Priority #1

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The New York Times editorial board usually publishes bland editorials. This one isn’t bland. It calls for action on an issue that is surpassingly important to the future of this country, simply because the ability to vote affects just about every other issue: 

Far too many Republicans are players in a cynical pantomime: They say that the new voting restrictions being passed across the nation are designed solely to thwart widespread voting fraud, when the reality is that widespread fraud does not exist and the new restrictions’ purpose is to frustrate and disadvantage voters who lean Democratic — especially minority, young and lower-income voters.

Are Democrats going to do a darn thing [or a goddamn thing] about it? We’ll soon find out.

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly rejected measures to make voting fairer, more accessible and more secure. In state after state, the party has spent this year pushing laws that tighten ballot access — at least for certain groups — and that make the system more vulnerable to partisan meddling.

This antidemocratic (and anti-Democratic) agenda began before President D____ T____, but he supercharged it. Now, the former president and his supporters — who tried unsuccessfully to overturn the last election by lying about fraud and trying to strong-arm state officials and Congress into flipping electoral votes — have continued their crusade against democracy at the state and local levels.

In the recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Republicans began floating bogus claims of fraud long before the votes were tallied. “Does anybody really believe the California Recall Election isn’t rigged?” Mr. T____ charged Monday, on the eve of Election Day. Urging voters to mistrust the system and to reject the outcome if they dislike it has become standard operating procedure for the G.O.P. [an acronym that needs to be abolished — there’s nothing grand about the Republican Party, a collection of miscreants very different from Republicans in the era of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant].

On Tuesday, Senate Democrats rolled out a reform bill aimed at curbing the madness. The Freedom to Vote Act, introduced by Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, would address longstanding flaws in the electoral system along with some of the Republicans’ recent machinations. It is a compromise proposal of sorts, crafted by a coalition of moderates and progressives after a more sweeping reform bill, the For the People Act, was blocked in June by a Republican filibuster.

This slimmed-down package jettisons some of the more controversial elements of the earlier plan. It would not, for instance, restructure the Federal Election Commission or mandate the use of nonpartisan commissions for congressional redistricting. It is nonetheless an ambitious, urgently needed corrective to Republicans’ ongoing assault on the franchise.

The package’s provisions range from making Election Day a public holiday to protecting local election officials from partisan interference. Partisan gerrymandering and voter caging, a sketchy method of purging voting rolls, would be banned. Same-day voter registration would be available in all states, as would automatic voter registration systems. A 30-minute wait-time limit would be imposed for in-person voting, and uniform, flexible ID requirements would be established in states that require voter IDs. The list goes on.

Federal voting protections wouldn’t just protect voters in red states. Blue and purple states with less liberal standards would have to up their game as well. For instance, neither Connecticut nor New Hampshire currently provides for early in-person voting, nor does New Hampshire have online voter registration. Wisconsin has a strict photo ID law. New York does not have same-day voter registration (though voters have the opportunity to move to change that in November). Federal standards would serve all voters in all states and of all electoral hues.

“Put simply, if the new bill is enacted, more citizens will be able to register to vote, vote in person and by mail and have their votes counted,” asserted Marc Elias, one of the Democrats’ top legal champions on voting rights. “And, those of us fighting suppression laws in court will have the tools necessary to achieve fast, consistent victories for voters when states fail to follow the law.”

Merits aside, . . . to avoid death by filibuster, it needs the support of all 50 Democrats plus 10 Republicans. Absent that, Democrats will face a hard choice: Let this crucial legislation die or eliminate the legislative filibuster in order to pass the bill on a party-line vote [actually, there’s no need to eliminate the filibuster — they simply have to create an exception to the filibuster, like the Senate has already done for “reconciliation” budget bills and judicial appointments].

This is a better dilemma, at least, than Democrats had to deal with over the summer, when they didn’t even have their entire caucus on board. While 49 Democratic senators supported the For the People Act, one, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, opposed it. As a conservative Democrat representing a deep-red state that Mr. T____ carried by close to 40 points last year, Mr. Manchin’s policy priorities [and his ridiculous whims] often clash with those of his Democratic colleagues.

But while there were some pieces of the For the People Act that made Mr. Manchin uneasy, his primary objection was that it lacked buy-in from Republicans. . . .

Bipartisanship is a big issue for Mr. Manchin — unsurprising, since his job security depends on appealing to voters who typically support the other party. He is correct that, even in today’s Senate, there can be agreement in areas where both parties are committed to making progress. . . .

