Category Archives: History

When Do We All Get To Say They’re Fascists?

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From The New York Times:

The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of D____  T____ in spreading the election lies that fueled it. . . . 

From the resolution unanimously adopted by the Resolutions Committee at the Republican Party’s winter convention:

WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger have engaged in actions in their positions as members of the January 6th Select Committee not befitting Republican members of Congress . .

WHEREAS , Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse . . .

RESOLVED, That the Republican National Committee hereby formally censures Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and shall immediately cease any and all support of them as members of  the Republican Party for their behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic . . . 

From The Times again:

It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by [the former president] and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable. 

It came days after [he] suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack and for the first time described his goal as aiming to “overturn” the election results. . . . 

The censure  was carefully negotiated in private among party members . . . 

In response:

Then there’s this from Vanity Fair:

Over the last several years, there have been many opportunities to throw around terms like “fascist“ and “fascism,” typically in the context of the Republican Party and the wannabe dictator to whom many of its members have pledged their undying loyalty. In response, said Republicans have frequently gotten bent out of shape about such terms . . .  And yet . . . 

Per Insider:

Amid the [Republican Party’s] nationwide push against teaching about race and sexuality in schools, two members of the Spotsylvania County School Board in Virginia advocated for burning certain books, according to the Fredericksburg-based Free Lance-Star newspaper. This came as the school board directed staff to begin removing “sexually explicit” books from library shelves, after voting 6-0 in favor of the removal, the Lance-Star reported. The board has plans to review how certain books or materials are defined as “objectionable,” the paper said, which opens the door for other content to be removed. 

Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg both championed burning the books that have been removed . . . 

Incendiary, Dangerous – Part 2

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Quoting Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

If and when D____ T____ runs for president in 2024, his will be a campaign devoted to revenge. Take all the ugliness, the anger, the race-baiting, the hate-mongering and the fetishization of violence that characterized his prior campaigns, and multiply them tenfold. That’s what’s in store for all of us.

T____’s revanchist [i.e. retaliatory] campaign will have many targets, but his greatest enemies are democracy and the rule of law itself. He made that clear this past weekend, when he took a new step in his long campaign to turn the horrific Jan. 6 insurrection into a story in which he and his supporters are the real victims.

T____ has been unwavering in justifying the insurrection and defending those who carried it out, beginning while the violence was still in progress. “We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said in a short video issued that day while the rioters were still rampaging, telling them, “We love you, you’re very special.”

But at a rally in Texas on Saturday, he went further than he has before.

“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

The practical implications of this pledge for the insurrectionists themselves may be small; nearly all are likely to have completed their sentences by the time Trump would take office in 2025. But the symbolic importance is enormous.

No president in history used his pardon power in as corrupt a fashion as T____. Early on, he dangled the possibility of pardons as a message to those who helped him commit his misdeeds: Stay loyal to me, and I will make sure you are not punished for your crimes. And he followed through, pardoning a rogues’ gallery of former aides: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Stephen K. Bannon and Michael Flynn, among others.

But now, T____ is not just speaking to those who work for him; he’s talking to the whole population of his supporters, millions strong. If you commit crimes in my service, he says — even violent crimes, even insurrection against the government of the United States — I will protect you. Do your worst.

He also lashed out at prosecutors examining his financial shenanigans and his efforts to pressure officials into overturning the results of the 2020 election:

If these radical, vicious, racist [i.e. black] prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.

This isn’t an explicit call to mob violence, but combined with his celebration of the mob violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and his promise to pardon those who carried it out, the implication is clear: The appropriate response to the operation of the American legal system, if it doesn’t produce the outcomes you want, is to threaten it in the same way the electoral system was threatened a year ago.

Trump’s statements were so alarming that even some Republicans objected to them. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said, “I think it is inappropriate. I don’t want to reinforce that defiling the Capitol was okay,” while New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu denounced the idea of pardons. And a handful of more reasonable Republican governors are willing to say that T____ shouldn’t be their party’s leader, because it will lead to more defeat.

But if there’s an internal conflict in the GOP over T____, he’s going to win it and his critics are going to lose.

You can point to some polls showing declines in T____’s popularity among the large universe of Republicans. But his GOP critics won’t coalesce into coherent resistance. Most Republican officeholders represent conservative states and districts where his supporters dominate, so they can’t be too critical of him. Those who are have no national constituency; there is no organized movement behind, say, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan.

