The Legacy of a Man Desperate for Relevance

Update: thanks again to Steve In Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. Keep on raging.

Lot of crazy political stuff to write about, but this bit of news overnight dominated today's thoughts: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, longtime figure among the Republican leadership, died at the age of 71.

He did not leave behind a good or kind legacy: He attacked immigration policies, tried to end asylum laws, fought to end "sanctuary cities," and committed to other Far Right stances against women and minorities much like any other Republican blowhard.

This was a man who wanted to be the most important person in the room... and never could (via Mark Liebovich, at the Atlantic):

Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One.

What could be more fitting, then, for Graham—unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning—to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived...

It is perfectly on the nose that Graham’s departure would occur just a few hours before he was supposed to appear on Meet the Press. It would have been his 64th appearance on America’s longest-running public-affairs program. In the Meet the Press greenroom there used to be a prominent photo of Graham yapping away alongside his Senate sidekick, John McCain. McCain, for his part, appeared 73 times on Meet the Press, more than any other guest in history—something McCain was especially proud of.

In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God’s green Earth (or God’s greenroom) was to beat McCain’s record. He never will...

“Try to be relevant,” Graham told me in that same 2019 conversation when I asked how he became such a relentless and essential lapdog to Trump (okay, I didn’t use quite those words). This was an ongoing mystery around Washington, especially given how critical of Trump Graham had been when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016...

Graham was always a first-class political shape-shifter, easily darting between the smarty-pants of Official Washington and the bare-knuckled MAGA Populists of South Carolina. This dynamic extended to the on- and off-camera Lindseys: One minute, he would be chumming it up with a Democratic colleague before their “hit,” and then, when the lights came on, he would be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump’s supporters back home...

It is a pity - in some way - that all of that glad-handing and back-patting - and ass-kissing - never really translated into anything substantive, especially considering how trump as president undid every foreign policy objective or ignored every policy suggestion that Graham tried to support.

Anne Applebaum (also at the Atlantic) took note of how Graham identified how dangerous trump could be as president... and accepted him anyways as his lord and master:

When Donald Trump first appeared in U.S. politics, Graham recognized him immediately for what he was: the spokesman for an alien ideology, one radically different from the idealistic patriotism that Graham had practiced and preached since childhood. Trump privately mocked the military that Graham loved as nothing but “suckers and losers.” He put falsehoods, cynicism, and personal greed at the center of his politics, while expressing disdain for transparency, accountability, and democracy itself. In 2015, Graham described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who should “go to hell.” Also as a “nutjob.”

When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak.

But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator. Graham went out of his way to telegraph his closeness to the president. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television, and supported him as he slowly destroyed the alliances that Graham had defended all his life, even as he undermined the institutions of democracy at home. In 2021, Graham refused to vote to convict Trump, even after he assaulted the Capitol and tried to reverse the results of the election...

The simplest thing to say about Lindsey Graham is that he sold his soul to donald trump and he sold it cheap. Whatever morals or personal values he held, he gave it up for access to power and retaining relevancy within a political party that spiraled downward into its own hell of racism, greed, and incompetency. Anything Graham could have stood for got flattened, and he never showed any sign of regret for what he'd lost.

That can be said for any of the Republican leadership that could have chosen integrity over dishonor, that is if any of the aging-out Republican leaders are still alive. We need actual proof of life regarding Mitch, you cowards.

This Isn't Entirely Good News, But For the Moment We'll Take It (w/ Update)

So I've been struggling over the past week trying to write up about the dangers of trump's incoming Cabinet picks - a number of them absolutely unqualified for their positions and arguably dangerous in those offices - when the most notorious and ill-advised pick - Matt Gaetz for Attorney General - found out this morning how screwed his chances were and opted to withdraw his name (via Elena Moore, Deidre Walsh, and Lexie Schapitl at NPR):

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is withdrawing his candidacy to be President-elect Trump's attorney general, after sex trafficking and drug use allegations threatened to imperil his confirmation.

After meeting with Republican senators to discuss his nomination, Gaetz, a conservative firebrand from Florida and a loyal Trump defender, wrote on social media Thursday that "it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition."

Trump's pick to lead the Department of Justice has faced concern and questions from Republicans all week. His decision to bow out puts some of those to rest.

When trump announced Gaetz as his Attorney General pick, the original response from most congresscritters - the ones who knew Gaetz and knew full well how much of a scuzbucket he is (allegedly) - was a mixture of shock and horror. Never mind how he had absolutely zero experience in law enforcement or legal jurisprudence to serve as the top federal prosecutor: Gaetz was facing a major ethics probe ordered by former Speaker McCarthy of his own party - the details of which kept leaking even as the Republicans on the committee voted not to release it to the public - which made it difficult for the Republican senators to happily back the move.

One horrifying thing is that while Gaetz is no longer up for an important Cabinet position - one that trump wanted twisted to serve his plans for revenge - he is still going to sit in the same U.S. House of Representatives that investigated him for his sexual and drug abuses. He had resigned once trump offered him the AG post as a means of squashing that incoming ethics report, but because he'd been re-elected by a Florida district that doesn't fucking care that their representative is an alleged sex offender Gaetz is going back to get sworn in to the next session. Surrounded by colleagues who know how much of a pervert he is.

(Revised Update 11/27: It turned out Gaetz will not return at all. Apparently he did read the room and realized he was doomed if he went back to Congress. DeSantis ordered up a speedy special election in 30 days, as the GOP hold on the House is insanely slim and they need every wingnut they can forcibly gerrymander into Congress. Gods help us though, there's rumors Gaetz is going to run for Florida Governor next cycle...)

The other horrifying thing is that trump still has a roster of loyalist Republicans willing to do his dirty work of turning the Department of Justice into his personal Department of Vengeance. Deciding to stick with picking someone from the Insanity State, trump tabbed former Florida AG Pam Bondi for the spot. While Bondi has the legal experience to serve at that job, she's better known as one of the state attorney generals who refused to pursue fraud charges on Trump University even after it became known she solicited trump to donate to her re-election campaigns. This cost the victims in Florida a chance to recover their money from the $25 million settlement trump agreed to avoid the court ruling. She is bought and paid for, America, and trump will insist she prove her loyalty by attacking everyone he wants destroyed.

If there's any good news from all this chaos, it's how the Senate Republicans made it clear they weren't going to roll over and beg for mercy the way trump and his MAGA supporters wanted. Befitting his role as the bully, trump had been signaling he wanted all of his Cabinet selections - as bad as they are, Gaetz was just the most noticeable disaster - regardless of any senatorial objections. he's out there threatening to use an obscure recess maneuver to circumvent the Senate's role of approving appointments. he tried getting his loyalist Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott elected to Senate Majority Leader (if there's any real good news, Scott didn't even make it out of the first round of ballots). One of trump's loudest lackeys, Sen. Tuberville, tried to threaten retaliation on his fellow senators should they refuse to accept trump's picks.

But if there's anything about U.S. Senators - regardless of party - it's that senators enjoy the power they wield within the federal system. Being a senator is almost as good as being a President, with just about the same number of perks and with fewer headaches. Those powers to "advise and consent" on things like Cabinet/Judicial appointments and foreign policy are things senators will not give up willingly.

While a Republican-controlled Senate will likely grant trump most of what he's asking - much like they did when they approved the likes of Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court - even they have to abide by their own standards, to which many of trump's other Cabinet appointments - some of them like Pete Hegseth getting exposed with their own scandals as I write this - are going to face a hard public review.

This isn't going to get easier. It's going to get crazier, as trump keeps looking for ways to blow this all up.

Gods help us. Again.

Let the GOP Backstabbing Begin (w/Update)

I'm not entirely in the mood to discuss the Shitgibbon's attempt tonight to use the excuse of a Presidential campaign to avoid DOJ prosecution, so I'll discuss the entire act of party implosion happening for the Republican Party this post-midterms.

