He Cops To It

The Never-Trumpers have been pretty solid, and doing some good work, even though they have yet to make a big dent in the "conservative" citadel. They've helped, but the problem with the unholy alliance of Evangelicals, MAGA, Gutless Congress Critters, and Big Dark Money is a much bigger problem than we can expect to be solved any time soon.

The saving grace there tho' is the same thing that's got Putin and Xi worried. ie:

The strongman is invincible until he isn't.

Rick Wilson has played a fair-sized role in orchestrating the shitty things Republicans have been doing for 30 years.

It's good to hear him cop to it finally.

Told Ya

Name a country under an authoritarian strongman's government where the citizens are encouraged to - or even allowed to - walk around with guns.

Here's a new guy I'm checkin' out:

Mary Trump

Concentration camps.

Today's Quote

Almost straight outa The Daddy State Awareness Guide.

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.

With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

Hannah Arendt

14 OCT 1906 - 04 DEC 1975

German historian and philosopher

Rage Against

One of the main things we can't allow ourselves to do is to sink into self-loathing.

Tell MAGA to go suck a whole bag of moldy dicks. Kick 'em in the metaphorical balls 

every chance you get. Do what gets you through the next few years, but don't let them convince you that this country is filled with assholes just like them. Don't sink into that morass, thinking, "Well, I guess that's who we are."

WE ARE NOT THAT

Seven Rules for Dealing with Autocrats And Their Enablers. --Trygve Olsen

Rule #1:

Play the Game You Are In, Not the One You Wish or Want to Play - Recognize and adapt to the dynamics. In a zero-sum struggle against illiberal forces, there's no room for romantic win-win approaches. The outcome is binary: either victory for democracy or defeat to autocracy.

Rule #2:

Speak Truth to Power Relentlessly - Challenge the illiberal forces' Big Lies by consistently speaking truth to their power base, the people. Persistence is key, as there's always a tipping point where either truth or lies prevail.

Rule #3:

Avoid Giving Autocrats Ammunition - Remember, the struggle isn't about policy or ideology but democracy. Be cautious with your words to prevent autocrats from using them to divide you from your allies.

Rule #4:

Recognize Authoritarians' Disregard for Truth - Understand that authoritarians operate in a truth-free zone, focusing solely on maintaining or gaining power. They want you to move on with them, don't. Stay vigilant in forcing them to answer for their actions, lies, and distortions.

Rule #5:

Employ Zero-Sum Judo - Turn their tactics against them. Use Big Truths, marginalization, dependency, mockery of disinformation, and division to weaken their power structure. Exploit their need for the legitimacy of democracy.

Rule #6:

The Stalin Rule - Unite Against Illiberalism - Stand with anyone willing to fight against illiberal structures, regardless of other differences. Shared commitment to democracy and opposition to illiberal politics is the binding force.

Rule #7:

Daily Challenge to Power Structures - Every day, seek ways to expose, confront, and destabilize vertical power structures. Be proactive in restoring faith in democracy and facing the fear used by autocrats to keep you in silence.

A Reminder

Trump is bent on vengeance as a means to cover up his crimes.

Today's Belle

Trump is telegraphing his disdain for how the transfer of power is supposed to work - even if he wins. He had an extremely chaotic transition in 2016, and now it seems he intends to ignore it altogether.

We have to figure his plan is simply to shit-can everything the US government is, and has been since 1789 - to tear it all down and remake the whole thing from the very beginning of his reign.

What He Says He'll Do

... is almost always exactly what he doesn't do.

But this guy is mad - in both the emotional and psychiatric senses.

This is not the kind of comic relief "unhinged" that pundits love to throw around, leaving everybody a plausible way to rationalize that he's just being a little nutty - he doesn't really mean that - c'mon, that's the thing he does to keep the rubes all amped up. It's part of his act.

No. Stop it. Even if it is just that thing he does, this fucker's audience is taking it all very seriously.

