Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

Nothing special, one post at a time since 2012

Tag Archives: Democratic Party

You’ve Probably Never Heard of “Murc’s Law”, But You’ve Seen It in Action Lots of Times

Posted on by

Murc’s Law is “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”. In other words, Democrats are responsible for  Republicans being the way they are and doing the things they do, either because Democrats provoked them or failed to control them.

It came up recently because of an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right”. (This widely-ridiculed article was written by a young man the Times identified as a “senior at Princeton”, not mentioning he’s a Republican activist).

Remember when people who live in the real world, especially Democrats, pointed out that not getting vaccinated would cause more people do die from Covid? And that hearing such a thing supposedly upset many Republicans who then decided not to get vaccinated?

Amanda Marcotte wrote about this peculiar phenomenon for Salon last year:

“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D____ T____’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012:

Untitled6

Republicans are about to take power in the House of Representatives once again, and so, with exhausting predictability, we return to a Beltway narrative where none of the choices they will make with that power are their fault: It is somehow all because Democrats have failed to manage Republicans properly. Unsurprisingly, the latest example comes from Politico, which pins the blame for the rise of right-wing superstar Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene not on the voters who sent her to Congress or the GOP leaders who indulge her or the conservative media that celebrates her. Instead, Greene’s popularity with Republicans is laid at the feet of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

“Biden World once ignored Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now it’s making her the face of the GOP,” announces a headline in Politico. But of course Biden had nothing to do with that, because Republicans had already done it.

Going back to the Times article, David Roberts of the Volts podcast says it’s a perfect example:

Murc’s Law says, basically: only the left has agency; the right is merely reacting, having its hand forced, being “pushed” or “shaped.”

This is not some quirk, it is central to reactionary psychology. Every fascist (and fascist-adjacent) movement ever has told itself the same story: our opponents are destroying everything, they’re forcing us to this, we have no choice but violence.

It is, at a base level, a way of denying responsibility, of saying, “we know the shit we’re about to do is bad, but it’s not our fault, you made us.” Once you recognize the pattern it shows up *everywhere*. (If you know an abuser, you’ll also find it in their rhetoric.)

It’s one thing for reactionaries to cling to this … but what’s irksome is that right-wingers playing the refs have basically trained mainstream political journalists to echo it. It is laced throughout US political coverage.

One of my favorite examples … is the notion that Al Gore “polarized” climate change and thereby forced the right into decades of lies and demented conspiracy theories….  Why’d you do that to them, Al?!

Another instance is when it’s assumed that Democrats could have stopped Republicans from doing something bad if only they’d tried or tried harder or made stronger arguments. A commentator once joked:

… A few more BLISTERING speeches [from Democrats] and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have totally realized that upper-class tax cuts are wrong!

Headlines that obscure who did what are consistent with Murc’s Law. “Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades” — no, it was Supreme Court Republicans who did that. “Out of 18 pro-democracy bills in 2022, the US Senate filibuster torpedoed 17 of them” — no, it was Senate Republicans who torpedoed them. “What could happen if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit?” — no, what could happen if House Republicans don’t vote to raise it?

Likewise, there are events that mysteriously take place. I had one in the blog a few days ago:

The Washington Post said “the [train] derailment [in Ohio] erupted into a culture battle”, as if culture battles simply happen without any help from the people who specialize in starting them and getting them in “the news”.

Here’s an even more recent one. From Investopedia:

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing refers to a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments.

Environmental criteria consider how a company safeguards the environment, including corporate policies addressing climate change, for example. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates. Governance deals with a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

Senate Republicans and two Democrats (Manchin and Tester) voted to kill a Labor Department rule that allows investment managers to consider ESG. From Talking Points Memo:

We talk about this stuff a lot as part of the “culture wars,” but that bestows a legitimizing gloss on it, as if there is some deeper, truer cultural dispute. There’s not. This a Republican tactic, and a highly effective one… It gets treated like these things just happen, as if Democrats or Fortune 500 companies stumble into previously unseen cultural war ambushes because they lack a feel for flyover country….

Note the passive voice here: “The business world has been pulled into partisan politics”…

This doesn’t just happen. Republicans and right-wing activists make it happen. They devote a lot of time, energy and resources to it. 

