About Your "Rights"

In a system of 3 co-equal branches of government, where checks and balances are supposed to keep each of the branches from overstepping its authority, how exactly do we hold the SUPREME COURT accountable?

How does Congress pass a bill intended to rein in a SCOTUS that seems to be running afoul of the document its supposed to be helping us enforce and keep intact, when that court has the power to nullify any law it sees fit to nullify? When that court can actually (in effect) rule to nullify parts of the US Constitution itself?

This is just the latest in a long-running series of constitutional crises being manufactured by those dark and mysterious entities known collectively as "they".

Hey - I may be paranoid, but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

Anyway, taking a look at a few wrinkles in this big fuckin' mess we're up to our eyeballs in:

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Louisiana reveals the war on rights that is coming if Roe is overturned

With the Supreme Court considering whether to overturn Roe v. Wade, Louisiana House Republicans advanced this past week an antiabortion bill of astonishing sweep. The proposal would rewrite the state’s homicide statute to “ensure the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization by protecting them by the same laws protecting other human beings.” In other words, not only would the bill empower Louisiana prosecutors to charge women who get abortions with murder, it appears to declare the use of in-vitro fertilization, intrauterine devices and emergency contraception to be homicide, too.

For half a century, Americans could more or less take for granted their right to terminate their pregnancies, seek help starting families or get IUDs. Many might not realize how dramatically overturning Roe would reshape American life. Some deny this reality, arguing that, should the Supreme Court repudiate Roe, as a draft majority opinion that leaked earlier this month suggests it might, the United States would resemble Europe, where first-trimester abortion is legal nearly everywhere. In fact, overturning Roe would result in the immediate banning of abortion in the 13 states that have antiabortion laws designed to kick in as soon as Roe is gone. Republican leaders in Nebraska, South Dakota and Indiana are calling for legislative special sessions to pass sweeping new abortion restrictions.

And Louisiana shows that, given the option, right-wing lawmakers are poised to wage a broad war against reproductive rights that would horrify most Americans. It might be that wealthy people in states run by anti-abortion zealots would be able to cross state lines to terminate their pregnancies or to seek other family planning options. (Though some Republicans want to try to ban that, too.) But poor people would be unable to get safe, legal abortions. On top of the health risks they would face seeking illicit abortions, in Louisiana these individuals might also risk being prosecuted for murder. Given that many women seek abortions because they would struggle to carry their pregnancies to term while caring for the families they already have, the bill would be a particularly cruel twist that would threaten the families who are least capable of facing such hardship.

If Roe were egregiously wrong, as Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. claims in the leaked draft opinion, the justices would have to weigh whether enabling such drastic and immediate consequences would be good for the orderly application of the law. But the court need not make that tough call, because Roe was a reasonable ruling to which seven justices signed their names, and which the court upheld in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Other than the makeup of the court, the only thing that has changed in the past half-century is that Roe has become a keystone decision for Americans’ personal rights. Overturning it now would wound the nation, worsen the country’s politics and make some of the most vulnerable Americans more so. It would be the height of gratuitous judicial activism.

Glenn Kirschner - There ought to be public hearings and an impeachment inquiry. 

Lawrence O'Donnell, with former USAG Eric Holder:

Good News (ish)

Quick reminder: Even though it's been more or less on its own since the early 1970s, the Post Office is still very much a government-sponsored service like any other. It's not intended to work exactly like a business.

We pour hundreds of billions into the Defense Department, and nobody's bitching about how the Navy should be turning a profit.

This is a "Yeah-OK-We'll-See" proposition, but at least it seems there's something that might actually get done about something.

Just don't get too het up - there's still the Petro Dollar Butt Boy Caucus in the US Senate to worry about, especially as regards an upcoming decision on what kind of vehicles the USPS is going to buy.

An initial order for 100,000 All Electric Mail Trucks pumps a shitload of happy into the Green New Deal, which makes for some big-time misery for Fossil Fuel Fuckers.

So yeah - we'll see.

WaPo:

The House on Tuesday advanced a major financial overhaul of the ailing U.S. Postal Service, relieving it of tens of billions of dollars in liabilities that agency leaders said prevented it from modernizing and providing efficient service.

The bill, which passed 342 to 92, marks a major breakthrough for the mail agency and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who made the legislation the centerpiece of his 10-year postal restructuring plan.

The Postal Service has implored Congress to help fix its balance sheet for nearly 15 years, and agency leaders are cautiously optimistic about prospects for the Postal Service Reform Act in the Senate. It has 27 co-sponsors in the upper chamber, including 14 Republicans, sufficient support to defeat a potential filibuster.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the chamber would vote on the legislation by the end of next week, citing its bipartisan popularity.

Democrats have hailed the legislation as crucial to the preservation of the Postal Service and its ability to reach nearly every American household six days a week. Republicans say the bill vindicates DeJoy’s initiatives and a conservative approach for a smaller mail service.

“We need to take steps to make our post office stronger,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the bill’s sponsor and chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told The Washington Post. “This bill helps and it will help in every way. It’s a reform bill that will save taxpayers’ dollars while at the same time making the operations of the post office more financially stable and sustainable, and making postal jobs and employee health benefits more secure.”

The Postal Service is required to prepay its retirees’ health-care costs, a mandate instituted in 2006 when mail volume was steady and the agency was profitable. But decades of falling mail use have turned it into a perpetual financial loser, and the pre-funding requirement has accounted for $152.8 billion of its $206.4 billion in liabilities.

Tuesday’s legislation, advanced by leaders of both parties, wipes clean $57 billion of that amount, and will save the agency another $50 billion over the next decade. The bill installs new timely delivery transparency requirements for the Postal Service, which has struggled with on-time service since DeJoy took office, and allows the agency to contract with local, state and Indigenous governments to offer basic nonpostal services, such as hunting and fishing licenses.

“Congress just doesn’t want to put a Band-Aid on the post office,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, told The Post. “We want to try to have a permanent solution to the post office, and that all predicates on having a reform plan. The former postmaster general never did come up with a reform plan.

“Now we have Louis DeJoy. He came up with a reform plan. … As evidenced by the support for this bill from Democrats, these reforms are working. The employees have bought into these reforms, and this bill will codify a lot of those reforms and help make the post office sustainable into the future.”