But there are limits to bipartisanship, and the system comes up hard against those limits on the issue of voting rights. Yet Mr. Manchin has continued his search. In June, he put forward an alternative framework for reform that he felt had more bipartisan promise. Key Republicans promptly dismissed it.

Meanwhile, their colleagues in the states are seizing the moment. Republican-controlled legislatures already have passed laws restricting ballot access in at least 18 states. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas recently signed a raft of measures that the head of the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank in New York, declared “the most extreme of the voting restrictions passed by legislatures this year.”

Undeterred, Mr. Manchin, at the behest of Senate leadership, huddled with colleagues to hammer out the revised plan that’s now on the table.

Having waited for Mr. Manchin to get behind a bill, the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is now eager to move forward. He says a vote on the new package could take place within the week.

Mr. Schumer has also made clear that he considers this Mr. Manchin’s moment to try to drum up whatever bipartisan support he can. “He has always said that he wants to try and bring Republicans on, and now, with the support of Democrats and this compromise bill — which Senator Manchin had great input into — he can go forward in that regard,” Mr. Schumer said Tuesday.

No one expects Mr. Manchin’s gambit to succeed. But if his earnest outreach to Republicans fails, where does the senator go from there? Will he simply shrug and sacrifice voting rights on the altar of bipartisanship? Will he bow to a minority party pursuing antidemocratic measures to advance its partisan fortunes?

. . . Bipartisanship can be a means to an end. But when voting rights are being ratcheted backward by one party, bipartisanship can’t be an excuse for inaction.

President Biden is said to be ready to enter the fray. “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls,” he recently urged Mr. Schumer, according to Rolling Stone.

Now, Mr. President, is the time to act boldly. Make those calls. Set up those Oval Office chats with Mr. Manchin and any other Democrats who might still need persuading. Bring all the powers of persuasion and the weight of the office to bear on this issue before further damage is done.

Having lost the White House and the Senate last year, Republicans appear intent on rigging the game in their favor before the midterms. Protecting the integrity of America’s electoral system and the voting rights of its citizens should be priority No. 1 — not because it helps Democrats, but because it helps preserve democracy.

Living Things Shaping the Earth Even Now

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If climate crisis deniers understood how we living things helped create and maintain the conditions for life on this planet, would some of them come to realize that we are affecting those conditions right now? This is from The Economist:

The idea that Earth is in some way alive, or can be treated as if it were, is common to many mythologies and sensibilities, and has been a theme in science for centuries. Its modern form, though, dates from the 1960s and the insights of James Lovelock, a British scientist then working at jpl, a laboratory in California that is responsible for most of America’s planetary science.

In thinking about the detection of life on other planets Dr Lovelock turned to a broad definition of the phenomenon: one offered by physicists and based on thermodynamics, the science of heat, work and order. This is that life uses, or creates, flows of matter and energy that allow it to increase and maintain complexity within itself. In doing so it deals with the universe’s natural tendency to break down complexity, thus creating disorder (known in thermodynamics as entropy), by actively increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe while reducing its own—exporting disorder, as it were.

Armed with this definition, Dr Lovelock proposed detecting life elsewhere by looking for signs of order, particularly in the form of chemical disequilibria—namely, intrinsically unlikely mixtures of chemicals that would have to be maintained by the persistent export of entropy. He concluded that the most detectable such order, at a planetary level, would be found in the composition of the atmosphere.

On Earth, a variable amount of water vapour aside, 99% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen. Most of the last 1% consists of argon, helium and neon (“noble” gases that demonstrate their nobility by being inert and fundamentally pointless), and other trace gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

As Dr Lovelock pointed out, this mixture is way out of equilibrium. Oxygen and methane react with each other. Such reactions take place constantly in the atmosphere. For these gases to be present simultaneously requires active sources of one or both. On Earth, life provides these. Plants, algae and some photosynthetic bacteria produce oxygen. Single-celled archaea called methanogens produce methane.

What is more, with energetic encouragement (as offered, for example, by bolts of lightning), oxygen and nitrogen will react with each other too, creating nitrogen oxides. Again, it turns out that life provides a countervailing process which lets the levels of both gases stay constant, despite the lightning. De-nitrifying bacteria produce the energy they need by turning nitrogen-bearing compounds like those oxides back into gaseous nitrogen, thus continuously topping up the level in the atmosphere.