The Problem

We're watching the process of a small minority taking power in a country where we've spent too much time patting ourselves on the back for being all big-time democratic, and not enough time making sure everybody understands that the whole fucking thing operates on the honor system.

In the various writings of the founders, they expressed fear that eventually, someone without honor would come along and use those writings as a guide book to pull down the republic and install himself as a new monarch.

This whole 'democratic republic' thing depends entirely on people behaving in an honorable way.

We make promises. We take an oath that says we'll honor the rulings of the courts, we'll honor the system of checks and balances, we'll conduct elections in an honorable way, and that we'll honor the outcomes of those elections. Honor.

Enter Donald Trump. And don't get me wrong here - this did not start when Trump came on the scene. He just recognized the opportunity to cash in on what many before him had laid the groundwork for.

There can't be anyone with a living thinking brain who believes the fairy tale that it's all good and peachy here in USAmerica Inc - that all you have to do is work hard, and play by the rules, and save your money, and you'll be livin' in high cotton before you know it - not with legacy admissions to the elite universities coupled with a totally unbalanced public school system, and militarized cops, and "right to work", and and and. This is not what meritocracy looks like.

We've got some bad problems with a system that becomes more corrupt and unfair with practically every passing day.

So there's a kernel of truth in what Trump and all the other dog-ass demagogues have been peddling. The problem is that Trump is in on the scam that was created by - and is now propagated by - people who seek to rule rather to serve. IOW, he's got priority #1 handled. ie: the rubes are completely buffaloed.

So there's been a hostile takeover of the GOP, and now we're seeing the next installment of the ongoing bloodless coup being fronted from a minority position by a guy who has no intention of ever doing anything that could ever be considered honorable.

And his minions are busy. They're always very busy.

The small group of House Republicans who might force a government shutdown

Roughly 10 lawmakers have at various times thwarted Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s proposals for both short- and long-term funding

Moments after a majority of House Republicans hammered out a plan to fund the government in the short and long term last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) stood up.

Throwing cold water on the discussion in a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol, Gaetz defiantly declared that he and several other House Republicans remained staunchly against a short-term funding solution — and there were enough of them to block it. As frequently as they needed to.

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Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), who until then had been on the side of the holdouts, stepped up to counter Gaetz’s claim, saying this new stopgap proposal — known as a continuing resolution — had earned his support. For a moment, there was hope among leadership that maybe others could be swayed, too.

Roughly 10 Republicans have dug in on their opposition to any short-term funding deal, blocking the House majority from delivering a bill chock full of their legislative priorities to the Democratic-led Senate in hopes of negotiating a more conservative solution to avoid a government shutdown.

Combined, these hard-right holdouts represent about 2 percent of the U.S. population, but account for 100 percent of the votes halting plans of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to keep the government open. Variations of the group have thwarted McCarthy at every turn during the months-long fiscal fights, turning their distaste for how the House functions and McCarthy’s leadership into a multimedia sideshow of bullhorns, pithy tweets, declarations on the House floor, and live streams from the gym.

The confrontation has left the government only days away from shutting down — closing certain federal agencies, immobilizing several anti-poverty programs, and delaying paychecks to thousands of government employees as well as members of the military.

“If you care to reduce spending, if you care to close the border, then every single day you wait, you are taking away our opportunities for leverage there,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a McCarthy ally, stressing that the holdouts will be blamed if conservatives don’t get anything out of a shutdown. “It results in you being responsible for spending more money, you being responsible for the southern border being open, you being responsible for giving federal employees a paid holiday.”

Gaetz, who is McCarthy’s toughest critic, has been the most vocal of the group, quick with a quotable dig or a bombastic floor speech. Still, the small band of holdouts has no real leader or unifying worldview.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has remained a loyal McCarthy ally until recent spending disputes, has been largely alone in saying her support is solely contingent on funding for Ukraine being excluded from any stopgap bill. While House Republicans have offered a short-term bill with some broad funding cuts, some money for Ukraine is still included because a continuing resolution, by definition, is a continuation of existing funding.