The bill is the result of months of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, DeJoy and the Postal Service’s powerful unions.

The liberal wing of the House Democratic caucus had pushed Maloney (D-N.Y.) to pass a broader bill that included provisions to protect mail-in voting, funding for electric vehicles and restrictions on political campaign activities for the postmaster general and members of the agency’s governing board.

DeJoy’s past fundraising for former president Donald Trump has long rankled Democrats, who have accused him of hampering the agency’s ability to collect mailed ballots during the 2020 presidential election.

But after negotiations with Comer, DeJoy and the postal unions, the House passed a much narrower bill that appears to have a pathway to Senate approval.

“This was an agreement bill,” Maloney said. “From Day One, we could have passed a bill with just Democratic votes, but it would have been dead in the Senate.”

“The Postal Service Reform Act is about the only thing we agree with Louis DeJoy on,” Porter McConnell, campaign director of the consumer rights group Take on Wall Street and co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, said in a statement. “Now it’s time for the Senate to pass the bill and send it to the president’s desk.”

DeJoy in a statement thanked the House leadership for its work on the bill and said that if it was passed by the Senate, "this legislation will have the same operational and financial impacts as the self-help steps we are taking at the Postal Service to provide the American people with the delivery service they expect and deserve.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill and chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement that he expected “to move quickly” to advance the legislation in the upper chamber.

“I have worked hand in hand with the bipartisan leaders of my committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee to craft this bipartisan bill that will help the Postal Service overcome unfair and burdensome financial requirements, provide more transparency and accountability to the American people, and continue its nearly 250-year tradition of service to every community in our nation,” Peters said.

DeJoy made postal legislation the largest component of his controversial “Delivering for America” 10-year plan for the agency. To make up for a $160 billion projected shortfall over the next decade, DeJoy raised postage costs and lengthened delivery times. The agency banked on Congress taking liabilities off its balance sheet and growth in its package shipping business to make up the difference.

The bill eliminates the Postal Service’s retiree health care pre-funding mandate and instead requires future postal retirees to enroll in Medicare, drawing some criticism that the legislation amounts to a congressional bailout.

“The truth is the post office isn’t lacking liquidity. It is bankrupt,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said on the House floor. “And nothing in this bill will make the post office truly solvent. It just wipes out and wipes away debt and shifts the burden on to taxpayers.”

The Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s nonpartisan bookkeeper, projected that the bill would save taxpayers $1.5 billion over the next 10 years, because postal retirees would boost Medicare’s prescription drug discounts.

But the vote on Tuesday has not thawed tensions between DeJoy and congressional Democrats, who are sparring anew over the Postal Service’s plan to replace its aging mail delivery fleet with up to 148,000 gas-powered vehicles, instead of electric trucks.

The White House and Environmental Protection Agency wrote to DeJoy last week saying the Postal Service’s environmental analysis of the fleet replacement was fundamentally flawed. DeJoy’s response over the weekend was defiant; he said in a statement that the Postal Service would consider purchasing electric vehicles only if Congress provided the funding.

Otherwise, he said, “We will be resolute in making decisions that are grounded in our financial situation and what we can realistically achieve, while pushing hard to take delivery of safer, cleaner vehicles by next year.”

Democrats are scrambling to find accountability measures to block the mail agency’s gas-powered truck purchases, but worry they are short on options. Proponents of Tuesday’s financial overhaul bill worried that a brewing fight over the fleet would imperil support for the Postal Service Reform Act. Instead, House Democratic leaders convinced members to separate the two issues.

“Get this passed,” Maloney said of the Tuesday vote, “and then we’ll work on that.”

The Cloture Problem

An Op/Ed from Norm Ornstein at WaPo: (pay wall)

Five myths about the filibuster

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has thrown down the gauntlet, saying he will move to change Senate rules by Jan. 17 if Republicans continue to block the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Because of the filibuster, neither can be enacted without 60 votes in the Senate — and no Republican backs both bills, though all 50 Democrats do. Supporters of the status quo have their reasons, many of them caught up in myths about the history of the Constitution and the Senate’s role.

Myth No. 1 - Senate bills have always needed a supermajority.

People often overestimate the depth of the filibuster’s roots. When the Senate voted in 2013 to invoke the “nuclear option” to approve presidential nominees, then-Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) wrote in The Washington Post that sidestepping the filibuster was “the most dangerous restructuring of Senate rules since Thomas Jefferson wrote them.” More recently, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) defended the filibuster in the Charleston Gazette-Mail by saying, “Our founders were wise to see the temptation of absolute power and built in specific checks and balances to force compromise that serves to preserve our fragile democracy.”

True - but the filibuster was not one of these checks and balances. The Senate did not have any provision for a supermajority on legislation for its first 17 years. Like the House, its rules allowed a “motion for the previous question,” where a majority could move directly to vote. That provision was taken out in 1806, when Vice President Aaron Burr cleaned up what he regarded as extraneous provisions in the Senate’s cluttered rule book. For decades after the change, the status quo largely prevailed - until the 1840s, when John C. Calhoun exploited the motion’s absence to stall anti-slavery action by talking at length on the floor, joined by allies. His adversaries had no ability to stop the talk. From the 20th century on, the rules changed multiple times, always to make it easier for the majority to overcome a filibuster and move to action.

Myth No. 2 - The framers feared 'the tyranny of the majority.'

Filibuster proponents often argue that the Constitution’s framers intended to obstruct decisions by simple majorities. In defense of the filibuster, Lewis & Clark Law School professor James Huffman wrote in the Hill that James Madison “would likely think it a brilliant innovation for preventing majority tyranny.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) wrote in the New York Times in 2019 that the filibuster is “central to the order the Constitution sets forth,” citing Madison’s view that the Senate ought to function as an “additional impediment” and a “complicated check” on the House.

But other than the explicit constitutional requirements for supermajorities, such as to approve treaties, the framers were foursquare for majority votes. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22 that allowing minorities to overrule the majority would cause “tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.” Congressional Research Service scholar Walter J. Oleszek has noted: “Overall, the Framers generally favored decision-making by simple majority vote. This view is buttressed by the grant of a vote to the Vice President (Article I, section 3) in those cases where the Senators are ‘equally divided.’” This provision makes clear that the Constitution’s drafters expected that most decisions would be made by majority vote.

