Layers Upon Layers

Martin Longman has been in the weeds of this more than I have, but if he's calling this the biggest scandal in US history, I'd pay attention.  Certainly there is an inordinate amount of smoke surrounding Rudy Giuliani.

It's corruption all the way down.

On Ellen

There's a fair amount of shit being lost over Ellen Degeneres sitting next to George W. Bush at a Cowboys game and not stabbing him to death with her drink straw. The article makes cogent points for why Bush was a terrible, terrible president.  Yes, he probably should be in the Hague answering for war crimes.

But he's not.  And it's not Ellen Degeneres's job to hold a war crimes tribunal in the owner's suite at a Cowboy's game.

If anything, here's another way to frame it:
Disgraced religious bigot who tried to stop same sex marriage is forced to sit next to a wealthier, more popular lesbian and her wife.

There is an exhaustion about purity politics in the age of Twitter and microwaveable outrage.  Just punch a button and get piping hot venom!  So, yes, Bush was terrible.  In some measures he was worse than Trump (though Trump's actions in Syria threaten to dethrone Dubya). But here's the thing.  All these Internet Brave Voices, if you were to sit them down next to Bush or even Darth Cheney, they wouldn't move. They wouldn't launch into a piece by piece diatribe over Bush's many failings as president.  They would sit and stew and maybe leave early.  Few people - when confronted with another actual human being - say the things they saw online.

Ellen has a philosophy of being kind to everyone who crosses her path.  That's her creed.  She has no obligation to live by yours.

Is This A Constitutional Crisis?

Yes.  This is a constitutional crisis.

Standing alone, the refusal to comply with subpoenas is in and of itself an impeachable offense.  If the Courts weigh in and say they have to hand stuff over and they still refuse...where do we go from there?

Krugzilla

Paul Krugman has always been too smart to be employed by the New York Fucking Times.

They Can't Quit Him

Brilliant analysis of why "conservatives" will not quit Trump.  It starts from the position of "Why not Pence?" Many non-conservatives like myself wonder, "Why not just let Pence give you your reactionary judges and regressive taxes? What conservative policies has Trump advanced that Pence couldn't also? In fact, given the shitshow he's currently unleashing in Syria against the Kurds, wouldn't Pence be much more preferable?"

The problem of this line of reasoning is that, well, it's a line of reasoning.

Conservatives Reactionaries don't really care about policy.  Sure, they want to strip away abortion rights and LGBT rights and some other things.  Their view of policy is overwhelmingly negative. They want to strip away certain things that have changed their world in the past twenty to thirty years.  Again, on a fundamental level the "conservative" movement is really a reactionary movement.

Trump is a perfect avatar of this movement.  "Make America Great Again" is the perfect slogan for a reactionary movement that imagines some idyllic past where white men ruled the world with perfect benevolence.  What's more, Trump is a seething mass of resentments and grudges, which is perfect for them. To the Reactionaries, Trump is a "fighter."  They have deluded themselves in thinking that he's fighting for them, when really he's either fighting to enrich himself or simply lashing out in tantrum after tantrum.  But then again, the tantrums are the point.

"Donald Trump hates who I hate" is pretty much the current state of politics in the GOP - outside of those with some modicum of education and perspective. They think that Trump has unlocked some sort of political magic that will allow them to hold on to power.

The reality is much different.  Mitt Romney - who typifies the sort of callow, professional politician that Mike Pence also represents - won 47.2% of the popular vote in 2012.  Donald Trump won 46.1% four years later.  Both numbers represent a shocking reality for the Republican Party.  Outside of the sort of "drawing to an inside straight" that Trump pulled off in 2016, they simply will not be able to reach a majority of the electorate.  Trump, however, at least nurtures the flaming grievances that define so much of their lives.  The piece above references the Kavanaugh hearings, which Reactionaries see as a "win."  In fact, Kavanaugh crystalised the problems for many suburban college educated women who don't burn with the culture war resentments of the Republican base.

The WaPo came out with a poll today that shows that Americans support impeachment hearings by 58-38.  Slightly fewer think he should be impeached at this time (49%), but that 58% number should shock the hell out of Republicans, because all that's happened since the first whistleblower came forward has been additional damning information.  When the dam breaks - and we can feel the foundations shaking - the sheer totality of Trump's criminality will be overwhelming.

Mike Pence is not Donald Trump.  If you're a rational person, you would prefer Pence every day of the week and twice on Sunday.  Not because he's a "better person" but because he's a less-worse person.  He's a bland, theocratic dipshit, but he's unlikely to double down on disastrous policies like a trade war or abandoning the Kurds. He is not so actively friendly towards the world's worst dictators.

The fact that Mike Pence is not a pulsating orange blob of omni-directional rage-tweets actually works against him in the mind of the Reactionary movement.

The Dictatorial Presidency

This is a nice run-down of how Trump has systematically abused the Constitution of the United States by refusing all Congressional oversight. It's obviously been a push-pull act for decades - if not a century - over the proper role of the Congress to oversee the Executive.  There are obvious areas where the presidency has some leeway over what they can do unilaterally. 

What Trump has done has been to willfully and directly violate some statutes and then dared anyone to do anything about it.  With a majority of the Republican electorate behind him, he's inoculated from repercussions inside the GOP, so he feels unbound. Fox News is both the catalyst for his crimes and the shieldwall against accountability. Because Fox basically tells the GOP base what to believe, they will never break with Trump until Murdoch, Hannity and Carlson do.  This has plunged them into an alternative reality with dire consequences for the Republic.

Once the malignant narcissist is gone, Congress will need to assert some control over the White House.  Legal penalties for failing to respond to subpoenas, for instance.  What they can do about Fox News is a far trickier subject. 