The atmospheres of Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, provided a stark contrast to this picture of biologically driven instability. They contained no pairs of gases that, at concentrations observed, would be likely to react. They were in equilibrium. This led Dr Lovelock to two conclusions: that there was no life on Mars and Venus; and that Earth’s atmosphere was, to a certain degree or in a certain sense, alive. It was not made of cells or enclosed in a membrane. Nor could it reproduce. But the flow of energy and matter through the living bits of the planet kept the atmosphere in disequilibrium and held entropy at bay. Life’s imposition of order and disequilibrium thus operated beyond the boundaries of cells, individuals and species.

The first of these conclusions was not popular. Many scientists wanted to send robots to Mars to look for life. To be told from the off that such searches would be fruitless served no one’s interests. But fruitless they have proved so far to be.

The second conclusion led Dr Lovelock to hypothesise that Earth behaves, to some extent, as a living organism, in that biology-based processes provide it with a degree of self-regulation which the system as a whole uses in order to keep itself to life’s liking. This “Gaia hypothesis” was highly controversial in the 1970s and 1980s. The views of Dr Lovelock, his followers and his opponents have since evolved. The idea that life actively seeks to keep the environment to its liking, a crucial feature of the hypothesis in its early days, is not now widely held. It is, however, universally agreed that the composition of Earth’s atmosphere depends on biological activity and that various feedback mechanisms which maintain the planet’s habitability have biological components.

The idea of Earth’s environment being a creation of its evolving inhabitants, rather than a background against which they evolve, seems on the face of things quite unlikely. Earth’s living organisms are estimated to contain about 550bn tonnes of carbon. Add in the other elements and remember that living things are, by weight, mostly water, and you might get up to a few trillion tonnes all told. The atmosphere weighs 5,000trn tonnes. How could a thin green smear of life which weighs less than 0.1% of that be calling the shots?

The answer is that life is peculiarly energetic stuff. Expressed in terms of power (the amount of energy used per second), life on Earth runs at about 130trn watts. That is roughly ten times the power used by human beings, and three times the flow of energy from Earth’s interior—a flow which drives all the planet’s volcanism, earthquakes and plate tectonics.

Most of what life does with this energy is chemical: building molecules up, breaking them down and dumping some of the eventual waste products into the environment. And this chemical activity is persistent. The cycling which moves carbon from the atmosphere into living things (through photosynthesis) and back to the atmosphere (through respiration) has been fundamental to the planet’s workings for billions of years. The same goes for the cycling of nitrogen. The great biogeochemical cycles are older than any mountain range, ocean or continent. Their work mostly done by bacteria and archaea, they predate the dawn of animals and plants.

The composition of Earth’s atmosphere before the prokaryotes got their membranes on it is a subject on which there are few data. But the geological record makes one thing clear: it contained almost no oxygen. Significant amounts of free oxygen entered the air only after the relevant form of photosynthesis had evolved. At that point the level of bacterially produced methane—which, in the absence of oxygen, could be quite high—crashed. Because methane is a greenhouse gas, so did the temperature. Roughly 2.5bn years ago the “great oxidation event”, as it is known, plunged Earth into an ice age that saw ice sheets spread to the equator.

The subsequent history of the atmosphere, during which oxygen levels have increased episodically, is coupled to life in various ways. There seems to be a link between oxygen reaching a threshold level about 700m years ago and the evolution of the first animals—it is hard, perhaps impossible, to lead an energetically profligate animal lifestyle without the extra power that oxygen provides to a metabolism.

The advent of trees, which were able to store carbon both in greater quantities than previous photosynthesisers and in forms that were hard for other organisms to break down, saw carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere fall far enough to trigger another global ice age. The recovery and utilisation of some of that hard-to-get-at carbon, now transformed to coal, is seeing life alter the atmosphere in yet another way a few hundred million years on—again with climatic consequences.

Over the decades which saw this new understanding of the role life had played in Earth history develop, Dr Lovelock’s associated insights about atmospheres as signals of life elsewhere made little progress. This was partly because of a lack of atmospheres. Aside from Earth’s, the solar system contains only seven thick enough to count. There have been reports of out-of-equilibrium trace gases on Mars (methane) and Venus (phosphine), but in both cases the evidence is shaky. The most recent orbital survey found no evidence at all for methane in the Martian atmosphere.

Happily, the past two decades have revealed thousands of planets orbiting other stars. Telescopes that can examine the atmospheres of some of these which look promisingly habitable should be available soon. One, the much delayed James Webb Space Telescope, is supposed to launch this Hallowe’en. If any of the orbs it studies suggest Gaia has been working her magic there, too, then the ideas these briefs discuss may one day undergo an intriguing examination. Some will probably turn out to be universal biological truths. Others, though, may just be chance properties of life on one particular planet. 

