not teach Franklin and Madison. You don't need to mention Teddy Roosevelt in the framework, because you simply cannot find a textbook that omits him. Instead, the framework was designed to encourage teachers to look past the "usual suspects."
Since the explosion of pent up anger in the spring, we have looked hard at how we teach US History. A few years ago, we ditched our primary source reader to include more BIPOC voices. Most of the documents are still by white men, because - again - you can't really help it in a survey course. You need to read Federalist 10 and 51. You need to read Lincoln's Second Inaugural. But you also need to read a Cherokee chief describing Indian Removal, and Douglass asking, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?"
For the cultural warriors, any criticism of America - which means anything that doesn't build America up to be a perfect, flawless country - is an attack on America. This simplistic, false and manichean worldview represents the extension of "conservative" thinking that is visible in every other realm. "Tax cuts are always good and pay for themselves and tax increases destroy growth." "Abortion is bad, but so is sex education, because sex outside of marriage is bad." Basically, the attempt is to destroy nuance, which is already under assault from the nature of online discourse.
If you read this essay by the excellent Adam Serwer, it attempts to describe the very real historical argument over the 1619 project. He does an exceptional job of unpacking all sides arguments, those who think the foundational essay was deeply flawed and wrote a letter saying so, those who think it was somewhat flawed and so wouldn't sign the letter and those who think it was spot on. For the record, I disagree with Hannah-Jones' assertion that the Revolution was mostly about preserving slavery. The rest of the essay seemed spot on, though. The argument about the role that slavery played in the Revolution is a good one and historians argue about that stuff all the time.
The point of Trump and the GOP's culture wars is to destroy the ability to see the world in a nuanced way. Because Trump and the GOP's legislative agenda is fairly toxic and their ability to manage the federal government effectively is non-existent, they need to keep their supporters in a frothy lather over things like teaching kids that slavery was bad and we should acknowledge that slavery was bad. The idea that America can be a great country while simultaneously being a deeply flawed country is a critical insight if you want to improve the country. The reality is that the GOP does NOT want to improve the country. They like massive inequality, undemocratic politics and racial injustice, because it ratifies their claims to support the "real America" of white people without a college degree and - incongruously - hedge fund billionaires.
Ever since 2000, it has been striking how almost every issue polls to the Democrat's advantage. Raise the minimum wage? Check. Combat pollution and climate change? Yes, please. Increase access to health care? That would be great, thanks. Raise taxes on the rich? About damned time. Yet, Republicans are able to squeeze out narrow wins by appealing to cultural resentments of white people. Those resentments run deeper than their interests. They will vote to deny themselves health insurance if it means a black person doesn't get it, too.
In 2016, Trump famously said, "I love the poorly educated." No doubt. He and the rest of the Republican party want to make that include everyone.
There are two Matthew Yglesiases. One is a troll who enjoys throwing bombs (similar to Jon Chait in that regards). The other makes thoughtful arguments with considered evidence. This article is an example of the Good Matt, and it makes a critical argument.
Yglesias lays out the case that America - and in particular the Republican Party - is drifting away from democratic legitimacy. This is undoubtedly true. The GOP has no way to secure the support of the majority of Americans. Bush managed 50.7% as an incumbent during a war, but before that his father's election in 1988 was the last time a Republican got a majority. It is inconceivable that Trump wins a majority in November (though he could still win re-election). Because they can no longer win majorities they rely on natural and man-made gerrymanders in the Senate and House.
The Senate could be addressed by giving voting rights to DC and Puerto Rico, but it's going to be tough to pull of completely. The House could be fixed by expanding the number of House members to an even 600. That makes for more districts, which makes it harder to pull of vote sinks like inner cities that give 80% of their votes to Democrats, while a Republican gets 54% in the suburbs. This would also help with the lopsided nature of the Electoral College, by giving more votes to more populous areas. It would eliminate the Wyoming/California problem, without having to amend the Constitution.
There are a host of voting rights that Democrats could write into law and presumably will if democracy survives the election, but they will need to play some hardball and introduce real structural change. As Yglesias notes: Trump did not cause this problem, his presidency reveals how profoundly damaging it has become. The reason we have a Fox and Friends president, is because our undemocratic institutions allowed it to happen.
In case anyone cares...I've moved from living in a tent on our porch to a storage room in the basement that smells like dirt. I also had a Covid test because sleeping in that tent gave me a sore throat, congestion and a headache. That was fun. She couldn't get into my brain so the damned swab was in there forever as she poked around. I had to move into the quarancave because people make a hell of a lot of noise in the middle of the night that I was unaware of until I had to sleep outside.