The Real Deep State

Just because Trumpistas like to whine about the Deep State doesn't mean there isn't a national security apparatus that can seriously ruin your day.

So far we know of three whistleblowers.  There is apparently one with complaints about the handling of Trump's tax returns, but that one is largely being ignored in the blizzard of revelations over Ukraine.

We now have a second whistleblower on the Ukraine phone call.  While we don't know the identity of the first whistleblower, yet, these are both apparently intelligence officers.  In other words, they work for the CIA, DIA or NSA.  These are serious people who usually only act when they have a plan.  Getting the first whistleblower out there has laid the ground for subsequent revelations.  (That Trump can't stop himself from doing crimes on TV is probably more than they expected.)

Trump's phone calls have been hidden - possibly illegally - on a secret server.  The idea that there are additional, damning phone calls is real.  The other reality is that there are therefore likely to be more whistleblowers, perhaps on calls to other countries. 

This has made Republicans very reluctant to defend Trump in public.  There are some efforts to shift the conversation AWAY from the Ukraine calls, but no effort to defend the actual calls themselves.  Any smart Republican - I assume there are some - will want to stay away from the microphones as long as possible. 

The shoes are dropping like crazy, and no one has an umbrella.

International Kleptocracy

Dan Nexon at LGM makes an important point about the link between most of the shitty things happening in the world today and a broadly undemocratic international wealthy class.  Putin is likely richer than Jeff Bezos, or could be if he wanted to. It's not just the various undemocratic regimes of rich men like Putin, bin Salman or Xi.  It's the fact that they have influence beyond their borders.  Putin and Russian money helped sell Brexit, which is turning Britain into a dysfunctional disaster.

And it extends to these shores.  There are plenty of rich Americans who hide their money and influence from public accountability. They shape laws behind closed doors and hide behind court ruling like Citizens United that were crafted by wealth-serving judges.

Take Warren's wealth tax. While a certain amount of wealth is immobile, much of it is able to move from shadowy banking system to shadowy equity markets without much oversight.  It would not be enough to simply pass the wealth tax, it will have to come with a massive reconfiguration of international financial rules.

After World War II, the US shepherded the Bretton Woods agreement into existence. While it was hardly perfect, it created structures to allow for greater freedom of trade that benefited Europe, the US and developing world countries that needed investment.  Globalization is a popular punching bag for populists of all stripes, but it has been generally a positive development for the very poor. However, traveling with these reforms has been the freeing of capital markets to create an international class of very wealthy people who are immune from the laws of nation states.

That has to change if the world will have a democratic future.

Injustice Department

When they finally drag that bloated orange narcissist from the Oval Office, repairing the damage to the DOJ will be a priority.  After trying to accomplish it with Sessions, Trump finally found his "criminal lawyer" in Barr.  Barr's "Justice" department has routinely shielded Trump from criminal charges.  What should worry them all is that the DOJ is full of lawyers who know what the law actually is.  Presumably, they are stockpiling evidence of how they have been pressured.

Frankly, I would love to see the ABA move to disbar Barr.  There are very few checks on the Attorney General, as long as Trump has his back.  He should be impeached and removed, but we all know that won't happen.  Disbarring him would be a signal to the rest of the lawyers at Justice of what their long term interests are. 

Enjoy The Weekend

What are the odds that either:

A) Trump does not commit another crime on television?

or

B) More evidence of his existing crimes doesn't come out?

A million to one?

A reminder that it's been 11 days since the impeachment inquiry was launched. 

Just 11 days....

China, If You're Listening...

China should open a corruption probe of Donald Jr and Eric Trump.  I mean...Trump asked them to, so they could say that they are simply following his advice.  Pretty good leverage for ending the trade war. 

Plus, that would be some A+ trolling.

He Can't Help Himself

Please stop doing new crimes so that we can properly investigate the old ones!  I mean, maybe his strategy really is simply breaking so many laws that it becomes impossible to hold him accountable for breaking any single law.  Beats whatever Giuliani is likely to come up with.

Kind Of A Big Deal

Bernie Sanders had a minor heart procedure. He had some chest pains, a blocked artery and two stints were inserted. 

The age question is out there for both Biden and Sanders.  Warren isn't that much younger, but her stamina is frankly amazing.  More than any other candidate, Sanders' supporters are inherently suspicious of the primary process and hostile to any criticism of their Messiah.  If health forced him out, that could have a very salubrious effect on the tenor of the secondary stages of the primary, as candidates are whittled down.  I hope he's fine, but I also hope he considers the risks of running an arduous campaign at his age.

Amber Guyger

There was a fair amount of grateful amazement by African Americans that Guyger was convicted of murdering Botham Jean in his apartment.  It certainly seemed an open-and-shut case against her, and the jury's quick deliberation seems to verify that. 

The assumption of many African Americans was that white people can walk into a black person's apartment and shoot them dead and get away with it.  The thing about the Guyger case was just how absurd her defense was.  Who walks into an entirely different apartment and think it's theirs? 

When I heard the verdict, I thought, "Well, of course."  The fact that most African Americans were surprised is both sad and amazing.  It's amazing that they can believe the justice system is THAT screwed up and still abide by its legitimacy.  Compare this to the cryptofascist Oathkeepers who are threatening to kill people if Trump is impeached via constitutional processes and replaced with Mike Pence.

This Will Work

Elizabeth Warren has the best trend lines of any Democratic primary candidate.  She has the most room to grow.  Even some of the Sandernistas like her, and they don't like anyone.

Her overarching message is corruption, but hating on billionaires seems like a winning strategy.

I mean, screw those guys.