While the Republicans reaped huge gains in Florida thanks to DeSantis' gerrymandering and the state Democrats' ineptitude, the national party didn't do so well. High expectations of a "Red Wave" - bolstered by historical trends of the President's party suffering in midterms (at least since the 1960s) - turned into a self-immolated debacle of bad Far Right candidates losing key races. Instead of gaining 25 seats in the US House, Republicans are looking at either missing control (there are still two-three seats that can favor Dems) or gaining the House with the slimmest margin in modern history (which would embolden the wingnut factions to make impossible demands on the Speakership).

It got worse in the Senate, where the GOP were expecting to break the 50-50 deadlock - which favored Democrats with Vice President Harris as the tiebreaker - by flipping Senate races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada to their favor. Instead, they lost those races leaving the Dems at that 50-50 advantage, with one outstanding recount for the Georgia race where Dem incumbent Warnock ought to outgain the hypocritical and addled Republican challenger in Herschel Walker. Dems should count on having a 51-seat majority in 2023 that should improve their ability to free up legislation from Senatorial gridlock.

There's a lot of anger among the Republican ranks, with finger pointing and accusations in every direction. Even their standard bearer trump got attacked because he pushed a number of extremist candidates who mostly flamed out, killing the "Red Wave" narrative. Other factions are lashing out at the existing party leadership, using this opportunity to seize the reins of power for their own greedy ambitions.

This is where Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott enters the picture. He is openly challenging Republican stalwart Mitch McConnell for party leadership in the Senate. Via Brian Slodysko and Mary Clare Jalonick at AP News:

Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Tuesday that he will mount a long-shot bid to unseat Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, opening the latest front in an intraparty battle between allies of McConnell and former President Donald Trump over the direction of the GOP following a disappointing showing in last week’s midterm elections.

The announcement by Scott, who was urged to challenge McConnell by Trump, came hours before the former president was expected to launch a comeback bid for the White House. It escalated a long-simmering feud between Scott, who led the Senate Republican’s campaign arm this year, and McConnell over the party’s approach to reclaiming a Senate majority...

It should be noted that Scott is a junior member of the Senate, having been elected into the seat back in 2018. There are a number of other Senators with more seniority some of whom aren't in Mitch's corner on this, and part of me wonders why they're not making this move.

Because Rick Scott is a goddamn hypocrite on this challenge. Scott was the one in charge of the campaign financing this midterms, and he's the one who failed to keep a lot of those Senate campaigns afloat, squandering money on his own self-promotion. If anyone among the current GOP Senate ranks deserves most of the blame, it's Rick "What Part of Fraud Did You Overlook" Scott. I mean, I wrote this back in August:

The other thing mentioned in that WaPo article is how Scott has been spending a lot of the party's money on himself, filming his own campaign spots - even though he's not running this cycle, his so-called buddy Marco Rubio is instead - as though he is the only one who matters. Scott also pushed out - against the advice of other party leaders - a policy agenda for Republicans that was a mix of "Contract On America" calls to patriotism, vague promises of culture war victories, and slashing popular federal social programs like Social Security.

If Scott thinks any of this is going to help him run a Presidential primary in 2024, he's not only a crook he's a goddamned idiot...

Rick Scott is quickly showing his true nature: A self-serving creature looking to put himself above others at their expense. Granted, you can say that about half the Senators who ever served in that capacity, but Scott is making himself far worse - well, okay, he's at par with Ted "Cancun" Cruz now - than any of them.

None of the other Senators should back Scott on his power play, because all it will do is expose them to the dangers of allowing this fraud to keep ripping them off for his own benefit.

And yet they will, because donald trump is backing Rick Scott, and for all the blame and public denouncing trump's been getting, the second he demands the party fealty he will get it because they dare not antagonize the MAGA voting base still in love with that con artist.

If Mitch McConnell has anyone to blame, it's himself. Through his long game of obstruction - to ensure a packed Federalist Society judiciary and a twisted conservative Supreme Court - McConnell pandered to the Far Right elements of the GOP that's now turning on him. He may not be at fault for the Republicans' failures to retake the Senate this cycle, but he did little to stop the avalanche of disaster to roll over them in the first place.

It will be interesting to note how this coup attempt in the GOP Senate plays out, who will side with Scott - and allow a known fraud to take over their entire Senatorial operations - and who will side with McConnell - who is honestly aging out and ought to step aside for "younger" leadership to assume a new direction - for the upcoming acts of obstruction and cruelty the GOP can inflict on the nation.

Personally, I'm rooting for that comet we keep hoping will hit the Far Right wingnuts and wash their toxins into the sea.

Update (the very next day!): Well that was quick. McConnell squashes Scott's coup attempt with a quick vote 37-10 with one abstaining. Now the fun is going to be watching how Mitch kicks Rick Scott off every committee and isolate him from every GOP fundraiser for the next four years.

Update (11/21/22): Thanks to Batocchio for adding me to this Monday's Mike's Blog Round-Up at Crooks & Liars! But Bato, my man, my brah, my mentor, you gotta give me a heads up if you want to add me to a Round-Up. I need to set the table and bake a cake! (also places the Silver trophy for Nonfiction Blogging on the table)

(I gotta crow a little...)

Quick Notes on a Big Biden Win August 2022 Version

I wanted to make a few comments about the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act:

The trick was finding out which trade-offs the Senatorial logjammers like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were willing to take in order for President Biden's agenda see moderate gains. As I noted before, there are few political forces as damaging as a self-serving Senator and Manchin had disrupted efforts at a massive liberal federal budget before. This time around, Majority Leader Schumer (and likely some back-room dealing from Biden) found out what Manchin's (and then Sinema's, which was apparently more money for drought rescue in her state) asking price was and got it done.

We should note that not everything the majority of Democrats wanted is in this bill, but as always there is still time for individual bills tackling those issues to get passed before the November midterms.

The optics on this passing the Senate can't be understated. For once in a long time, the Democratic Party does not look like it's in disarray and warring among its ranks. True, the factions persist - and the Far Left progressives like Bernie Sanders are upset they didn't get a "perfect" bill passed - but this Democratic-led Senate (and next up, a Democratic-led House effectively whipped into line by Speaker Pelosi) was able to get something done that the Republicans couldn't do the last time they ruled both parts of Congress (outside of a massive tax cut haul for the super-rich that no one else wanted).

With my thoughts spoken, let's go to what Emily Stewart, Li Zhou, and Rebecca Leber are saying at Vox:

It’s a lot smaller than the grand dreams Democrats had when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. But the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, still does quite a lot. It contains historic provisions to tackle climate change and takes steps toward fulfilling a longtime Democratic policy goal: letting Medicare negotiate the prices of some prescription drugs.

The bill could affect what kind of car you buy and how you heat your home. It will prevent big price increases this year for some people who purchase individual health insurance. And if you aren’t paying your taxes, there’s a better chance that the IRS will find out.

Here’s what’s in the bill and what it would mean for American life in the coming years...

The Inflation Reduction Act would be the biggest thing the US has ever done to tackle climate change, and climate makes up the largest share of the bill’s spending: nearly $370 billion.

That’s smaller than the House version from last fall, and a fraction of what Biden originally envisioned for climate. Senate Democrats claim these investments will be enough to cut climate pollution by roughly 40 percent...

The policies overall aim to push American consumers and industry away from reliance on fossil fuels. The biggest share of the funding goes to tax credits and rebates for a host of renewable technologies — solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles. It includes incentives for companies to manufacture more of that technology in the United States. The bill would also invest in energy efficiency at industrial sites that can help lower the sector’s hefty carbon footprint, while also dedicating some funds to forest and coastal restoration.

The bill, if enacted, would break new ground on other problematic areas of the climate crisis. It sets the first methane fee that penalizes fossil fuel companies for excess emissions of the especially powerful climate pollutant. Another substantial part of the funding helps disadvantaged communities with monitoring and cleaning up pollution, and builds their resilience to climate impacts...