The WaPo did yeoman's work and cataloged Trump's lies from last night. Again, it's difficult to say why Trump lies so much. Is it ignorance? Probably. An indifference to the truth or a hostility towards it? Likely both. The fact is that Trump has made easily refuted lies part of his rhetoric and the 42% simply do not care.
There's a little bit of this in all of us - not caring that we are being lied to when the lie pleases us - but this is something fundamentally different. A few years ago, I can to conclude that policy positions are largely irrelevant to many voters. I think it first occurred to me during the 2000 election, when Gore's ideas were largely popular (in a vacuum) but it scarcely seemed to matter when voters made their choices. Policy white papers don't matter - tribe matters, identity matters.
I don't know how a representative democracy can survive these trends. The Enlightenment was always overblown in its esteem of reason, but reason was considered the seat of government. Now it's tough to say that anyone who currently supports Trump - aside from a few millionaires and billionaires - are making their electoral decisions based on who would most successfully run the government for the benefit of the greatest number of Americans.
They are voting their hatred of "liberals" and existing in a biosphere of panicky flopsweat about anarchists, antifa and child traffickers. A few hundred over caffeinated anarchists in Portland and a few thousand cases of trafficking have created a parallel universe drenched in fear and extinguishing reason.
Update: I certainly think Joe Biden will wipe the floor with Trump during their debates, but it will require a moderator who establishes facts and again, his lies won't matter to his 42%.
After 17 days in Georgia, I finally returned to my home. However, because parts of Georgia have abandoned good public health policy, I have to quarantine from my own family. We can interact outside at a distance and inside with masks on. I am presumed Covid positive until time and a test prove otherwise.
As a result, I am staying in a tent on our upstairs porch.
I'd like to thank everyone who thinks Covid is a hoax for making this possible.
I've spent the last few weeks helping my mom die of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and then trying to help my sister navigate the estate issues and all the paperwork. Dying is, of course, a tremendously fraught and emotional event for everyone involved. I watched my mom struggle with the pain the cancer caused her, I watched her take her last, gasping breath. Every night for a week, I would say goodnight to her semi-conscious mind and tell her I understood that she needed to move on and we would be OK and wonder if I would ever see her again.
As I said, it take a toll.
After death, though, the hard work never stops. Even a simply cremation is expensive. I was shocked at the expense of running an obituary. My family is incredibly lucky to be a very solid financial position, but we have a series of trusts and partnerships related to real estate that are a bear to deal with. It takes weeks to officially die and months to sort out everything around it. My dad died in 2017 and his estate is still "open." Packing up my mom's stuff, giving some to Goodwill and knowing I will never see that jacket on her again. It adds up.
Hospice nurses are amazing people. To do what they do, day in and day out, is an act of emotional endurance I can't fathom. Mom's nurse happened to be there for the end and her kindness and thoughtfulness was simply breathtaking. Hospice has made the process of dying so much better for the person dying. No more sterile hospital rooms, hooked up to machines laboring against the inevitable.
It strikes me that we probably need something for the survivors in the days and weeks after death. Not just counseling, though hospice does help with that. Even something as simple as an app or webpage that can help resolve all the little details with bank accounts and credit cards; cellphone accounts and cable subscriptions. I'd hate to call it a "killer app" but there you go.
Mom repeatedly said, "This damned virus is screwing up my cancer," which was true. She was able to have a decent May and June with her family and a decent July with her friends, but it was hard. Now, I have to go quarantine from my family for two weeks. All I want right now is the embrace of my wife and sons. All I have is this damned virus.
The Trump Administration continues to be a cesspool of corruption and lawbreaking. Now we have evidence that the guy who's responsible for your mail being late has been violating campaign finance law. Before we degenerate in "bothsides," yes, the Bill Clinton has some sketchy things going on in 1996. Gore's great crime was making a phone call on White House grounds with a DNC calling card, as opposed to going down the street. That was a scandal! Now we have massive violations of the Hatch Act and of course DeJoy's contempt for the laws of America.
As always with Trumpistan, every allegation is a confession but in this case, Trump's rhetoric of "draining the swamp" and "I alone can fix it" is kind of the opposite. Here, he's routinely enabling the worst, most corrupt, least competent hangers on - from DeJoy to DeVos to Navarro to Kudlow to...Jesus it just keeps going.
It is painfully obvious that Trump is not alone in this. The entire GOP should be held accountable. They had an opportunity in January to end this Reign of Error and prop up Mike Pence to likely lose in November, as opposed to letting the Trumps and their myrmidons to loot the nation and likely lose in November.
Mitt Romney can stay, but every single Republican Senator is a co-conspirator in an ongoing crime.