So no Republican would beat him in a presidential primary. And if he is their nominee, what will happen? Once again, nearly every Republican will say, “I don’t agree with everything he says, but since the alternative is Democrats being in power, I’m behind him.”

Which will mean indulging T____’s increasingly violent rhetoric and promises to abuse power and undermine the rule of law.

From now through 2024, T____ will steadily ratchet up his threats of lawlessness from both inside and outside the government he seeks to lead. And his fans will thrill to every moment of it. Just as in 2016 he told them to abandon civility and relish giving offense, in 2024 he will give them new permission to edge toward violence.

The difference between then and now is that the 2016 version of T____ felt that adherence to laws and norms — paying your taxes, obeying labor laws, telling the truth on loan applications — was for suckers, losers, people who didn’t have his ability to get what they want from the system.

But today, the system isn’t merely something he wants to circumvent and manipulate, it’s his enemy. It validates his election loss, it prosecutes him and his business, it resists him at every turn. And he wants revenge, both by winning in 2024 — with the help of a cadre of candidates who are all but promising to steal future elections on his behalf — and with a new presidential term that will make the previous one look upstanding and honorable.

T____’s malignant presidency ended with an attack on both the Capitol and the American system of government. If he gets another chance, do you doubt he’ll bring even worse?

His threats are not just talk. They’re a terrifying preview of what’s to come, and we’d better pay attention.

It’s Only the Supreme Court. Take Your Time!

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Justice Stephen Breyer announcing his retirement later this year prompted Alexandra Petri, the Washington Post’s humor columnist, to comment. But the situation ain’t funny: 

Some things are urgent, such as, for instance, filling a Supreme Court vacancy. Other things are not urgent, such as, for instance, filling a Supreme Court vacancy. Sometimes it is a little hard to know which one it is. It depends on whom you ask — Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2016, or Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2020.

Now, Justice Stephen G. Breyer has retired (thanks for reading, Justice Breyer!), and it is time to locate a new jurist who will be willing to sit around for the next several decades writing withering dissents and waiting for her colleagues to die. And being warmly collegial, of course! It sounds depressing when you put it like that, but that is how the Founding Fathers designed it.

We had better proceed at a speed of some sort! Yes, now is either the time to grind to a halt, or to move forward with blazing rapidity from nomination to confirmation in 30 days . . .

Of course, the president presides over a Senate majority that could evaporate at any moment, which sounds urgent! But that president is a Democrat, so, a wash.

Sure, we have been rushed before. “I felt that the timetable for the last nominee was too compressed,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). After all, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in such a short period of time that a Texan who became pregnant at the beginning of the process would still have been allowed to get an abortion when it ended . . .

“This time,” Collins continued, “there is no need for any rush. We can take our time, have hearings, go through the process. It is a lifetime appointment, after all.” So true! Now is the time to really sit and deliberate. The past two nominees were, only in the strictest and most literal sense, the deciding votes that could overturn Roe v. Wade; this nominee will be the one who has to sit there collegially dissenting after it happens, a role that requires a great deal more scrutiny.

We have hurried into this sort of thing before, and we can see how that turned out. (Please shout “Well!” or “Badly!” after a count of three so that we can see how apolitical a body the court currently is!) Now is no time to be hasty. The time to be hasty was earlier, after the failure of the Merrick Garland nomination to get a hearing but before the nomination of whoever this will be, when we were ramming new justices into forever appointments at astounding speeds and having the time of our lives.

Now, we should take our sweet time. We should get out our big reading glasses and a huge stack of books and proceed with enormous care. No rush! It’s fine! Nothing can go wrong. The Senate appears very functional. President Biden is in office, with a wafer-thick zero seats to spare! We have world enough and time at last, and we can finally do all the detailed, lengthy vetting that we have been meaning to do all this time but couldn’t, for some reason.

There’s no excuse to cut corners now. This time, the FBI might even have the leisure to follow up on the tips it receives.

What Republicans Are For

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Political parties usually tell voters what they want to do. One way is to write a party platform when they nominate somebody for president. The Democrats did it for the 2020 election. The Republicans didn’t. Instead, they said they’d continue to support (i.e. bow down to) the person they were nominating:

. . . in the context of a pandemic, recession, social inequity, and climate crisis the party’s policy is simply:

“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

It is hard to read this “platform” as anything other than “we stand for whatever D____ T____ wants” [Brookings Institution]. 