One way Obamacare expanded health care coverage was by creating marketplaces for people to purchase insurance and offering federal subsidies to help low- and middle-income households afford it. Households making up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line — about $106,000 for a family of four — could get federal help to pay their premiums. After that, they were on their own.

But in 2021, Congress eliminated those caps, instead saying that no household should have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income for health insurance. The change had the biggest effect on people making between 400 and 600 percent of the federal poverty line (for the same household of four, that would be up to $159,000 per year). As Vox’s Dylan Scott previously reported, the changes also enabled roughly 7 million people to qualify for free health insurance under the ACA.

Those policies, however, were set to sunset by the end of this year, leaving millions of people to face much higher health care expenses moving forward. The Inflation Reduction Act extends these subsidies for three years through the end of 2025, ensuring that people won’t face that surge for a while yet...

This bill allows them to finally fulfill that campaign promise by enabling Medicare to negotiate on prescription drugs — a major change that could lead to significant cost reductions for a small subset of drugs.

As outlined in the bill, Medicare will be able to negotiate on a handful of drugs, with those new prices taking effect in 2026. In 2026, Medicare will only be able to address costs for 10 drugs; over time, that will increase to 20 drugs. The drugs in question will be determined based on a slew of criteria, including how expensive they are...

This is mostly good news for Medicare users, which is most everyone ages 65 and up. As they're retirees on limited incomes, they need this protection. The bad news is that fixing drug prices for private insurers - those of us on HMOs - didn't pass. The failure to get insulin - a life-saving drug for millions - capped is a glaring problem, and one that Republicans refused to budge. Back to the report:

Actually raising taxes can be hard, politically. So Democrats are, in part, taking a different approach: getting people to pay more of the taxes they already owe. The Inflation Reduction Act agreement increases funding for the IRS so that it can up enforcement and go after unpaid taxes. Senate Democrats, drawing from Congressional Budget Office numbers, estimate that, by investing $80 billion in the IRS over a decade, it will collect $203 billion...

There is, in short, a large number of large corporations that have been tax dodging for years: Not just finding tax loopholes to exploit but basically refusing to hand over the taxes they still owe. There is a backlog of unpaid taxes, and there hasn't been enough IRS agents to deal with that backlog.

One 2019 paper by Natasha Sarin, now at the Treasury Department, and economist Larry Summers put the tax gap at $7.5 trillion from 2020 to 2029, with most of that figure linked to the wealthy. They calculated that underreporting was five times higher among people making more than $10 million annually than for those making under $200,000. Senate Democrats say that none of the funds directed to the IRS will be intended to increase taxes on anyone making under $400,000...

For all of the screaming by Republicans that the IRS is going to come audit you, relax. A solid majority of Americans earn well under $200,000 (the most common wage is around $45,000, and middle class would be somewhere around $65,000. If you are earning more than $100,000 you are NOT middle class, you're rich fuck you) and literally not worth the IRS' time to audit. Seriously, studies have shown most working Americans pay their taxes and with little cheating. What the IRS is going to do is go after the people and corporations who are over that $10 million cutoff, the ones who ARE most likely cheating and more deserving of those audits.

The agreement also includes a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion. Senate Democrats note that while the current corporate tax rate is 21 percent, dozens of major companies, including AT&T, Amazon, and ExxonMobil, pay much less than that. Originally, the provision was expected to raise $313 billion, though new carveouts were added to win Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) vote, which give manufacturers and private equity firms more leeway when it comes to the new minimum tax rate. Those changes are likely to reduce the revenue this measure will bring in.

There is also a 1 percent excise tax on corporations’ stock buybacks, which are currently not subject to any taxes at all. That excise tax is estimated to raise roughly $73 billion in revenue...

This last one poses a bit of a puzzler. One of the big reasons why large corporations kept making their stock buybacks was how easy it was: a Buyback increased your stock value and gave the corporation more ownership of its own stock without really doing anything of value to justify it. Instead of putting your profits into things like raising wages for employees or investing in more capital to expand your business, you just put it back into your stocks and made the boards and CEOs richer.

The puzzler is: Will corporations live with this tax? Given how these mega-businesses are loathe to pay any tax at all, how many of them would start refusing to run their own buybacks anymore? What would happen to their profits then? They'll probably ask their army of accountants to come up with fresh ways to hide their profits and deny the U.S. government any fresh revenue.

Well, it's certainly one more reason the corporations will not give up their dark money funding for Republican election attempts.

Do us a favor, Americans: If you want Big Business to pay their fair share in taxes, make sure to vote Democratic this midterms and keep the Republicans from another round of unnecessary, deficit-causing, only-for-the-rich tax cuts. 

Four For the Fourth: Fixing the Flaws

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about women's rights to independence, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

This is, as mentioned earlier, one of the most dire 4th of Julys I've ever honored.

Because the state of our nation is at a crossroads between majority progressive reform and minority violent retrenchment. As David Atkins notes at the Washington Monthly:

The Roberts Court has imperiled America’s unity. The country’s center-left majority is disenfranchised and under assault from the likes of Samuel Alito. Something has to give.

The large, productive populations of blue states like California and New York—which famously give far more to the national treasury than they get back—chafe under a system that affords far more clout to the citizens of Idaho and Wyoming. The voting majority that won seven of the last eight presidential popular votes and that constitutes 70 percent of the GDP will throw off the yoke of a conservative minority. Most Americans below the age of 40 are progressive—well to the left of today’s median Democrat—and will not buckle under the imposition of a white Christian nationalist agenda by an aging conservative minority.

They know that the Supreme Court has lost its moral authority. Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election only once in 30 years, yet Republican presidents have nominated most of the Court’s justices. No Democratic president has chosen a chief justice since Harry Truman in 1946. The last Republican president entered office having lost by nearly 3 million votes even with the aid of a foreign dictatorship, whose help he begged for on the campaign trail. One of those justices was stolen outright by Mitch McConnell under pretenses of it being an election year, only to see the Senate confirm another justice while votes were being cast in the next cycle. The Senate that confirmed those justices is absurdly skewed in favor of small, white, rural conservative states, such that Senate Democrats represent 43 million more voters yet are locked in a 50-50 tie. And the Senate’s skew will only become more blatantly unjust and unsustainable...

The Framers created the Senate and the Electoral College to bring small states on board with the larger national project and to temper what they worried would be the passions of the electorate. They feared demagogues—yet ironically, their solution enabled the rise of one. Their concessions to slave states failed to prevent the Civil War. They got many things wrong and could not foresee or prevent the rise of political parties. Crucially, they also expected future generations to change the Constitution frequently, yet it has barely been amended in almost a century...

The reason I started this blog back in 2006 was to start arguing over the amendments our nation needed to repair a creaky and aging federal constitution: A model of governance that needed to update for a 21st Century that was more progressive than the Founders realized, and stuck to an electoral model that wasn't meant for so many states and a population more than 50 times the nation's original size.

I mean, I got into a tweet debate with Conor Friedersdorf this morning about the problems with the U.S. Senate representation:

Back then the population disparity (10 times) was not as immense as it is today (68 times) between the largest state (CA) and the smallest (WY). You can fit 25 states plus DC into CA and still have room for New Jersey. THAT'S how bad the Senatorial imbalance is now.

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) July 4, 2022

This is just one of the many things that need to get fixed so that the tyranny of Minority Party Rule doesn't destroy this nation.

Just amending the representation in the Senate - to end the equal seating of two Senators per state regardless of population, which has unbalanced this Senate to where the political minority of small states can logjam the entire legislative process - would be a huge reform. Changing the rules so that the ten most populous states receive an extra third Senator while the ten smallest states shrink to just one Senator would be the most rational means of doing it (although the small states will begin screaming how their representation is being taken away. Too bad. You don't have enough people to justify having that much power!). Just by changing this, the responsibilities of the Senate - especially the consent and advise for judicial appointments - will reflect the interests of the majority of voters nationwide.

Most other reforms our Constitution should focus on would be fixing a Supreme Court that has become too partisan, and too much a source of political brinksmanship that has helped polarize our parties.