Ed Note: More than a couple of writers have interpreted Madison's "tyranny of the majority" as basic paranoia. The founders were "landed gentry" (ie: the minority) - the only ones who were originally enfranchised with the right to vote. They worried about delivering power to the unwashed masses, and went about engineering ways of clawing that power back. And the more power shifted to "regular people', the more shitty schemes were hatched to thwart the will of the majority.

Myth No. 3 - The filibuster fosters moderation and cooperation.

In The Post, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) wrote last year, “The filibuster compels moderation.” She is not alone in arguing that the rule has a salutary effect on lawmakers’ bipartisan dealings: The Heritage Foundation’s Thomas Jipping, for example, claims that it “encourages consensus.”

That may have been true in the distant past, but it has not been the case for a long time. The Senate changed the filibuster rule in 1975, from two-thirds of those present and voting to three-fifths of the entire Senate. The “present and voting” standard, by requiring senators to show up, put the burden on the minority; the absolute standard shifted the burden entirely to the majority. On most issues, when it is clear that a cloture vote (that is, a vote to end debate) would fail, there is no debate, which would only take up precious floor time. The minority can kill bills with few or no visible traces, and has no incentive for moderation or compromise. A good example: The House passed two bills last year requiring universal background checks on guns. Neither was even brought up in the Senate because Republicans made it clear the measures would die on filibusters.

Myth No. 4 - Keeping the filibuster now will preserve it in the future.

Some Democrats are reluctant to change the filibuster because they worry what Republicans would do under the new rules if they regained the majority. “We have more to lose than gain by ending the filibuster,” Sinema argued in her Post piece. Manchin, also writing in The Post, said: “If the filibuster is eliminated or budget reconciliation becomes the norm, a new and dangerous precedent will be set to pass sweeping, partisan legislation that changes the direction of our nation every time there is a change in political control. The consequences will be profound - our nation may never see stable governing again.”

The implication is that if Democrats grit their teeth and keep the filibuster as is, Republicans will exercise the same restraint when they recapture the majority. But recent history offers no evidence that the GOP would be constrained by tradition. During the Obama presidency, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, insisted on keeping in place the “blue slip” tradition, which lets senators decide the fate of lower-court judges nominated from their states. But early in the Trump presidency, when a Democrat used the tradition to block a nominee from his state, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the committee’s new chairman, abandoned it.

Then there is the Supreme Court. McConnell quickly changed the filibuster rule to enable majority action on Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Then, after refusing to hold a hearing on Barack Obama’s nominee 11 months before the 2016 presidential election, saying tradition demanded that the victor of the election choose a new justice, he abandoned that norm and held a vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett eight days before the 2020 election.

Myth No. 5 - A rule change would make the Senate just like the House.

Some believe that without the filibuster, the Senate would lose its essential character. This is what Brown University professor Rich Arenberg argued in The Post in 2019, that “leaving most questions to a simple majority vote would render the Senate much like the House of Representatives.” Responding to Democrats’ proposed rule change at a news conference Monday, McConnell said: “Make no mistake about it, this is genuine radicalism. They want to turn the Senate into the House. They want to make it easy to fundamentally change the country.”

It is true that the Senate was designed to be very different from the House: It represents states, gives those states equal footing and allots senators six-year terms. The Senate does not, however, derive its character from supermajority requirements. After all, the filibuster did not even exist when the body was founded. Democrats have proposed, for example, requiring that senators actually speak on the floor, or flipping the standard such that the Senate would require 41 votes to continue debate rather than 60 to end it. These reforms to the filibuster would not weaken the Senate, but would restore it to its rightful place in our political system.

Jan6 Stuff

Coupla things just got a little clearer for me:

1. The apparent involvement of several Poodles at DumFux News, and the heat they may be about to feel, could remove a lot of the wonder as to why Chris Wallace suddenly bolted.
2. Devin Nunes has also made an abrupt career change - saying he'll leave Congress before the end of this year, in order to take the top job at Trump's new "media company". I'm thinking that's because Nunes is about to be implicated (again - this time officially, and this time without cover), and his only shot is to try to propagandize his way out of this mess.

18 U.S. Code § 1505 - Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies, and committees

Whoever, with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance, in whole or in part, with any civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act, willfully withholds, misrepresents, removes from any place, conceals, covers up, destroys, mutilates, alters, or by other means falsifies any documentary material, answers to written interrogatories, or oral testimony, which is the subject of such demand; or attempts to do so or solicits another to do so; or

Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress—

Shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.

Ed Note: You don't really think Herschel Walker or David Perdue are in any way a match for Raphael Warnock, do ya?

Build Back Better

Democrats passed the BBB in the House very early this morning by a vote of 220-213.

Every Republican voted against it, and it now goes to the Senate, where every Republican will vote against it, even though many of them in both chambers make campaign promises that sound very similar to what Biden and the Dems are trying to deliver for us.

Reuters:

The Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed President Joe Biden's $1.75 trillion social policy and climate package, sending it back to the Senate where it is likely to be modified further.

Here is what the latest version contains, according to the White House:

FAMILY BENEFITS

• Free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds
• Support for childcare costs: Families that earn less than $300,000 a year would pay no more than 7% of their income on childcare
• Tax credits worth up to $300 a child per month
• Bolsters coverage of home-care costs for the elderly and disabled through the Medicaid health program
• Expands free school meals and provides $65 a month in grocery money during summer months for 29 million low-income children who are eligible for free lunches at school

CLIMATE

• Rebates and credits to cut the cost of rooftop solar systems by 30% and American-made, union-made electric vehicles by $12,500
• Incentives to encourage U.S. manufacturing of clean energy technology and shift other industries to reduce carbon emissions
• Creates a 300,000-strong Civilian Climate Corps to work on environmental and climate projects
• Creates a Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator to invest in climate-related projects, with at least 40% serving disadvantaged communities
• New spending on coastal restoration, forest management and soil conservation

