Category Archives: Politics

The Attack Continues

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A New York Times editorial entitled “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now”:

One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.

This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.

On the surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is D____ T____ who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. T____ and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.

We know now that top Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures privately understood how dangerous the riot was and pleaded with T____ to call a halt to it, even as they publicly pretended otherwise. We know now that those who may have critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.

For now, the committee’s work continues. It has scheduled a series of public hearings in the new year to lay out these and other details, and it plans to release a full report of its findings before the midterm elections — after which, should Republicans regain control of the House as expected, the committee will undoubtedly be dissolved.

This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.

Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.

Many of these laws are being proposed and passed in crucial battleground states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the T____ campaign targeted voting results in all these states, suing for recounts or intimidating officials into finding “missing” votes. The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity of election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of their power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the last election was fraudulent.

Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.

This isn’t the first time state legislatures have tried to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people, nor is it the first time that the dangers of such a ploy have been pointed out. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison warned Congress of the risk that such a “trick” could determine the outcome of a presidential election.

The Constitution guarantees to all Americans a republican form of government, Harrison said. “The essential features of such a government are the right of the people to choose their own officers” and to have their votes counted equally in making that choice. “Our chief national danger,” he continued, is “the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of popular suffrage.” If a state legislature were to succeed in substituting its own will for that of its voters, “it is not too much to say that the public peace might be seriously and widely endangered.”

A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.

“The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of the vanishingly few Republicans in Congress who remain committed to empirical reality and representative democracy. “And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”

The answer, for now, appears to be no. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-third approve of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger.

Political violence is not an inevitable outcome. Republican leaders could help by being honest with their voters and combating the extremists in their midst. Throughout American history, party leaders . . . have stood up for the union and democracy first, to their everlasting credit.

Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, even if nothing else.

Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.

Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, T____ and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.

One Came from Austria and Loved his Dog. The Other Came from Queens and Didn’t Have One.

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They say the first one to mention the Nazis automatically loses the argument. But anyone who reads a Hitler biography has to be struck by the similarities between the German dictator and a recent president. Among the similarities: They both claimed to be extraordinary, to have knowledge and abilities they didn’t possess. They raged against imaginary enemies. They blamed others for anything that went wrong, never themselves. They told lies by the truckload. They couldn’t be trusted. They ignored the law whenever it suited their purposes. They were psychologically insecure and viewed mild criticism as disloyalty. They came to power with the help of those who knew better. They convinced millions of their fellow citizens to follow them blindly, many to the point of their own destruction.

The final paragraph of Volker Ullrich’s two-volume biography of the mass murderer:

“We are not and cannot be done with confronting Adolf Hitler”, wrote the Catholic author Reinhold Schneider in 1946. “In a certain sense, we will be bound to him for all eternity.” Schneider’s words remain pertinent today. Hitler will remain a cautionary example for all time. If his life and career teaches us anything, it is how quickly democracy can be prized from its hinges when political institutions fail and civilizing forces in society are too weak to combat the lure of authoritarianism; how thin the mantle separating civilization and barbarism actually is; and what human beings are capable of when the rule of law and ethical norms are suspended and some people are granted unlimited power over the lives of others.

Never Trust a Politician Who Loves Coal and Drives a Maserati

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The moderate Republican senator from West Virginia who calls himself a “Democrat” says he cannot vote for the Build Back Better Act for a few silly reasons he borrowed from the 50 immoderate senators who openly admit they’re Republicans. This was after months of negotiations. The White House is royally pissed. Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued this statement soon after Manchin spoke on the Republican news channel:

Senator Manchin’s comments this morning on FOX are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances. Weeks ago, Senator Manchin committed to the President, at his home in Wilmington, to support the Build Back Better framework that the President then subsequently announced. Senator Manchin pledged repeatedly to negotiate on finalizing that framework “in good faith.”

