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Category Archives: Politics

It Needed To Be Said

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President Biden made a speech last night that more Americans should have heard. The TV networks didn’t interrupt their regular programming for it. You needed cable TV or an internet connection to watch it.

Earlier in the day, the former president, the criminal, said he would give full pardons to the January 6th insurrectionists if he’s re-elected. He went further. He said he’d apologize to them.

From what I’ve read today, the talking heads on TV were more focused on the setting for the President’s speech than what he said. They wondered how the speech would “play”. They were apparently concerned that Republicans would feel insulted.

Today, at least one reporter, John Harwood of CNN, spoke differently:

Of course, it was a political speech in a mid-term election year. The issues he’s talking about are inherently political. But … it’s important to say that the core point he made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true! That’s not easy for us as journalists to say. We’re brought up to believe that there are two political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements. The Republican Party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well. And a … portion of their constituency attacked the Capitol on January 6th violently. By offering pardons or suggesting pardons for those people … Donald Trump made Joe Biden’s point for him.

It was John Harwood’s last day at CNN. He’s one of the people the new management has fired in their attempt to make CNN a more pleasant viewing experience for Republicans and others lukewarm about democracy.

So here’s a partial transcript of the presidential speech that got so many people upset. It brings to mind what President Harry (“Give ’em Hell) Truman once : “I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell”.

THE PRESIDENT:  My fellow Americans, … I speak to you tonight from sacred ground in America: Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This is where America made its Declaration of Independence to the world more than two centuries ago with an idea, unique among nations, that in America, we’re all created equal.

This is where the United States Constitution was written and debated.

This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known with three simple words: “We, the People.”  “We, the People.”

These two documents and the ideas they embody — equality and democracy — are the rock upon which this nation is built….

But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault.  We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.

So tonight, I have come this place where it all began to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats, and about the incredible future that lies in front of us if only we choose it…..

But first, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.  Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology…..

But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

These are hard things.

But I’m an American President — not the President of red America or blue America, but of all America.

And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people.

They refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections … to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.

They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people.  This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.

That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.

But while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can: We are not powerless in the face of these threats.  We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy.

There are far more Americans — far more Americans from every — from every background and belief who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it.  (Applause.)

And, folks, it is within our power, it’s in our hands — yours and mine — to stop the assault on American democracy.

I believe America is at an inflection point — one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.

And now America must choose: to move forward or to move backwards?

… MAGA Republicans have made their choice.  They embrace anger.  They thrive on chaos.  They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

But together — together, we can choose a different path.  We can choose a better path….

I know this nation.  I know you, the American people….

This is a nation that honors our Constitution.  We do not reject it.  (Applause.)

This is a nation that believes in the rule of law.  We do not repudiate it.  (Applause.)

This is a nation that respects free and fair elections.  We honor the will of the people.  We do not deny it.  (Applause.)

And this is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool.  We do not encourage violence.

We are still an America that believes in honesty and decency and respect for others, patriotism, liberty, justice for all, hope, possibilities.

We are still, at our core, a democracy.  (Applause.)

And yet history tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.

For a long time, we’ve told ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed, but it’s not.

We have to defend it, protect it, stand up for it — each and every one of us.

That’s why tonight I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology.  (Applause.)

We’re all called, by duty and conscience, to confront extremists who will put their own pursuit of power above all else.

Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy. …Today, there are dangers around us we cannot allow to prevail.   We hear — you’ve heard it — more and more talk about violence as an acceptable political tool in this country.  It’s not.  It can never be an acceptable tool.

So I want to say this plain and simple: There is no place for political violence in America.  Period.  None.  Ever.  (Applause.)

We saw law enforcement brutally attacked on January the 6th.  We’ve seen election officials, poll workers — many of them volunteers of both parties — subjected to intimidation and death threats.  And — can you believe it? — FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens.

On top of that, there are public figures — today, yesterday, and the day before — predicting and all but calling for mass violence and rioting in the streets.

This is inflammatory.  It’s dangerous.  It’s against the rule of law.  And we, the people, must say: This is not who we are.  (Applause.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.  They’re incompatible.  (Applause.)