The simplest fix to correct the Court right now - the near-permanent Far Right stranglehold on six seats out of nine - would be to expand the court. And this wouldn't even need an Amendment because Congress already has the power to add or subtract from the bench. This has actually happened before in the 1860s when the nation was responding to the last time the political minority - Southern slaveholding conservatives - caused this level of damage. They shrank the number of Justices in 1866 to stop Andrew Johnson from replacing retiring jurists with pro-segregationist people, and then re-expanded the number to nine (where it's been since) to give U.S. Grant and the then-liberal Republicans the chance to ensure an anti-slavery pro-rights Court would work.

So adding four seats - while the Democrats control both the White House (Biden) and the Senate (tie-breaker vote) before the 2022 midterms shake things up - would be the simplest thing but also greatest political hazard for Democrats. They worry that a future Republican-held Congress and White House would escalate like an arms race: If Dems upped the seats to 13 for a 7-6 ideological advantage, the future GOP would respond by added 10 seats for a 16-to-7 sledgehammer. Even though there IS a legitimate reason to expand to 13 seats - there are 13 judicial districts (11 state regions and 2 special jurisdictions) that require oversight by a Supreme Court Justice - the Dems don't seem to want to go that route.

Even though the Republicans would jump at the chance to expand to 13 seats right now if they were in power, and bump it up to a 10-to-3 advantage they would never let go of.

There is another way to fix the Supreme Court but it might involve an amendment: Setting retirement age limits. Right now due to wording in Article III Section I, judicial appointments may be lifetime. Best way to make sure the SCOTUS seats change hands - by either a term limit (12 or 16 years) or mandatory retirement (65 years old) - and make it harder for either party to plan any long-term control of the judiciary.

Another Amendment this nation needs in this dark hour is something, anything, to stop the partisan gerrymandering that gives the state parties too much control over who can actually run for office and who can win. We've seen the evidence and reports about how gerrymandering districts to extremes reduces voter interest and turnout. We know how gerrymandering pulls away power from the urban populations and gives that power to sparse rural areas. We've watched the last 10 years how partisan gerrymandering gave us minority party rule at both the state and Congressional levels. 

Instead of fair districts, instead of ensuring each person's vote will count, gerrymandering diminishes that power and grants it to the special interests - mostly the greedy and the evangelical - who don't care about what happens to the citizenry. If we could get a Congress responsive enough to pass such reforms... but we can't, because there's enough figures in both parties who prefer the gerrymandered status quo. The irony: Gerrymandering makes sure we don't get enough reformers elected to end gerrymandering anyway.

Oh, and getting rid of the broken Electoral College - a system that violates the will of the majority of Americans, may well deny us rightfully-elected Presidents in the future - is a must.

The United States need so many other reforms to our electoral system and to the checks and balances that ought to exist between the federal branches and the states. To get there, we as voters are going to need a concerted effort - by enough Americans across enough states - to use whatever power we have left at the ballot box to pass these reforms and restore both our rights and our safety. 

That means voting FOR those who can reform our system - Democrats - and voting AGAINT those who will corrupt it further - Republicans - for their own greedy sadistic needs.

This won't be a good Independence Day until we're independent from the corrupt powers in high places.

Good luck. Keep fighting.

American History Bends A Little More Towards Justice

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

- Martin Luther King Jr. 

In what has literally been a century in the making, the United States Congress FINALLY passed an anti-lynching law that should help ensure some justice against the racism that haunts this nation. Via AP News:

Congress gave final approval Monday to legislation that for the first time would make lynching a federal hate crime in the U.S., sending the bill to President Joe Biden to sign into law.

Years in the making, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is among some 200 bills that have been introduced over the past century that have tried to ban lynching in America.

It is named for the Black teenager whose brutal killing in Mississippi in 1955 — and his mother’s insistence on a open funeral casket to show the world what had been done to her child — became a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights era.

“After more than 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching, Congress is finally succeeding in taking a long overdue action by passing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer...

The House overwhelming approved a similar measure in 2020, but it was blocked in the Senate.

Last week, the House overwhelmingly approved a revised version and the Senate passed the bill unanimously late Monday...

I'm not sure what happened to end the endless filibustering that kicked up in the Senate every time an anti-lynching bill came to a vote. There had always been just enough Conservative types - from the Dixiecrats  of the early-mid 20th Century to the Far Right Republicans like Rand Paul during the last 40 years - to delay its passage long enough for the clock to run out each congressional term.

Thankfully this time, that stoppage didn't happen.

This law is coming after not just decades of Blacks suffering vigilante violence at the end of the rope but recent acts of straight-up racist murders from Trayvon Martin to Jordan Davis to George Floyd and most recently to Ahmaud Arbery. There are tens of other deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police or gun-toting assholes to list here.

In cases like Floyd and Arbery, the federal government did pursue hate crime charges, that the murderers responsible violated the civil rights of their victims, but it still seems not enough to ensure justice was served, that the racism driving those acts of violence were not truly exposed to the nation so we could understand just how severe a problem lynching continues to be.

The matter now - once President Biden signs the bill - is going to be a question of enforcement: How often will the federal government call on this law to investigate those victims whose deaths were conspiratorial acts of racism? There are a number of questionable Black deaths by hanging across the United States that the local police are dismissing as suicides that could now - I would hope - get investigated as possible lynchings.

We can only hope, as always. The fear and rage that drives racism runs deep in this nation, it's been a mindset haunting our collective psyche for generations: It will take a lot of work to fight racism until justice and equality can drive that rage and fear from our world.

There's also a lot of work to stop the goddamn racists from pushing their censoring "Let's never teach how bad racism is" bullshit in our public schools, but that would require a majority of American voters to stop voting for the goddamn Far Right Republicans to our county school boards and state legislatures.

We need to keep bending the United States towards justice.

One Sentence Thought About Biden's Chance for a Supreme Court Pick

With Justice Stephen Breyer finally (!) announcing his retirement, giving President Biden the opportunity to select a honorable and qualified Supreme Court Justice to affect our jurisprudence for the next 20-30 years, we need to understand this won't put a dent in the 6-seat majority the wingnut conservatives have on a Court that's set to roll back 50 years of women's rights and civil rights, but it will at best provide better diversity on a bench that's supposed to represent ALL of the United States in terms of having more women AND more Blacks when Biden selects a woman African-American - who WILL be qualified, suck it you haters - to perform much-needed acts of Judicial Review: As well as providing a foundation that hopefully Biden will fill other upcoming vacancies (Thomas and Alito are both close to retirement age) as long as there's no goddamned obstruction out of that goddamned Mitch McConnell and his Republican cronies in the Senate so please for the LOVE OF GOD AMERICA vote more Democratic candidates into the Senate this 2022 election cycle because THE GODDAMN ELECTION RESULTS MATTER (hi, 2016! /cries).

Whew.

And So Manchin Burns the Nation

I've said this before: There is nothing more dangerous and destructive to the United States than a self-serving arrogant tone-deaf Senator.

Yes. This means Senator Joe Manchin out of West Virginia just shot his own Democratic Party in the collective foot again. From Russell Berman at The Atlantic (paywall): 

With a few short sentences on Fox News, Senator Joe Manchin today dashed the dreams of Democrats by coming out firmly against President Joe Biden’s signature legislative proposal. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” Manchin said of the $1.75 trillion bill that the House passed last month.

His opposition after months of negotiations adds to a hellish winter that followed a brutal autumn for Biden, who is presiding over yet another resurgence of the pandemic, stubbornly high inflation, and an electorate that has soured on him. Now, Manchin has seemingly demolished the centerpiece of the president’s economic agenda in Congress, validating the warnings of progressives who for months held up the passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill because they feared the West Virginia centrist—who, in a 50-50 Senate, essentially wields a veto pen among Democrats—would do exactly what he did...