HEALTHCARE

• Enables the Medicare health plan for seniors to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs that have been on the market for at least nine years
• Penalizes drug companies that increase prices faster than inflation
• Caps out-of-pocket prescription drug prices at $2,000 a year and lowers insulin prices to $35 a month
• Expands Medicare to cover hearing aids
• Reduces Affordable Care Act premiums by an average of $600 per person a year
• Expands Medicaid coverage to low-income people in the 12 states that have opted not to expand the program on their own

HOUSING

• Expands affordable housing, public housing and rental assistance programs
• Broadens down-payment assistance to bolster home ownership
• Expands lead-paint removal efforts
• Supports community-led redevelopment in low-income neighborhoods
• Encourages local governments to ease zoning restrictions that limit housing density

EDUCATION

• Increases Pell Grants for college costs
• More aid for historically Black colleges and other minority-serving schools
• Boosts the Labor Department's job-training programs by 50%

IMMIGRATION

• $100 billion in "immigration reform," which is additional funding beyond the $1.75 trillion
• Efforts to reduce backlogs, expand legal services and improve border processing and asylum programs

OTHER PROGRAMS

• Expands a tax credit for low-income workers to cover those who do not have children
• More money for rural projects
• Supports community violence intervention

TAXES

• 15% minimum tax on corporate profits for companies with more than $1 billion in profits
• 1% surcharge on stock buybacks
• 15% minimum tax on foreign profits of U.S. corporations
• 5% surtax on personal income above $10 million
• additional 3% surtax on income above $25 million
• close loophole to prevent wealthy from avoiding 3.8% Medicare tax
• bolster the Internal Revenue Service to improve customer service and focus enforcement on wealthy tax evaders
• expands a deduction for state and local taxes that primarily benefits upper-income households in high-tax states.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

This is some pretty good analysis, which stands up in good shape - as long as we don't dismiss or discount the (IMO) very strong probability that Bannon will make deliberate attempts to drag it out so that it does threaten to torpedo Republicans in congress during their runs for re-election next year.

In a piece in Daily Beast almost 5 years ago, Bannon self-identified as a Leninist.

"Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment ... to bring down the entire establishment including the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress”

The hole in the logic is that if Bannon presses his case against the Repubs, and succeeds in pulling them down next year - leaving Dems with majorities in both houses - who's left for him to have on his side?

So, are we talking about a very delicate thread-the-needle thing? Maybe Bannon's just another self-loathing bomb-thrower who isn't really in favor of anything - he's not trying to build anything after all the destruction he's bringing - he just wants to watch it all burn(?)

What else is Bannon counting on that I'm not seeing?

Curious as fuck. Scary too.

Today's Press Poodle Award

It's like they just can't help themselves. When it starts to look like the reality of the situation is that yes, the shit going on in USAmerica Inc is in fact mostly because of the dog-ass GOP, the Press Poodles have to fuck with us - they feel the need to push some bullshit on us that "balances" it out again. 

I hate these fuckin' people sometimes.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Senate GOP prepares to block bill to fund government, stave off default

The expected opposition would deal a death blow to the measure, which had passed the House, and adds to pressure on Democrats to devise their own path ahead of a series of fiscal deadlines starting this week.

Senate Republicans on Monday prepared to block a bill that would fund the government, provide billions of dollars in hurricane relief and stave off a default in U.S. debts, part of the party’s renewed campaign to undermine President Biden’s broader economic agenda.

The GOP’s expected opposition is sure to deal a death blow to the measure, which had passed the House last week, and threatens to add to the pressure on Democrats to devise their own path forward ahead of a series of urgent fiscal deadlines. A failure to address the issues could cause severe financial calamity, the White House has warned, potentially plunging the United States into another recession.

Ahead of the planned Monday vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) staked his party’s position — that Republicans are not willing to vote for any measure that raises or suspends the debt ceiling, even if they have no intentions of shutting down the government in the process. GOP lawmakers feel that raising the borrowing limit, which allows the country to pay its bills, would enable Biden and his Democratic allies to pursue trillions in additional spending and other policy changes they do not support.

“If they want to tax, borrow, and spend historic sums of money without our input, they’ll have to raise the debt limit without our help. This is the reality. I’ve been saying this very clearly since July,” McConnell said last week.

Democrats have sharply rebuked that reasoning: They have pointed to the fact that the country’s debts predate the current debate, arguing that some of its bills, including a roughly $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package adopted in December, had been racked up on a bipartisan basis. Democrats also have stressed they had worked with Republicans under President Donald Trump to raise the debt ceiling even when he pursued policies they did not support, including the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Democrats’ arguments have failed to sway Republicans, resulting in a widely predicted outcome that now forces Democrats to recalibrate their strategy on a tight timeline. They have until Thursday at midnight to craft a plan to fund the government, or else key federal operations will suspend or scale back many operations Friday morning. And they must act before mid-October to raise the debt ceiling, or they could risk a financial calamity that could destabilize global markets.

It is not clear how the Biden administration might respond in the event Congress failed to act in time to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, which would be an unprecedented event. Officials in the past have studied whether they could prioritize certain debt payments while delaying obligations, but some at the Treasury Department previously have described such a process as largely unworkable, since many investors could still consider the U.S. government to be in default if it started missing any scheduled payments.

The high stakes prompted Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard on Monday to stress that Congress has no alternative but to take action before the looming deadline.

“Congress knows what it needs to do. It needs to step up,” Brainard said at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics. She added that the “American people have had enough drama” over the past year.

The standoff only serves to highlight the intensifying acrimony on Capitol Hill, where Democrats on Monday are also set to forge ahead on their plans to adopt as much as $4 trillion in new spending initiatives backed by Biden. That includes a plan to improve the nation’s infrastructure, which Republicans support, and another that raises taxes to fund new health-care, education and climate initiatives, which the GOP opposes. Those measures also hang in the balance, as the House had hoped to begin debating them — and potentially hold votes — as soon as this week.

Republicans say they are still willing to support a funding stopgap, so long as it is entirely divorced from the debt ceiling. Absent an agreement, Washington would grind to a halt, disrupting federal agencies that are responding to the coronavirus while leaving thousands of federal employees out of work and without a paycheck.

“There would be a lot of Republican votes for that,” Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) predicted Sunday during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Democrats have also pledged to prevent a government shutdown, raising the odds that lawmakers can still stave off a worst-case scenario by the end of week — so long as the two parties cooperate. Their eventual measure is also expected to include billions of dollars to respond to two recent, deadly hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard, as well as money to help resettle Afghan refugees.