We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country.  It’s wrong.  We each have to reject political violence with — with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster.  Now.

We can’t let the integrity of our elections be undermined, for that is a path to chaos.

Look, I know politics can be fierce and mean and nasty in America.  I get it.  I believe in the give-and-take of politics, in disagreement and debate and dissent.

We’re a big, complicated country.  But democracy endures only if we, the people, respect the guardrails of the republic.  Only if we, the people, accept the results of free and fair elections.  (Applause.)  Only if we, the people, see politics not as total war but mediation of our differences.

Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated.  And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today.  (Applause.)

They don’t understand what every patriotic American knows: You can’t love your country only when you win.  (Applause.)  It’s fundamental.

American democracy only works if we choose to respect the rule of law and the institutions that were set up in this chamber behind me, only if we respect our legitimate political differences.

I will not stand by and watch — I will not — the will of the American people be overturned by wild conspiracy theories and baseless, evidence-free claims of fraud.

I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost.  (Applause.)

I will not stand by and watch the most fundamental freedom in this country — the freedom to vote and have your vote counted be taken from you and the American people.  (Applause.)

Look, as your President, I will defend our democracy with every fiber of my being, and I’m asking every American to join me.  (Applause.)

… MAGA Republicans look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair.  They spread fear and lies — lies told for profit and power.

But I see a very different America…  Just look around.

I believed we could lift America from the depths of COVID, so we passed the largest economic recovery package since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  And today, America’s economy is faster, stronger than any other advanced nation in the world.  (Applause.)

I believed we could build a better America, so we passed the biggest infrastructure investment since President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  And we’ve now embarked on a decade of rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, highways, ports, water systems, high-speed Internet, railroads.  (Applause.)

I believed we could make America safer, so we passed the most significant gun safety law since President Clinton.  (Applause.)

I believed we could go from being the highest cost of prescriptions in the world to making prescription drugs and healthcare more affordable, so we passed the most significant healthcare reforms since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act.  (Applause.)

And I believed we could create — we could create a clean energy future and save the planet, so we passed the most important climate initiative ever, ever, ever.  (Applause.)

… It’s never easy.  But we’re proving that in America, no matter how long the road, progress does come.  (Applause.)

… We have never fully realized the aspirations of our founding, but every generation has opened those doors a little wider to include more people who have been excluded before….This is the work of democracy…

We can’t afford to leave anyone on the sidelines.  We need everyone to do their part.  So speak up.  Speak out.  Get engaged.  Vote, vote, vote.  (Applause.)

And if we all do our duty — if we do our duty in 2022 and beyond, then ages still to come will say we … kept the faith.  We preserved democracy.  (Applause.)  We heeded … not our worst instincts but our better angels.  And we proved that, for all its imperfections, America is still the beacon to the world, an ideal to be realized, a promise to be kept….

We just need to remember who we are.  We are the United States of America.  The United States of America.  (Applause.)

Identifying Semi-Fascism Again

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I posted something a few days ago regarding Biden’s use of “semi-fascism” to describe what’s happening in the Republican Party. The author I quoted said some of the factors he listed should be given more weight than others. Being in thrall to a single leader is, for example, more important than making a fetish of the young. Here’s another take on “semi-fascism” from Brooklyn writer John Ganz:

“Semi-fascist” is actually used by scholars….In Stanley Payne’s A History of Fascism: 1914-1945, the author employs it several times and invests it with real content. In fact, semi-fascism was a common phenomenon because fascist movements had so much difficulty obtaining popular support and had to meld with conservative allies and existing institutions. In most places, fascist movements either failed or became a junior tendency in a broader political context:

Thus in the absence of a plurality of generically fascist regimes and systems, it is possible to refer only to a number of semifascist or would-be fascist regimes, while in turn distinguishing between the character and structure of each type and subtype both among themselves and in comparison with diverse kinds of conservative (or at least nonsocialist) nonfascist authoritarian regimes.