Anyone wanting to blame Progressives in this fight ought to punch themselves in their own faces. The Far Left held up their end of the bargain only to have Manchin - posing as a Centrist but in reality he's a crass opportunist hiding his personal greed behind the excuse of bipartisanship - pull his card out of the castle to let it all tumble down.

I'm a self-proclaimed Moderate (not a Centrist) and even I can't understand why Manchin is pulling these stunts other than to keep his own pockets lined with lobbyist cash while his own state of West Virginia slides deeper into poverty.

I have to refer to West Virginia resident John Cole at Balloon-Juice, who has long seen Manchin up-close in action and has loathed the corrupt Senator's behavior for years:

Yes, Manchin knocked bunch a bunch of beers on his houseboat last night, woke up this morning and drove his Maserati to the tv studios, and opened his piehole. It’s more of the bad faith bullshit, and I don’t know how much of it he will walk back or if he even will, or he is just setting the stage for his colleagues and the WH to shit on him so he can peace out and join the Republicans or go Independent. I don’t know, and I don’t really care any more, the man is dead to me...

I don’t know why this is so hard for Joe to explain. I’d think it would be pretty easy to explain extending the child tax credit, black lung benefits, lowering prescription drug prices, expanding medicare, providing home health care for the elderly, and so on to West Virginians. Especially considering that West Virginians are some of the poorest, sickest, and oldest Americans, as well as having a large community of miners with black lung...

The only ones profiting from Manchin's stubbornness has been Mitch McConnell and his fellow upper-class warriors of the Republican ranks. They're reveling in the self-immolation between Democrats all the while making sure that our nation never does ANYTHING to address poverty, hunger, suffering of families, and reconnecting millions to the American Dream of good jobs, safe communities, and a future for our children. And they don't even have to lift a finger: Manchin is doing all of the dirty work for them.

There is still a chance the Democrats will go back and repackage the major parts of Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda, and still a chance they could pass something short-term to placate the likes of Manchin, but I doubt it. Manchin is strutting here like a god-emperor Corrupt Senator of the Gilded Age, unconcerned with the damage he leaves in his wake while heading to his expensive racecar en route to his personal yacht.

Gods help us. This is how we're rolling into 2022.

The Game Of Politics Where You Shoot Your Own Party In the Foot

There is nothing more dangerous to the American body politic than a self-absorbed self-destructive Senator. Forget Representatives, forget Governors, forget corrupt judges, forget most Presidents (Nixon, Harding, and trump are the exceptions, and remember Nixon and Harding earlier served as Senators).

Via Allan Smith at NBC news:

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Sunday that he will not vote for S.1, known as the For The People Act, the massive elections and ethics reform package Democrats have proposed.

The announcement immediately imperils the bill, which is universally opposed by Republicans and would require elimination of the Senate filibuster to be passed. The legislation was passed in the House this year.

"It's the wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together and unite our country, and I'm not supporting that, because I think it would divide us more," Manchin said on "Fox News Sunday." "I don't want to be in a country that's divided any further...

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette-Mail, Manchin argued that any federal voting legislation must have bipartisan backing, and he said he would not vote to kill the legislative filibuster, as some have said is needed to pass voting reforms.

"The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen," he wrote. And in speaking to West Virginians, "I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party's agenda."

So because the Republicans are the sons-of-bitches who refuse to be bipartisan and work with Democrats to pass meaningful legislation, Senator Manchin has decided... to side with Republicans and screw the Democratic Party.

And he's going to get away with it because the Democrats can't secure enough votes to hold a simple majority vote to get rid of the Cloture/Filibuster rules to make it harder for Republicans to obstruct, and because the nature of the Senate makes it difficult for party leadership to rein in the "mavericks" who enjoy making a mess without having to pay the consequences.

You might understand why a lot of Obama-hating Republicans despised John McCain when he killed their effort to nuke ObamaCare back in 2017. But in that situation, those same Republicans failed to give McCain - or the rest of the country - any sane alternative to replace what they were about to destroy.

What Manchin - alongside Arizona Senator Sinema who also doesn't seem to get the crisis - is allowing to happen here: He's preventing the Democratic Party from passing laws that would override and stop the Republicans at the state level from suppressing voter turnout that would otherwise favor Democrats. He says he'll support the John Lewis Act which is also up for consideration, but he doesn't seem to get that the Republicans will pull the same obstructionist stunt against THAT bill and talk Manchin into dismissing it as "too partisan" as well.

All it takes is one Senator holding up the whole thing. Where a President is a singular office and thus answerable to the national voters, where the House is so large a body with a basic majority vote policy that trouble-makers most times either quit after a few terms or have little impact on stopping things, just ONE fucking Senator can filibuster or hold or delay everything and never face any punishment because the state they're from won't hold them accountable for their sins.

And so we're back to where things won't get done. Again. Things like alleviating college loan debts or raising the federal minimum wage or job protection laws or anything that would actually HELP Americans here and now.

We're also back to the high risk of Republicans rigging the 2022 midterms, making sure that just like in 2010 they are able to seize at least partial control of Congress and ensure a Biden Presidency enjoys no further success. Denying "victory" at the expense of people's lives.

Only this time, it's the entire electoral process at risk, one thing that could directly affect the Democratic Party - Manchin's own fucking party - in the near future. It won't be to another era of inertia, it'll be to a darker round of Republican misrule with even harsher tax cuts for the rich, even harsher anti-abortion laws to hurt women, and more attempts to kill off any affordable health care.

And if the Republicans have their way - without Manchin and Sinema or any other self-serving Democrat stopping them - the Democrats the American people will never see an honest and fair election ever again.

Goddammit. This is why I can't go full Democrat. There's too many fucking cowards running the party that's also ruining the country.

Just Kill The Filibuster

So that bipartisan investigatory commission into the January 6 Insurrection died a partisan death thanks to just enough Republican Senators to say NO and just enough Democratic Senators to not give a f-ck. Via Steve Benen at MSNBC:

It was emblematic of how the process unfolded. Republicans said they were open to the creation of an independent commission, but only if their demands were met. Democrats, willing to pay high prices in the interest of governing, met those demands, only to have House GOP lawmakers balk anyway.

Today, Senate Republicans did the same thing...

I can appreciate why the procedural details may seem boring and unimportant, but it's worth emphasizing that this was technically not the vote to create the Jan. 6 commission. Rather, this was a procedural vote on something called a motion to proceed -- which in practical terms means Republicans blocked a Senate debate over whether to create the Jan. 6 commission.

For those unfamiliar with congressional procedures, it's probably also worth noting that the gap between the opponents and proponents was less important than it might appear: proponents of the bipartisan plan needed 60 votes. Period. Full stop. The fact that most senators supported the proposal is, thanks to the filibuster rules, irrelevant. In fact, if only 60 senators showed up for today's vote, and 59 of them voted "yes," the one "no" vote would prevail...

This procedure basically forms part of what's known as the filibuster, an internal procedural process wherein just one Senator of either party makes clear their intent to delay a vote by talking as long as possible to prevent a bill or an appointment being made (certain votes have deadlines attached to them). The talking itself isn't even necessary: All the Senator has to do nowadays is THREATEN to filibuster, and a Cloture motion has to be voted on it, and that requires that bloody 60 votes.

And this is where I bitch about the Democrats being cowards, because they have the means of rewriting Senate procedures right now and can easily get rid of this debate blocker, to get rid of filibustering altogether and require simple basic majority (51 out of 100) votes on everything so they could end Republican obstructionism here and now... and they won't.

/headdesk

I've been complaining about the filibuster all the way back to 2009, when this was a different blog: 

Worst of all is the filibuster rule. What was once an obscure rule is now an impediment on getting anything passed in the Senate (the House has no filibuster and so can pass laws by majority vote more quickly) because the filibuster can't be stopped (Cloture) unless two-thirds of the Senate votes to, which means you need 60 votes nowadays to ensure Cloture. Problem is where the Republicans are organized to a fault to where their own party is consuming themselves, the Democrats are disorganized to where each Senator can (and does) act like their own party and vote however they want...