What is remarkable about this election is how unstable the populace is and how stable the electorate is. Take a look at this. Aside from a little Covid-19 bump for Trump (much smaller than other heads of government), his re-elect number has been amazingly stable at between 41-43%. He's the incumbent; he's known; people have largely made their mind about him. The common refrain from Blue America is "How the hell can 4 out of 10 Americans support this putz?" But the reality is that incumbents usually win election, and his numbers have been very stable and very bad. These re-elect numbers are largely the same as his job approval numbers. RCP uses some trash polls, but you can still see the stability. Even with trash polls like Rasmussen and Trafalgar, Trump's job approval is really shitty.
At the same time, the country is incredibly unstable. As Trump fans the hatreds of his base, protests are becoming increasingly shot through with violence. Trump is wagering that if he gets the base to violently interact with mostly Black and radical remnants of the mass protests of June, then he will eek out a win by appealing to law and order. However, there is very little chance of that working.
The understated dynamic of 2016 was that BOTH candidates were historically unpopular. Biden has been derided as the Most Generic White Guy, but that turns out to appear to be a huge advantage. Turnout was actually high though as people came out to vote AGAINST Clinton or Trump (along with those eager to see the first female president). According to these metrics, only the wartime elections of 2004 and 2008 had as high a voter participation as 2016, unless you want to go back to 1968. So where are "new" Trump voters coming from? As the article states, electoral strategies that depend on turnout usually fail. Ask Bernie Sanders how that worked out.
Usually, anything you do to inflame your base inflames the other base. The more Trumpier Trump gets, the more he appeals to his supporters worst instincts, the more he forces fence sitters into Biden's lap. Notably, in 2016, Republicans won a slim plurality of votes for the House of Representatives. In 2018, Democrats won the House popular vote by 9 points. Guess what Biden's lead is right now.
At this point in time, Trump is losing. Badly. Texas and Georgia are toss-ups. Wisconsin - which was supposed to flip back to Trump with the unrest in Kenosha - is trending towards Biden. Recent polling from Arizona - the home of Barry Goldwater - shows about a ten point lead for Biden. Pennsylvania seems to be the most important state right now for both camps.
As the current underdog, Trump has to change the dynamics of the race, but there's precious little he can do. Historically, debates have been the last chance to change the trajectory of a campaign, but Trump's approval/re-elect number is so stubbornly persistent that it's unlikely he can get any change out of that. Trump has been trying to paint Biden as a senile old fool living in his basement, and Biden's stutter has been at the heart of that effort. If Biden comes out and puts in a completely average debate performance, the election is over. Trump has created such low expectations of Biden that he's gifting him his only chance to get back in the race.
Yeah, yeah, vote like we're losing. Sure. But sometimes it helps to get people to the polls if they know they are going to win and similarly if the numbers move further from Trump in the wake of the Atlantic story about his disparaging remarks about the military, it could depress Republican turnout. That's how you keep Doug Jones in the Senate and kick Graham, McConnell and Cornyn out.
Right now, we're winning. Time to run up the score.
This thread is interesting in terms of where we are with Covid. When you look at the county rates of positive tests it looks exactly like I thought it would back in May. Large swaths of rural America are getting hit. The 19th century "Greater New England" that stretched along the Erie Canal into the Great Lakes is looking better. A lot of that is simply better governance in those states, some of which is a byproduct of getting crushed back in the spring. But it's pretty clear we suffer from two handicaps when dealing with Covid:
1) There is no national strategy
and
2) Morons walk amongst us
The good news is that steroids are proving very effective in treating either the cytokine or bradykinin storms that are causing many of the health problems. Additionally, we should have a vaccine sooner rather than later, unless Trump fucks that up, too.
From March to July, we had 215,000 additional deaths in the US. Some were Covid, some were health conditions complicated by Covid, but that's more Americans that died from combat wounds in the Civil War (disease was the big killed back then), and we haven't added August to the list. We still have people insisting that Covid's not that big a deal, but I guarantee you they will be falling all over themselves with "Never Forget" on 9/11.
Anyway, the partial shut down of the country in spring was designed to give us time to work on how to contain this disease. Good news! We now have much better treatments, a vaccine seems months away and we know how to mitigate the disease: everyone wears masks and washes their hands. Bad news! See the two points above. Without Trump and his administration making some sort of national mask mandate an essential part of their messaging, we will continue to have his cultists refuse to wear mask. And it's critical that EVERYONE mask, because it's most important for the asymptomatic infected to be masked.
I'm down in Georgia helping my mom transition from this life, and I was worried, frankly about coming to a "hotspot" state. But masking seems really good here. People are masking out of doors, which to me signals a real commitment to masking. If you're masking on the sidewalk, you're masking in the store. But when I look at Georgia's test positivity rate, it's pretty clearly the exurbs that are getting hit hardest. In the thread linked above, Friedan thinks simply masking from the beginning could have cut the death rate in half, easily. That's bad, but you know, half as bad.