One of Payne’s primary examples of “semifascism” is Franco’s Spain: “That early Franquism contained a major component of fascism is undeniable, but it was so restricted within a right-wing, praetorian, Catholic, and semipluralist structure that the category ‘semifascist’ would probably be more accurate.” That is to say, in Franco’s Spain, hardcore fascists were part of a broad coalition of a more traditional authoritarian right and were subordinated to the role of junior partner and eventually swamped by the regime. You can also see similar processes take place in Legionary Romania, Horthy’s Hungary, Vichy France, and Salazar’s Portugal. Even Mussolini’s Italy had to make serious accommodations with conservative forces and kept aspects of the constitutional order in place at the beginning of the regime.

So, that’s regimes, but what about movements? Surely those must be more ideologically pure or clear-cut? Well, how would you characterize Action Française, Croix de Feu, or the Ku Klux Klan for that matter? The America First Committee contained Nazi sympathizers and others who were just sincerely anti-war. So, it was quite literally “semi-fascist.” Huey Long was not really a fascist, but he attracted a number of fascist followers, like Lawrence Dennis and Gerald L. K. Smith, because he looked close enough to them. They thought he could be turned into a more full-blown fascist, which was probably similar to the attitude of people like Bannon towards T____. Suffice it to say, there are many historical movements that anticipate fascist-style mobilization and themes, or copied some aspects of fascism while being more traditionally conservative in their desired outcome, or that excited and inspired fascists without fully delivering.

… As the highly-respected scholar Robert Paxton points out, fascism is less a coherent ideology than a set of “mobilizing passions:”

  • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
  • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual
  • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
  • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
  • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
  • the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;
  • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
  • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
  • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

Now obviously some of these features apply more to T____ism than others, so “semi-fascism” seems to be right on the money.

The fact of the matter is this: T____ism at its core is a movement fixated on restoring national greatness through the charismatic leadership of a single providential individual who “alone can fix it.” It is obsessed with national decline and attacking internal enemies. Although more loosely organized and weaker than those of the classical fascisms, MAGA also has paramilitary formations that have tried to carry out this project to the point of attempting the overthrow an elected government. From the very beginning of his political ascent, he attracted the interest and enthusiasm of the extreme right. He was the kind of thing they’d been looking for for a long time. Perhaps now a disappointment, perhaps now a failure, but certainly a step in the right direction as far as they were concerned.

Biden was probably hedging: his aides were concerned if he said “fascism” it would be too strong. But he was landing on a pretty reasonable interpretation of the case….

Saying someone is fascist or semi-fascist does not make all their supporters to be goose-stepping stormtroopers or say they deserve to be in the dock at Nuremberg.

Many normal people, including conservatives and even former leftists, at one point or another supported Europe’s fascist regimes. They did so because one or another part of their appeals sounded good to them, or they did it as a protest vote against a system that wasn’t functioning well; many sensible and educated people thought of fascism as essentially technocratic solution to the ills of liberal democracy. Fascism was, at one time, and as I fear it is becoming again, attractive and persuasive, not just brutal and overwhelming. The problem was that it was not a solution to any of the crises that beset these democracies: it was a disastrous series of lies and delusions. And that is the reason to call this for what it is: to say, “Look, we’ve seen this before. It doesn’t end well….”

Unquote.

Biden will address the nation on television tonight concerning this ongoing threat to democracy. He might not use “semi-fascism” again but it’s clear what and who he’ll be talking about.

Fascist? Semi-fascist? You Be the Judge

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You may have heard that Joe Biden said something impolite recently. At a fundraiser, he said:

What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just T____, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.

Later, at a rally, he added:

The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security. They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace — embrace — political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.

Today, the Guardian published an interview with Jenna Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State (the officials who, among other things, administer state elections):

Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, is warning anyone who will listen that the fate of free and fair elections in the United States hangs in the balance in this November’s midterm contests.

In many of the most competitive races for offices with authority over US elections, Republicans nominated candidates who have embraced or echoed [the] myth of a stolen election in 2020.

Griswold … is urging Americans to pay attention to the once-sleepy down-ballot contests for secretary of state – lest they lose their democracy.

“What we can expect from the extreme Republicans running across this country is to undermine free and fair elections for the American people, strip Americans of the right to vote, refuse to address security breaches and, unfortunately, be more beholden to Mar-a-Lago than the American people,” Griswold, 37, said….

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post welcomed Biden’s language:

Good for him. Those who cherish democracy need to call out the proto-fascist [my emphasis] tendencies now seizing the T____-occupied GOP.

Republican candidates up and down the November ballot reject the legitimate outcome of the last election — and are making it easier to reject the will of the voters in the next. Violent anti-government rhetoric from party leaders targets the FBI, the Justice Department and the IRS. A systemic campaign of disinformation makes their supporters feel victimized by shadowy “elites.” These are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

President Biden still apparently thinks most Republican politicians are “mainstream”. They haven’t fallen under Dear Leader’s spell. But the past six years have shown that the Republican “mainstream” is now the Republican minority.

So what about fascism or semi-fascism? How should we describe today’s Republican Party?

The internet has lots of descriptions of fascism. I found one from six years ago, published two weeks before the disastrous 2016 election. “How fascist is D____ T____?” was written by J. R. McNeill, a history professor:

Since the 1950s, dozens of top historians and political scientists have put fascism, especially the Italian and German versions, under the microscope. They’ve come up with a pretty solid agreement on what it is, both as a political ideology and as a political movement, factoring in all the (sometimes contradictory) things its progenitors said as they ascended to power. As a political ideology, fascism has eight main traits. As a political movement, it has three more. So: Just how fascist is T____?

Prof. McNeill then lists eleven fascistic traits and grades the Republican’s two-time  presidential candidate and favorite to run again on each trait, using a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being Hitler or Mussolini-level fascism. Keep in mind that in 2016 the professor hadn’t yet seen the “billionaire” candidate in action as president.

1 — Hyper-Nationalism: “By the standards of American politics, he is a hyper-nationalist, but by the standards of historical fascism, he is not in the upper echelon”: 2 points

2 — Militarism: “By and large, [he] does not blithely recommend military action and often lambastes his rivals for allegedly incompetent military adventurism. He does not dress his followers in ersatz military garb” (well, that’s something): 2 points

3 — Glorification of violence and readiness to use it in politics: “[His behavior is] well short of the standard of Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts, who not only called for political violence but resorted to it extensively”: 1 out of 4, but knowing what we know now, let’s give the professor the benefit of the doubt. It has to be 2 or 3 now, so let’s say 2 1/2.

4 — Fetishization of youth: 0 points. He has nothing like the Hitler Youth, for example.

5 — Fetishization of masculinity: “On swaggering machismo he gets full marks”: 4 points.

6 — Leader cult: “Fascists always looked to a leader who was bold, decisive, manly, uncompromising and cruel when necessary — because the parlous state of the nation required such qualities. Mussolini and Hitler … encouraged their followers to idolize them as Il Duce and der Führer.” (Remember “I alone can fix it” at the Republican convention? That should have immediately disqualified him): 4 points

7 — Lost-golden-age syndrome: Did someone say “Make America great again?”: 4 points

8 — Self-definition by opposition: Considering the myriad groups and individuals he’s condemned, it’s hard to believe he didn’t earn 4 points. But as Prof. McNeil says, “he does not advocate their annihilation, as Hitler did” (at least not in public): 3 points

9 — Mass mobilization and mass party: “He made a venerable [political party] into his vehicle” and “likes to refer to his following as a movement”. The professor only gave him 2 points, but since he later got 46% and 47% of the vote in two national elections (137 million votes in all, although less than his opponents), let’s bump his number up: 3 points

10 — Hierarchical party structure and tendency to purge the disloyal: “Fascist movements, like revolutions, ate their children. Anyone who displayed only tepid loyalty to the leader or who showed the potential to outshine the leader risked being purged or killed. So did followers who outlived their usefulness.” Prof. McNeil only gave him 1 point (no Night of the Long Knives), but given the fate of “moderate” Republicans these days: 2 points

11 — Theatricality: “In style and rhetoric, fascism was highly theatrical. Film and audio of Mussolini and Hitler make them seem like clownish buffoons, with their exaggerated gestures, their salutes, their overheated speeches full of absolutes and superlatives”. That sounds like somebody: 3 points

Prof. McNeil ended up giving the first-time presidential candidate 26 points out of a possible 44 on the fascist scale. His conclusion is interesting, especially given Biden’s recent remarks:

T____ is semi-fascist: more fascist than any successful American politician yet, and the most dangerous threat to pluralist democracy in this country in more than a century, but — thank our stars — an amateurish imitation of the real thing.

Having recent history in mind, I gave him 29 1/2 points. No Adolph or Benito, but definitely semi-fascist. And since nobody better represents today’s Republican Party, we should apply the same label to the outfit that should no longer be called the “Grand Old Party”.

Student Loan Forgiveness: Bad Assumptions, Bad Arguments

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I went to college when you could do it relatively cheaply. More recently, a close relative took out loans and paid them off. Yet I find myself strangely pleased that President Biden is giving many former students financial assistance. If you happen to disagree (or if you don’t), here are perceptive comments on the matter from two columnists. First, Paul Waldman of The Washington Post. Then Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times.

One can make reasonable arguments against the student loan forgiveness plan President Biden announced this week. But the outright fury of the response in some quarters, and the absurd bad faith and hypocrisy being mobilized against this plan, have been a wonder to behold. And it is revealing fundamental things about the people taxpayers think the government ought to help.

To watch the reaction, you’d think this is the first loan forgiveness program in human history. You’d also think it’s absolutely vital to determine whether every last recipient will be morally deserving of this assistance, and whether any good people anywhere might fail to qualify for it. The more you examine these arguments — not only from Republicans but also journalists and a few Democrats — the weirder they seem.

At the most basic level, loan forgiveness isn’t novel or even unusual. Our bankruptcy system allows people to discharge loans every day — yet perversely, the law makes it extraordinarily difficult to get released from student loan debt even if you’re bankrupt. Some well-known people have used the bankruptcy system to eliminate their debts [including a former president, six times].

The government, furthermore, bails out people, companies and industries all the time when it decides that doing so is worthwhile. In the Great Recession we bailed out banks, insurers and auto companies. D____ T____ handed out tens of billions of dollars to farmers hit by his pointless trade war. Pandemic relief distributed hundreds of billions of dollars in forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses.

Some of those forgiven loans — remember, taxpayer money, from truck drivers and waitresses — even went to the same Republican members of Congress who now rail against forgiving student debt, as the White House eagerly pointed out. If you’re a struggling blue-collar worker, are you mad that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had $183,000 in loans forgiven, or that Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) had $1.4 million forgiven, or that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had $482,000 forgiven?

If not, why does student loan forgiveness make you mad?

This leads to one of the most bizarre arguments against this program: Sure, it helps some people, but what about people it doesn’t help? What about people who never went to college, or who already paid off their loans? Why should they chip in to help these other people?

That argument could be raised against almost every government program in existence. This is the nature of paying taxes and having a government: Your money goes to all kinds of things that don’t benefit you directly or that you don’t like. You pay to maintain national parks you might not visit, and to find cures for diseases you’ll never contract. You support schools even if you don’t have kids. You build roads in states you don’t live in. You support wheat farmers even if you’re on a gluten-free diet.

How many people complaining about loan forgiveness have campaigned against the mortgage interest deduction? It costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year, and its recipients — homeowners who itemize their deductions — are disproportionately wealthy. Where are all the cries of “How does this help people who rent, or people who already paid off their mortgages???”

The flip side of that argument is one we’re also hearing, that some people who will get this assistance might not truly need it. Journalists are searching for supposedly undeserving recipients, no matter how small their numbers. What if there’s an engineering major who just graduated and hasn’t gotten a job yet, but next year she’ll be working at Google? My God, are we going to forgive her loans when in 10 years she could be a billionaire?