And I wrote that back when the Democrats had 59-60 seats and could have overridden every Cloture procedure and forced the Republicans to eat their own failures. Instead, they kept faltering over passing major legislation that could have shortened the economic recession during Obama's tenure, all because enough Democratic Senators wanted their egos as "Centrists" stroked. And not enough Democrats pushed to end the Filibuster/Cloture rule altogether to ensure simple majority votes. Gods, it was frustrating then and it's frustrating now to watch the Democrats shoot themselves in their own cowardly foot rather than get rid of an unwanted and self-damaging rule.

Ezra Klein wrote this at Vox back in 2015: 

Today's filibusters simply paralyze the Senate until the majority either finds 60 votes to proceed or gives up and moves on to another piece of business.

The filibuster is no longer about ensuring that minorities can make themselves heard on the floor of the Senate; rather, it's about forcing the majority to find 60 votes to pass anything...

Some political scientists argue that the idea of individual filibusters has become outdated; they say the Senate now operates under the filibuster's 60-vote requirement as a norm, and it's anything that requires a simple majority that's the exception. In other words, in the modern Senate, almost everything is filibustered...

This speaks to a crucial fact about the filibuster: though a filibuster can only be broken with 60 votes, the rule that powers the filibuster can be changed, or even eliminated, with 51 votes. The filibuster is a minority protection that exists at the pleasure of the majority.

This is the fundamental tension of the filibuster: it gives the minority the power to obstruct the majority, but if the minority pushes that power too far, the majority can end the filibuster entirely...

That last part is something that the Senate Democrats - clinging to a super-slim majority of 50-50 with VP Harris as the 51st tiebreaker vote - can do, they could vote on eliminating the debate procedure and shut down filibustering as a tactic. They could break the Minority Rule the Republicans have been forcing on the United States for 20-plus years.

The Democrats could vote to end a filibuster process that has routinely been used as a racist override of legislation: The filibuster is a "Jim Crow relic" interfering with Civil Rights and voting bills, and above all blocking anti-lynching bills that we haven't been able to pass as far back as the 1920s. Christ, Rand Paul filibustered against an anti-lynching bill just last year!

We ought to have seen an end to the filibuster the minute the Democrats gained control this February 2021... and they didn't because the likes of Joe Manchin (WV) and Krysten Sinema (AZ) still think there's some personal value to be had in stopping our nation's legislative body from passing meaningful reforms and much-needed budget deals.

Because of that cowardice in the party ranks, the Senate doesn't belong the Democratic majority: It belongs still to that goddamned obstructionist Mitch McConnell. And because of all that, our nation is still screwed.

Just kill the filibuster, Democrats. SAVE THE DEMOCRACY YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT.

Democratic Gamemanship, Also Known as Competency

If you're not following Balloon Juice website you should, it's magazine-quality blogging at a fraction of the price and with 150 percent more "OH HELL YES" you can enjoy reading.

Blog overlord John Cole is a rare poster but he will provide input from his frozen corner of West Virginia, where like myself he's stuck in a deep Red state praying for sanity to rain down and wash the Far Right wingnut madness into the ocean. One thing he's aware of is his state's major Democratic figure, Senator Joe Manchin, who likes to play throne-maker as a conservative Centrist holding the keys to Senate control to keep his more liberal party from doing much to actually benefit the nation. So this happened recently for Cole to cheer about:

There are two easy ways to fail as a Democratic politician. The first is to listen to the bobbleheads in the media, and the second is to listen to the online left on twitter and elsewhere. The Biden campaign famously ignored both of them, including yours truly, who consistently lobbied for him to not run. So when you see the Politico writing that Biden and Harris fucked up by having Harris speak to West Virginians, or you see the dumbest man in American politics call it a mistake, ignore it.

There is a reason VP Harris spoke directly to West Virginians, as I noted the other day, and here you have the fruits of that labor:

“Well, first and foremost, I wish we’d all come together,” Justice responded. “But, on the flip side of that, we’ve got a lot of people in West Virginia that are still struggling with paying their power bill because they got laid off because this pandemic just swept their job away from them.”

Justice continued: “What we need to do is we need to understand that trying to be, per se, fiscally responsible at this point in time, with what we’ve got going on in this country, if we actually throw away some money right now, so what?”

The governor added that “we have really got to move and get people taken care of and get people back on balance. I want to work with the Biden administration, just like I worked with the Trump administration, and I want us to move forward...

That was Republican governor Jim Justice, when asked by the state’s biggest political radio guy, Hoppy Kerchival, whether or not the COVID stimulus needs to be bipartisan. The only people who give a fuck about Joe Manchin and whether or not this was a mistake by the Biden team are Joe Manchin and the beltway morons. Governor Justice and the people don’t give a fuck about process or procedure or whose feelings were hurt, they want results. They don’t give a shit about bipartisanship or Rand Paul’s feels about the budget, they want to feed the kids and keep the power on and make sure grams doesn’t die from the ‘rona...

And you know what? Pelosi and Schumer just did this:

As President Joe Biden attempts to pass his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal with Republican support, Senate Democrats are working to move ahead without the GOP using an obscure, but powerful, procedural tool known as reconciliation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Monday that they have filed a joint budget resolution — the first step to potentially enacting a budget reconciliation bill.

“It makes no sense to pinch pennies when so many Americans are suffering,” Schumer said in floor remarks Monday. “The risk of doing too little is far greater than the risk of doing too much.”

Pelosi and Schumer would not do this if they did not have the votes, so what you can bank on right now is that Manchin is one of those 51 votes in the Senate. So no, Biden and Harris didn’t fuck up by going directly to the people of WV and Arizona. They got Manchin and Sinema in line.

Much like Cole, I'm getting good vibes from this. If the Democrats in Congress are serious about getting things done, they have to bulldoze their way past any obstructionist efforts that McConnell can toss up in the Senate, and the powers in Reconciliation allow them that chance. That much of what needs to get done to resolve our pandemic woes fits the parameters of budgeting - the spending needed to keep people housed and fiscally safe, to keep businesses in the black on their spreadsheets, to help hospitals and medical suppliers - is something that the Republicans can't stop.

Oh, the Far Right - especially in the media - will try to push a "bipartisan" argument that Biden and the Democrats need Republican votes to make any pandemic aid package work, but what the Republicans have brought to the table so far - a miniscule package that only pays for a third of what's proposed, and doesn't include any stimulus checks most Americans need - is pretty much a joke.

The Congressional Democrats can push ahead with their stimulus package of $1.9 trillion dollars without ANY Republican votes, which would - guess what - make the Republicans look bad because a majority of Americans will see the Democrats claim this win while the GOP is pouting in a corner threatening to take their toys home (see if they care).

This is a moment where Biden can sign a much-needed and much-welcomed relief bill to the benefit of his own party, and where Biden can tell Mitch McConnell - bastard that he is - to go sink into the deepest pit of hell where Mitch belongs.

Have at it, Democrats. Get the sh-t done that a competent, well-versed political party can get done for America.

Impeachment As a Toothless Law, As Partisanship Holds Sway

As we get set to watch donald trump get impeached for his involvement with the Insurrection riot of January 6, we need to consider how it's already a foregone conclusion that the Republicans in the Senate will not put country before corruption. It's not so much that they forgave his sins during the impeachment trial over his attempted extortion of foreign aid to scam the 2020 elections, it's that they're about to forgive the more violent act he attempted that threatened their very safety. Today's preliminary fight gives us an idea how the final vote is going to be (via Barbara Sprunt at NPR): 

After senators were sworn in Tuesday afternoon as jurors in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Sen. Rand Paul quickly pressed for a vote to force lawmakers on the record over the issue of the trial's constitutionality.

The Senate voted 55-45 to reject the Kentucky Republican's argument that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.

Just five Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — joined Democrats in voting to table the motion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., notably voted with most of the GOP conference in support of Paul's motion.

A two-thirds majority is required for a Senate conviction. Paul's point of order likely foreshadows the intentions of most Republican senators during the trial and demonstrates how unlikely it is Democrats will garner the 17 Republican votes needed to convict Trump.

What is the use of a legal system when it has no means of enforcement? When the people entrusted to uphold the law and the Constitution itself refuse to do so? We saw the same thing last year when - in spite of all the evidence that trump abused our foreign relations with Ukraine in order to stage fake scandals to affect our own elections - a Republican-controlled Senate did the bare minimum to answer the House's impeachment charges and mocked the failed results.

Looking back at the history of impeaching those who served as President, we can recognize the moments where the need for impeaching a corrupt President did not occur because that President's party also controlled enough of Congress to make the point moot. We can see the moments when impeachment was used as a partisan weapon instead of upholding the Constitution. We can remember how only once in our nation's history did impeachment seem likely - Nixon was facing that fate before he resigned - only because our political landscape was genuinely bipartisan enough to see the reality of how Nixon's acts threatened the public trust.

Impeachment is broken. Either it is too partisan a tool that threatens the independence of the Executive Branch, or the Legislative Branch is too partisan and corrupt to properly employ the impeachment process in any legal and just manner.

trump's own regime is proof of that failure. When Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress, they refused to bring up the matter of impeachment when trump misbehaved and failed to adhere to policy, protocol, or the letter of the law. It took the Democrats - an opposition party - to win the House of Representatives to bring that threat of accountability to the table... and even then, the supermajority need from a nearly-split Senate made it impossible to follow through for removing trump for the crimes he'd committed.

The Founding Fathers may have created the Impeachment process but did so in an era when partisanship had yet to form during our nation's infancy. They did it under assumptions that civic duty and personal honor would drive the individuals in Congress to value integrity over impulsive selfishness. They never considered the reality that Congresspersons - especially when one of their parties turned corrupt the way the modern Republicans have - would avoid their own accountability, that the entire elective process - bent and battered by decades of gerrymandering and false narratives - would fail to hold them accountable when they failed the people and themselves.

The inability to use impeachment now creates ruptures in the entire legal system. One of the reasons Robert Mueller's investigation into the Russian interference with our 2016 elections cycle didn't go far enough was due to Mueller avoiding the implications of crossing a long-standing Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo that sitting Presidents cannot be charged with crimes. Mueller was able to prove at one end that Russia DID meddle in the elections process and duly filed charges on culprits he uncovered. But any link that could have been proven from trump's end of things couldn't be proven because that memo prevented Mueller from digging deep enough to find proof that could stand in court.

That OLC memo has got to go. It shouldn't be upheld as legal precedent. Congress should pass legislation overriding that damn thing, and put in place the ability for a federal investigation/grand jury to file criminal charges on a President found to be breaking the law. It doesn't have to be everything under the sun, obviously: the argument against charging Presidents is to avoid them getting charged with petty-ante stuff every day by conspiracy nuts and partisan hacks. I understand that.

But there ARE certain crimes directly related to the powers of the office that CAN be investigated and charged. I'm talking acts of Obstruction - the one thing Mueller could prove trump had done, but had to leave to Congress to charge which they never did - and acts of Bribery and Extortion that are spelled out as impeachable offenses but are better resolved as criminal charges. I'm talking about serious felonies like Murder (personal cases of murdering individuals, not shipping soldiers off to war or anything), Sexual Assault/Rape, and/or Conspiracy to commit such crimes. We can't rely on a political method of accountability to play out on such crimes, because we're seeing that not enough politicians today will treat it seriously in a bipartisan manner.

trump's violations of the Emoluments Clause ended up going unpunished, because the Courts - now all happily aligned to the Far Right, protecting trump as best they can - kept redefining the line of who could file such complaints and delayed the result until it was too late. This is inexcusable. Congress needs to pass legislation spelling out exactly who can challenge such violations of our Constitution's ethics, and make sure it's something that any President who violates it gets charged and held right away. The Emoluments Clause is one of the few laws that relates directly to the President's misconduct, and it ought to be enforceable the second the corrupt Executive breaks that law. Impeaching him on Emoluments violations would never have passed the Republicans playing defense in the Senate.

Impeachment works great as a symbolic gesture, but it's become worthless when it can't be properly used. We need to move beyond this, we need to make the legal system understand the dangers of a corrupt monster sitting in the White House requires a more direct response. If you're worried about how criminal charges would disrupt the orderly workings of government, don't be. We have a 25th Amendment in place that can reasonably replace an arrested/detained President caught up in acts of provable corruption and allow for a smooth transition of power.

We have fallen too far within a partisan political landscape to allow criminal acts to go unpunished. Impeachment can't punish wrong-doers like trump: Federal felony charges are the only sane response left to us.

Four for the Fourth 2020 Part II: Statehood for DC

One topic that's come up recently, and one that's relevant to our Day of Independence, is the state of statehood for the district that deserves to be a state. Via Barbara Sprunt at NPR:

House Democrats approved a bill Friday afternoon to make the District of Columbia the nation's 51st state.

The vote was 232-180 largely along party and the legislation is expected to go no further in the face of opposition by Republicans in the Senate.

For decades, Washington, D.C., license plates have bemoaned the District of Columbia's lack of statehood, reminding viewers in bold blue letters of its "taxation without representation."

Despite having a population larger than that of Vermont or Wyoming, the District's 700,000 residents don't have anyone voting for their interests on the floor of the House or the Senate...

The history of the District was that the fledgling nation needed a permanent home for its federal government under the Constitution - the preceding Articles of Confederation did not require a permanent address and it had proven confusing and cumbersome to move around half the time - but the Founders also feared a centralized capital would become a cesspool of violence unless Congress had direct control of their security. So they resolved that the capital have NO representation in Congress, not be part of any other state. When they carved out Washington DC, they carved away portions of Maryland and Virginia as the District and tried to make it a politics-free zone (Virginia took back its part - Alexandria, Fairfax, and Arlington - in 1847).

Back in those days, Washington was mostly undeveloped and barely populated with 50,000 by 1850, by comparison nearby Baltimore had 169,000 in 1850. The Federal government itself was minimally staffed with few departments, Congress didn't meet during the hot summers and most everything was handled at the state levels.

Didn't exactly stick.

The Civil War redefined the roles that the Federal government performed, requiring an expansion of the bureaucracy, which meant more local residents living and staying in the district. By the 1930s DC had the population equal to any major U.S. city. After the New Deal and World War II/Cold War expanded the Federal government to its current size, the surrounding metro - bleeding into Maryland and Northern Virginia - made DC a near-equal metropolis to New York, Chicago, or L.A.

As a result, there's currently 650,000 people living in a small almost 10-mile square area that are U.S. citizens... who also have no representation in Congress other than token attendees who can barely do things like show up in committee meetings and birthday parties.

By comparison, Wyoming the smallest populated state at 578,000 or so has a fully empowered House representative and two fully empowered Senators.

The lack of representation at the Federal level causes a lot of local hardships for the residents. Relying on Congressional approval for a lot of things that would normally be covered by a state government, for example. But the loss of political representation always sting.

The fears the Founders had about personal security for the Congress and Executive branches - the fear of mobs and riots - still hasn't been resolved by denying these citizens their rights. We still have mass protests in DC, we've had riots in the area, and yet there's still forces and mechanisms in place to ensure our halls of power are well-protected. None of this is going to change if DC becomes a state.

Statehood for the district is a question of fairness. It is a question of political representation - voting power, civil rights, accountability - for a block of citizens large enough to be a state under any other circumstance. Statehood for DC is a question of self-determination for its residents, and a concern for all fellow Americans.

There is a political element to this fight - given the cultural differences between urban and rural areas has become so partisan that the many rural and less-populated states (that are conservative) outnumber the heavily-populated states (that are liberal) - that makes it unlikely the Republican-controlled Senate will ever play along with DC Statehood. Which is all the more reason for the battleground states with Senate elections this 2020 cycle should vote out the Republican obstructionists and let the Democrats run both House and Senate and ensure DC becomes... um, have we figured out what to rename the place? Washington as a state's already been taken, it won't be a district anymore so DC is irrelevant... Can't call it New Columbia, the mailing address abbreviation would conflict with North Carolina... Oh here we go, the proposed renaming would be Douglass Commonwealth after famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

The polling nationwide suggests this is not a popular move, but it should be. Americans should stand for the rights of fellow Americans when it comes to our power to vote, our access to civil liberties, our abilities to elect leadership to serve us. Make DC a state, dammit.

P.S. I am totally for statehood for Puerto Rico. Its status as a territory for almost 100 years has left it vulnerable to budget crises and natural disasters that cry out for statehood to guarantee stronger national support. We've already made Puerto Ricans full citizens back in the 1910s, we need to take the full step towards commitment and make their home a full member of the United States.

All This Outrage Must Lead To Action Against Republican Corruption. IT MUST.

So as I recover from surgery, the rest of this week has mostly been watching the Republican-controlled Senate avoid even the pretense of holding a fair Impeachment hearing, which previous versions in 1868 and 1998 both allowed for witness testimony. This time around, Mitch McConnell has lined up enough of his fellow GOP buddies to ignore evidence and just vote on what will likely be a partisan acquittal over donald trump's attempt at extorting Ukraine into creating a fake investigation into Biden's family to hurt Joe Biden's 2020 chances in the general election.

All we can say for certain now is the Republicans are not interested in Truth.

The Republicans are not interested in Justice.

The Republicans are sure as hell not interested in the American Way (no, they are interested in the White Racist Greedhead Way).

All that remains now is the Voter Outrage towards Republican Corruption.

Because a vast majority of Americans wanted witnesses to be heard at the Impeachment trial. And when it came time to be a representative body towards the needs of the American majority... the Senate Republicans shrugged and said "so what."

This is what we are down to, fellow Americans.

Republican party leadership has made it very plain: They will side now and always with a corrupt trump who seeks to abuse the powers of the Presidency to achieve any crooked gain.

Republicans do not care for the rights and wishes of the nation's citizenry. They are kicking each concern to the curb, laughing to their cushy incumbent jobs in the belief that the voters back home will NEVER hold them accountable.

It is far past time to hold Republican officials accountable for the crimes they commit as well as the crimes they allow.

It is well now the time to find every Democratic challenger to every Republican Senator up for re-election this 2020 and it is damn well the time to support each Democrat to victory this November.

Find your Democratic Candidate for the Senate and aid them every way you can.

Update: Doug has added a weblink to the Indivisible's Payback Project.

Keep the House in Democratic hands, make sure the popular vote majority that fills that half of Congress remains Blue and Angry.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SUPPORT THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE FOR PRESIDENT THIS 2020 AND VOTE THAT GODLESS SHITGIBBON OUT OF OUR WHITE HOUSE.

Nobody is coming to save us from the wingnuts, America. It's up to us. Make government accountable again. Make the Republican crooks flee for their lives.

Get the vote out this 2020.

What the Impeachment of donald trump Means

Tuesday - tomorrow - the Senate trial of donald j (aka The Shitgibbon) trump begins regarding two articles of Impeachment:

trump, of course, wants it all to go away and pretend he's vindicated (via Jessica Hullinger at The Week):

President Trump's lawyers filed a brief on Monday urging the Senate to dismiss the impeachment charges against him and calling the House's impeachment process a "perversion" of the Constitution, The Associated Press reports.

The 110-page brief calls the House's impeachment case "flimsy," insists Trump did "absolutely nothing wrong," and says he has "been the victim of an illegitimate partisan effort to take him down," The New York Times reports. The House filed two impeachment articles against Trump — abuse of power for withholding aid to Ukraine in order to pressure that country to investigate his political rivals, and obstruction of Congress for blocking the House's impeachment inquiry.

The brief "does not deny that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to open investigations into Democrats," the Times writes. Instead it argues that this was within Trump's rights as president. As to the obstruction of Congress article, the lawyers say the president has a right to confidential deliberations.

The "President Can Do What He Wants" defense is pretty much the only one trump and his lackeys have. Problem is, legal precedent says FCK all to that. Let's refer to Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine for more:

The first problem with this argument is that it rests on incorrect facts. At the time President Trump was withholding military aid to Ukraine, officials inside his administration worried that he was breaking the law by refusing to allocate spending that had been passed by Congress. But the legality had not been officially settled at the time, which is what allowed Trump’s supporters to insist that he had not broken any laws. But last Thursday, the Government Accountability Office formally ruled that withholding the aid did violate the law.

This ruling doesn’t mean Trump is a criminal who needs to be impeached. But given the weight his supporters have placed on the lack of a formal legal violation, it is quite significant. When you rest your defense upon a technicality, you’re in trouble when the technicality turns out to be technically wrong.

Second, as a historical matter, there is no evidence that impeachment was designed to deal solely with violations of federal law. The framers debated impeachment and the record suggests a broad range of concern, ultimately leaving the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” to Congress to decide. Alexander Hamilton defined it as “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Historically, less than one-third of impeachments of federal officials have charged a criminal violation.

Finally, as a constitutional principle, the notion that a president cannot be removed for abusing his power, but can be removed for a criminal violation, however small, would turn impeachment into a ludicrously ill-fitting solution for the problem it was designed to solve. It implies Trump could not be impeached for promising to pardon anybody who murdered his political rivals, but could be impeached if he resold a mattress that was missing its tags...

Simply put: trump and his legal puppies are trying to set up an environment where abuse of power isn't real unless a President commits a by-the-book crime except for the fact they're also arguing that no President can be charged with a crime so why even bother.

/headdesk

The thing is, Impeachment is now set to go in the Senate, and it's looking like Senate leader Mitch McConnell will try to do everything to block the proceedings from public view. Considering how the cable news channels - Fox and CNN - of the day covered Clinton's trial, this is hypocrisy of the highest order. Republicans are hoping to God that "Out of Sight" means "Out of Mind."

This is all part of McConnell's hopes to quickly kill the whole proceeding before enough damning testimony is allowed to air in the first place. There is a genuine fear that if enough critical information about trump's actions blocking Ukrainian aid and then covering up those attempts got out, it would make it harder for the Republican Senators to blithely vote Not Guilty and walk away.

Even with the slight majority the GOP has in the Senate, this IS an election year and a third of the Senate is under voter review: There's at least three Senators in the crosshairs of angry voters back home - Collins in Maine, Ernst in Iowa, Gardner in Colorado - that they could refuse to play Mitch's game. And there's a few more Senators - maybe Murkowski, maybe even Mitt Romney now in a Utah with his own base of support - who may be safe enough from any trumpian retaliation to deny McConnell an easy ride. Mitch can't afford to lose two of his coalition: three or more and the Democrats can vote to have every last document tracing trump's misdeeds and a column of witnesses testifying submitted as evidence.

Granted, there's a lot of hope riding on that last paragraph. We're still looking at the most obvious end of the Impeachment process: trump gets acquitted because there's not a two-thirds supermajority to find him guilty of even one charge for removal.

But accountability still matters: Voters are going to remember how the Republicans behaved during all this. The GOP brushes this off, gives trump an easy acquittal, and enough angry voters back home supporting Impeachment will blame the Senate for ignoring their duty. The Republicans are going to have to play this just right: Show enough concern and handle the process as serious as required, pretend to listen to enough evidence to convince the media they're not faking, and then acquit trump and have a huge party at his Doral resort.

But I doubt it. These Republicans have shown little care of how they're viewed by the American majority. They'll be sloppy and reckless with the rules like they've been for decades.

And the only way this ends well for the United States is that each Republican bastard failing in their oath of duty gets kicked out of power for good.

In the meantime, here's hoping for a big show of witnesses backstabbing each other in ways to make the surviving afternoon soaps look like Disney Junior cartoons.

#ImpeachTrump