We begin today with John Cassidy of The New Yorker and his postscript to the debt ceiling debate/bill/law and what it says about our politics of today.
Biden’s world view, which he has stuck to doggedly since launching his Presidential candidacy, in 2019, is that, even as full-scale partisan warfare rages on social media and cable news, there are still enough reasonable people in Congress, and enough moderate voters in the country, who can be mobilized to keep the show on the road, and even get some constructive things done, such as subsidizing green energy and reducing the cost of insulin for seniors. (The debt-ceiling agreement preserved both of these policies.) Inside the 2020 Biden campaign, this argument got reduced to the mantra “Twitter isn’t real life.” But, to the President himself, fostering bipartisanship is a personal mission. “No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries but as fellow-Americans,” he said in his television address. “Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans, to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.”
Admirable sentiments. But the fact remains that the House Republicans recklessly manufactured a crisis to pursue their political ends and ended up achieving some of them. After vowing for months not to negotiate about the debt ceiling, the White House was forced to reverse course and make a series of concessions to reach a deal. As I argued last week, the agreement could have been a lot worse, but the process by which it was reached—extortion, basically—supported Fitch’s argument for staying on high alert, namely that “there has been a steady deterioration in governance over the last 15 years.” […]
If the Republicans return to power, they are likely to make the fiscal outlook considerably worse by cutting taxes again, especially taxes on the rich, which is what they did during the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump administrations. When Republicans are out of office, they talk about reducing the deficit; when they have power, they introduce policies that increase it. This is a long-standing pattern, and there’s no compelling reason to assume that it will change soon. Fitch failed to mention this ongoing threat to fiscal stability, but it’s a key feature of the deterioration in U.S.-government finances over the past forty years, and the ratings agencies should be willing to point this out. Financial irresponsibility in Washington isn’t a symmetrical phenomenon.
Tim Miller of The Bulwark thinks that if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024, DeSantis should expect that the “objective fact” that, in many instances, he’s already campaigning to the right of Number 45 is going to be noticed.
If someone is aspiring to the presidency and their critical takeaways regarding the Trump administration are that Trump was:
Too deferential to experts on COVID
Too anxious to distribute a life-saving vaccine
Not harsh enough on immigrants who were brought here as children
Too adversarial to the prison-industrial complex, and
Not passionate enough about the need for a rhetorical attack on the “woke left”
Well, then you are going to have to forgive me if I come to the conclusion that you are a deranged lunatic. […]
I’m not saying that I think DeSantis would be more extreme than Trump. I’m simply observing the objective fact that DeSantis’s explicit campaign message is a promise that he will be more extreme than Trump! At least when it comes to public health, immigration, race-based policy initiatives, and LGBT+ issues. And at the same time, on the issues where Trump is objectively more extreme and threatening—democratic norms, the rule-of-law, siding with Putin—DeSantis has to date been either silent or extremely careful to challenge his opponent in language that does not preclude Trump supporters from concluding that DeSantis is on their side.
Chris Melody Fields Figueredo writes for The Hill about the state-by-state attack on the nation’s Black voters.
Amendment 4 in Florida is a prime example. In 2018, over 64 percent of Floridians passed Amendment 4 by ballot initiative, effectively approving the restoration of voting rights of 1.4 million formerly incarcerated individuals — predominantly Black voters — who finished their terms of sentence, including parole and probation. Despite sweeping approval at the ballot box, the Florida Legislature responded by introducing new legislative hurdles to delay the implementation of Amendment 4. After years of litigation, confusion remains. Florida officials have no central database to determine who is eligible to vote, and “election police” continue to arrest Florida residents previously deemed eligible to vote by the state.
The racially motivated fallout of Florida’s Amendment 4 is not an isolated incident. In fact, Mississippi, which has the largest Black population of any state in the country, has been a testing ground for restrictions meant to marginalize Black voters and suppress the policy interests of the state’s Black communities.
Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press writes that Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Randolph will no longer be party to a federal lawsuit in a case involving H.B. 1020, the Mississippi law which allows Justice Randolph to appoint judges in Hinds County (home of Jackson).
The majority-white Mississippi Legislature gave Randolph, who is white, the power to appoint unelected judges earlier this year, saying their goal was to make Jackson safer. Opponents of the law argue that the appointments will take power away from locally elected circuit court judges and diminish Black voters’ power in Hinds County.
In his order, Wingate lamented Jackson’s high-crime rates.
“Caught in this ‘race to the grave’ are the most innocent—young children whose still developing lungs had barely tasted the nutritious air which was their birthright,” the judge wrote. “On the other end of this ‘killfest’ are the senior citizens hoping to spend their golden years in retired harmony with family and friends, instead of outfitting their homes as fortresses.”
Last month, a state judge dismissed a separate state lawsuit against H.B. 1020, but the plaintiffs have since appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, where Randolph presides. A coalition of voting rights groups is representing local plaintiffs, including the Legal Defense Fund, the MacArthur Justice Center, the Mississippi Center for Justice and the ACLU of Mississippi.
The editorial board of The New York Times writes about the pre-emption of local authority by the state of Texas.