In other words, l’etat c’est moi (or rather, l’etat c’est lui).

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post explains why the Republicans still don’t want to spell out what they’re for:

President Biden at his news conference last week asked the question that the media should have been asking Republicans for months: “What are they for?”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) won’t say. Asked last week what was in Republicans’ agenda if they regain control of Congress, McConnell told reporters: “That is a very good question. And I’ll let you know when we take it back.”

Consider the arrogance and disdain for voters inherent in that answer. Responsiveness to the voters? Solutions to the problems they complain about, such as inflation? Only suckers would care about such things, Republicans seem to believe. They prefer to spend their time concocting cultural wedge issues, spreading conspiracy theories and obstructing progress on issues for which there is broad, bipartisan consensus (e.g., a path to citizenship, reasonable gun laws).

But it would be misleading to say Republicans are not for anything; they certainly do have an agenda. The problem is that it is so unpopular they dare not remind voters about their plans.

Republicans have clear views on taxes. They want to protect the super-rich from paying more taxes, even though billionaires became 62 percent richer during the pandemic and many pay practically no federal income taxes. And Republicans really don’t want corporations to pay their fair share either. They favor keeping the corporate tax rate at 21 percent, even though corporate income taxes make up a mere 7 percent of federal revenue. (The Tax Policy Center reports: “Revenue from [corporate taxes] has fallen from an average of 3.7 percent of GDP in the late 1960s to an average of just 1.4 percent of GDP over the past five years, and 1.1 percent of GDP most recently in 2019.”)

Republicans are also for underfunding the Internal Revenue Service so that the agency does not have adequate resources to enforce existing tax laws. And they would like to do away with the child tax credit that cut child poverty by 40 percent. It is not a stretch to say Republicans actively promote income and wealth inequality.

Republicans are in favor of forcing women to continue pregnancies and giving birth, even in cases of rape and incest. They also delight in incentivizing Americans to spy on pregnant women whose reproductive choices don’t match the party’s religious doctrine and to turn them in for bounties. Meanwhile, they strenuously favor protecting anyone who refuses to be vaccinated or wear a mask. In other words, Republicans favor “personal choice” when it comes to preventing the spread of a deadly disease, but not when it comes to a woman’s body.

Republicans are all in when it comes to keeping in place monuments to the slave-owning traitors of the Confederacy; removing anything from school curriculum that might make White people feel uncomfortable, including Martin Luther King Jr. and the KKK; and stopping the FBI from investigating death threats against school board members and other public officials. No wonder white supremacists are so enamored with the GOP these days.

Republicans are also the best friends of climate change. Why else would they oppose the Paris accords, new subsidies for green energy, measures to phase out of coal and higher car mileage standards? They are, however, all for emergency aid when extreme weather strikes — but only for their own states.

And now we know Republicans are devoted to making voting harder and giving Republican lawmakers the ability to elbow out nonpartisan election officials so they can control vote-counting. They are definitely for respecting election outcomes — only when they win.

You don’t have to be a mind reader to figure out why McConnell wants to conceal Republicans’ agenda for as long as possible. . . . 

Biden’s First Year: A Reality Check

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I hoped that the standard year-in-review or one-year-anniversary appraisals of Biden’s first year would remind anybody who’s paying attention that he’s already achieved a lot as president (in addition to making the White House less corrupt and less incompetent). There have been a few such positive appraisals, but not as many as I expected. CNN political analyst Kirsten Powers wrote one of the positive ones:

Here’s an apparently unpopular opinion: Joe Biden is not failing or flailing. His presidency is not in peril.

It’s hard to see this through the blizzard of over-the-top headlines such as, “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency,” “How the Biden Administration Lost Its Way” and “Biden’s Epic Failures.”

Everyone needs to take a breath: It’s been one year. These headlines could just as easily read, “Joe Biden Fails to Fix Every Problem in the World in 365 days.”

What drives much of the “presidency in peril” coverage is Biden’s approval ratings. CNN’s poll of polls, released Thursday, found that 41% of Americans approve of the way Joe Biden is handling his job while 54% disapprove.

Low approval ratings are used as a proxy by various political and ideological factions to argue that the president needs to do more of what they want and if he doesn’t, he won’t get reelected. (Spoiler alert: nobody will cast their vote in three years based on how they feel today about Biden). . . .  It’s become conventional wisdom in the media that Biden’s approval ratings started dropping because of how he handled the Afghanistan withdrawal. But Gallup’s senior editor Jeff Jones told Politico in November that his declining poll numbers began before that, during the Delta Covid-19 variant surge.