By almost any measure, Republicans have already won once they’ve “made it a partisan issue.” What seems to get misunderstood is that that’s the actual goal. Corporations and institutions don’t want to pick sides. They want to play it down the middle. So Republicans keep shifting the “middle” farther and farther right. By this point in these controversies, the game is basically over already. What’s maddening is that everyone keeps getting played.

Finally:

FqLDRTBagAAkHYT

We Should Believe It When We See It

Posted on by

Minutes after passing a bipartisan bill to increase US production of semiconductors, Senate Democrats announced that, believe it or not, conservative “Democratic” Senator Joe Manchin has agreed to pass a Democrats-only budget reconciliation bill that addresses some of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

One cool thing about this is that evil Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said he wouldn’t support the semiconductor bill if Democrats tried to do any good Build Back Better stuff. So it appears the Democrats waited until right after the semiconductor bill passed to announce they were doing something Build Back Better-ish (i.e. good) after all. Maybe this will work out, assuming erratic “Democratic” Senator Krysten Sinema goes along, giving Senate Democrats the 50 votes they need (with Vice President Harris breaking the tie in the 50-50 Senate):

From Crooked Media’s free, informative, daily newsletter:

Dear readers, have we ever told you how wise and handsome we’ve always found Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to be? No? Well it’s totally true, and senator, if you’re reading this, you would look especially good allowing the passage of climate legislation that will prevent our country from simultaneously burning and drowning. 

In a surprise turn of events, Manchin and Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced today that they struck a deal on a domestic-spending package that includes climate and energy programs and tax increases on the wealthy. This is a breakthrough after more than a year of negotiations that looked all but dead two weeks ago when Manchin abruptly announced he would not support any new climate spending, because he was just too concerned about inflation, you guys!!! 

Manchin has been a thorn in the side of his Democratic colleagues, the main holdout on most of the progressive social policies the Biden administration had hoped to enact. In his somewhat-opaque statement, Manchin signaled support for climate and energy programs, as well as “adopting a tax policy that protects small businesses and working-class Americans while ensuring that large corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.” Is this the same Joe Manchin we have come to know and mostly-disdain? Could it be?  

Well yes, it still mostly is the same old Joe. The bill agreed upon was titled the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 [eyes roll out of my head] and Manchin in his statement made sure to include a jab at the much more comprehensive Build Back Better, which he can now brag to his pals across the aisle about helping to kill. His statement also focuses mostly on inflation, and not the climate emergency or the many ills that Build Back Better was trying to treat. But for once I will resist dragging Joe’s ass too hard, because this bill is much better than the extremely-narrow drug-pricing package Dems were prepared to accept when it looked like Manchin was ready to walk away entirely last month.

And now that Fossil Fuel Joe is on board, the bill is much more likely to actually become law, and the bill is actually good [although we don’t know all the details yet].  

The climate provisions in the proposed bill are the largest fiscal piece of it, to the tune of $369 billion, which is good. All aspects of the bill—the reduction in energy and health care costs, and the deficit reduction—are anti-inflationary, which is also good. The bill allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices and lowers ACA premiums, and closes a whole host of tax loopholes with increased funding to the IRS, all without any regressive, shit-eating spending cuts you’d normally expect Congress to include in a big budget bill. We’re not sure where his change of heart came from (was he visited by three ghosts when he had covid this week?) but we’re not questioning it.  

Assuming Dems can pass the bill in the House and the Senate parliamentarian allows it to be approved with 51 votes (or 50 and a tie break from VP Harris) through the budget reconciliation process, this has a serious chance of becoming law as early as August. This would be a huge win for Democrats going into midterms, who will need every single win they can get. It will give them a concrete answer to voters rightly asking, “What have you done for me lately?” 

The bill faces a number of hurdles before it can become law, but White House Joe has signed off on it in a statement, so we thank you, Senate Joe, for your begrudging cooperation at last. Kyrsten Sinema don’t even FUCKING think about it.

An initial summary of the compromise bill.

If Biden Knew Now What He Didn’t Know Then

Posted on by

If a Democrat as audacious as Mitch McConnell was president, they’d point out we increased the size of the Supreme Court to 9 justices in 1869 because there were 9 federal judicial circuits. The population was 38 million. Now that there are 13 circuits and the population is 338 million, the president would say we need 13 justices. The president would deny any other motive and Democrats would immediately add 4 Democrats to the Court. But that’s not the president we have.