To appease Greene, GOP leaders at one point floated removing Ukraine provisions from any short- or long-term funding measure. But Greene has balked, noting she had asked leadership to do this, but they did not take her demand seriously until she shockingly switched her vote last week to block a bill funding the Pentagon for a full year.

Asked if she would be open to voting for a CR if it didn’t include Ukraine funding, she said, “It depends on what’s in it.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks in opposition to funding for the war in Ukraine on the House steps of the Capitol on Tuesday. (Elizabeth Frantz/For The Washington Post)
A broader group of holdouts are just fed up with how the House functions. They blame leadership for following a decades-old formula to fund the government: Fail to pass 12 individual bills that fund a variety of government departments, then wait until the last minute to pass a short-term bill that keeps the government open long enough for both chambers to hash out a deal to pass a package of long-term spending bills, known as an omnibus.

“Lather, rinse, repeat. The Washington wash cycle,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, who has opposed past CRs.

Congress has been unable to pass all 12 appropriations bills on time through each chamber since 1997, which many House conservatives consider a contributing factor to the federal government spending much more than it takes in, leading to the country’s ballooning debt.

That failure of process is why many of the holdouts insist they will never vote for any stopgap measure out of protest for the status quo. They blame McCarthy for continuing to follow the well-worn funding path, even though he is said to have promised otherwise earlier this year in his quest to gain the speaker’s gavel.

“I’ve been very consistent about opposing a CR,” Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale (R-Mont.) said. “It’s not the way to fund government. It simply extends [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s spending and Joe Biden’s policies. I voted against them for two years, so I’m not going to begin voting for them right now.”

House Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans who lost reelection last year, approved a $1.7 trillion funding package in December 2022 to keep the government open until Sept. 30 of this year. Many conservatives dislike a stopgap bill because it continues existing funding levels for a short time, meaning they would have to vote for levels they voted against last year.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who hasn’t voted for a CR since he took office in 2019, didn’t rule out voting for a CR, but said on Tuesday he couldn’t see himself supporting one “at this point.”

Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) board an elevator after leaving a House Republicans meeting on Sept. 20. (Elizabeth Frantz/For The Washington Post)
Asked whether he’d rather vote for a CR or trigger a shutdown, he responded, “That’s kind of like saying, would I rather have a pencil stuck in my eye or in my ear?”

There is also a group of freshman Republicans — Reps. Eli Crane (Ariz.), Cory Mills (Fla.), Andrew Ogles (Tenn.) and Wesley Hunt (Tex.) — who have self-identified as “Never CR” voices, saying their constituents elected them last year to change how the process works.

“I’m opposed to it because, in principle, it’s what happens up here consistently,” Crane said. “Even as a freshman, I know that, right? It’s the old, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a CR.’ As if we haven’t had nine months to do what we’re supposed to do and pass the appropriation bills.”

Most of the holdouts have specifically called for the passage of all 12 long-term appropriations bills — but those lawmakers have also contributed to inhibiting that process. Roughly 20 holdouts initially blocked leadership from scheduling a vote on a procedural hurdle, known as the rule, to fund the Defense and Agriculture departments for a full year. Those bills eventually moved forward for debate on the House floor as part of a broader package Tuesday, in a win for Republican leaders.

Some in the “Never CR” group also intimate “never say never” when it comes to them possibly supporting a stopgap bill. But that support largely depends on the contours of a bill, and not all are on the same page of what those contours are.

Ogles said he would support a stopgap measure only when the House passes their remaining 11 appropriations bills, especially if they defund the Department of Justice’s investigation of former president Donald Trump — a provision that does not have the full support of the Republican conference.

“At the end of the day, leadership procrastinated and created a mess,” Ogles said. “Now we’ve got to find our way through it. And if that means staying [in Washington] a couple of extra weeks with a shutdown, that’s fine.”

