Senate Republicans are on the brink of bringing a quick and sudden close to President Donald Trump's impeachment trial. The votes to block consideration of subpoenas for witnesses and documents are all but in hand. Senior GOP aides caution nothing is locked in yet, but make clear this proceeding will be coming to an end soon.
WASHINGTON -- In the end, the impeachment calculation nearly all Senate Republicans are making is fairly simple: They would rather look like they ignored relevant evidence than plunge the Senate into an unpredictable, open-ended inquiry that would anger President Donald Trump and court political peril.As Republican leaders on Wednesday lined up behind blocking witnesses in the trial, their reasoning reflected the worry that allowing testimony by John Bolton, the former national security adviser whose unpublished manuscript contradicts a central part of Trump's impeachment defense, would undoubtedly lead to a cascade of other witnesses. They in turn could provide more damaging disclosures and tie up the Senate indefinitely, when the ultimate verdict -- an all but certain acquittal of the president -- is not in doubt."For the sake of argument, one could assume everything attributable to John Bolton is accurate, and still the House would fall well below the standards to remove a president from office," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.Republicans have offered myriad rationales for refusing new testimony: Gathering it was the House's job. Calling more witnesses would lead to prolonged court fights over executive privilege. They had heard more than enough evidence to reach a verdict. There was not enough evidence to show they needed more information. Allowing the House to force the Senate into a drawn-out impeachment trial would set a dangerous institutional precedent.In essence, during what they hoped would be the final hours of Trump's trial, Senate Republicans were constructing a permission structure for not trying to get to the bottom of what happened, with the hope that voters would find their explanations satisfactory and reasonable."We don't need Bolton to come in and to extend this show longer, along with any other witnesses people might want, and occupy all of our time here in the Senate for the next few weeks, maybe even months," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas and a close ally of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, said Tuesday evening on Fox.Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff and a top outside adviser to McConnell, made it clear that Republicans viewed the idea of calling witnesses as a disaster in the making."More witnesses = Hindenburg," Holmes wrote Wednesday on Twitter, showing a picture of the flaming airship. "None of it changes ultimate acquittal."McConnell has maneuvered to head off the conflagration. In a private meeting with senators on Tuesday, he warned rank-and-file Republicans that he was short of the votes to thwart a Democratic call for witnesses, an unmistakable tactic to bring wavering senators into line.On Wednesday morning, he summoned a key swing vote, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to his office for a private meeting. She emerged refusing to speak about her intentions. And when the question-and-answer period opened later in the day, he gave the first question to three of the remaining Republican holdouts for witnesses: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Murkowski and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. The move signaled that McConnell was singularly focused on providing the waverers the answers they needed to feel comfortable ending the trial without more evidence.Nearly all of the politically vulnerable Senate Republicans up for reelection in November have embraced their party's strategy, making it clear that they favor taking their chances defending their votes against witnesses over trying to explain to voters loyal to Trump why they backed broadening an investigation into a president who is very popular with the Republican electorate.Sen. Cory Gardner, the Colorado Republican trying to hang on to his Senate seat in a state that has turned increasingly blue, illustrated that point on Wednesday when he said he would not support additional witnesses -- a stance that is likely to draw considerable blowback from critics at home but endear him to Republicans."I do not believe we need to hear from an 18th witness," he said in a statement, emphasizing that the House had already heard from plenty of people.While polls show broad bipartisan support for calling new witnesses, Gardner, who protectively endorsed Trump's reelection months ago, is keenly aware that he stands no chance without the wholehearted backing of the president. Republicans live with the reality that a critical tweet from the president can quickly send their campaigns into a tailspin, a point reinforced by the president's latest Twitter warning shot on Wednesday morning."Remember Republicans," he wrote, "Witnesses are up to the House, not up to the Senate. Don't let the Dems play you!"Collins is the only Republican up for reelection who is now seen as a likely vote for more witnesses. She is the