On Tuesday of this week, Senator Manchin came to the White House and submitted—to the President, in person, directly—a written outline for a Build Back Better bill that was the same size and scope as the President’s framework, and covered many of the same priorities. While that framework was missing key priorities [especially climate-related, I bet], we believed it could lead to a compromise acceptable to all. Senator Manchin promised to continue conversations in the days ahead, and to work with us to reach that common ground. If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.

Senator Manchin claims that this change of position is related to inflation, but the think tank he often cites on Build Back Better—the Penn Wharton Budget Institute—issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures. Many leading economists with whom Senator Manchin frequently consults also support Build Back Better.

Build Back Better lowers costs that families pay. It will reduce what families pay for child care. It will reduce what they pay for prescription drugs. It will lower health care premiums. And it puts a tax cut in the pockets of families with kids. If someone is concerned about the impact that higher prices are having on families, this bill gives them a break. [He also referred to the deficit and energy policy.]

. . . Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word.

In the meantime, Senator Manchin will have to explain to those families paying $1,000 a month for insulin why they need to keep paying that, instead of $35 for that vital medicine. He will have to explain to the nearly two million women who would get the affordable day care they need to return to work why he opposes a plan to get them the help they need. Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone—we cannot.

We are proud of what we have gotten done in 2021: the American Rescue Plan, the fastest decrease in unemployment in U.S. history, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, over 200 million Americans vaccinated, schools reopened, the fastest rollout of vaccines to children anywhere in the world, and historic appointments to the Federal judiciary.

But we will not relent in the fight to help Americans with their child care, health care, prescription drug costs, and elder care—and to combat climate change. The fight for Build Back Better is too important to give up. We will find a way to move forward next year.

Unquote.

I was wrong to think the Democrats would pass Build Back Better in some form this month. I still think they’ll get some of it done in the new year, since even Manchin will vote for some of it. The state he represents prefers Republicans but has the lowest per capita income in America, lower even than Mississippi. Politicians usually want to help people who live in their states, even if said politicians made their money in the coal industry and drive a Maserati.

Manchin, Manchin, Manchin, Maybe, Maybe, Maybe

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Since all 50 Republican senators are opposed to even debating voting rights legislation, the only way for the current Senate to protect democracy is for all 50 Democrats to agree to change the filibuster. One “Democrat” who hasn’t agreed yet is the Maserati-driving, coal-loving senator from West Virginia. Greg Sargent of The Washington Post says there might still be a glimmer of hope regarding Sen. Manchin and voting rights:

By now, you’d be forgiven for concluding the chances of Sen. Joe Manchin III supporting a filibuster carve-out to pass democracy protections are somewhere between nonexistent and extremely nonexistent.

The West Virginia Democrat has spent many months chasing after Republican support for legislation protecting voting rights and democracy, and virtually none has materialized. Yet he continues to insist he won’t support any sort of filibuster reform, even to pass legislation he himself champions that would accomplish something he himself says is essential [it’s not clear he knows the meaning of “essential”].

But in an interesting twist, some Senate Democrats still haven’t given up on Manchin. Though the story all over Twitter is that Waiting For Manchin is utterly hopeless, they’re still trying to win him over.

I’m told Manchin and a dozen other Senate Democrats met with an expert on Senate rules and discussed various ways of carving out a filibuster exception or otherwise reforming it to allow passage of voting rights legislation. . . . 

The ideas included looking at how to change the rules specifically to pass voting rights protections by a simple majority threshold, a Senate Democratic source who shared details of the meeting told me. The source added: “Manchin is engaged.”

The expert whom Manchin and other Democrats met with is Martin Paone, who has three decades of experience in Senate staff positions, the source tells me. Paone will also attend Friday’s caucus meeting among Senate Democrats, where this will get further discussion.

These meetings are separate from another set of meetings going on among Senate Democrats that doesn’t involve Manchin.

Manchin supports a reasonably good package of democracy protections, including things such as automatic voting registration, various curbs on voter suppression and election subversion, limits on partisan gerrymandering, and baseline standards to facilitate voting by mail. Elections expert Richard L. Hasen has declared a package like this worth supporting.