Bishop said Wednesday he remains open to a short-term deal, but cautioned that he would need to see a clear path forward for House Republicans to pass an “acceptable package of appropriations bills.” Three Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and decisions, said that McCarthy chose to have the House focus on passing full-year funding bills this week in large part because it could show Bishop and possibly others that Republicans are committed to significantly curbing spending.

But not all holdouts agree.

For some like Gaetz — who, alongside holdouts Rosendale, Crane, and Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), never voted for McCarthy in the speaker’s race in January — the opposition at times feels personal. Gaetz has threatened to trigger a vote to depose McCarthy as speaker if he relies on Democrats to help pass a CR, and several other holdouts have suggested they might support such a move.

McCarthy and his allies have denounced the holdouts — though not by name — for remaining so fervently against a CR that it undercuts their goal of passing year-long appropriations bills.

“It’d be concerning to me that there would be people in the Republican Party that will take the position of President Biden against what the rest of Americans want,” McCarthy said Tuesday. “I don’t understand how, at the end of the day, they would stay in that lane.”

But several far-right holdouts and others who support keeping the government open for at least a week or two at a time remain largely in agreement that their relentless pressure on Republican leaders has made it less likely that they’ll try to fund the government this way next year.

“Among Republicans, there are those who don’t think we should make a change to anything that happens up here,” Bishop said. “And I am going to cast every single vote to see to it that the direction changes. We’re going to change the way this institution functions, so far as I have any control of it.”

Democrats understand they're called to serve

Republicans believe they're entitled to rule

When Autocrats Get Nervous

Generally, there are 2 main reasons for a country to get belligerent.

1. Feeling big and bad, they start throwing their weight around to take advantage of their strength
2. Feeling not so big and bad, they start throwing their weight around to cover up their weakness

Putin's aggression towards Ukraine seems to have been a manifestation of #1 above - mistaken to be sure, because he was apparently unaware of the enormous corruption that has been hollowing out the Russian military (as well as the economy) for 30 years. Which is tragically laughable given the fact that Putin is about as corrupt as they come, but somehow he trusted the colonels and generals (who were busily selling all the tank engines on the black market) when they told him everything was peachy, and don't worry, boss - we'll knock over Kyiv in about a week?

China's been getting all frisky too. We've been thinking their aggressive posturing is because of their strength as well, but we're becoming aware of some very serious problems there. ie: work force demographics due to a dramatic decline in their population growth, they've way over-built both commercial and residential spaces, and they're seeing a near collapse in consumer spending and capital investment.

So, sometimes the assholes are assholes because they need territory or population or resources.

Sometimes the assholes are assholes because they need to hide their asshole-ishness behind some make-believe shit.

And - of course - sometimes the assholes are assholes just because they're assholes.

Blasting Bullhorns and Water Cannons, Chinese Ships Wall Off the Sea

The Chinese military base on Mischief Reef, off the Philippine island of Palawan, loomed in front of our boat, obvious even in the predawn dark.

Radar domes, used for military surveillance, floated like nimbus clouds. Lights pointed to a runway made for fighter jets, backed by warehouses perfect for surface-to-air missiles. More than 900 miles from the Chinese mainland, in an area of the South China Sea that an international tribunal has unequivocally determined does not belong to China, cellphones pinged with a message: “Welcome to China.”

The world’s most brazen maritime militarization is gaining muscle in waters through which one-third of global ocean trade passes. Here, on underwater reefs that are known as the Dangerous Ground, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., has fortified an archipelago of forward operating bases that have branded these waters as China’s despite having no international legal grounding. China’s coast guard, navy and a fleet of fishing trawlers harnessed into a militia are confronting other vessels, civilian and military alike.

The mounting Chinese military presence in waters that were long dominated by the U.S. fleet is sharpening the possibility of a showdown between superpowers at a moment when relations between them have greatly worsened. And as Beijing challenges a Western-driven security order that stood for nearly eight decades, regional countries are increasingly questioning the strength of the American commitment to the Pacific.