But the fight over the debt ceiling is another matter entirely.

Even as they readied a vote against the suspension Monday, Republicans maintained they do not want the U.S. government to default. Instead, they have said Democrats should shoulder the burden on their own given their proposed increases in federal spending, including a roughly $3.5 trillion tax-and-spending package they hope to move through the House as soon as this week.

Democrats plan to advance that measure through a legislative maneuver known as reconciliation. The move allows them to sidestep Republican opposition, particularly once it reaches the Senate, where the party has only 51 votes — and otherwise would need 60 to proceed. But GOP lawmakers have seized on the process, demanding that Democrats also use it to increase the debt ceiling.

The move is easier said than done: It could be time consuming, and it could expose Democrats to a series of uncomfortable political votes. And it is guaranteed to force the party to choose a specific number by which to raise the country’s borrowing limit, rather than merely suspending it, perhaps turning the entire process into fodder for GOP attacks entering the 2022 congressional midterms.

The entire endeavor has frustrated Democrats, recalling for some the brinkmanship over the debt ceiling from a decade ago that hammered U.S. markets and spooked investors globally, as the country for the first time risked the potential for default. The standoff ended only after Democrats agreed to across-the-board budget cuts and caps that they say decimated the ability of federal agencies to provide much-needed health and education programs.

“It is bad for the economy. It is bad during this time we are struggling with a pandemic,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said during an interview on CNN over the weekend, noting that Republicans added more than $7 trillion to the deficit under Trump. “These are the kinds of things that should be pro forma.”

And the kicker:

If this isn't more of the usual cynical bullshit, it seems like Wall Street would be freaking out just a tiny bit.

So the real question is:

Why the fuck do we have to be forced to live on the knife's edge all the fuckin' time?

Just So We Know

The New Republic 

(pay wall - but they give you a few freebies, and they have an audio version)

Donald’s Plot Against America

Now, he and his GOP enablers are peddling the Second Big Lie: that January 6 was just legitimate protest. It’s the crucial ingredient in convincing America to return them—and him—to power.

I felt as though I had stumbled across a crime scene so violent that I couldn’t process it, let alone synthesize the images in front of me. The parts remained stubbornly separate, and there was no way to grasp the meaning of the whole.

In the early afternoon of January 6, while the mob was still swarming the stairs of the Capitol, I was asked in an interview what I thought of the unfolding situation. I watched the crowd that had been stoked that morning by my uncle, and by Republicans like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Mo Brooks, with their Confederate flags, their MAGA hats, and their Camp Auschwitz shirts; I watched the smoke (the origin of which I couldn’t yet discern) drift through the air, and I heard their shouts of grievance and anger. It looked like a scene from a failed country whose government had just been toppled, a banana republic; but it was the United States of America, my country, our country, and, knowing who was responsible for the chaos here, the first word that came to my mind was “tawdry.”

Of course, it was so much more than that—so much more dangerous and serious than that, as we would eventually find out. At around 2:15, while Republicans Cruz and Paul Gosar were objecting to the legitimate results of the election, the insurrectionists breached the Capitol, Congress was adjourned, and frantic attempts were made to get the vice president and all of the senators and representatives to safety.

Two hours later, the Georgia Senate race was called for Jon Ossoff. It mattered, certainly; it meant that the Democrats would control the Senate. But there was no room for celebration. After four years of Donald’s incessant attacks and ineptitude, we were already exhausted. Joe Biden’s victory was supposed to have offered us some reprieve, but having given Donald room to promote his Big Lie, elected Republicans had now granted him the opportunity to incite an insurrection. So there would be no respite from the madness, from Donald’s particular blend of mendacity, cruelty, and destructiveness. There would be no celebrating.

That horrific day—which we now know General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to as a “Reichstag moment”—was bracketed by Donald’s incendiary speech given just before noon and a video released two hours after the Capitol had been breached that added more fuel to the fire. The speech itself was full of grievances—lies about the “landslide election” that had been stolen from him, threats to Mike Pence, whom he led the crowd to believe had the power to overturn the results of the election, fabulations about people voting as Santa Claus and Democrats’ taking down statues of Jefferson and Lincoln, and calls to action demanding that the crowd force Congress to “do the right thing.” In the 62-second video, Donald says the word peace three times, presumably because somebody convinced him he had to distance himself from the role he played in stoking the mob’s violence; but, because he can never help himself in these instances, he kept hammering away at what was supposedly stolen from them. The video sickened me just as the “apology” video he recorded after the Access Hollywood tape was released had sickened me. I feared the same result—that there would be no consequences.

That night, after I was finally able to turn off the news, the only two things I knew with absolute certainty were: one, that for the first time in our nation’s history there had not been a peaceful transfer of power, because my uncle, who could not accept his resounding defeat and the humiliation that came with it, had attempted to inspire a coup; and two, the next two weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration would be the most dangerous this country had ever lived through.

On November 7, after Joe Biden was declared the winner, Donald began peddling the Big Lie—massive voter fraud and cheating by Democrats had turned Donald’s landslide victory into a loss. The phrase “the Big Lie,” coined by Adolf Hitler, describes the technique of saying something so outrageously false that people will believe it simply because they think nobody would have the audacity to lie so brazenly. This has been a specialty of Donald’s since, as a teenager, he had to convince his father everything he did was always the biggest, the greatest, and the best. Back then, his lies protected him from his father’s wrath. The Big Lie about the election protected him from having to face the deep narcissistic wound he’d suffered after losing to Biden. In addition, it kept his base riled up—keeping them afraid of what a Biden administration planned to take away from them (or force upon them) and enraged by what he claimed had been stolen from them.

In Donald’s January 6 video, the Second Big Lie was born. By telling them that they are loved and special, he transformed the violent anti-American mob into patriots who had merely been trying to save their country from the Democratic Party’s treasonous attempt to steal the election from him—and therefore from them. We’ve seen how this has become a strategy for almost every single Republican politician as well. Despite the testimony given by D.C. police officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, and Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell in front of the House select committee on July 27, which was impossible for any empathetic human being to watch without feeling a visceral rage and profound sadness, this will continue to be the Republican strategy. They know that if midterm voters still remember the truth about January 6, they’re in trouble. The insurrection of January 6 should have been a wake-up call. It looks, instead, to have been a dress rehearsal.