rare member of her party who still seeks to appeal to a broad range of independent and even Democratic voters as well as Republicans. Her fellow Republicans say they see her as being in a unique position, and they have given her ample running room to do what she thinks is best for her reelection, even if it causes them problems.Republicans insist that they have given the House case against Trump serious and sober review and have found it wanting. They are also obviously chafing against the constraints of the trial, forced to sit quietly in the chamber for hours on end, when they are much more accustomed to making their presence known at hearings and during floor votes and then exiting at their convenience. The thought of the trial continuing, with no end in sight and the result preordained, sparks despair in many of them.But it is not just their schedules they see at risk if the Senate were to go down the path of new witnesses. Republicans have increasingly pointed to the fact that the Democratically controlled House has forced the Republican-led Senate into an impeachment trial to the exclusion of almost all other activity under strict Senate rules. They say allowing the House to effectively freeze the Senate would set a dangerous precedent."To make something out of the two impeachment articles would send an incredibly bad message to every House after this," said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership. "If you really want to shut the Senate down, just send them a vague article of impeachment."Democrats dismiss that complaint as well as the others raised by Republicans, saying they are simply in search of justification for failing to conduct a thorough review of the behavior of a president with a firm hold on voters who are essential to their individual political survival, as well as Republican control of the Senate."They keep coming up with excuses," said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, who added that Republicans' claims that witnesses would chew up weeks or months of Senate time were exaggerated and that he believed the testimony could be secured and wrapped up in a week or two.If Republicans were so worried about precedent, he said, they should be concerned with what will happen if Trump is acquitted without the Senate taking the necessary steps to parse all the information it can about his conduct."If he's allowed to completely stonewall, to do absolute obstruction on everything and not be held accountable, he'll do it again and again, and future presidents will do it again and again," Schumer said. "And this grand experiment we call democracy will have been fatally, fatally eroded."Still, Schumer conceded on Wednesday that his hopes of additional witnesses were growing fainter as the Republican leadership worked to lock down senators and bring the momentous proceeding to a close as soon as the vote on whether to call witnesses was concluded -- a move now expected on Friday.A slim possibility still existed that other Republicans would join Democrats and Collins and Romney in calling for more testimony, upending the party's game plan. But nearly all Republicans were more than ready to vote, and they did not need new witnesses to confirm their verdict that it was past time to bring a speedy end to the trial.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
When Molly Ivins died 13 years ago this week, the world lost one of its great wits, social commentators, and fighters for civil rights and social justice. The void she left was huge, which is why we’ve been posting our “Molly Ivins Moment” in C&J every Thursday since she passed. I think now more than ever we could use a good dose of Molly, so here's a Texas-size handful of her greatest hits…
» “Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”
» “How can you not love Texas politics? You pick up the paper in the morning and it's kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator.”
» On Pat Buchanan's culture-war speech at the 1992 Republican convention: "It probably sounded better in the original German."
» “We get so scared of something—scared of communism or crime or drugs or illegal aliens—that we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing freedom. Never works. It's still true: the only thing to fear is fear itself.”
» “My friend Mercedes Pena made me get in touch with my emotions just before I had a breast cut off. Just as I suspected, they were awful. ‘How do you Latinas do this—all the time in touch with your emotions?’ I asked her. ‘That's why we take siestas,’ she replied.”
» “I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.”
» “Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
As I like to say, Molly Ivins was (and via her legacy still is) Red Bull for the Democratic soul.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
C&J Annual Fundraiser: Day 3
Sorry to pull out the big persuasion gun, but this morning I feel it's necessary to play the country song card in the hopes that it'll help keep this column afloat for another year. So here goes. I hope this works: "I'm beggin' ya darlin’, please."
To send a donation via snail mail, the address is:
Bill Harnsberger, 16 Pitt Street, Portland, ME, 04103.