While the United States makes no territorial claims to the South China Sea, it maintains defense pacts with Asian partners, including the Philippines, that could compel American soldiers to these waters. Just as anxiety over nearby Taiwan has focused attention on the deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing, the South China Sea provides yet another stage for a contest in which neither side wants to betray weakness. Complicating matters, Chinese diplomats and military officers are engaging less at a time when open communication could help defuse tensions.

China’s arming of the South China Sea has also forced Southeast Asian fishermen — from nations like the Philippines that Chinese diplomats have referred to as “small countries” — to abandon the fishing grounds they have depended on for generations. It is putting tremendous pressure on those governments.

“I told the Chinese, ‘Your leadership talks about shared prosperity, but what you are doing cannot make it more plain that you think we are just stupid people who can be fooled and bullied,’” said Clarita Carlos, who until January served as the national security adviser of the Philippines. “The interconnected oceans should be our common heritage, and we should be working with marine scientists from every nation to fight the real enemy: climate change.”

“Instead,” she added, “the Chinese are building military bases on artificial islands and bringing guns to the sea.”

During a four-day sail through a collection of rocks, reefs and islets called the Spratlys that are within the Dangerous Ground, New York Times journalists saw the extent to which China’s projection of power has transformed this contested part of the Pacific Ocean. Not since the United States embarked on its own campaign of far-flung militarization more than a century ago, leading its armed forces toward a position of Pacific primacy, has the security landscape shifted so significantly.

A P.L.A. Navy tugboat lingering in the vicinity had failed to stop us, perhaps because of the early-morning hour. But as we approached the Chinese military base, the tugboat, about 2.5 times the size of our vessel, churned water to reach us, turning on its floodlights and blasting its horn repeatedly. Over the radio, we were told that we had intruded into Chinese territorial waters.

Our boat was Philippine-flagged, and an international tribunal convened by the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in 2016 that Mischief Reef was part of the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf of the Philippines. China has ignored that ruling. In a radio exchange, we said we were allowed to sail through these waters.

The P.L.A. tugboat responded with more barrages of its horn, a sonic assault so piercing that we felt it in our bodies. Then, with its floodlights nearly blinding us, the P.L.A. tugboat rushed at our vessel, swiping within 20 meters of our much smaller boat. This was a clear breach of international maritime protocol, maritime experts said.

As dawn broke, we could see both the fortifications on Mischief Reef and an array of Chinese vessels closing in from different directions: half a dozen maritime militia boats and a recently commissioned navy corvette designed to carry anti-ship missiles. The navy tugboat stayed near, too.

On other occasions, Chinese coast guard and militia vessels have rammed, doused with water cannons and sunk civilian boats in the South China Sea. In 2019, for instance, 22 Filipino fishermen were left to float amid the wreckage of their boat for six hours after a Chinese militia vessel struck them.

Danger extends overhead. In May, a Chinese fighter jet sliced past the nose of a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane flying through international air space over the South China Sea, echoing an incident last December when a Chinese fighter came within 20 feet of an American plane.

Zhou Bo, a retired P.L.A. colonel who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said that claimant nations and the United States — which conducts regular air and sea patrols in the South China Sea — should accept Beijing’s contention that this is Chinese turf.

“The U.S. should stop or decrease its operations there,” he said. “But since it is impossible, so the danger will grow. A stronger P.L.A. can only be more resolute in defending China’s sovereignty and national interests.”

Mr. Zhou added that he thought the risk of a conflict between the United States and China was higher in the South China Sea than in the Taiwan Strait, another theater of geopolitical friction.

Frictions in the South China Sea are greatest in places where Southeast Asian countries have defied the Chinese mandate that the waterway, scooped out on Chinese maps with a dashed line, belongs to Beijing. In waters close to Vietnam and Malaysia, Chinese vessels have disrupted attempts to explore and develop oil and natural gas fields. The Chinese coast guard has forcibly prevented its Indonesian counterpart from arresting Chinese fishermen operating well within Indonesian waters.