Sometimes I Think This Country Is Too Stupid To Survive

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Here’s an example (this one is from Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post, with my comments in italics):

How much does President Biden’s proposed agenda cost?

This seems like a straightforward question, but the answer varies wildly depending on your accounting method. And this has caused headaches as Democrats try to lock in crucial . . . votes within their own party.

In recent years, there has been something of a budgeting double standard in the framing of Republican and Democratic economic proposals. Consider Republicans’ signature achievement during the T____ era, their 2017 tax cut. This bill was usually referred to as a “$1.5 trillion” tax cut because that was the initial estimate for its net cost over a decade.

A bill’s net cost refers to the price if you add up all the provisions that raise money, subtract all the provisions that lose money and then see how it all washes out. For the 2017 tax bill, the net result was forecast as a $1.5 trillion increase in deficits over a decade. (This was later revised upward, to nearly $2 trillion.)

If, however, we had counted only the law’s gross costs (i.e., without offsetting revenue-raisers, such as the cap on state and local tax deductions), its price tag would have looked multiple times more expensive.

But that’s exactly how most politicians and journalists are tallying the “cost” of Democrats’ safety-net-and-climate legislation.

As Republicans did in 2017, Democrats are trying to pass their legislation through “reconciliation,” a process that requires only a party-line vote. Most references to the Democrats’ package describe it as costing $3.5 trillion.

That number reflects the gross costs of Democrats’ agenda items, such as paid leave, health-care expansions, universal pre-K and child tax credits.

In other words, the $3.5 trillion headline refers to only one side of the ledger. However, Democrats plan to pay for at least some of these priorities with various offsets, such as higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Once you include the offsets, the net cost will be lower.

How much lower? That’s TBD. Democrats are still fighting over what will make it into the bill, including various tax hikes.

We know the maximum possible net cost, though. When a bill goes through reconciliation, lawmakers must commit in advance to a ceiling on how much the bill can raise deficits.

Last month, lawmakers agreed to a maximum deficit increase of about $1.75 trillion over a decade. They could ultimately choose a smaller number. The White House says it’s aiming for a fully paid-for bill — i.e., with a net cost of zero — though that outcome seems unlikely.

The $1.75 trillion maximum net cost has gotten almost no attention, while the $3.5 trillion gross figure dominates news coverage. This has irked White House officials, one of whom complained to me that “ ‘$3.5 trillion’ is disconnected from any kind of meaningful measure of what this developing legislation is,” since it doesn’t reflect the bill’s deficit impact or even the total size of its spending items. (The proposal cuts some taxes, too.)

And the framing matters because it has been distorting congressional negotiations.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) reportedly has drawn a red line for the bill’s “size” at no more than $1.5 trillion. If he were focusing on a net cost of up to $1.5 trillion, Democrats could cram a lot of priorities in the bill, so long as they also include substantial pay-fors. But Manchin has apparently anchored his demands around the bill’s gross costs [ignoring how the bill would be paid for!].

That severely constrains what programs Democrats can create or expand, no matter how enormous the offsets are.

How come Republicans got to use bookkeeping that made their legislation seem less costly, while Democrats are saddled with metrics that overstate their fiscal profligacy?

. . . [One explanation is that] some Democrats emphasize their agenda’s gross costs because they want to play up the scale of progressive ambitions. When comparing an agenda to the New Deal, it helps to make it sound larger. And recent polls suggest Democratic voters increasingly like the sound of Bigger Government.

So progressive leaders don’t guide the debate away from that $3.5 trillion gross figure, and reorient discussions toward (smaller) net costs, as White House officials might prefer; after Manchin’s downsizing demands, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) declared that $3.5 trillion is “the very least” the plan should cost [even though it wouldn’t cost that much!]. . . .

Twenty Years Later

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Twenty years ago this morning I was on my way to the World Trade Center as part of my regular commute. The conductor announced that it appeared a small plane had hit one of the towers. So I took a different train under the Hudson River and got off some blocks north of the Trade Center. Standing on Broadway, I watched the building burning and then got on a subway. By the time I’d gotten to work, the other tower had been hit. I could see them both burning from a window on that side of our building.

I reacted differently than most people, partly because it affected my job. We had to deal with the stock exchange being closed that week. But I didn’t watch any of the endless TV coverage and immediately feared that the president would take advantage of the situation, which he did in disastrous fashion. The air around the site was acrid and stayed that way for a surprisingly long time.

From David Roberts (@drvolts on Twitter):

3,200 on Thursday. 2,400 yesterday. On average, Covid is killing around as many Americans as died on 9/11 every single day. 