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JEERS to potent ponderables. Exciting day yesterday in the Senate, as the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump shifted from the opening-argument phase to the Q&A portion. Each senator was allowed to submit a question in writing to presiding judge John Roberts, who read selected ones aloud and gave the prosecution and defense teams an opportunity to respond. Here are some of the queries that made it past the Chief Justice's lips:
"Can I go pee?" (Sen. Inhofe)
"I have to pee, too. Can I go next?" (Sen. Cotton)
"The hall monitor says I need a potty pass. Can I have a potty pass?" (Sen. Inhofe)
Flummoxed by a question, Ken Starr tries to phone a friend, until he realizes he doesn’t have any.
"Can I use Jim's potty pass or do I need my own?" (Sen. Cotton)
"I'm back. Do I give Sen. Cotton my potty pass now?" (Sen. Inhofe)
"Actually, can I get a new potty pass, please? I don’t know where Jim's pass has been." (Sen. Cotton)
"Show of hands…who here likes green eggs and ham?" (Sen. Cruz)
"Should I be contorting my facial features to look concerned, troubled, or distressed?" (Sen. Collins)
"Can we speed this up? I've got a 3 o'clock Mar-A-Lago tee time." (Sen. Graham)
"Paper or plastic? Ha ha kidding! You can skip this one, I'm a kidder, ladies and gentlemen." (Sen. Romney)
To his credit, Roberts tossed the frivolous ones.
CHEERS to the brutal, brutal winter of twenty-aught-twenty. The latest numbers from Quinnipiac (a complex name you can easily remember by the anagram "Niacin Quip") are brutal for Republicans trying to sweep the evidence under the Senate rug and pretend like their party boss isn’t a corrupt, national security-compromising son of a bitch. Turns out an overwhelming chunk of the unwashed rabble will have none of it:
Three-quarters of registered voters think witnesses should be allowed to testify in the Senate impeachment trial, which has reached a crucial inflection point, a new national poll from Quinnipiac University finds.
This includes 49% of Republicans who think witnesses should be allowed to testify,75% of independents and 95% of Democrats.
Almost three-in-five (57%) want to hear more details of Trump's explanation for his actions. … More than half of voters (between 52%-54%) say that Trump has abused his power, isn't telling the truth about his actions and has obstructed Congress. Another 52%believe the Trump administration's withholding of US aid to Ukraine was not justified, while 34% say it was.
Quinnipiac also found a large majority—76 percent—responded favorably when asked if "them gol'durn Trump boys deserve a good spankin'." Personally, I would caution against that. I’m told they squirt hair gel when cornered.
CHEERS to "32." Make sure you take a moment today to say Happy Birthday (or, to use his dialect, "Happy buhthday") to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who turns 138 today. He was far from perfect, as all presidents have been: trying to pack the Supreme Court, turning away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, the internment camps, the womanizing (though not with porn stars, as far as we know). But he was a force of nature who didn’t let polio stop him as he charged headlong into fighting the depression and wars on multiple fronts in Europe and Asia, while passing reforms that made life better for ordinary Americans. Says William Ridings and Stuart McIver in their book Rating the Presidents (where FDR sits at #2, just below Lincoln):
Roosevelt is praised most often for his role in preserving the American capitalist system at a time when many countries were opting for fascism.
Given the dire crises he was forced to confront, perhaps the highest praise from the poll is "the right man in the right place at the right time." [...]
Others praise him for stopping Hitler—and shudder to think what might have been if a less-effective president had been at the helm in those dangerous days.
The lunatics on the right try mightily to rewrite history by insisting that the New Deal was a failure. Never mind that laws enacted in the 1930s—chipped away at though they were—helped prevent our 2008 Great Recession from turning into an all-out depression. Pay your respects here. And never let anyone forget the difference between the parties, as defined by Roosevelt himself: Democrats say we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Republicans say we have nothing to fear but everything but fear itself.
P.S. It's also Dick Cheney's birthday today. He turns 666. Again.