How bad is it? How bad will it get? Brian Beutler of Crooked Media lays it out in an edition of his Big Ten newsletter:

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we could travel back in time to 2019 or early 2020 and tell Joe Biden he’d be the next president, but that under the governing approach he’d laid out for primary voters—pro-filibuster, anti-court reform, conciliatory to a fault with the GOP—he’d oversee the abolition of the right to abortion, the hollowing out of the regulatory state, the imposition of an imaginary constitutional right to concealed carry, the disintegration of his policy agenda, an inability to marshal a federal response to a violent coup, and perhaps, right before his re-election campaign, the constitutionalization by five rogue Supreme Court justices of the January 6 strategy to steal elections for Republican candidates. 

What if anything would he do or say differently? … If Biden had rethought his institutionalism, what different steps would he have taken to rally Democrats around a new and (by necessity) more partisan approach to governing, to insure against rapid democratic backsliding and maybe even the end of the republic?

The answer may actually be “none.” All of these things have come to pass, and Biden still at least claims faith in the institutions that are steering the country toward an authoritarian takeover. 

But I suspect this is not the presidency Biden wanted or imagined for himself. I think he really did want to save the country … and preside over an American renewal. I think (because nothing else really makes sense) that he drove himself into a cul-de-sac by running on the idea that his victory would largely solve these problems automatically, that retrofitting the country’s democracy wouldn’t require using carrots and sticks and tireless persuasion to change what it means to be a Democrat. That as a calm, unimpassioned figure, his mere presence would quiet national unrest and refasten the bonds that used to hold the country together. By the time he realized he’d handed Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema all the justifications they’d need to stand in the way of responding to new threats, it was too late.

Obviously this is a multi-layered counterfactual, of limited probative value. Maybe if Biden had been open to more procedurally radical ideas, he would’ve lost the election; maybe no amount of cajoling from the leader of the party—no matter how early and heartfelt and persuasive—would’ve changed what Manchin and Sinema thought they could get away with. If you’re intent on concluding that Biden played a bad hand perfectly, and we were always destined for the abyss, it isn’t hard to reason your way there.  

But the problems swallowing Biden’s presidency were easily foreseeable. For one thing, I foresaw them! In October 2019, I wrote that candidates who cling, like Biden, “to the view that a golden era of compromise will dawn once T____ is gone… will lock themselves into a mode of governing that can not work anymore. Their supporters and intra-party critics will be demoralized, their presidencies will stagnate, and they will waste precious time grasping for a better approach.”

Around the same time, I pleaded with Democrats to begin leveling with their voters about the dangers of the Supreme Court, and the need to dilute its power, because, “If Dems don’t preemptively expand the courts, Republican judges, with their lifetime appointments, can simply wait until the elected branches are divided again and then implement the disastrous judicial agenda they’ve been building toward for 40 years.”

That actually proved a little optimistic, because what happened in reality is those justices waited until the Democratic Congress gave the high sign that it would under no circumstances intervene to check them, and they got to work right away….

Obviously we can’t go back to 2019 to travel roads not taken, we can only move forward from where we are. That’s why I’ve been going on for months about what Democrats should do if and when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Well, that happened a week ago now, but the simple idea remains the same: Level with voters about the party’s current limitations, stemming from its narrow majorities, and make a simple promise to codify Roe as a first order of business next year if voters manage to give them two more Senate seats and a House majority. 

…but at the same time I know that even on the off chance that this strategy works out perfectly—that Democrats make the midterms a referendum on Roe, and win the majorities they need to codify it—we’ll still be plagued by those earlier failures. 

Without movement to reform the courts, it’s easy to see how a hard fought victory could turn pyrrhic. If Dems codify Roe in January 2023, without taking any steps to insulate it from the illegitimate judiciary, I give it a few weeks before Republicans find a corrupt judge, probably a T____ judge, to enjoin it nationwide on some laughable pretext. I’d give it better-than-even odds that this same Supreme Court would make up a basis for voiding it. 