The answer to that question is, who cares? Seriously. As a taxpayer (and as someone who, yes, took out student loans and paid them off), I don’t mind if some people get relief who might do fine without it, because tens of millions of lives could be transformed by this policy. The question is how much good the program as a whole does, not whether it helps someone somewhere who doesn’t really need it. The overwhelming majority of recipients will be middle class and because it gives extra to Pell Grant recipients, people from poor families get the most help.

Finally, some people warn that the program could worsen inflation, because it will put money into the economy. The truth is that the effect on inflation will likely be minuscule, but you could raise the same objection to literally anything the government spends money on.

For instance, earlier this summer, the House passed an $839 billion military spending bill for the 2023 fiscal year — that’s one year, not over a decade. Will pumping that much money into the economy be inflationary? And if so, should we just stop funding the military?

The fact that this question probably sounds ridiculous to you is revealing: Nobody ever worries about the inflationary effect of military spending, because people make that kind of objection only to policies they don’t like.

And that’s what’s at the heart of the objections to Biden’s loan forgiveness: Most of those making them are perfectly happy to have the government help some people, just not these people. And if that’s your argument against student loan forgiveness, you haven’t shown why the program is bad; all you’ve done is reveal yourself.

Unquote. Now from Mr. Bouie’s newsletter (no link available):

The Republican response to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is to try to turn the issue into a culture war…. Republicans would say that they are simply speaking up for those Americans who won’t benefit from the program. But they’re working under faulty assumptions.

First, a few details on the program itself. Under the plan, Biden will direct the federal government to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for recipients of Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from low-income families), and up to $10,000 in loans for other eligible borrowers. It is restricted to individuals with incomes of up to $125,000 a year and households with incomes of up to $250,000 a year.

If every single recipient earned $124,999, it would lend credence to the Republican argument that this is some kind of war on working-class and blue-collar Americans. But they don’t. In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s policy are exactly the people Republicans claim to represent with their rhetoric. As my newsroom colleague Jim Tankersley notes, “the people eligible for debt relief are disproportionately young and Black. And they are concentrated in the middle band of Americans by income, defined as households earning between $51,000 and $82,000 a year.”

If you want to haul freight for a living, you’ll need a commercial driver’s license, which means you’ll need training, which means you’ll need school. This schooling can cost thousands of dollars, and students can pay their tuition with federal student loans. So, too, can people who need training to work as medical technicians or home care workers or physical therapists or restaurant workers, among many other trades and professions.

Millions of people with blue-collar jobs owe thousands of dollars in federal student loans, and they may not have the income needed to pay them off. Biden’s plan helps them as much or more than a graduate of a four-year college with debt on the ledger. It also helps the millions of Americans who took out loans, attended college, but for one reason or another could not complete their degrees and are in the worst of all financial worlds as a result.

Like the “welfare queen,” the lazy, profligate and irresponsible student loan borrower of Republican rhetoric is a myth. And the point of the myth, as I said earlier, is to spread cultural resentment.

The fact of the matter is the Republican Party does not have anything to offer the millions of working- and middle-class Americans who labor under the burden of student debt. For all the talk of “populism,” the party is still hostile to the social safety net, opposed to raising the minimum wage, hostile to unions and worker power and virtually every economic policy intervention that isn’t tax cuts and upward redistribution from the many to the most fortunate few.

To debate the reality of student debt relief is to make that more than clear to the public at large. Republicans, then, are trying to make this a debate over culture, to try to reduce issues of class to a question of aesthetics, with traditional blue-collar workers on one side and the image of an ungrateful and unproductive young person on the other. And they’re hoping, as always, that you won’t notice.

Unquote. 

That should be the Republican Party’s epitaph: THEY HOPED YOU WOULDN’T NOTICE.

Some Perspective on the Renegade Supreme Court Majority

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We know they’re corrupt, but are they so out of the ordinary? David Cole is a law professor and the legal director of the ACLU. These are excerpts from a longer article from the New York Review of Books:

Over the course of the Supreme Court’s 232-year history, 110 men and six women have served as justices. Just a small handful of them have been “originalists,” holding the view that the only appropriate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask how its provisions were specifically understood at the time they were adopted. But in 2020 that handful became, for the first time, a majority of the Court when Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, joining fellow originalists Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. (Chief Justice John Roberts is sometimes an originalist and sometimes not.) During the 2020–2021 term—Barrett’s first—the Court proceeded cautiously, mostly seeking consensus across ideological lines through narrow decisions.