Chinese forces frequently harass Philippine coast guard boats trying to access a tiny contingent of Philippine marines stationed on Second Thomas Shoal, which, like nearby Mischief Reef, also lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. (Control over such a zone gives a country the rights to all resources within it, although foreign flagged boats are allowed free passage through most of the waters.)

In February, a Chinese coast guard ship directed a military-grade laser at a Philippine coast guard boat trying to resupply the marines at Second Thomas, temporarily blinding some sailors, according to the Philippine side. The Chinese coast guard has also unleashed high-intensity water cannons at the resupply boats, as recently as last month. In both cases, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the Philippine vessels were violating Chinese territorial sovereignty, forcing the Chinese to intervene.

As we left Mischief Reef, with Chinese vessels still shadowing us, we saw just how lopsided the contest is at Second Thomas. In 1997, the Philippines, outmanned and underfunded, beached a World War II era navy ship on the shoal, creating a makeshift base from which its soldiers could defend Philippine waters.

With the marooned navy ship in the distance, we watched as the same Philippine coast guard vessel that had been targeted by the military laser was flanked by a pair of Chinese coast guard ships more than double its length. The radio crackled with verbal jousting.

“Since you have disregarded our warning,” a Chinese coast guardsman said, “we will take further necessary measures in accordance with the law, and any consequences entailed will be borne by you.”

“We will deliver food and other essentials to our people,” the Philippine side answered.

The Philippine boat barely made it through to resupply the marine base. Every week brings such a David and Goliath showdown, and the chance for a dangerous miscalculation.

“The Chinese are flouting the maritime rules of engagement and intentionally violating the good rules of conduct,” said Gregory B. Poling, the director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’re making foreign vessels veer, sometimes at the last moment. One day, a foreign vessel is not going to veer off. And then what?”

Despite its lack of territorial claims in the South China Sea, the American Seventh Fleet regularly cruises these waters to ensure freedom of navigation for all nations, according to the U.S. Navy. (Beijing contends that the presence of American military ships, particularly patrols near Chinese-controlled bases, inflames tensions.) And security pacts bind the American military to several Asian countries. The Philippines, which was once an American colony, is tied to the United States in a mutual defense treaty that Vice President Kamala Harris said last year would extend to “an armed attack on the Philippine armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the South China Sea.”

This month, U.S. and Philippine warships sailed together in the South China Sea, and the two navies plan a joint patrol later this year.

American support has not always been so full-throated. In 2012, Chinese vessels occupied Scarborough Shoal, off the coast of the Philippines’ most populous island, even after the United States thought it had brokered a deal for both the Philippines and China to withdraw from the reef to cool tensions. Despite the Chinese incursion, American forces did not defend the shoal. Chinese boats have essentially controlled Scarborough ever since.

Around the same time, China began constructing what it said were “typhoon shelters” for fishermen on several South China Sea reefs it controlled. Then Chinese dredgers began piling sand on the atolls. Airstrips and barracks appeared. In 2015, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, stood in the White House Rose Garden and said that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” of the Spratlys, despite satellite evidence that China was doing just that.

“The U.S. response was pretty much limited to statements that they opposed it, but not much more,” said M. Taylor Fravel, the director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of books on China’s defense strategy and territorial disputes, noting that the development of the P.L.A.’s South China Sea military bases was done in three phases from 2014-2016. “It’s reasonable to speculate that a much harder response to the first wave would have prevented the next two waves.”

The 2016 tribunal ruling that dismissed China’s “historical claims” over most of the South China Sea came just as the Philippines was ushering in a new president, Rodrigo Duterte, who made close ties with China a signature of his six years in power. Mr. Duterte ignored the tribunal ruling, even though it favored his country. Since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office last year, his administration has spoken out against the Chinese presence in the South China Sea. Mr. Marcos has also granted the United States access to a handful of military bases on Philippine soil and is allowing for the building of others.