JEERS to peace in our bizarro time. Are you sitting down? You really should be sitting down, because when I tell you about Jared Kushner's Israel-Palestine peace plan, you're going to need some sort of reliable anti-gravity tuchus catcher nearby. After millennia of strife and misery in the region, a humble American coastal elitist slumlord has broken through the violence and gridlock to forge a road map for peace and prosperity among the Israelis and the Palestinians. It's a miracle! Here are the highlights of his two-part plan—already endorsed by the impeached American president and the indicted Israeli prime minister—crafted by candlelight out of love, divine inspiration, and sheer force of will:
1. It's 80 pages
2. Fuck the Palestinians
True fact: if Oslo recognizes his breakthrough achievement, it'll be the first time the Nobel Peace Prize weighs more than the recipient.
CHEERS to the great uniter. 92 years ago this week, in in 1928, Scotch tape was marketed for the first time by 3-M. It holds things together like a charm. But to shut up Lindsey Graham only duct tape will do.
JEERS to signing the divorce papers. The deed is done. The die is cast. The curtain has come down. The fat lady has sung. Grandma has been set adrift on an ice floe. The carriage has turned back into a pumpkin. In mere hours, Great Britain will become an orphan on the world stage:
The European Union grudgingly let go of the United Kingdom with a final vote Wednesday at the EU’s parliament that ended the Brexit divorce battle and set the scene for tough trade negotiations in the year ahead.
On the bright side: tea will still be served at 4pm.
In an emotion-charged session at the session in Brussels, lawmakers from all 28 EU countries expressed their love and sadness, some, notably from Britain’s Brexit Party, their joy. Some even cried and many held hands during a mournful rendition of the Auld Lang Syne farewell song that contrasted sharply with hard-headed exhortations that Britain won’t find it easy in the talks that will follow the country’s official departure on Friday. […]
Britain will leave the EU after 47 years of membership. It is the first country to leave the EU and [its departure] reduces the number in the bloc to 27.
But the "remainers" in Britain,who know this is a dumb move (among other things, their health system is about to get "American’d"), are getting one final dig in at their xenophobic countrytwits. Topping the pop charts in Britain now by popular demand is Ode to Joy—the anthem of the European Union. Enjoy your last day of normalcy, UK. The zombie apocalypse begins on the morrow.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 30, 2010
CHEERS to justice served. It took a Kansas jury 37 minutes to deliver their decision on Scott Roeder, who admitted he murdered Dr. George Tiller last year: "Don’t let the prison-cell door hit your ass on the way in." Assuming his appeals fail, he'll spend the rest of his life behind bars, smug in the knowledge that he'll be rewarded with a penthouse suite in Heaven as a martyr. And I'll spend the rest of my life smug in the knowledge that he's in for a very rude surprise.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to more Molly. You've all behaved yourselves so well this morning. So for dessert you get a hefty slice of American pie, courtesy of the rhetorical shitkicker who said of herself: "I'm a Texan. I drive a pickup truck. I drink beer. I hunt. I'm a liberal. So what?"
» “Some civilians believe the definition of an honest Texas pol is one who stays bought. But among pols of the old school, the saying was, ‘If you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in the Legislature.’ Many of our pols have the ethical sensitivity of a walnut.”
» “Populism is the simple premise that markets need to be restrained by society and by a democratic political system. We are not socialists or communists, we are proponents of regulated capitalism and, I might add, people who have read American history.”
» “The poor man who is currently our president has reached such a point of befuddlement that he thinks stem cell research is the same as taking human lives, but that 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians are progress toward democracy.”
» “Yes. He should run. He’s the only Democrat with any 'Elvis' to him.”
—Molly on Barack Obama in 2004
» “Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.”
» "I accidentally became an authority on George W. Bush. Like the guy who climbed Everest, it was there."
» "I don't have any children, so I've decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin. I figure freedom and justice beat having your name in marble any day. Besides, if there is another life after this one, think how much we'll get to laugh watching it all. ... We may not be able to take it with us, but we can still fight for freedom after we're gone."