The very same people who were willing to send American children to war, spend trillions of dollars nation-building, commit war crimes, torture prisoners, & build a massive domestic-surveillance regime in response to 9/11 are unwilling to wear masks to stop a daily 9/11. 

What’s uncomfortable to talk about is that, especially for the loudest post-9/11 voices, it wasn’t really about the lives lost. It was about ego injury, about being hurt by a group of brown people we’d been socialized to think of as primitive & weak. 

The whole ensuing cascade of horrors was mostly about repairing the injury to the large & tender egos of America’s self-style Manly Men. The official elite discourse somewhat obscured this, but it was very, very clear when you read the war bloggers or watched Fox. 

Why does this 9/11 20th anniversary feel weird & muted? Because the real historical significance of 9/11 is that it marked the beginning of a downward spiral for the US, as a democracy & as the dominant global superpower. We’re too close to that, to *in it*, to reckon with it. 

And, just to bring it full circle, this explains the utterly hysterical reaction of US political elites & media to Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. It wasn’t about lives, it was about *humiliation*, the “Big Dog” running home with its tail between its legs, in failure. 

Responding with Cool Reason to the Negativity About Biden’s Summer

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David Rothkopf of The Daily Beast uses Twitter to inject some cool, refreshing oxygen into this summer’s frequently stifling political analysis (with a few comments from me):

And now, the latest Biden report from the Conventional News Network…

It’s been a rough summer for the president folks because

–Job growth slowing slightly (although yes, Biden has created more jobs in his first six months than any president in history) [I’d rephrase this to say that coming out of last year’s lockdown, we’ve had the fastest job growth since such things have been measured, which is at least partly the result of Biden’s recovery and stimulus programs]

–COVID spiking (although yes, the administration performed a miracle getting the vaccine out & the Republican Party has systematically undermined admin efforts to save lives)

–Afghanistan exit chat (although yes, the president ended a futile 20 year war and the administration managed to evacuate 125,000 people so far in one of the biggest humanitarian airlifts every, and ending wars is chaotic by nature)

–Infrastructure plans face opposition (although yes, that’s the way Congress works, the infrastructure bill represents a bipartisan breakthrough and much of the opposition is posturing)

–Fires, floods and storms! (although yes, Biden has put together an aggressive plan to combat the climate crisis, undone the huge damage done by his predecessor, gotten the US back into the Paris Accords, and made this a priority in the way no prior president has) [plus, you know it’s the weather, which presidents don’t control]

–Biden draws on his own personal experience while expressing compassion (although yes, the previous president was a sociopath and the story that being a genuine human made people uncomfortable was a cynical political spin job by the opposition…like much of the above)

Record economic growth, record job creation, record appointments to the court, the most diverse administration in history, massive effort to undo the damage done by predecessors, ushering in a new future oriented foreign policy and ending the disastrous post 9/11 era…

Restoring compassion, competence, a respect for the rule of law and a commitment to governance…although yes, we get it, he’s not perfect, not every goal is achieved, sometime his opponents succeed in blocking him, sometimes mistakes are made but he’s actually having a great year.

But let’s be honest, a slight dip in public opinion polls is inevitable when there’s so much misinformation and false bothsidesism in media coverage and what’s really important–support for his core policies remains high and bi-partisan.

Oh..and one more thing..the opposition does not offer any kind of credible alternative policies, focuses on obstruction, remains loyal to the most corrupt, incompetent, malevolent demagogue in US history, are systematically carving away the rights of American women and voters and are conducting an assault on democracy in the United States that may yet succeed. Biden is hugely successful if imperfect and much remains to be done. His opponents represent a threat to everything we have cherished about America’s values and our institutions.

But sure…let’s go with that old conventional wisdom, that easy if entirely inaccurate set of takes that are so popular these days. Who cares if it makes terrible outcomes in our country’s future more likely? Who cares if it is deeply misleading?

(P.S. This is not directed at any one media organization. There are many great journalists at work at almost everywhere you’d watch or read, if you don’t watch Fox or OANN. But among them, there are others who are helping to create the problem flagged here.)

Unquote.

Adding my two cents, I’m not sure if the Democrats should have bothered negotiating infrastructure with the Republicans, or just put everything into one big reconciliation bill that could pass with no Republican support. My big problem with what Biden has done so far, or hasn’t done, is that he hasn’t been able to get Senate Democrats to create an exception to the filibuster to protect voting rights. I’m also not sure Merrick Garland was a good choice for Attorney General, since Garland doesn’t seem very interested in what went on in the previous administration.