That doesn’t mean the thing I keep badgering Democrats to do isn’t worth it….It’s easy to get yourself spun up about how things might go wrong, and then use the likelihood of future setbacks as an excuse to do nothing now. Even if Democrats never get that court-reform religion, codifying Roe next year would be better than retreating tactically. If a judge enjoins it, that’s a new opportunity for the same Democratic majority to consider checking and balancing the judiciary.

But Democrats aren’t going to get there so long as the Democratic president is aggressively opposed to expanding the court. The Dobbs ruling didn’t change their minds, the subsequent opinion stripping EPA of the power to regulate climate pollution didn’t change their minds. Why would a ruling that voids the Women’s Health Protection Act change their minds? Their minds will start to change when the leadership stops being scared of going to war with the courts. I gather they’re scared that if they blur the abortion issue with the cause of court reform, the public will reject it. But the thing to do then isn’t to say ‘I’m not for expanding the court,’ it’s to say the court has lost its legitimacy, and it needs to be restored one way or another.

I guess what I’m trying to get across is that it’s critically important for Biden and Dems to understand what has happened to them, why it happened, and to abandon the disastrous thinking that led them here. 

Personally, I think someone with Biden’s ear should tell him he’s perhaps four months away from going down in history as the president who lost democracy without throwing even a half-hearted punch.

On Friday, this same rotten court announced that it will hear a case that was cooked up specifically to constitutionalize the GOP’s January 6 strategy for stealing elections. Needless to say, if the Alito 5 rule the way D____ T____ wants them to rule (and they very well might) that’s likely game over for the republic.

And the worst part is, that isn’t the kind of wreckage that Democrats can fix by codifying this or that. Democrats have to expand the Court before these ghoulish justices hear or decide that case, or they will corrupt the 2024 election, and we’ll likely never get another chance.

Mr. Beutler continues here.

We Should Criticize the Home Team When They Deserve It

Posted on by

Two articles today have a common, negative theme:

Why Are Democrats Letting Republicans Steamroll Them? (Politico)

The Fall of Roe Is the Culmination of the Democratic Establishment’s Failures (The Washington Post)

The Politico article says the two parties have very different approaches to national politics:

The simplest way to summarize the situation is that Democrats value democratic norms over policy achievements, and Republicans feel the opposite….

This is a pattern we’ve seen repeated ever since. Republicans attempt some unprecedented and shocking move; horrified Democrats respond by trying to be the adults in the room; and then the Democrats go unrewarded for it.

To be sure, a country is probably better off with one responsible party than with zero. But in important ways, this kind of asymmetry can be dangerous, making the government less and less representative of its people….

We’re seeing this dynamic again in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. This ruling, while opposed by most Americans, was a longstanding goal of Republicans … And Democratic leaders had, thanks to [the] bombshell disclosure of the draft opinion, ample warning that it was coming. And in response, they have done … virtually nothing.

There are actions Congress could take (although with likely opposition from the two “Democratic” roadblocks, Manchin and Sinema); or the House could take by itself; or the president could take. Some of these might be considered norm-breaking and deemed too aggressive by Very Serious People. But as the Politico author points out, game theory tells us that the best way to deal with an uncooperative opponent is to stop cooperating. Otherwise you’ll be  taken advantage of over and over.

The Washington Post article by Perry Bacon, Jr., says Democratic leaders are simply too damn old:

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the underwhelming reaction from senior Democratic leaders to that huge defeat, make the case even clearer that the party’s too-long-in-power leaders — including President Biden — need to move aside. On their watch, a radicalized Republican Party has gained so much power that it’s on the verge of ending American democracy as we know it.

It’s a gerontocracy. Biden is 79; Nancy Pelosi is 82; her second-in-command, Steny Hoyer is 83; the House’s third-ranking Democrat, James Clyburn is 81; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is only 71, but his second-in-command, Dick Durbin, is 77. (I’m slightly younger than all of them but understand it’s too easy for politicians to overstay their welcome.)

Mr. Bacon continues:

Party leaders … spent 2021 downplaying Republican radicalism while emphasizing building roads years from now. No matter what happens this election cycle, their previous defeats, lack of new strategies and open disdain for the party’s activists is too much to allow this group to remain in charge. The Americans who will most suffer from entrenched GOP rule … deserve leaders who will fight as hard and creatively as possible for them, not a leadership class so invested in defending its own power, legacy and political approach….