Sadly, gone too soon.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Culturally Woke: More Americans Visited Cheers and Jeers Than the Movies—By Far
Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are among the only 2020 Democrats getting face time with Iowa voters as other contenders serve as jurors in President Trump’s impeachment trial. For the four Senators running for president, a pivotal Friday vote is their choice between hearing from more witnesses and risking being off the campaign trail on caucus day. Ed O’Keefe is in Iowa to see how the remaining candidates are taking advantage of the final days before the caucus.
Republicans are closer to the 51 votes they need to head off witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial than it seemed earlier this week, with senators saying there are perhaps four who are still in play.
Two of the 53 Republicans — Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins ...
Before celebrities and their publicists figured out that a goofy, faux-homeboy named Ali G was actually the smart, edgy comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a succession of political and cultural figures – Newt Gingrich, C Everett Koop, James Baker, Gore Vidal, EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, among others – agreed to sit for televised interviews with the “rapper.” Almost always, Ali G’s calculatedly crass, good-humored stupidity brought out his subjects’ petty vanity and condescension, their humorless self-importance. The unmaskings – the glimpses of bad character – were at once horrifying and hilarious.
I thought of those episodes while listening to NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly’s January 24 interview with secretary of state Mike Pompeo. One imagines Pompeo or his staffers assuming that a pretty blonde woman with such a good-girl name, Mary Louise Kelly, would lob softballs and take notes as he explained the government’s Iran policy. Someone must have failed to do due diligence, alerting the secretary to Kelly’s paradoxically calm and hard-hitting approach, to the unperturbed persistence with which – in interviews and in reporting from Russia, China and Iran – she has pursued the facts.
When a college basketball player shoots free throws, he can expect opposing fans sitting behind the basket to wave their arms, shout and hold up clever signs to distract his focus from the rim. During opening arguments at the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, his lawyers attempted the same tactics.
A former colleague once used the analogy to free throws during a trial in the prosecution of a massive fraud case. She asked members of the jury to maintain focus on their mission of finding the facts after the defense offered a number of irrelevant arguments to distract them from their job. Similarly, Trump’s team offered several arguments to divert public attention from a quest for the truth.
One bit of arm waving that Trump’s lawyers have engaged in is the argument that House managers are attempting to undo an election. White House counsel Pat Cipollone argued that Democrats are asking the Senate to “tear up every ballot” from the 2016 election, characterizing impeachment as an affront to democracy. But our Constitution includes impeachment to protect our citizens from a leader who abuses his power. Concerned about a monarch with too much power, the framers specifically included a method for removing a president from office. If impeachment were improper because it reversed an election, then no impeachment of a president could ever occur. Our Constitution provides otherwise.
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"... there is nothing unusual about quid pro quos in presidential calls. Diplomacy often is about asking your counterpart to do something for your country in return for something you can deliver." But leveraging public goods for private gain is NOT diplomacy; that's corruption. https://t.co/4ot27Dn44m
For some time, I was against the Democrats’ offering any Biden as a witness in Mr. Trump’s trial, on principle. Just because the Republicans want to batter Hunter Biden is no reason to submit either him or his father as fodder to hostile Republicans. But principle can be turned on its head; calling Hunter Biden could backfire on the Republicans big time. [...]
Having Joe Biden’s son testify would illuminate the Bidens’ irrelevance to the issue of whether the president held up congressionally appropriated military assistance for Ukraine until the Ukrainian president announced — not necessarily conducted, just announced — a government investigation into the Bidens’ role. An appearance by Hunter before Senate questioners now could also go some distance toward removing him as an issue in the general election, should his father be the Democratic nominee. In fact, Hunter could be the star witness as to why a president’s (or vice president’s) offspring should stay out of any business that might have something to do with their parents’ job.
— Jared Kushner, on the conflict in the Middle East
Hello! I’m a relative of your doctor, and I am here to perform your open-heart surgery. [...]
Please lie back and stop attempting to struggle. In case you might worry that I am not qualified to perform this surgery: I read 25 books. So you are in good hands. No, I have not done this before, but in a way, that makes me actually more competent. When I look at you, I don’t see all the problems people saw before: an aorta, and ventricles, and the little tube thing that pokes out. I just see solutions. I am going to put your heart together in a way that has never been tried, but I can guarantee (I read 25 books) that it will make everything 100 percent better, using synergies.
Sasha Abramsky at The Nation writes—Trump Acts Like a Mafia Don—and GOP Senators Yawn. Day by day, tweet by presidential tweet, the country retreats from its democratic premise, yet the grandees of the GOP decline to intervene:
Day by day, tweet by tweet, the country retreats from its democratic premise, this great experiment in pluralism wilts a little more, and the prospect of violence in the political process grows, yet the grandees of the GOP, running scared of its base, declines to intervene.
Former national security adviser John Bolton lets it be known that Trump personally told him that releasing aid to Ukraine was tied to the latter’s announcement of an investigation into the Bidens—and the revelation is met with yawns from GOP senators.
Bolton wants to be a Senate witness, yet majority leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus is terrified that he will blow apart the GOP’s hear-no-evil/see-no-evil strategy. So they pretend his testimony is a nonstarter. The rapidity with which a great democracy has sunk into cultist politics is terrifying.
Lev Parnas produces an audio recording of Trump demanding that his acolytes “take her out,” referring to then–Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Trump sounds just like a Mafia don ordering a hit, yet the GOP meets this revelation of thuggery with silence. It’s now apparently acceptable for the president to “take out” ambassadors who stand in the way of his corrupt machinations.
“This is Kavanaugh all over again,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters on Monday. Soon it was the company line. [...]
Republicans are framing the revelation—from a book manuscript by former national security adviser John Bolton obtained by the New York Times—as a last-minute gimmick, a desperate attempt to change the rules of a game that’s already in progress. Bolton can’t be trusted, and besides, it’s way too late! The House had its chance to get Bolton on the record, the argument goes, and the Senate should not let the development sidetrack it from a case that’s already been laid out. Otherwise you risk losing control of the whole process and creating a partisan spectacle that needlessly tarnishes the reputation of a good man. (The good man, to be clear, is Donald Trump.)
This is, as Barrasso intimates, the basic story Republicans have told themselves about Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for more than a year. Kavanaugh was on his way to confirmation when Christine Blasey Ford came forward to allege that he had sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers in Washington, DC. Under pressure, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee agreed to hold a new hearing to question Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh.
But the lesson of the Kavanaugh hearings wasn’t the effectiveness of Democratic gamesmanship; it was the power of stonewalling. Blasey Ford was unambiguous about what had happened (“indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” as she put it), and offered a roadmap for further investigation. But none of it mattered, because Senate Republicans did not want to know what had really happened. They were not interested in figuring out, definitively, whether their nominee for the Supreme Court had sexually assaulted someone, and whether he was lying about that or anything else (for instance: his drinking). They did not want to uncover information that would change their minds, so they constructed an elaborate public ritual to help them not find out.
Donald Trump’s digital advantage may be freaking out Democratic strategists, but what should worry everyone is the technology itself. What makes Trump’s operation so formidable is not so much his investment in digital or any particular architecture that he’s built. It’s more that he’s able to take advantage of monitoring people through their cell phones.
To be clear, the Democrats can and will do the exact same thing. The problem isn’t the candidate, but the capability.
Thomas Edsall discusses this in a piece for the New York Times. It begins with geofencing, a practice that involves tracking every cell phone that enters a predefined area, like a church or MAGA rally. Armed with these phone numbers, identities can be sussed out from other commercial databases, and then people can be sorted by how frequently they vote, their party registration (if any), and all manner of personal information.
It’s possible, we suppose, that former Rep. Darrell Issa didn’t realize his TV ad attacking a GOP rival, Carl DeMaio, in the 50th Congressional District primary race could be seen as gay-baiting. The ad, ostensibly about DeMaio’s stance on immigration and President Trump, includes two gratuitous references to the fact that DeMaio is gay.
But others did make the connection, including the chair of the San Diego County Republican Party, who called the ad “highly inappropriate.” For any honorable candidate, this would have been the moment to apologize for any unintentional (assuming it was unintentional) messaging and agree to stop running the ad. Instead, Issa continues to stand by it. [...]
This district just emerged a few weeks ago from the disgraceful era of Duncan Hunter, who stepped down from Congress this month after pleading guilty to misusing campaign funds. Hunter also exploited inflammatory tropes in attack ads against his Democratic challenger in 2018. It was bad enough that voters in this district rewarded him with another term. They should demand better from whoever replaces him.
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Dear - @GOP & @WhiteHouse - Who can I contact to verify this claim? Where are the locations?What are the companies?Who are the workers? https://t.co/LhwOGuBqQD
On Sunday, tens of millions of Americans will tune in to Super Bowl LIV to watch Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs try to crack the nut that is the San Francisco 49ers defense. After the fourth quarter comes to a close and the clock reads triple zeros, the fans, casual and devoted alike, will turn off their televisions or change the channel. They probably won’t think twice about the Kansas City team name or the “tomahawk chop” and redface that Kansas City fans will almost certainly bring to the stadium in Miami.
The contours of the issue are familiar, playing out on repeat in the decades since the tomahawk chop first emerged out of Florida State and made its way to Kansas City, Atlanta, and countless high schools across the country: Native people have protested the cartoonish racism and appropriation, while the franchises, team owners, and local legislators—with varying degrees of malice—have ignored these protests or deflected criticism. Papers put out polls on whether readers believe something that is very obviously racist is actually a problem. Public relations firms are paid to craft campaigns to preserve team names as tradition or some kind of perverse tribute. And then the teams play. Fans watch. Some people make money. Everyone goes home.
The mascot issue is not about whether Native people have been properly polled. It is not a question of American ignorance. It’s that the people with the most power in this situation—the owners, the franchises—know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. And in the face of much morepressingmaterial concerns, it’s true that a fair number of Native people might not care much, either, which is a sentiment I’ve heard from members of my own family and tribe.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic writes—Selling the Green New Deal to Texas Unions. The AFL-CIO's endorsement of Mike Siegel suggests a new way forward for environmentalists and labor:
Texas’s 10th Congressional District stretches, improbably, from the outer fringes of the Houston metro area to suburbs west of Austin. After sending Democrats to Congress for over 100 years, it has voted for Republican Representative Michael McCaul in every election since its 2005 redistricting. Two years ago, Mike Siegel—a civil rights lawyer and labor activist running on an ambitious progressive platform—came within five points of flipping the district back to blue. This year, campaigning as a Green New Deal supporter, he’s hoping to finish the job. Influential Democratic Party groups like Emily’s List have lined up behind his primary opponent, corporate lawyer Shannon Hutcheson, who fits a more typical profile of Democrats running for red seats. Having been dual-endorsed by the Houston-based Texas Gulf Coast Labor Federation, Siegel and Hutcheson battled it out for the Texas AFL-CIO endorsement, which Siegel had won in 2018. The endorsement was announced at the regional federation’s Committee on Political Education, or COPE, Convention in Austin this past weekend, and while Siegel won it again, his harder-fought victory this cycle offers a preview of what it will take to win labor’s support for a new generation of climate policies.
Siegel and his supporters spent last weekend in nearly round-the-clock meetings with unions, some of whose international leaderships have previously spoken against the Green New Deal. “Everybody throws in something about a just transition when they talk about taking on climate change,” Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, told me. “But I think there’s concern about how central workers’ issues are going to be to that process.… It’s just really hard when you’re in that industry, particularly in a place like Texas,” Levy said of unionized fossil fuel workers in the Right to Work state. “You see all these slings and arrows headed your way to your livelihood, climate change being one of them.” The Green New Deal, he told me, “is either the panacea or the devil, depending on where you’re coming from.”