In the mind-bogglingly long and destabilizing year since the publication of my first book, Too Much and Never Enough, America’s weaknesses and structural deficiencies have been laid bare because one man, Donald John Trump, did something none of his predecessors would have dreamed of doing—through his destruction of norms, he actively set out to undermine and dismantle the very institutions that were designed, in part, to protect us from leaders like him. Keeping him in check required a functioning legislative branch and Cabinet secretaries, like the attorney general or the head of health and human services—who were willing to act with some independence—to put country over party. But having shown himself incapable of building anything, Donald has always been expert at tearing things down. In this endeavor, he has had plenty of sycophants, enablers, and users, just as he has throughout his life. And Republicans saw a way to make the most of it.

As a politician, Donald has benefited greatly from his rabid base of supporters. He embodies their fear and gives expression to their grievance. He doesn’t just give them permission to indulge in their white supremacy; he champions it. He makes them feel good about their prejudices. Following him by denying the virus or claiming immunity from it is another way for them to feel superior. It’s bizarre, because in the process they are putting themselves and those they love at risk, but it is similar to the function lynching has historically served for white people. Lynchings are not only about showing the power of the aggressor but also about demonstrating the other person’s weakness and total subservience. That makes sense in the context of what white supremacists and white supremacy were trying to accomplish, because, in an incurably racist society, the power so clearly belonged to the one race, and the vulnerabilities so clearly belonged to the other. The response to Covid—the denialism and disdain for science—functions the same way, but in this case, whether they acknowledge the reality and the risk or not, the denialists are victims, too. These are devout (for lack of a better word) Republicans. If the people they’ve voted for, at every level of government, equate mask-wearing with being liberal or claim that worrying about catching a deadly virus somehow makes you weak, you will follow their lead. Donald took it a step further. In order to demonstrate their allegiance and support, it was no longer enough for them to attend a rally. They had to do so in the middle of a deadly pandemic without social distancing or wearing a mask

That’s the part that is confounding. But it demonstrates how deeply it matters to them that they, at least in their own minds, maintain a position of superiority over those they consider less-than—particularly Black Americans and immigrants—and stay connected to a man who, through a mesmerizing dance of his followers’ micro-concessions and his own micro-aggressions against them, keeps them in thrall. That their children are dying or their parents and friends are dying isn’t beside the point—it is the point.

It’s impossible to understand the appeal Donald has for his followers if we try to do so from the perspective of people who value honor, decency, empathy, and kindness in their leaders. It isn’t that they see things in Donald that aren’t there. They identify with what is—the brazenness of his lies, his ability to commit crimes with impunity, his bottomless sense of grievance, his monumental insecurity, his bullying, and, perhaps most intriguing, the fact that he is an inveterate failure who keeps being allowed to succeed. Donald is their proxy and their representative. And their ardor has only seemed to grow since his loss. We need only look at data from North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd’s campaign to see how complete this identification is. When Republican primary voters were told that Budd had been endorsed by Donald, there was a 45-point net swing in his favor, skyrocketing him to a 19-point lead over his primary opponent. The idea that any other one-term president (George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter) would have had the same kind of influence is laughable. On the other hand, though, neither one of them would have tried.

By the same token, elected Republicans, Donald’s chief enablers, see Donald as a means of perpetuating their own power. But they aren’t just putting up with the worst of him simply because they see him as a means to an end. He is them. They value his mendacity and his name-calling and his autocracy because these work for them as well.


Republicans counter truth with absurdity, rendering the truth inoperable. Now a party of fascists, they call Democrats socialist communist Marxists, which is effective in part because it is so nonsensical and in part because they are never asked to define the terms. They cover up their massive (and successful) efforts at voter suppression with wild claims of widespread voter fraud, which essentially doesn’t exist—31 incidents in over a billion votes cast, a number so vanishingly small as to have no meaning.

The main mechanism by which they can successfully carry out these sleights of hand is fear. Whether it’s drug dealers from Mexico or caravans from Central America or Democratic presidents coming for your guns, abolishing religion, or letting gay people get married, they need to keep their voters afraid.

Mr. Lockwood, the frame-narrator of Wuthering Heights, describes a feverish nightmare in which, during a blizzard, he sees a child outside his window begging to be let in. He is so undone by the appearance of this wraith that he drags its wrist across the broken pane of glass, until its blood soaks his bedsheets. “Terror made me cruel,” he says. Fear is a deeply unpleasant emotion, and Republicans have become expert at stoking it, on the one hand, and transforming it into anger on the other. This state of affairs makes it much easier for their followers to become comfortable with the cruelty of their leaders—whether of policy or of action—as long as it is directed at groups they’ve been told they should fear. It also makes it easier for the Republican rank and file to be comfortable with their own cruelty—it feels better than fear, and it allows them to delude themselves into thinking they have some measure of control, because they have been granted permission by the powers that be to express their cruelty with impunity.

Elected Republicans have become Donald’s greatest enablers since his father, Fred. For all of their professed reluctance and half-hearted attempts to keep Donald at arm’s length, almost every single elected Republican at every level of government, either tacitly or enthusiastically, very quickly came to support his breaches—against decency, the rule of law, and the Constitution. Kevin McCarthy went from being one of Donald’s critics in the immediate aftermath of January 6 to pretending that creating a commission to find out what happened on that day was somehow a partisan witch hunt. Elise Stefanik intuited that going all in with Donald would be her best chance for advancement. The number three Republican in Congress, Liz Cheney, had the audacity to stand up against the Big Lie, for which she was removed from her leadership position and replaced by Stefanik.

The most dangerous Republican enabler by far is, of course, Mitch McConnell, who saw an opportunity that even he probably never dared hope for: The guy in the Oval Office wouldn’t just sign off on every aspect of the Republicans’ agenda, he would push the envelope—of decorum, of autocracy—so far that the system itself could be used to create permanent minority rule. Donald showed his party (and yes, it is his party) the limits of pretending to care about good governance or play by the rules. He also showed them the utility of not just stoking racism and hatred of the Other—in the form of immigrants, Democrats, and even epidemiologists—but championing those who espoused them.It was possible for Donald, the weakest man I have ever known, to exploit the weaknesses in the system not because he introduced them, but because they were there for him to exploit in the first place.