The dynamics on Manchin and the filibuster are more complicated than it seems from the outside. According to a voting rights advocate who has been in discussions with Manchin and other Democratic senators, the basic contours of the situation are as follows.

First, Manchin remains reluctant to support anything seen as a “slippery slope” to ending the filibuster entirely. So it’s more likely he’d support reforms that stop short of a full carve-out of the filibuster to pass voting legislation. Such reforms could include requiring the minority to hold the floor to sustain a filibuster . . . 

The advocate says Manchin is more open to ideas [that] can legitimately be described as “restoring the filibuster” [to what it used to be, i.e. a way to delay a vote, not block it].

This would be a good argument. After all, a filibuster can now be executed simply via an emailed statement from a single senator. That’s obviously a ridiculous state of affairs that allows the minority to render the Senate dysfunctional for bad-faith purposes while escaping procedural difficulties in doing so, and even evading public accountability for it.

Still, . . .  pulling the trigger on broad reforms [that would increase] the burden on the minority is complicated. Manchin could decide a carve-out just on voting rights is simpler in the interim, the advocate says.

Here’s another nuance. A second source who has been informed about discussions between Manchin and other senators tells me Manchin seems open to arguments that cast filibuster reform as a response to partisan procedural abuses.

In this conception of the situation, that source says, the fact that the Senate can’t pass voting rights legislation “shows that the institution is fundamentally failing,” precisely because it “used to do so on a broad bipartisan basis.”

What’s more, this source says, this sort of filibuster reform wouldn’t be about “passing the left’s priorities,” but instead about “passing changes that are basic to the functioning of democracy.”

Manchin appears open to these arguments as a longtime advocate for bipartisanship in the Senate, the source says, because here it’s obvious the filibuster is being used to further partisan efforts to close down pro-democracy reforms that used to be a bipartisan no-brainer.

And of course, this really is the essence of the matter. Manchin really has spent months in a good-faith effort to win over GOP support for democracy protections that he really does believe are essential to making the system function better.

The only [Republican] senator who has appeared marginally interested in participating is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The fact that virtually the entire GOP is uninterested — while GOP state legislatures are passing restrictions on voting everywhere by simple majority — should have weight for Manchin.

Because after all, if democracy reform must be bipartisan, as Manchin says — yet virtually no Republicans will participate, no matter how earnestly Manchin seeks their support — then sticking to that notion is tantamount to allowing Republicans to single-handedly remove democracy reform from the agenda entirely, on a purely partisan basis.

That can’t be acceptable, by Manchin’s own lights.

To be clear, there are still reasons for extreme skepticism that Manchin will ever get to yes. But if he somehow does, these routes might be the way he gets there.

The Disappointing State of Play in the Senate

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The Brookings think tank has a page that explains the US Senate’s filibuster. This is a key section:

“Senators have two options when they seek to vote on a measure or motion. Most often, the majority leader (or another senator) seeks “unanimous consent,” asking if any of the 100 senators objects to ending debate and moving to a vote. If no objection is heard, the Senate proceeds to a vote. If the majority leader can’t secure the consent of all 100 senators, the leader (or another senator) typically files a cloture motion, which then requires 60 votes to adopt. If fewer than 60 senators—a supermajority of the chamber—support cloture, that’s when we often say that a measure has been filibustered” [meaning the measure won’t be debated, voted on or adopted].

“While much of the Senate’s business now requires the filing of cloture motions, there are some important exceptions. One involves nominations to executive branch positions and federal judgeships on which, thanks to two procedural changes adopted in 2013 and 2017, only a simple majority is required to end debate. A second includes certain types of legislation for which Congress has previously written into law special procedures that limit the amount time for debate. Because there is a specified amount of time for debate in these cases, there is no need to use cloture to cut off debate. Perhaps the best known and most consequential example of these are special budget rules, known as the budget reconciliation process, that allow a simple majority to adopt certain bills addressing entitlement spending and revenue provisions, thereby prohibiting a filibuster.”

Unquote. The upshot is that senators cannot filibuster the two things Republicans most care about, appointing judges and cutting taxes (odd how that worked out). 

To avoid a Republican filibuster, the Democrats are trying to use the budget reconciliation process to pass Biden’s very important Build Back Better act by a simple majority (meaning 50 Democratic “yes” votes, followed by Vice President Harris voting “yes” to break the 50-50 tie). But one Democratic senator still won’t provide the 50th vote the Democrats need. 

They also want to pass voting rights legislation to protect what’s left of American democracy. They can’t use the budget reconciliation process for voting rights, so they need a different way to get around a Republican filibuster. The only way to do that is for the 50 Democrats (and VP Harris) to change Senate rules to make voting rights legislation an exception to the filibuster (in the same way judges and tax cuts are exceptions). But one or two Democratic senators still won’t provide the 49th and 50th vote the Democrats need. 

From today’s Crooked Media “What a Day” newsletter:

With Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) blocking passage of the Build Back Better Act, Senate Democrats have gamely pivoted to the voting-rights legislation also blocked by Manchin and Sinema. Get in, loser, we’re going nowhere in a different direction! 

  • Final negotiations on the reconciliation package appear to have ground to a halt, as Manchin’s objections to temporary programs (including the temporary child-tax-credit extension) and overall price tag thwart Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s plan to get it passed by Christmas. The final monthly payment authorized under the current expanded child tax credit went out on Wednesday; Congress would need to extend the program by December 28 to keep the payments on track in January. 
  • Anxious to get something done, some Senate Democrats have announced a new push to pass their elections bill, despite still needing unanimous agreement on changing filibuster rules to do so. Schumer said on Thursday that he hopes to get voting legislation passed “in time for the 2022 elections,” tacitly acknowledging that there’s no way a bill makes it to President Biden’s desk before the end of the year. 
  • On the one hand, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) made a terrific point on the Senate floor this week, after lawmakers approved a filibuster [exception] to raise the debt ceiling: “I believe that it is misplaced to change the Senate rules only for the benefit of the economy when the warning lights on our democracy are flashing at the same time. I happen to believe that our democracy is at least as important as the economy.” Hard to fault that logic!

On the other hand, there’s no indication that Manchin and Sinema have come around to the rule changes necessary to pass the bills they say they support. 

  • Manchin indicated on Tuesday that he’s still not open to reforming the filibuster to pass voting-rights legislation unless there are Republican votes to do so, to the gleeful cackles of Republicans everywhere. A Sinema spokesperson ruined everyone’s holidays by announcing Wednesday that she “continues to support the Senate’s 60-vote threshold,” though Democrats are discussing narrow filibuster reforms and not outright abolition, so it’s worth noting that Sinema’s office also called for “the Senate to publicly debate its rules, including the filibuster, so senators and all Americans can hear and fully consider such ideas, concerns, and consequences.” It’s not, like, a lot of hope, but at this point we’ll settle for vaguely hope-scented. 
  • Schumer may not have an obvious plan to get voting bills passed before the midterms, but he’s right to want to. Democrats may have owned themselves out of their House majority by refusing to gerrymander as aggressively as Republicans in the handful of states where they had the chance, in the absence of redistricting reforms. The decision of just five blue states—California, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington—to switch over to nonpartisan redistricting commissions will cost House Democrats 10-15 seats, according to trusted redistricting nerd Dave Wasserman. It’s entirely possible that Republicans will gain control with a smaller margin than that.

To quote Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) this morning, “a 50-50 Senate sucks and we can’t get things done.” Rather than unconvincingly pretending otherwise until it’s time for another vacation, Senate Democrats might as well be clear about the fact that two of their members are abetting the GOP assault on democracy, and at some point make them go on the record about it.