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Schiff: "Alan Dershowitz lost a criminal case in which he argued that if a corrupt motive was only part of the motive, you can't convict. And the court said, 'oh yes, you can' ... So he's lost that argument before, he makes that argument again before this court."
With six days until the Iowa caucuses, the political establishment has arrived at a troubling realization: It might be time to take this Bernie Sanders guy seriously. In the past few days, polls have shown Sanders breaking dramatically from the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls have shown him leading in Super Tuesday states California and Utah, while he’s climbed meaningfully in early states Nevada and South Carolina.
In the aftermath of Sanders’s ascendancy, various corporate gatekeepers and big-money representatives are scrambling—with little coherence or success—to put together a last-minute campaign to slow him down. The justification for such action, of course, is that the political establishment and their corporate henchmen, self-styled paragons of pragmatism and stewards of lucid, sober thinking, need to protect the electorate from a wild-eyed radical who is dangerously out of touch with America.
But the last-second freakout tells us less about the Sanders campaign than about those political elites themselves, whose political instincts are so alarmingly wrongheaded that they’ve managed to ignore an obvious risk to their continued status until a week before voting begins. If anyone has revealed themselves as inept to the point of disqualification, it’s the anti-Sanders neighborhood watch.
Sanders has been in the race since last February, which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.
Cedar Falls, Iowa—A roar of approval filled the packed ballroom on the University of Northern Iowa campus when Black Hawk County Supervisor Chris Schwartz reminded hundreds of Iowans that, almost two decades ago, “It was Bernie Sanders who stood up to George Bush and said no to war!”
The applause was just as loud a few minutes later, when Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Mark Pocan, from neighboring Wisconsin, told the Iowans he was barnstorming for Sanders because “Yes! We must stop endless wars!”
The national media has moved on from discussing the prospect that President Trump’s decision to kill a key Iranian general had brought the Middle East to “the brink of war.” But concerns about issues of war and peace—which briefly upended the national debate in early January—continue to influence the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. That’s benefiting Sanders, especially in Iowa.
Everything old is new again. If American workers are ever to emerge from the economic insecurity and political powerlessness that are so characteristic of our second, contemporary Gilded Age, they are likely to rediscover some of the innovations in labor policy and corporate governance that emerged more than a century ago in that first era of social inequality and capitalist excess.
That’s because the structure of capitalism today, and the legal framework that sustains it, evokes many of the same social and economic pathologies that made Americans of that bygone era question the future of US democracy itself.
It has never been just a question of inequality: robber barons then, and the rise of a politically potent billionaire class today. Rather, the two Gilded Ages are similar because at both times a new and disruptive reconfiguration of American capitalism has made necessary a radical set of policies designed to democratize the world of work and empower a multiracial working class.
A bold and comprehensive report from Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program, “A Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy,” offers twenty-first-century reformers an innovative set of policy ideas challenging corporate power in our time.
It was with something like slack-jawed amazement that I read Dominic Patten’s on-the-ground report from Sundance chronicling attendees’ disgust and amazement at the testimony in Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial. The Deadline reporter’s missive reads almost like parody, a communique from an Armando Iannucci-esque parallel universe where Hollywood swells hope and pray that the country is a nation of easily misled rubes. [...]
Patten, wandering around Sundance, found a number of industry bigshots who were shocked, shocked to learn that Weinstein was a world-class monster. The quotes are stunning both in their content and in the fact that they were still, despite Weinstein’s defenestration, delivered anonymously. [...]
All of which is to say it’s a little bit rich to hear the good visitors to Park City profess their disgust with Weinstein. It’s hard to take any of this seriously — especially when it’s offered up anonymously — as a real bit of soul-searching or examination of the predations of the movie profession. Indeed, it reads much more as a bit of rear-end-covering, a way to profess innocence without actually having to put a name to a statement of ignorance.
Senators spent hours questioning House managers and President Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday, but there are new signs that the impeachment trial may end as early as Friday, pending a crucial vote on allowing witness testimony. Nancy Cordes breaks down what to expect from the pivotal Friday vote.