By reducing the right of localities to make their own decisions, Texas has joined dozens of other states that have asserted their dominance over cities in recent years through a practice known as state pre-emption. One watchdog group has counted more than 650 pre-emption bills in state legislatures this year; the large majority have been introduced by Republican lawmakers to curb policymaking in cities run by Democrats.
It’s not a new phenomenon — city halls and state capitols have always jockeyed for authority, and in a legal showdown, the state usually wins, as the more supreme power. But conservatives used to champion ideas like local autonomy, devolution and even block grants as a way of weakening centralized control. The 20th-century movement toward home rule, or letting localities handle most of their own affairs, was once supported by both Republicans and Democrats. What’s now become clear is that Republicans dislike local control if they are not in charge of it. The home rule movement has steadily faded in the last few decades as state lawmakers on the right have become more aggressive in invalidating the priorities of elected officials in cities, which have moved leftward in their voting patterns in recent years.
“We are seeing a real increase in the pre-emption of local authority,” said Clarence Anthony, the chief executive of the National League of Cities and a former mayor of South Bay, Fla. “Local officials are elected by citizens to represent them, and they’re the ones who know what their citizens need the most. But we’ve been seeing state legislators trying to have control over local communities, and that’s not good governance at all.”
…while major corporations are continuing to spend token amounts on marketing to the LGBTQ community, a Popular Information investigation reveals the same companies are spending millions backing anti-LGBTQ politicians. The investigation found that 25 corporations have donated $13.5 million to anti-LGBTQ politicians since January 2022. […]
The investigation found that Anheuser-Busch donated $227,108 to anti-gay politicians since January 2022, including the sponsors of anti-LGBTQ legislation in Texas and Florida and 29 members of Congress rated zero by HRC.
All 25 corporations included in Popular Information’s analysis were highly rated by HRC’s 2022 Corporate Equality Index (CEI). 20 of the 25 corporations received perfect scores (100) and none received a score below 85. Along with workplace policies, the Corporate Equality Index purports to measure corporations’ “public commitment to the LGBTQ community.” But HRC’s methodology excludes political donations.
Greene, one of the most outspoken MAGA diehards in Congress, drew heat from the right for voting in favor of McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal with President Joe Biden last week and flipping on her support for the public release of Jan. 6 surveillance footage that she said could “put the security of the Capitol at risk.”
[…]
Bannon, who has frequently hosted Greene on his podcast, took to the right-wing platform Gettr to call for Greene to face a primary challenge from “Real MAGA.”
Other right-wingers quickly joined in.
“I 100 percent support a challenge to MTG, and look forward to meeting and helping a serious challenge to her,” right-wing host Stew Peters told The Daily Beast.
I know, I shouldn’t laugh but 😂 😂😂…my sides, my sides
Michael Hirsh conducts the last interview with the man who released the Pentagon Papers to the press, Daniel Ellsberg, for POLITICO.
Ellsberg, snowy-haired but energetic despite the cancer — renowned for his eloquence, he still speaks in perfect paragraphs — was calm, even jovial, during what his son, Robert Ellsberg, said would be his last interview. Based on his experience in the covert world, Ellsberg sees a direct line between the deceptions and lies that led to the Vietnam War — and 58,000 American deaths — and the deceptions and lies that justified the Iraq war. This high-level deceit, Ellsberg says, extends to America’s current drone war policy around the world, in which the government has allegedly covered up the number of civilian deaths it causes.
“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” he says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.”
Really, Hugh Hewitt? Really?
Violent and organized mobs (as opposed to “shouting panelists or rioting protesters”) invading the Forum sounds nothing like the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol or a threat to end the republic, I suppose.
Good thing the WaPo comments section for Hewitt’s essay almost unanimously disagreed with Hewitt.
I guess that if you belong to a political party that does not want to know or teach the truth about your own nation’s history, then why should it be expected that one should show regard for any nation’s of city’s history? Hmph.
Finally today, I read a number of articles linking the war in Ukraine with D-Day (today is the 79th anniversary of D-Day). Here’s one from Paul Krugman of The New York Times.
I wish I could say that the citizens of Western democracies, America in particular, were fully committed to Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat. In reality, while most Americans support aid to Ukraine, only a minority are willing to sustain that aid for as long as it takes. For what it’s worth, U.S. public opinion on aid to Ukraine right now looks remarkably similar to polls from early 1941 (that is, well before Pearl Harbor) on the lend-lease program of military aid to Britain.
What about those who oppose helping Ukraine at all?
Some of those who oppose Western aid just don’t see the moral equivalence with World War II. On the left, in particular, there are some people for whom it’s always 2003. They remember how America was taken to war on false pretenses — which, for the record, I realized was happening and vociferously opposed at the time — and can’t see that this situation is different.
On the right, by contrast, many of those who oppose helping Ukraine — call it the Tucker Carlson faction — do understand what this war is about. And they’re on the side of the bad guys. The “Putin wing” of the G.O.P. has long admired Russia’s authoritarian regime and its intolerance. Before the war, Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz contrasted what they perceived as Russian toughness with the “woke, emasculated” U.S. military; Russia’s military failures threaten such people’s whole worldview, and they would be humiliated by a Ukrainian victory.
Have the best possible day, everyone!