The fact is, approval ratings are most closely tied to how people feel about their day-to-day lives. Americans are understandably fatigued as we enter the third year of the pandemic and, until the US gets back to some semblance of normal, we should expect Biden’s approval ratings to reflect that frustration. Moreover, gas prices are high and research has shown that presidential approval ratings often track with gas prices, even though the president’s power over these prices is limited. The economic news is mostly good for Biden — unemployment is down and wages are up — but inflation is high and rising (note: In the US but also in many other countries). Taken together, this means the day-to-day life of many Americans feels really hard. 

It doesn’t help that the media reinforce the idea that Biden is somehow failing because he hasn’t solved issues that have bedeviled his predecessors over longer periods of time. The New York Times dinged Biden this week, noting that, “The president has not yet succeeded in meeting his own goals for combating climate change,…[hasn’t] delivered on his broader promise for a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented Americans” and has failed “on the central promise he made during the 2020 campaign — to ‘shut down’ the pandemic…”

This is bananas, but it’s a fairly typical roundup of the disconnected-from-reality analysis of Biden’s first year.

No president has been able to achieve a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, including presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who were not able to accomplish immigration reform over an eight-year period each. Biden should not be expected to do what they couldn’t, in a single year, in the middle of a global pandemic.

Speaking of the pandemic, it’s hard to shut it down when conservative leaders across the country are committed to making sure that doesn’t happen. Biden, for his part, signed into law the historic $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to ensure broad distribution of vaccines. But he can’t force people to get vaccinated. He did issue vaccination and testing mandates for businesses, but those were rebuked by the Supreme Court. He also isn’t responsible for conservative disinformation and efforts to thwart measures to protect people from Covid by Republican elected officials, which is the primary reason the US is still struggling with the virus in a way that some other industrialized countries aren’t.

What about Biden’s alleged lack of success in solving the climate change issue in a single year? Biden has taken many steps that are within his authority on climate change such as rejoining the Paris climate accord, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and undoing many Trump-era anti-climate executive orders. He has pushed climate priorities in his Build Back Better bill which anyone who is sentient knows hasn’t passed because Biden enjoys the slimmest of majorities in the Senate and he couldn’t win over Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. There is also the fact that Republicans have zero interest in this bill. Republican obstructionism is not Biden’s fault.

Biden is not a magician; he is president. He can’t shout “abracadabra” and produce 50 Democratic senators who will support every element of his agenda. There aren’t 10 GOP senators to pull out of a hat to back common sense and patriotic priorities like protecting voting rights. “But he didn’t end the filibuster for voting rights,” is the complaint. Right, because he doesn’t have the votes.

This doesn’t mean that Biden couldn’t have done some things better in his first year. The administration was caught flat-footed by the Omicron variant and failed to deliver on promises to make testing easier and more available to Americans. Biden should have called Sen. Manchin’s bluff on Build Back Better a long time ago and struck a deal if there was one to be had (which is debatable). If Manchin wouldn’t strike a deal, Biden should have moved on to something more achievable like breaking the bill into smaller parts (something he said in his press conference this week he is open to doing).

Ultimately, we need to remember that Biden entered the White House during one of the most difficult periods this country has ever faced. “The worst pandemic in 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” he said during his campaign. “The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60’s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change.” We can now add to that list an attack on democracy by one of the two major political parties.

. . . Whatever Biden’s flaws, the country is in a better place than it was when he took office, something that was not a given considering the challenges he was up against. Like all presidents, he is clearly absorbing the lessons of the first year and recalibrating for the next.

Unquote.

I’ll add two positives not mentioned: 

No president since Ronald Reagan has gotten so many judges confirmed in his first year. Mr. Biden has also fulfilled a campaign promise by nominating perhaps the most diverse slate of judicial picks ever: 75% are women and 71% are people of color, according to FiveThirtyEight. Also important, court watchers say, is that the 40 new judges bring with them a wide backdrop of legal experience [including, for example, public defenders and civil rights and labor lawyers] (CS Monitor).

Secondly, he had the courage and insight to end the longest, stupidest war in American history, while evacuating nearly 130,000 Afghans and Americans in a matter of days after the national government collapsed more quickly than most observers expected.