But this past term, which concluded on June 30, these five individuals abandoned caution and exerted their newfound authority like few justices ever have. The Court eliminated the right to abortion, struck down a century-old New York law that limited the public carrying of guns, required Maine to fund religious education and a Washington State public school to allow its football coach to pray publicly at the fifty-yard line after games, blocked President Biden’s Covid vaccine mandate for large businesses, and denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to require power plants to shift away from coal in order to slow global warming. Compromise, consensus, and the rule of law are out; the radical exercise of power is in.

In several of its most controversial decisions, including those on abortion, gun control, and prayer, the Court invoked originalism to overturn long-standing law and precedent. That approach, if applied consistently, would upend virtually all of constitutional law. Because so few justices throughout American history have been originalists, constitutional law as it stands today, especially with respect to its open-ended guarantees of liberty, equality, and due process, bears little resemblance to how it was originally understood. To revert to that understanding would be plainly unacceptable; it would mean, for example, reviving “separate but equal” [schools for blacks and whites] and depriving women of equal protection. For better or worse, even the most committed originalists don’t apply originalism consistently, so it’s unlikely that the Court will resurrect Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision upholding segregation. But this past term, the new majority aggressively applied originalism to disastrous effect, and only they know how far they will go.

The biggest case of the term, and thus far of the century, was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which five justices, including all three of [the previous president’s] nominees—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—voted to overrule Roe v. Wade and about twenty other Supreme Court cases that had followed and applied Roe over nearly half a century. Dobbs will almost certainly be included among the Court’s worst decisions in history. Never has the Court eliminated a constitutional right so central to the equality and autonomy of half the nation. And never has the Court overturned precedent on such a transparently thin basis….

The majority’s conclusion that Roe was “egregiously wrong” rested on its view that the only appropriate way to interpret the Constitution is by reference to its “original understanding.” But there is another way to read the Constitution. It’s sometimes called the “living Constitution” or “common-law constitutionalism,” and it is the method used by virtually every justice in the Court’s history other than the five in the Dobbs majority, the late Antonin Scalia, and sometimes Chief Justice Roberts. Under that approach, the Court starts with the text of the Constitution but recognizes that its broad, open-ended terms—such as “liberty,” “due process,” and “equal protection”—were designed to evolve over time, through the accretion of precedent, the articulation of principle and fundamental norms, and reasoning by analogy. Under that approach, Roe is not “egregiously wrong” but plainly correct.

In a series of decisions over the last century, the Court has interpreted “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment in this way, and not exclusively by reference to its original understanding or “history and tradition.” It has relied on the provision to bar stomach-pumping to search for drugs and forced sterilization, and to protect the rights to use contraception, to marry someone of a different race or the same sex, to choose how to educate one’s children, and to engage in consensual sexual relations with adults of one’s own sex, despite the fact that none of these rights is expressly provided in the Constitution. The right to choose whether to bear a child is of a piece with these decisions and is therefore protected for the same reason. Roe is “egregiously wrong,” then, only if the methodology used by virtually every justice to have ever served on the Court is egregiously wrong….

Overturning precedent requires more than a determination that the prior ruling is wrong, because otherwise the Constitution would change each time the makeup of the Court does. Justice Alito conceded that the Court must also ask whether people have relied on the prior ruling before overturning it. But he callously dismissed such concerns… This is stunningly obtuse….While the majority opinion in Dobbs declared that “the most striking feature of the dissent is the absence of any serious discussion of the States’ interest in protecting fetal life,” the dissent quoted the majority’s own language back at it: “‘The most striking feature of the [majority] is the absence of any serious discussion’ of how its ruling will affect women.”