McConnell is the greatest traitor to this country since Robert E. Lee (with the difference that McConnell has been trying to take our country down from within). He has always been expert at using existing rules and procedures in ways they weren’t intended to be used, and yet—whether it was denying Merrick Garland a hearing, pushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, or ending the filibuster as it applied to Supreme Court nominees but employing it to block legislation that would expand voting rights—his anti-democratic maneuvers have been performed within the bounds of the system. The fact that he’s misusing the system outlined in the Constitution isn’t an exoneration of him, however; it’s a condemnation of the Constitution’s limitations. The definition of treason in the Constitution is so narrow (levying war against the country or giving aid and comfort to the enemy) that a case could never be made against him. It would be difficult, however, to find anybody in modern times who has so undermined our democracy.

This destruction of norms by Donald and other Republicans in the executive and legislative branches has happened so quickly, and has been so thorough, that it’s clear the seeds of it must have been planted a long time ago. It was possible for Donald, the weakest man I have ever known, to exploit the weaknesses in the system not because he introduced them, but because they were there for him to exploit in the first place.

These situations are not the result of four years or even four decades of poor governance—although the worsening of the problem has certainly accelerated since Ronald Reagan’s disastrous presidency. The combination of “trickle-down” economics, his devastating handling of the AIDS crisis, and the intensification of the “War on Drugs,” with all of its racist implications, accelerated the divide between Americans along economic, cultural, and racial dimensions. But we really need to go back to this country’s inception to understand how we got here and to assess how we can possibly repair the extensive damage. With Joe Biden’s election, we did indeed snatch democracy from the jaws of autocracy—a rarity in human history. But as the insurrection of January 6 made clear, we are not out of the woods yet—far from it.

I contend that we have arrived at this fraught political moment in which it feels that everything is at stake because of our long history of, on the one hand, failing to hold powerful white men accountable and, on the other, the normalization of white supremacy. How else do we grapple with the fact that we Americans appear so spectacularly vulnerable to corrupt and incompetent leaders? How else do we understand the breathtaking extent to which the federal government, because of the cynicism, selfishness, and opportunism of one man, proved incapable of managing the crises of Covid and the ensuing economic fallout? How else do we explain the effectiveness of Donald’s strategy of race-based division? And how do we avoid acknowledging that supporting him or even accepting him meant that institutionalized racism was not only not a deal breaker, it was an effective political strategy?

The initial response of Donald’s administration to the pandemic was driven by his inability to take it seriously. Once the virus had undeniably taken hold here, Donald hung on to the fact that it had originated in China, which allowed him to make it about the Other from the outset. In spring of 2020, when Covid was spreading almost exclusively in blue states, and later, when it became clear that Black Americans were being disproportionately affected, it was easier for him to dismiss the danger. Even when it became clear that no one was safe, he made the case that Americans had to choose between combating the virus and saving the economy, squandering what could have been an extraordinarily unifying moment for this country. But Donald has no interest in unity. He thrives on division and chaos—much of it racially driven. We saw this in the way he exploited the backlash against Barack Obama’s presidency, thereby giving his base permission to express their racism even more openly and proudly.

The Republicans haven’t lost their way. They have, instead, found it. And it has led them straight toward unabashed white supremacy and fascism. This is nothing new. We saw what happened after the Civil War. The traitors of the Confederacy were given a pass by the North, and the promise to grant freedmen and women their 40 acres was largely reneged in the interest of reestablishing “national unity.” Because of the enormity of the North’s postbellum failures and the terrorist tactics employed by the re-empowered Southern Redeemers—those believers in the Lost Cause, who are the direct ancestors of those who sullied the Capitol Rotunda with their Confederate flags—the Black vote in the South was all but eliminated. The large majority of the electorate of the Southern slave states remained racist and reactionary, allowing the South to continue as a closed, fascist state for another century.

Only the Democrats and the media can save democracy from fascism. But the Democrats are split between the activists who understand the stakes, and the institutionalists who keep following a rule book the Republicans lit on fire a long time ago. On the one side, the progressives and pragmatists, senators like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, and Amy Klobuchar, seem to understand the urgency of the problem—American democracy can’t survive if we fail to realize that the United States Senate is currently operating under the tyranny of the minority. On the other side, institutionalists like Joe Manchin and Dianne Feinstein cling to the idea that maintaining long-standing mechanisms like the filibuster, which is not in the Constitution and impedes the Senate’s ability to act democratically, is more important than enacting legislation that would, on the one hand, help the American people in substantive ways while bolstering Biden’s presidency and, on the other, prevent the Republican Party from turning this country into an apartheid state. It remains to be seen whether President Biden himself, who understands the workings of the body in which he served for almost 40 years, will be able to transcend his own institutionalist leanings. His July 13 speech on voting rights was a powerful repudiation of Republican voter suppression—but he didn’t mention the filibuster once.

The Republicans haven’t lost their way. They have, instead, found it. And it has led them straight toward unabashed white supremacy and fascism.

What happens next also depends on how the media portray what’s currently going on. In 2016, the media lent Donald’s run a gravitas and seriousness it hadn’t earned. The Senate’s failure to convict him of impeachment the first time around was a crucial moment, as it allowed Donald to campaign for the 2020 election as if he were a legitimate candidate—but this time with all of the attendant powers of incumbency, including the massive bullhorn. By asking him questions they would ask any other candidate, the media didn’t just confer upon him legitimacy, they erased the fact that he was a traitor to his country who had been impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after seeking the help of a foreign power (for the second time) in undermining his political opponent. Anybody who was paying attention knew the trial Republicans put on was a sham, a shabby bit of political theater, the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion. “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind,” said Senator Lindsey Graham before the trial even began. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”

Since the election was called for Joe Biden, the media have done reasonably well calling the Big Lie what it is, and yet Republicans who lie about the Big Lie continue to be given a platform. There are propaganda outlets, led by Fox News, that amplify the lies of the Republican Party while distorting (or ignoring) facts. Many in the mainstream media, however, act as if journalistic neutrality means giving both sides equal time no matter the content of their message.