We start school in about ten days. It's a bit anxiety producing, but there are real policies we can do to make it safer. If everyone did this, we'd be in such a better place. This is a failure of leadership not medicine.
How many times have we seen Trump saying something that would end the career of any other politician? How many awful things has he said about human beings because he can't see certain people are legitimately human? You would think that his latest vomitous expression of bilious narcissism - saying that US military is staffed by "losers" and "suckers" - would be the end of him. Trump - significantly - does not enjoy plurality support among active duty service members; Biden is beating him. My guess is that if we see more confirmation of this reporting, combined with the bounty story, we could see Trump's number dip below 40%.
But maybe not.
I'm skeptical that anything can pierce the willful disregard for the majority of Americans that grips Trump supporters. Of course, if Trump gets 38% of the vote, that's worse than Hoover did.
Still, I'll believe it when I see it.
Here is an article explaining why we can't predict the result of the fall election with any certainty. Some of this is true of any election. Much more of it is true because of the unprecedented way that Trump won in 2016. Pundits are shell-shocked.
There is perhaps an argument that the pandemic hurts Trump in terms of his handling of it, but gives him a pass on a terrible economy. There is reluctance to say who the protests hurt more: Trump as an authoritarian goon or Biden as a tool of the Radical Left. Who knows how remote voting will work? All of this is true, but there are some salient facts at play.
Let's look at this chart of first term approval ratings of previous presidents (in red and Trump in grey). In order we have Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama.
What explodes off the page for me is the consistency of Trump's numbers. The idea that those numbers are going to change anytime soon is laughable.
This interactive page allows you to monkey around with 2016 voting groups and see what gets either candidate to 270 EV. One problem I noted was that no matter how I fooled around with it, I couldn't turn Arizona blue until I completely erased Republican net support among 65+. This, despite Biden being anywhere from +10 to -3 in the polls. That's a pretty wide range, but it certainly suggests that Arizona is a swing state. My guess is that because the model only allows you to track certain demographics at one time, you won't be able to account for improvement among whites with college degrees AND increased black turnout AND increased support for Dems among people over 65.
Still, it's fun.
One thing Democrats and Republicans can apparently agree on is that they shouldn't look at the polls. The most recent reputable polls have the following margins: USC/Dornsife (Biden +10); Morning Consult (Biden +8.5); Leger (Biden +7) and then the "holy shit" polls: Emerson (Biden +3), Atlas Intel (Biden +3).
Which polling sample is right? The Atlas Intel poll has Trump's support among Black voters at 28%. That...uhhh...seems off. But Emerson is a well regarded pollster, and they also have Trump drawing close to 20% among Blacks. Morning Consult did a lot of state polling and found Biden leading in Florida (+2), Pennsylvania (+4), North Carolina (+2), Minnesota (+7), Wisconsin (+9), Michigan (+10), Georgia (+3) and Arizona (+10). I'd like to Pennsylvania higher, but those are strong polls. If he only holds on to PA, WI, MI, MN, and AZ, that's 289 EV. Add in ME2 and we are at 290. But if you add in FL, GA and NC, you vault to 350.
In other words, unless Trump really is winning 20% of Black voters, Biden is winning.
Which brings me to the next two months. There are two important pending actions for Congress this fall. The first is our apparent inability to figure out how to keep the government open. Yes, it's time for Government Shutdown In The Middle Of A Pandemic! The second is another stimulus plan. The GOP hardliners are opposed to both.
Ideally, we would get a CR to keep the federal government open and a stimulus bill that will help state and municipal governments (who are hamstrung by balanced budget amendments) to keep providing funding for local services. The towering irony is that if the GOP can't agree to a stimulus bills THEY WILL BE DEFUNDING THE POLICE.
If you're Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer here is your calculus - which has remained roughly the same since May. First, negotiate, but only on your terms. If the GOP won't meet your demands, fine. A wave of layoffs and misery will hit the country in October. Second, realize that even a half measure will help, capitulate to the GOP in order to forestall real misery and deaths of despair that will come from no CR and no stimulus.
Do you do what's best for your party or what's best for your country. We know the GOP would pick party over country. And it can often help them win elections. Given the existential threat Trump poses to American democracy, I would be inclined to draw bright red lines and let McConnell and Mark Meadows walk away. Let the government shut down. Let the states furlough teachers and cops. Let the markets tank. Better to do that than agree to a shit bill that could hand Trump another four years and still cause all sorts of problems in the short term, much less the long.
I have faith in Nancy Pelosi but only to a point. She will protect her caucus. She will protect her party. Hopefully that will protect us all.