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the Court similarly elevated adherence to a crabbed view of history over both standard constitutional methodology and present-day reality….By the increasingly common margin of 6–3, struck down a New York law dating from 1911 that required individuals to demonstrate that they had a need to carry a gun in public before they could be licensed to do so….

The Second Amendment did not even protect an individual right to own a gun until the Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008. Before then, the courts, the Justice Department, and historians had long viewed the Second Amendment as protecting only the rights of states to field a militia, as a check on federal tyranny. In Heller, after a long and carefully orchestrated campaign by the National Rifle Association, the Supreme Court for the first time announced that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to possess a firearm in one’s home for self-defense…..At the time, however, the Court reassured the public that the Second Amendment right was not absolute and was subject to reasonable regulations…..

In Bruen, however, the Court went much further. In a decision written by Justice Thomas, it announced that the only gun regulations that the Constitution permits are those that have a direct analogue in laws that existed in the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was adopted, or possibly the nineteenth century, when Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment….In the absence of a specific historical precedent, any restrictions on the right to bear arms are unconstitutional—no matter how serious the threat guns pose to public safety or how reasonable the regulation…..

The Court’s approach is contrary to common sense, constitutional precedent, and the very history it purports to rely upon. Most fundamentally, why should states in the twenty-first century be limited to what states did centuries earlier, particularly when conditions have radically changed?

… The particular historical approach Justice Thomas announced, in which the only laws that are valid are those that mirror eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laws, applies to no other constitutional right. …With respect to virtually all other rights, courts also ask whether the state has a strong enough interest to limit the right, and whether it has done so in a sufficiently narrow way. This “means-ends” scrutiny, pervasive in constitutional law, governs free speech, free exercise, and equal protection claims, among others, and expressly allows for the assessment of contemporary needs and conditions….

But it gets worse. Defenders of New York’s law cited boatloads of historical examples of laws restricting the public carrying of weapons, spanning nearly seven hundred years. They include the Statute of Northampton, first enacted in 1328, which made it a crime to carry arms in public without the king’s permission and which was copied by several American colonies. Limits on carrying weapons continued through the founding era, and before and after the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment. It should hardly be surprising that governments have long restricted the carrying of weapons in public.

Justice Thomas, however, found ways to reject each and every historical example. As Justice Breyer pointed out in a devastating dissent, Thomas found some “too old,” others “too recent.” “Some were enacted for the wrong reasons,” others “arose in historically unique circumstances.” Thomas’s wide-ranging set of excuses for rejecting analogues only underscores the subjective character of the enterprise and belies any claim that the historical method of interpretation significantly restrains judicial discretion….

Judging, especially at the Supreme Court level, requires not just a theory for interpreting constitutional law. It requires statesmanship, humility, an open mind, and, perhaps most importantly, respect for the institution and the accumulated judgment of one’s predecessors. As the Dobbs dissent noted, Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter [all nominated by Republican presidents] understood that:

The American public … should never conclude that its constitutional protections hang by a thread—that a new majority, adhering to a new “doctrinal school,” could “by dint of numbers” alone expunge their rights. It is hard—no, it is impossible—to conclude that anything else has happened here.

Next term the Court takes up the constitutionality of affirmative action, racial discrimination in redistricting, a sweeping challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, a claim that “expressive” businesses have a right to discriminate against gay couples … and an unprecedented and dangerous claim that state courts cannot police their legislatures when they gerrymander congressional districts. Whether the Court will continue its headstrong approach to all that has gone before it is likely to depend on how we as citizens respond to its initial salvos. If Americans mobilize, demonstrate, and vote on issues like abortion, gun control, and climate change, the Court will at some point have to take heed. But if we sit back and allow it to take away our rights and safety without a fight, there’s no telling how far the five [or six] justices who now exercise majority control will go.

Unquote.

It’s an excellent article, but I disagree with the author’s contention that this Court “will at some point have to take heed” of what the majority of American voters want. Short of Congress doing something like adding Supreme Court justices or limiting the Court’s ability to declare laws unconstitutional, this renegade Republican majority has absolute power. They can rule however they want and can always make up reasons for doing so.