The Republicans continue to think that Donald is somebody whom they need. While it’s true that Trumpism, so-called, doesn’t scale, and that only Donald can carry the mantle of Trumpism, the fact that it’s not a winning formula (after all, Republicans, largely thanks to Donald, lost the House, the Senate, and the White House) is completely irrelevant. They continue to embrace Donald because they need him to keep the Big Lie alive in order to maintain the support of the base, so they can advance their voter-suppression legislation while continuing to cast doubt on the last election by pushing for audits in states, like Arizona, where the popular voter margin was narrow.

Every undemocratic facet of our system—from the filibuster to the Electoral College to voter suppression to failing to make the District of Columbia a state—favors Republicans. They have no incentive to change anything. Tens of millions of voters may be effectively disenfranchised by their legislation and faux-audits, but their voters are not. The endgame is to make it impossible for people who would vote against them to vote at all. In a country of changing demographics and increasing openness to diversity, at a time when elected Republicans are on the wrong side of almost every issue—gun safety, taxes, voting rights—they know the only way for them to cling to power is to cheat, and if there is one skill the de facto leader of their party has, it’s his ability to cheat his way out of—or into—just about anything.

Trumpism doesn’t need to scale. Republicans just need to keep that 35 percent so riled up that the base seems bigger than it is while they quietly make sure the rest of us don’t have a voice.

The stakes are incredibly high in every election going forward. The 2020 election was more important than 2016, and 2022 will be more important than 2020. We can’t discount the pernicious influence of white supremacy, which is not just an extremist movement. It’s not just the KKK, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers. It is the mainstream of the Republican Party, and we don’t need to qualify it.

Not only can’t Republicans give up their white supremacy, it turns out they don’t have to. It has been and continues to be a winning strategy. Donald got 62 million votes in 2016 and 74 million votes in 2020. Though Biden’s win was decisive, Republicans overall beat expectations, picking up seats in the House and becoming a minority in the Senate that, because of the filibuster, functionally leaves them with an enormous amount of leverage. We desperately needed a total repudiation of Donald and his Republican enablers. We did not get one.

It’s a tragedy, but it comes from having for decades convinced their electorate to vote against its own economic self-interest in the name of racial superiority. Their attitudes in this matter are positional. The question for them isn’t just “Am I doing well?” but “Am I doing better than?” And we all know who it is they need to be outperforming. As long as that is what matters to them, they will double down on white supremacy and hatred of the other side while maintaining their ability to do so through gerrymandering and voter suppression. That’s all they’ve got.

On July 6, President Biden tweeted, “Six months ago today, insurrectionists carried out a violent and deadly assault on our Capitol. It was a test of whether our democracy could survive. Half a year later we can declare unequivocally that democracy did prevail. Now, it falls on all of us to protect and preserve it.”

This well-intentioned statement misses the mark. The danger hasn’t passed—in fact, as Republicans continue their almost universal support for the first Big Lie, while using it to promote hundreds of sweeping voter-suppression laws in almost every state, they are now lining up behind the Second Big Lie, which is that the insurrection of January 6 was an inside job perpetrated by the FBI, or that the violent attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power with the intention of hunting down the speaker of the House and hanging the vice president was a fun-filled protest carried out by wonderful real Americans like Ashli Babbitt, the latest martyr to their cause. Now, those who participated (and their supporters) are being told that it is they who have been wronged, it is they who are the patriots, and only they whose voices deserve to be heard.

Republicans have made it clear that going forward they will embrace whichever version of the Second Big Lie is most useful in the moment—causing the kind of cognitive dissonance they have become quite comfortable with. It’s absurd—but it’s also effective with enough of their voters that we can’t dismiss it, just as we can’t dismiss Donald. It’s exhausting. And it’s infuriating. But we look away at our peril. Democrats need to accept that there is no longer anything to hope for from their Republican colleagues. For all intents and purposes, we currently live in a country with only one functioning political party that is working to make the lives of all Americans better, only one party that believes in democracy.

Democrats must stop squandering their advantage as they waste time waiting for Republicans to feel shame. They have none. Over the four years Donald was in the Oval Office, there were any number of opportunities for Republicans to break with a man who, at every turn, undermined everything they claimed to have stood for—law and order, the military, moral conservatism, fiscal responsibility, and small government. And yet they never did.
January 6 should have been a wake-up call for all of us, Republicans in particular. Initially at least, some of them had been scared enough by a mob intent on committing violence against any member of Congress they came across to recognize that the monster they’d deluded themselves into thinking they controlled could not, after all, be tamed. Instead, they have followed Donald’s lead. Less than six months after the fact, Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde claimed the insurrection was a “bold-faced lie” and nothing more than “a normal tourist visit,” despite the fact that there is a photo of him rushing to help barricade the door against the mob. Donald continues to double down on his claim that these were peaceful people and actually said “there was such love at that rally.” There has been no pushback from Republican leadership. There can’t be. They know that any investigation into what happened that day is a losing proposition for them—either because they’ve been covering it over or because they’re guilty of sedition. They also know that the 2022 election will turn in part on how many Americans they can convince of the Second Big Lie: that the insurrection never happened.

And as far as the 2024 presidential election is concerned, I initially thought Donald wouldn’t run. Even if he managed to convince himself that he had won but the Democrats had somehow stolen the victory from him, his defeat was so resounding, I believed that, although he might pretend to run as a way to raise money and keep the spotlight on himself, he would never put himself in that position again. Now I’m not so sure. As has been the case since my grandfather discovered that his second son could be of use to him, everything has broken his way. In this case, almost the entire Republican Party has backed not one but two Big Lies that benefit him. If enough people buy into the Second Big Lie, if enough of those voter-suppression laws pass and Republicans make significant gains in Congress and state legislatures in 2022, Donald might begin to think that a win in 2024 would be a sure thing for him, and he might make the decision to run after all. And if he were to win ... there would be no coming back from that.

Mary L. Trump @MaryLTrump
Mary Trump’s new book, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, will be released on August 17.

What A Day It Must've Been

Usually we'd fuck people over and take their shit. But later, sometimes we'd buy their shit and then fuck 'em over. Is that progress?

Alaska