After we left Second Thomas Shoal, we sailed toward the Philippine island of Palawan, home to nearly a million people. Green hills rose on the horizon as we neared Sabina Shoal, a rich fishing ground for centuries. In recent years, the Chinese have placed buoys here. The Philippine coast guard has removed them.

Right on Sabina Shoal, where delicate coral once thrived, we saw boats arranged in a defensive formation. Ropes tied some of the vessels together. Chinese flags flew. Men bantered over the radio in a southern Chinese dialect. No fishing nets were in evidence.

China has said that such trawlers are commercial fishing vessels, and a Chinese appetite for seafood has created the world’s largest fishing fleet. But these South China Sea boats, experts say, rarely fish. Instead, they act as a maritime militia, swarming contested waters and unoccupied reefs for days or even months. They have steel hulls and advanced satellites, and some have rammed smaller Southeast Asian fishing boats. If a storm descends, they shelter at Chinese naval bases, like those built on Mischief, Fiery Cross and Subi reefs, satellite imagery shows.

We could see empty Chinese instant noodle packets floating in the water. We heard the Philippine coast guard over the radio, urging the Chinese boats to leave Sabina. There was no response. The Philippine entreaties faded.

The Alarm Keeps Clanging Away

A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook

On Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican effort to limit the reach and scope of initiatives and referendums as another instance of the party’s war on majority rule. One thing I wanted to include, but couldn’t quite integrate into the structure of the column, was a point about the recent use of legislative expulsion to punish Democratic lawmakers who dissent from or challenge Republican majorities.

We saw this in Tennessee, obviously, where Republicans expelled two Democratic members — Representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — for loudly supporting a youth protest for gun control from the statehouse floor using a bullhorn.

We saw another example this week, in Montana, after State Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender woman, spoke out against a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. Calling her comments (“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”) “disrespectful and “inappropriate,” Montana Republicans have barred Zephyr from attending — or speaking during — the House session for the rest of the legislative term, which ends next week.

In Nebraska, a Democratic lawmaker is being investigated by an ethics panel for a conflict of interest regarding her filibuster of another bill to ban gender-affirming health care for minors. The conflict? She has a transgender child.

And if we look back to last year, we’ll recall that House Republicans censured former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their roles in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

What to make of this?

Expelling or censuring members isn’t necessarily an attack on majority rule or popular government, and yet it feels more sinister, in a way, than an impenetrable partisan gerrymander or even a strict voter ID law. I think that’s because these moves against dissenting members constitute an attack on representation itself.

No one forced Tennessee Republicans to expel Representatives Jones and Pearson. They could have ignored them. But they were so incensed by the show of opposition that they deprived about 130,000 people of their representation in the legislature. Silencing and effectively banning Representative Zephyr means that about 10,000 people in Montana’s 100th District don’t have a voice in the legislature.

The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities.

The Constitution guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” I’ve written before about how this “republican form” is mostly undefined; neither the framers nor the courts have really said what it means for a state to have one. But I think we can at least say that when legislatures are stripping communities of representation over dissent and disagreement, it doesn’t exist.

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was, as I mentioned, on the Republican attack on referendums and initiatives, and how the party has committed itself to circumventing the will of the majority wherever it thinks it’s necessary.

There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage.

My Friday column was on the drama on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where its chairman, Dick Durbin, asked Chief Justice John Roberts to testify at a hearing on Supreme Court ethics. I wrote that the response from Roberts demonstrates something crucial about the relationship between the court and the American political order.

“Separation of powers,” in Roberts’s view, means the court is outside the system of checks and balances that governs the other branches of government. “Judicial independence,” likewise, means neither he nor any other member of the court has any obligation to speak to Congress about their behavior. The court checks, according to Roberts, but cannot be checked.

And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1995 political comedy “Canadian Bacon.”