There is a real ideological divide between the center-left and left in the Democratic Party. But I think an equally and perhaps more important fissure is between the political approach of the Old Guard and those who embrace a modern style of politics [among whom he includes Elizabeth Warren, who’s 73] …  I sense that they understand how politics in 2022 actually works. Unlike Biden and Pelosi, they are not wedded to polls and bipartisanship and do not constantly distance themselves from the party’s activists. They are much more open to new thinking.

I agree with both of them, but I’ll add another factor: money. There is nothing on the left that matches the number of billionaires and less than billionaires who fund right-wing organizations, Fox News being the prime example. But that imbalance doesn’t excuse the failure of Democratic leaders to effectively deal with the Republican menace.

President Biden’s biggest failure has been his inability to get 50 senators (all of whom caucus with the Democrats) to support his agenda, even on matters that don’t require reforming the Senate filibuster. Depending on how things work out, his appointment of the cautious Merrick Garland may be his second biggest failure. If you need a recent example of his perspective on Washington politics, here’s what President Biden said in February regarding duplicitous turtle-face Mitch McConnell, the guy who packed the Supreme Court that’s now running the country:

You’re a man of your word, you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.

What Democrats Could Do

Posted on by

Lots of people are giving Congressional Democrats advice. One such person is Perry Bacon. He writes for The Washington Post. Here’s his suggestion (with commentary from me):

The Republican Party isn’t fit to lead, and most voters know it — that’s why Joe Biden won the presidency. But all those 2020 Biden voters shouldn’t be expected to turn out for two more years of Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) blocking most legislation in the Senate, sometimes joined by moderate Democrats in the House….

Democrats should level with voters. . . . There was never really a Democratic “trifecta,” because Manchin and Sinema are more independents than they are Democrats.

They should be clear about the solution: a Senate with at least 52 Democrats and a House with at least 218 Democrats [they would actually need more than 218, since that would give every Democrat in the House veto power, just like Manchin and Sinema have had in the Senate for the past two years]. If they get that, they can say, they will pass a specific agenda, something like this:
  1. Eliminate the filibuster.
  2. A national law guaranteeing a right to an abortion in the first trimester and in all cases of rape and incest.
  3. A democracy reform law mandating independent commissions to draw state and congressional districts lines free of gerrymandering; vote-by-mail and two weeks of early voting; proportional representation through multi-member congressional districts; and measures to prevent election subversion.
  4. A ban on the sale of military-style weapons such as AR-15 rifles and high-capacity magazines, along with universal background checks for gun sales.
  5. A minimum income tax of at least 20 percent on billionaires.
  6. A ban on members of Congress buying individual stocks.
  7. National marijuana legalization.
  8. A climate change plan that puts the United States on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
  9. A required civics and life-skills course for high school seniors, with the same curriculum throughout the country.
  10. Voluntary term limits of 12 years in Congress for all Democrats (six terms in the House, two in the Senate) [A better idea would be a voluntary retirement age, say 70 years — airline pilots have to retire at 65, some state judges have to retire at 70]
  11. What connects these ideas? First, many of them are already popular….

Second, they directly confront America’s biggest problem: the radicalized Republican Party and how our political system gives a small bloc of GOP voters, the party’s donors and its elected officials veto power over the preferences of most Americans, including many Republicans.

Third, they acknowledge this stark reality: The United States is experiencing a non-military, uncivil war that the Democrats must win.

The Republican agenda of expanding gun rights, narrowing voting rights and functionally abolishing abortion rights doesn’t seem coherent or logical until you view it as an agenda of White male Christian hegemony. Then it fits together perfectly. The Democrats must stop trying to duck the so-called culture wars and instead fight hard to win them. There is no middle ground between White male Christian hegemony and multiracial, multicultural social democracy — and the Democrats shouldn’t be shy about using their power to impose the latter, since it’s what a clear majority of Americans want.

[These proposals would be] an acknowledgement that America’s economic and political establishments have failed and need to be changed.

Unquote.

Mr. Bacon didn’t include any strictly economic proposals or any ideas for court reform, although he mentions “the proposal of legal writer Elie Mystal to create a 29-member high court” (others have suggested a smaller number, like 13 or 15). But it’s a pretty good list and would remind some voters what would be possible with more Democrats in Congress. 

%d bloggers like this: