A Few More Takes on the Recent Alabama (Political) Shakes

As a pick-me-up for any readers bummed out by our recent cautionary post on the Alabama election results, I recommend this sharp-eyed analysis from New Republic’s Jeet Heer about what Doug Jones’ victory may portend for U.S. politics.  After commenting on President Trump's notable failure to persuade voters to support his preferred candidate in Alabama, Heer makes a few further observations that seem both correct and grounds for optimism:

Trump is turning out to be a true disaster for the Republican Party, because his hardcore supporters are numerous enough to win primaries (as they did for both Moore and Trump), but can only be mobilized by a divisive politics that’s alienating a chunk of traditional Republicans while also animating the Democratic opposition.  This can only to lead political disaster for the Trump led GOP.

In the wake of Moore’s defeat, Republicans will be more divided than ever.  Moore supporters like Steve Bannon, the Breitbart CEO and former Trump strategist, had prepared for such a result—and whom to blame for it.

The Republican Party is facing a nightmare 2018 scenario where Bannon-backed populist candidates disrupt the primaries, creating wounds that will make it difficult for the GOP to unify and win general elections.

There’s a final ominous fact about the Alabama election.  Moore lost in large part because of the accusations of sexual assault against him. This is an indication of a sea change in American culture, one that bodes ill for a president who notoriously boasted that his celebrity allowed him to grope women with impunity.  Seeing Tuesday night’s election results, Trump has every reason to worry that the social forces that took down Moore have the president in their crosshairs.

Let’s take these point by point.  First, the idea that Trump’s very success with a hardcore base is also working against him has been a central theory of Trump Studies since he began running for the presidency.  The 2016 election was a body blow to this notion, seeing as Trump ended up alienating a whole lot fewer Republican voters than many thought he would; in the end, partisan loyalty ruled the day.  The Alabama election results, like those in Virginia last month, suggest that now that they’ve experienced the full horrific reality of an empowered Trump, sufficient numbers of Republicans are starting to lose their enthusiasm for the GOP to help the Democrats make substantial gains.  And as demonstrated in both Virginia and Alabama, Trump’s presidency has galvanized Democratic voters, much more than his candidacy did in 2016; again, the lived experience of a Trump presidency seems to have made a world of difference.

On to the second point: Heer’s suggestion that Moore’s defeat will divide the Republican Party even more presupposes that it’s divided to begin with, which may be underestimating the degree to which the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon white nationalist vision has overcome the GOP as a whole.  Many obviously still resist this authoritarian, racist vision — Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker come to mind — but many more, both politicians and rank and file, have embraced it.  Moore’s defeat gives these slightly less conservative politicians ammunition for making a case that the party has gone too far to the right, but it seems to me that most Republican voters are still on board with the red meat vision of Trumpism.  My guess is that the “Bannon-backed populist candidates” won’t divide the party so much as largely win their races, reflecting the horrid new consensus position of the Republican Party.  In facing their Democratic challengers, though, we will have the best test to date of whether this shift to the right will end up losing them more votes than they gain.

Finally, it does seem certain that a “sea change in American culture” is upon us, with a reckoning regarding sexual harassment and assault against women finally at hand.  My gut tells me that “tidal wave” may be a more apt nautical description than "sea change" for the righteous storm, both cultural and political, that daily roils and strengthens around us, and that will likely upend political expectations in 2018 and beyond.  Jonathan Chait has written a short piece on how Trump’s self-avowed history as a sexual predator may yet come back to destroy his presidency, after he himself lit the fuse that runs through the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent cascade of sexual misconduct stories involving public figures.  Whether or not such fitting poetic justice is visited upon the president, it bears remembering that we are only at this critical moment because in response to misogynists like Trump, thousands of women have gone public with painful stories — an inspiring democratic response to the sexual infractions of the powerful. 

What Hath Doug Wrought?

As with the Virginia elections last month, Doug Moore’s victory over accused pedophile and Constitution-shredder Roy Moore demonstrates that some basic laws of politics remain alive and well in what often seems like a post-Newtonian Trumpian universe to which we’ve all been delivered.  Energized base voters will help you win elections; competent and inspiring candidates help a lot, too; and a huge public backlash to the majority party’s politicians and policies is a big plus.  

But I'm a little nervous that too many people, critically including politicians and other influential members of the Democratic party, may draw the wrong conclusions from this seeming continuity with our pre-Trump world.  Progressives need to make damned sure that we're running on and implementing policies that include an accurate assessment and remediation of the rotten root causes of Trump’s ascent to power — an ascent which by this point stands revealed as an authoritarian movement that threatens American life as we know it.  Trump and the increasingly right-wing Republican Party thrive off the dislocations of an increasingly inegalitarian and self-cannibalizing economy, channeling people’s economic insecurity toward fears of minorities and others perceived as different or un-American.  On top of this, the increasing racial diversity of American society is provoking a white backlash that is intersecting in toxic ways with economic anxiety.   

It’s extremely noteworthy that the GOP itself has placed a response to these tectonic forces at the center of its modern agenda.  But rather than seeking to cure or ameliorate economic malaise or social tension, Republicans have chosen to double-down on the forces driving economic inequality, whether through aggrandizement of the financial sector, support of monopolistic corporations, passage of an unfair tax bill, or enactment of voter suppression efforts.  All the while, as a distraction on the cultural front, they lie to their base about the benefits of their economic policies and encourage a demonization of minorities, whether blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims.  

Even under President Obama, economic business as usual was failing most of us.  Inequality continued to widen; employment may have finally increased to normal levels years after the Great Recession, but wages barely crawled upward; and the cost of basics like higher education, health care, and homeownership continued to outpace inflation.  There are millions of people whose economic prospects remain stunted due to the lingering effects of the recession.

I offer this quick sketch as context for why I think we should think critically about the outcome in Alabama.  It is not enough to win an election; it is critically important to then work to deliver actual benefits to voters that address the issues I identified above, and to attack the legal roadblocks that the GOP has attempted to sow in the American political landscape like so many anti-democratic pillboxes.  Analyzing the Alabama election results, THS fave Jamie Bouie shows exactly how this sort of holistic diagnosis and prescription should be done.  He writes that while Jones alone can't be expected to reverse racial inequality in the state, his vote may help save the Children’s Health Insurance Program or protect Medicare and Medicaid benefits, which Bouie describes as “keeping a rotten status quo from decaying further.” 

But beyond this, Bouie zeroes in on a structural issue that the vote in Alabama should highlight — the degree to which Doug Jones won only because African-Americans were able to vote in force despite suppression efforts, and how fighting voter suppression should be at the center of progressive politics.  Bouie describes various reports of voter suppression observed on election day, from police officers attempting to serve warrants at polling stations to enormous lines in African-American precincts — a character-building test of one’s patience and ability to miss work mysteriously denied to whiter parts of the state.  In fact, voter ID laws have been carefully tailored in the state to target African-Americans while maintaining the ridiculous pretense of being race neutral:

A 2011 law mandated strict photo identification to vote in the state, and actions taken in 2015 closed voter ID offices throughout the rural counties of the Black Belt, where many black Alabamians reside. The state later lowered some of those hurdles, but the impact remains. Proponents of those policies argue any suppression is an unintended consequence—that no one wanted to keep black voters from the polls—but in Alabama, the evidence is stacked against them. One advocate of the original voter ID law claimed, on record, that it would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure,” and two of the law’s sponsors were caught on tape attacking black Alabamians in explicitly racist terms.

And this is exactly the point where the fears I highlighted at the beginning come back to haunt me.  As Bouie notes, if Democrats are going to start turning statehouses and Congressional delegations bluer, voting reform and protection will need to be front and center of their agenda.  But doing so is going to require not only a popular understanding of how pernicious the problem has become, but fighting the temptation to point at states like Alabama and rationalize away taking on such a hard fight by saying, Hey, we still won even with the voter restrictions!  Voting reform will also mean that the Democrats will have to swear off partisan gerrymandering in their own favor, a position which will surely seem like political suicide to more conventional pols.  But it’s far more important to institutionalize a level playing field than seek short-term advantage which the GOP will only exploit and push beyond all previous norms when they have the power to do so.

Given our desperate political straits, it’s critical that we learn the right lessons from this election.  But I don’t want to miss the forest for the trees, either.  Jones' victory is a huge deal in basic political terms — it’s effectively a repudiation of gutter-dwelling politicians like Moore and his endorser-in-chief, Donald Trump.  The reduction of Republican control of the Senate to a single vote is going to haunt the GOP through 2018.  And though I started on a note of caution, it IS highly encouraging that basic rules of democratic politics are intact: energy and enthusiasm still matter.  So does momentum, and Democrats now have even more of it going into the 2018 elections.  Substantively, too, although there’s a risk of learning the wrong lessons, Alabama provides a great chance to learn the right lessons, about how important the right to vote is, and how much people are ready for change from our current retrograde course. 

Senator Chuck Grassley Advocates for Estate Tax in Trying to Knock It

"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”  In one sense, this utterance from GOP Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is a trifle, something a man of a certain older generation might say.  But while it casually asserts an obvious fairness in cutting the taxes of those who have money to invest, a look beneath the surface shows that fairness to those who work hard for a living is not what either the estate tax debate or the language of his original comment are about.  Indeed, his phrasing colorfully and concisely captures so much of the backwards and classist thinking behind Republican efforts to lower the taxes on the wealthiest among us.

The laudable wish to pass something on to one’s posterity and the incentive this can provide for a person to work diligently is not in dispute.  What IS in dispute is how much of this money should be taxed.  Many in the GOP say none or only a little should be — a sure recipe for instituting a system of inherited wealth and even aristocracy at odds with American democracy, as massive sums of money would be passed from hard-working parents to their trust-fund progeny, and in the next generation from the idle rich to yet even more work-ethic-deprived offspring, in a debilitating spiral truly awful to behold (as our prime exhibit, I refer you to look no further (if you can stand it) than the Trump kids).

An estate tax can and should be relatively high for the basic reason that its earner is no longer around to use his or her wealth, and those who would inherit it have not actually worked to earn it.  A society also needs to balance the right to pass something on to one’s relations against the larger social goal of limiting the tax burden on the living.  This point is not raised by defenders of the inheritance tax nearly enough; taxes need to be paid by someone, and if rich, dead people aren’t paying them, then it’s likelier that poor, living people will be on the hook — and how exactly is that fair?  Reducing or eliminating the estate tax directly rewards not those who have earned money, but their heirs; it is a tax that by definition will never benefit the actual earner. 

If poor people spend all their money, it is because they do not have much of it, and do so in order to purchase the basic necessities of life.  Grassley’s comment opens a window into how, say, a conservative politician might convince himself that rich families deserve to make their families rich in perpetuity.  In invoking the tired image of poor people who don’t invest because they spend their money on foolish things, the senator elides the common sense fact that the main reason poor people don’t invest in things like the stock market is simply because they are poor.  In point of fact, it is kids who inherit scads of money without having to work for it who are relatively more inclined to spend their money “on booze or women or movies,” — to which we can also add a few exciting possibilities, such as “yachts or baccarat in Monaco or a membership at Mar-a-Lago.”

Beyond Collusion Confusion

The Hot Screen has found itself in a conundrum when grappling with the overall story of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election.  At this stage, a full year later, there are so many threads to follow that it often feels overwhelming to keep up, much less synthesize what we’ve heard and read into anything worth sharing with our readers.  In this way, the Russia story is a (very big) microcosm of the American experience since Trump’s election: seldom, if ever, in most of our lifetimes has there been so much critical and disturbing news that constantly threatens our ability to absorb and assess it.

But some recent articles are shining a light on the particular reasons why the overload feels so very dramatic.  First, Talking Points Memo has posted what for me has been the single most useful article I’ve read regarding the Russia investigation in recent weeks.  Focused on disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, it makes the critical point that major parts of the story don’t really make sense until we realize that we’ve all been trying to understand not simply the facts of a static plot hatched by Team Trump, but a plot that began to twist and turn still more as the plotters reacted to the fact that they were being investigated by both the federal government (i.e., the FBI and intelligence agencies) and the press.  As Marshall puts it, 

[T]he logic of events only really comes into focus when we realize that there was a sort of race taking place between the Trump team’s effort to arrange a rapid rapprochement with Russia in the first weeks of January and February and a mix of the intelligence community, the national security apparatus and the press piecing together what had happened during the 2016 election. Imagine it as a starting pistol firing off on the morning of November 9th, with both teams racing to get more of their critical work done by the end of January.

As Marshall proceeds to detail, this “race” helps explain, among other things, Flynn’s otherwise strangely reckless behavior, particularly in relation to his pre-inauguration contacts with the Russian ambassador.

But this observation about the complicated interaction between the collusion plot and effort to uncover it also helps lay bare another way to understand the underlying arc of what we’ve been learning.  First, it helps to think that there are three distinct but interrelated phases to the collusion effort.  One is the pre-election period in which Russia rendered assistance to the Trump campaign; the second is the post-election period, including prior to Trump’s inauguration, in which the Trump team tried to make good on its half of the Faustian bargain it had made, including through diplomatic concessions beneficial to Russia; and the third comprises the efforts by the Trump administration to hide the existence of these first two parts from view, both at the time they happened and continuing into the present.

This taxonomy seems glaringly obvious now.  Again, we have to ask: Why has even such a basic framework felt so elusive?  Two particular reasons occur to us.  The first is a point elaborated in a second recent TPM article, which details the ways in which multiple members of the Trump administration have lied publicly about their knowledge of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador.  The larger point this suggests is that the White House, amplified by the right-wing media, has knowingly constructed a false narrative to cover their tracks — essentially, the implementation of the third “cover-up” phase I noted above.  I’ll return to this point sooner or later, but for now I want to at least state it more acutely: the White House appears to have engaged in what can rightly be termed a massive conspiracy to cover up the equally massive conspiracy involving the Trump team's relationship to Russia during the election and beyond.

The second major reason I think it’s been so difficult to understand the elements of the narrative is that the basic existence of collusion has felt elusive, even for those of us who closely follow this story.  This is deeply related to the word "collusion" itself, which as various people have noted is not necessarily a term of law but more of a general concept.  But as Brian Beutler notes over at Crooked Media, for their own separate reasons both the media and Trump defenders have stressed the legal definition as paramount in judging whether anything malign occurred between Russia and Trump’s team.  Beutler goes on to makes the case that despite such hedging in the media and outright denials by Trump partisans, collusion is at this point, by any reasonable understanding of the word, an established fact:

We know that Russian spies approached the Trump campaign offering assistance in the election multiple times. At least twice, Russians dangled the lure of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including stolen emails, and both times, Trump campaign officials (George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr.) expressed interest. Trump, Jr. was particularly enthusiastic about the idea of cooperating with the Russians, and shortly after he welcomed Russian spies to Trump tower for a meeting about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, he coordinated messaging with Wikileaks, which operated last summer and fall as a cutout for Russian hackers.

After repeatedly communicating to Russia (in public and in private) that they welcomed interference in the election, Trump and his aides cast public doubt on whether the saboteurs were Russians at all. When Trump went on to win the election after benefiting from this interference, members of his inner circle, through Michael Flynn, secretly connived with Russia to subvert the countermeasures the American government had undertaken as penalties for Russia’s interference.

[...]

“Whether or not these actions amounted to a crime,” writes former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa, “it was a coordinated, covert effort directly against the interests of the United States. It threw off what was likely a lot of planning and analyses and contingencies that various agencies had prepared. I think when we focus exclusively on the criminality aspect, we (continue to) miss how these efforts essentially aided and abetted a hostile foreign state who attacked our country. That is the big picture.”

If the story were to end where we are right now, with no further confessions or indictments or revelations, it would still amount to the biggest scandal in American political history.

[...] At this point, to say collusion allegations remain unproven is materially misleading.  Collusion has been conclusively proven; we are in the process of learning how extensive it was, and whether, in the course of it, American conspirators committed federal crimes.

Beutler’s piece is one of the clearest statements I’ve read about where we are vis-a-vis the existence of collusion; but even his effort feels like it founders somewhat under the burden of using this term, even as he digs into the use and abuse of the word, and to spell out what he himself means by collusion.  The Hot Screen wonders if it might be more helpful, more clarifying for the public discussion, if we moved closer to the language of the FBI agent Beutler quotes — that the efforts of the Trump administration “aided and abetted a hostile foreign state who attacked our country.”  Whether or not any laws were broken, such activity is, for purposes of American politics, utterly damning for those who carried it out; using "collusion" as some sort of shorthand seems to obscure the actual activity engaged in.

As Beutler writes, journalists and Trump partisans both have their reasons for insisting on a more legalistic definition of collusion.  But conversely — and here we arrive at another major reason for the fog of obscurity around the term — Trump’s opponents find benefits in keeping alive the term’s ambiguity.  While the president's defenders spin “collusion” into meaning whether or not a specific law was broken, his adversaries benefit from the non-legalistic reading of the term, because it suggests malfeasance even if no law was broken.  That is, keeping the term “collusion” relatively vague allows them to keep damaging suspicions about Trump in public view without getting tied down to questions of whether specific laws were broken.

But this raises yet another question: now that we’re at a point where we can say with sureness that Trump’s campaign and then administration conspired with the Russians to subvert the U.S. elections, and subsequently acted to cover up their behavior, why aren’t more Trump opponents speaking up about this fact?  That is, why are they still either embracing the perspective that we don’t know yet if any laws were broken, or refusing to assert directly that Trump’s team participated in an attack against our country?

I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of possible and reasonable explanations for holding their fire.  Maybe they have faith that Robert Mueller will find evidence of law-breaking, and fear making partisan attacks when Mueller might have proof that could persuade even some Trump supporters of Trump’s bad behavior?  Maybe they look at their minority status in Congress and see that they lack the power to do anything?  Or perhaps they don’t think asserting the existence of treasonous behavior will be effective unless we have direct evidence of President Trump’s involvement (in fact, this distinction between the activities of Trump versus the rest of his team is yet another reason for the fog around the term “collusion” — if the president himself didn’t collude, was it so bad?)

But our guess is that the central reason that more Trump opponents aren't making the case that his team essentially committed treason is that all of us, individually and collectively, lack a framework for fully comprehending the scale of the bad acts before us.  There are few, if any, worse political offenses in a democracy than conspiring with another country to subvert your own country’s election process, and then acting in ways that benefit that meddling country.  But trying to write about it, these words seem disproportionate, grandiose and insufficient all at once.  It feels like writing about the plot of a spy novel.  We try to comprehend what has happened, and despite our best efforts still find ourselves wandering in the interminable mists of collusion.

This failure, or more charitably, this difficulty of full comprehension, exists for so many of us because full comprehension can only occur when you also feel it fully; and to feel it fully means to enter into a state of rage and helplessness.  Because it is not at all clear what to do, even while it is equally clear that this situation cannot stand.  A president whose campaign conspired with a foreign power to win him the presidency is an illegitimate president, regardless of whether laws were broken or whether or not he would have won anyway.  If a country does not recognize and repudiate treason, then it isn’t really a country.  

But it’s also clear that the response to such an attack on our democracy requires a doubling-down on democracy in response: on collective, non-violent action to restore ourselves to an accountable, legitimate government.  With immediate impeachment impossible, given that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the overriding goal would be to force the resignation of President Trump and those who participated in both the collusion and the cover-up.

It may feel like a secondary issue, but our ability to comprehend and build the necessary collective action to address this challenge is deeply hobbled by the left’s discomfort with a discourse of patriotism.  This may be because of how thoroughly the right has co-opted and transformed competing conceptions of patriotism into an increasingly nationalistic, militaristic, grandiose ideology more akin to the propagandistic mindset of authoritarianism.  In opposition to this, it may be that those of us who believe in a democratic, tolerant, and law-abiding United States need to find our way to a public solidarity based on our shared hopes and aspirations, mutual respect, and understanding that collectively we are much more powerful than the sum of our parts.

Diplomats Beset by Eerie Brain Drain in Havana

The Hot Screen confesses to being fascinated by a Cold War-style mystery that’s taking place in Cuba.  As Politico summarizes, a couple dozen American officials and a handful of Canadians “reported hearing high-pitched sounds and exhibited symptoms reflective of a concussion, including dizziness, nausea and memory issues.”  These incidents began shortly after Election Day 2016, and continued until August of this year.  Part of the strangeness is that no one knows quite what happened to the victims.  The number one possibility for a while was the use of some sort of electronic device, such as an acoustic or microwave device, against the diplomats.  Under this explanation, it seemed the incidents could have been the result of a surveillance operation gone wrong or even intentional malicious attacks on the officials.

There are also eerie and disconcerting details, including the experience of some diplomats of hearing a sound in one part of a room, only for it to disappear a mere few feet away.  And new reports indicate that the U.S. government is beginning to back off the sonic attack hypothesis.  As it turns out, medical examinations have uncovered changes to white matter in some of the victims’ brains — changes that experts believe wouldn’t be caused by sonic means.  Another article I read suggested that chemical exposure might be the culprit; I assume that under that scenario, the noises the diplomats have reported hearing could be a type of aural hallucination caused by the effects of such exposure. . .

Assuming these are attacks, the question of motive and perpetrator remains obscure.  There are theories that a rogue faction of Cuban intelligence may be behind the incidents, perhaps as a way of derailing improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations; the U.S. is also looking at whether Russians are involved.  The mix of unknown means and indeterminate intent, along with the apparent lack of progress in getting to the bottom of it after so many months, is truly odd.

Republican Tax Bill Doubles Down on Class War Against Average Americans

When we see that the Republican tax legislation showers corporations and the rich with bundles of cash, while plundering the wealth of the middle and working classes to pay for this largesse, and on top of that drives up the deficit on the order of $1.5 trillion dollars, what we are witnessing is not tax reform but class warfare by means of federal law.  And with provisions that particularly raise taxes on citizens of states that have voted Democratic in the last several presidential elections, we see again that this is not tax reform, but use of the tax power as a weapon to punish political opponents (conversely, provisions like a removal of a ban of political activities by tax-free churches rewards far-right evangelicals, allies of the GOP).

Republicans tell a tale of how Americans businesses are crippled by high taxes, even while it seems impossible to find an economist who says that businesses actually end up paying those high taxes, what with the loopholes and deductions already available under current law.  And claims that high taxes make the U.S. less competitive are belied by the fact that the American economy’s boom times in the 1950’s and 1960’s were a time of much higher corporate taxes, and by the complementary evidence that current business leaders would rather plow their tax windfalls into stock buybacks than invest in future products or, heaven forfend, pay higher wages to their workers.  

With the elimination of deductions for property and state income taxes, the GOP is exporting its anti-tax, anti-government mania to states that disagree with the notion that hollowing out education, social services, and health care should be the goal of governance.  The party of small government is making sure that big government crushes the ability of states to respond to the common wishes of their voters.  Apparently, we should all just shut up and be Alabama now.

We need to reckon with the fact that after literally decades of Republican lies about how cutting taxes to the rich will trickle down to the rest of the economy, the Democrats and the progressive movement have failed to discredit this notion in the public eye — for how else were the Republicans able to put forward this falsehood once again without being laughed out of the room?  What may be most fantastical about this legislative process is that the Democrats are not forcefully making the logical counterargument — that in an economy as driven by consumer spending as ours, the most direct way to stimulate the economy and help corporations succeed is to provide tax relief to the lower- and middle-income people most likely to spend money.  Absent in the legislation as well is any notion that the people who should get the most tax relief are those who would benefit the most from it — people towards the lower end of the wage scale who would spend it on necessities, not the wealthy who will now simply have more money to buy luxury goods.  To put it in terms even a Republican can understand — the stock market will do better when all Americans have money to spend.

Or is it possible Republicans don’t believe in capitalism anymore, at least the capitalism that most Americans understand it to be?  In the outright plunder of this tax bill, its robbing of our common future to reward the upper class in the present, in its tacit acceptance that corporations have no obligation to invest in America or pay their workers more, this legislation is of a piece with the monopolistic capitalism that’s taken hold while most people have been working hard just to make ends meet and support their families.  Republicans would rather not draw attention to this pernicious development; but the Democrats have failed to make a larger case about the changing nature of American capitalism that would provide context for why this tax bill is such a very bad idea.

This leads us to perhaps the most frightening aspect of the bill.  After decades of ever-increasing inequality in our country, this bill is like pouring gasoline on an already-raging fire.  The rich, already so very wealthy, will get richer.  Everyone else will get poorer.  For me, most sinister are the provisions that directly assault people’s ability to move up in the world, such as ending tax deductions for student loans and grad student tuition waivers.  Perhaps most unbelievably, the legislation even eliminates a small deduction for teachers who buy school supplies out of their own pockets — to the GOP, teachers are first and foremost members of hated unions to be punished, not educators of our children to be thanked for their invaluable public service.

Some are arguing that this tax bill will radicalize the majority of the country against the GOP, but I think that depends entirely on whether the political opposition is willing and able to make a forceful case for the many over the wealthy.  Without such an effort, the likelier possibility is that this bill will administer destabilizing blows to the economy and the social order that will only increase the GOP’s hold on power.  After all, the party, and Trump in particular, have absolutely thrived off economic inequality and people’s resulting fears around diminished economic and social standing.  The racial animus that Trump stoked and profited from might have a life of its own, but it’s also deeply entwined with economic insecurity.  As the promises of this bill fail to come to fruition, Republicans will have an incentive to double down on the overt racism and faux populism that Donald Trump has engineered.  They will bet that people’s resentment and rage at their ever-diminishing prospects can always be channeled away from the proper targets — the increasingly powerful upper class, corporations that no longer view themselves as part of a social contract with America, and, last but not least, the GOP itself, which has done so much to clear the way for such a hideous economic state of affairs.

Democrats need to put repeal and replacement of this monstrous tax legislation at the center of their platform for taking back Congress in 2018.  On economic, political, and moral grounds, this is a no-brainer.  Left in place, this bill will cripple the possibility of actual tax reform and relief for Americans, and the deficits it entails will forestall funding programs that benefit ordinary Americans, from increased college tuition assistance to universal healthcare.  The Democrats would also do well to put this legislation in its proper historical context; not just in relation to the increasing inequality of the past 40 years, but the acceleration of this trend in the aftermath of the Great Recession, from which the upper reaches of American society have recovered far more quickly than the majority.  Less than ten years after the peak of the downturn, it seems inconceivable that policies that benefit the 1% to the detriment of ordinary working Americans wouldn't get laughed off the public stage — it's a measure of how deep our ongoing economic and political malaise runs that such a retrograde plan is about to become law.

The rich need to start paying their fair share; the working and middle classes should be rewarded for their hard work so that they can support their families and help their children achieve a better future.  Corporations need to invest in America if they want tax relief, including higher wages for their employees.  Progressives are discussing dozens of ideas to implement such a vision; they make a hell of a lot more sense than raising taxes on average Americans.  Let’s make the Republicans regret the day they ever dreamed up this gift for the 1%.

There Is Absolutely No Public Support for Giving Away Our Internet to Giant Telecommunications Companies

As is so often the case with right-wing assaults on consumer protections, the repeal of net neutrality is being described as a solution to a problem that government has created; as Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai puts it, “Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet.”  But the truth is that without government regulation, massive telecommunications companies will be able to gouge consumers, stiff-arm competitors, and stifle free speech in pursuit of their own oligopolistic profits.  The “government intervention” bemoaned by an AT&T vice president is actually the government’s insistence on equal access — that is, the government’s prevention of malign corporate intervention that would squeeze consumers and upstart competitors, and subordinate the free flow of ideas and information to the profit-seeking of communications giants.

Here’s how I think of the primary issue at play: right now, the internet is like a giant bazaar in which, as big as it is, every company and internet site gets a front-row location.  If I want to read an obscure political blog, my access to that site can’t be given a slower connection than if I were trying to visit, say, CNN.  Without the net neutrality rules, that obscure political blog could be given a back row seat.  Of course, providers could ask both CNN and that blog to pony up money to make sure people are still routed to their sites at the old speeds — but guess which of the two news sites will be able to afford it, and which will become handicapped by its lack of financial resources?  In this, repeal of net neutrality is a grotesque assertion of the privileges of giant corporations over individuals and small businesses.

The pending loss of net neutrality is one of the biggest crises our country is currently facing, and that’s saying a lot (check out this article at The Nation for some righteous fire and brimstone on this point).  We can safely say that there is absolutely no broad public support for this change.  It's all about fucking over the consumer; but whether by accident or design, it’s also a frontal assault on the free exchange of information, aka the lifeblood of our democracy.  It’s telling that along with this change, the FCC has just announced a plan to get rid of the limitation on a single corporation controlling TV broadcasts that reach more than 39% of American homes — a rule that will be used by ultra-conservative Sinclair Broadcasting to beam its propaganda into millions more American households.  Dominated by Trump backers, the FCC has abandoned any pretense of serving the American people.

The overarching reality is that the internet is a public good.  In fact, the existing net neutrality rules involve the FCC’s determination that broadband internet is an essential public utility, which is indeed how millions upon millions of Americans experience their daily internet access.  Our tax dollars built the internet; it's highway robbery when big companies want to take it from us, and then charge us even more to use what's rightfully ours.  It’s time to hit the phones and let your representatives know we’re not going to stand for this giveaway to powerful telecommunications companies.

With Insane One Percenter Tax Plan, GOP Tilts at Electoral Oblivion

The more I read about the Republican tax legislation, the more outlandish and outrageous it becomes.  Its tilt in favor of the rich is its greatest sin, remarkable in its brazenness.  Those who could benefit the most from a tax cut — people earning less than $25,000 — would receive the paltry sum of $50 with the proposed plan.  Meanwhile, the benefits to the richest among us are extraordinary.  

Apart from needlessly increasing inequality in the United States, we need to bear in mind that the plan will also likely mean cuts down the road into programs that benefit ordinary Americans, as the GOP will use the deficits created by the tax plan to justify such reductions.  At a basic level, Republicans are making a choice to return tax money to the wealthiest among us, rather than using that money for the public good.  Call me cynical, but I don’t think that those wealthy people are going to turn around and spend their money on things like student lunches, health insurance for children, or much-needed infrastructure projects.     

But the foulness of this bill only grows the more you dig into it.  Perhaps most extraordinary is the way the plan seems designed to raise taxes on blue state populations to the benefit of Republican-leaning states.  The single largest factor here is the elimination of deductions for state and local taxes, which disproportionately benefit Democratic-leaning states; as noted in an op-ed by political scientist tag-team Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “all of the states that have above-average use of the state and local taxes deduction voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”  Lest you think we are talking small amounts here, these changes would result in increased taxes of $1.3 trillion over 10 years for taxpayers in those states.  Hacker and Pierson note that the other major tax break slated for downsizing is the home interest deduction, which would also have a disproportionate effect on Clinton-voting states.

At a basic level, hitting the state and local tax deductions punishes taxpayers of states that spend more on government.  That is, if the voters of a state choose to tax themselves more heavily in order to provide better education, superior health care, or a cleaner environment, the Republican tax bill effectively hurts them for using government to promote the public good.  Another way of putting this: the Republican tax bill penalizes states that dare to use democratic governance to build their common future.

The dangers of using the tax system to punish entire states and reward others are not only political, though those are frightening enough; after all, the use of state power to harm opponents is the stuff of authoritarian governments, not democracies.  In the words of one prominent conservative from the Heritage Foundation, “The big blue states either cut their taxes and costs, or the stampede of high-income residents from these states accelerates.  The big losers here are the public employee unions — the mortal enemies of Republicans. This all works out nicely.”

And beyond this naked power play, there are real economic costs that we’ll all be paying, blue and red states alike; according to Hacker and Pierson,

Red America may hold the key to Republicans’ control of government, but blue America holds many of the keys to our nation’s economic future. Indeed, among the blue-state pay-fors, the most troubling may be those that will bleed institutions of higher education, particularly in the House bill. In their zeal to extract revenues from blue states, Republicans are threatening our nation’s ability to excel in a global knowledge economy.

These concerns become still more palpable due to the inclusion of various provisions in the tax plan that seem to specifically target the ability of working and middle class people to advance both educationally and economically.  The Center for American Progress shows that the House plan cuts education benefits by $65 billion over 10 years.  Among the specifics, student loan interest could no longer be deducted, and tuition reductions for grad students would be treated as taxable income.  Until now, there’s been a federal Lifetime Learning Credit that provides $2,000 annually for things like grad school and job training; but apparently the proper role of government no longer involves helping people get an education, so this is going away as well.  

The final tell that this tax legislation has everything to do with favoring the 1% is the fact that, after literally years of fighting Barack Obama over allegedly out of control government spending, and insisting that the national debt was the greatest of threats to our country, this proposed legislation will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.  That’s money on which interest will need to be paid, and the bill’s skew toward the rich means that it will be the middle and working classes that disproportionately foot the bill for giving the Richie Riches of the country still more money to buy new Jaguars, jewels, and vacation homes in gated communities safe from the rank and file of average Americans.  As a New York Times editorial puts it, “Republican leaders aren’t just trying to transfer money from current middle-class and poor Americans to corporations and the very wealthy.  They are also trying to transfer money from future middle-class and poor Americans to corporations and the very wealthy.”

This bill has “political suicide” written all over it: its deep unpopularity in public opinion polls suggests that most Americans aren’t falling for the con, and it’s difficult to believe that many who see their taxes go up next year won’t be a hard sell to vote GOP going forward.  But it’s no surprise that Republicans are trying to implement the type of cuts they’d only been able to dream of through the Obama years.  Having lived with the fantasy for so long, they seem disinclined to face up the possibility of electoral backlash, instead soothing themselves with thoughts that the public is too inattentive to notice how they’re about to be screwed.  That’s a hell of a gamble.  This bill may well pass; but whether it does or not, this tax nightmare will be a weight around the neck of every Republican senator and representative come 2018.

War on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Will Gain Republicans a Pyrrhic Victory at Best

On Friday, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, resigned in advance of the end of his 5-year term.  His departure was long expected, and the White House had indicated for some time it intended to appoint Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget, as acting director until President Trump appoints, and the Senate confirms, a new permanent director.  According to its stated plan, upon Cordray’s resignation, the White House went ahead and appointed Mulvaney as planned.

But as the Intercept’s Dave Dayen began pointing out last week, and as burst into full public view in the past 48 hours, the president’s action has run up against the language of the legislation creating the CFPB.  As part of an effort to shield the CFPB from political pressures, the CFPB director is to be succeeded by its deputy director, pending Senate approval of the president’s pick to head the bureau.  Until a couple days ago, the CFPB only had an acting deputy, so this rule may have been moot; but the day before his departure, director Cordray appointed Leandra English to the deputy role.  Hence, under the law that created it, English is now the director of the bureau in the wake of Cordray’s departure.

The White House, though, is taking the position that another law, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, overrules the language of the CFPB legislation.  So now there are essentially two heads of the CFPB, and it appears this may require a court decision to be resolved.  But however things shake out, the Trump administration clearly opposes the work of the CFPB; we need look no further from the president’s tweets from yesterday, in which he stated that the CFPB had been a “total disaster” and had “devastated” financial institutions.  Likewise, Mulvaney himself has previously called the bureau a “sick, sad joke.”  Such attacks by those nominally charged with running the agency are potent reminders that the insulation from political pressures intentionally included in the design of the CFPB was well-considered and essential to its operation.

Beyond this, the imbroglio over its leadership succession serves to highlight one essential fact: the CFPB has earned the ire not only of the White House, but of many Congressional Republicans and much of the financial industry at large, for the simple reason that it’s doing its intended job: protecting consumers from the predation of financial institutions.  Here’s how a recent piece at The Intercept describes its accomplishments:

In fact, the CFPB has emerged as that rare beast — a fast-moving agency that actually chalks up wins for average Americans. By the end of 2016, shortly before Trump took office, the 5 1/2 -year-old bureau’s enforcement actions against everyone from the country’s biggest banks to small-time debt collectors had already returned $11.9 billion to 29 million consumers. The CFPB had created a public database of consumer complaints against banks and other lenders, and had issued new rules governing everything from mortgages to student loans to the prepaid cards that millions of “unbanked” Americans carry in their wallets. A year ago, the bureau finalized new rules giving prepaid customers some of the same protections enjoyed by those who use credit cards. 

So it comes as no surprise that the CFPB has been targeted by the financial sector and the politicians it buys off for degradation and elimination.  The Intercept piece describes a near-literal army of lobbyists and lawyers who attempt to gum up the agency’s ability to work by filing endless lawsuits and information requests that eat up the time of its employees.  In fact, as you read this account, it begins to feel amazing that the CFPB has actually accomplished anything at all in the face of united and deep-pocketed resistance from the sectors it’s supposed to help regulate.  You also get a sense of how deep-rooted the rot in the financial industry remains, nearly ten years after this sector of the economy nearly caused a new Great Depression and required a bailout via massive amounts of taxpayer money.  From fake customer accounts created by Wells Fargo to rip off consumers, to obscure rules meant to cause credit card holders to miss payments and get dinged with penalties, to payday lenders that insist on every American’s right to the financial freedom to pay exorbitant interest and get caught in a downward spiral of unsustainable interest payments, a truly huge chunk of the financial sector sees screwing consumers as the key to its own financial success.  

It’s a measure of our debased and badly askew political economy that the CFPB seems like a nearly miraculous government institution — a bureau that not only has the mission to protect consumer rights, but the enforcement power to back it up, and that moreover actually does its intended job.  In a larger sense, it’s a shining example of government by the people working for the people.  This is why the bureau has attracted such outsized enmity beyond just the financial sector: it’s a daily rebuttal to the right-wing lie that government is always a hindrance, never a good, and a rejoinder to the fiction that an unregulated market will provide consumers with the best choices.  These are the reasons why the battle for proper succession to head up the CFPB, and advocacy for the bureau more generally, is so important. 

To hear its opponents talk, you’d think that the CFPB houses a cabal of Marxists plotting to destroy the U.S. economy.  The criticisms are overwrought and generally laughable on their face, and boil down to a rage at not being able to gouge consumers whenever and wherever desired.  As a specific example, Donald Trump’s tweet that the CFPB has “devastated” financial institutions is notable for its lack of actual facts to back up the accusation.  And this hysterical opposition is actually another sound strategic reason for engaging wholeheartedly in the defense of the CFPB: these ridiculous and unfounded criticisms end up highlighting the malfeasance of the financial industry and the need for the CFPB in the first place, leading the public to increased awareness of the benefits of the agency.  Even the financial industry has appeared to mind the dangers of a direct assault on the CFPB until now — hence the attacks on the margins via lawsuits and other attempts to slow the CFPB down.

But now that the White House has chosen to put the agency in the crosshairs, attempting to place an outright enemy of the bureau as its head, the assault has become full frontal.  Unfortunately for its opponents, the CFPB continues to enjoy overwhelming public support — including among Republicans.  By highlighting his opposition to an agency with a clear and public-minded mission with broad support, the president in particular highlights the falseness of his faux populism and lack of interest in protecting ordinary citizens.  To insistently remind the American people of the concrete and publicly beneficial accomplishments of the previous administration seems like folly, the strategy of someone who thinks that lying will get you everywhere.  But the facts about the CFPB are easily accessible and digestible to the public at large.  The president’s incipient war on the bureau should stick in the craw of any citizen who fears and loathes the outsize power and malignant tactics of big banks and big finance more generally.

The flip side is that Democratic defense of the CFPB is as close to a sure thing as you can get in politics.  The bureau is popular, and its mission is well-understood by many Americans.  Attacks by the GOP and defense by the Democrats demonstrate that the latter can be counted on to look out for average Americans, while Republicans paint themselves as the tools of big business.  In fact, the Democrats should be advocating for expanding the resources of the bureau, as a way of exploiting Republican vulnerabilities in its broader alignment with a predatory financial sector.  The GOP will keep gunning for the CFPB as long as it exists; it’s political good sense to make them pay the steep price they deserve.  Like their current attacks on net neutrality and their hideous tax plan, Republicans  have declared open season on average Americans, all in defense of the richest and most powerful people in the land.

Can Thinking Like the 1% Help Average Americans Fight Tax-Based Class Warfare?

I guess congressional Republicans can justify the tax legislation barreling through both houses right now by assuming that not enough average people will pay close attention; that enough voters will hear “tax cuts” and assume they’re getting some, too.  How else could you think that raising taxes on millions of working- and middle-class families would be a good idea, and won’t result in an electoral wipeout in 2018?  It’s clearer than ever that the main constituency of the GOP is their rich donor class, who make out like bandits under the proposed tax plans.  They can try to sell it as a supply-side approach to goosing the economy, but at this stage of the game, I think the simplest explanation is the right one: they’re cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors.

And why do rich people want their taxes cut?  Because they want to be even richer — certainly not because they want to create jobs.  This basic fact somehow gets obscured again and again, as if the essential fact of 1% greed had been placed in the witness protection program.  It’s not just on taxes that we see this; siphoning money to the top is the blueprint of our entire economy at this point.  If you thought we’d reached peak income inequality during the Obama administration, wait ‘til you see what the Trump years do to us, when the goal of transferring wealth upward has become the official policy of both elected branches of the U.S. government. 

Most horrifying to me are the proposals that seem to be deliberate attacks on the idea of the U.S. as a country of social mobility.  The repeal of the estate tax is Exhibit A; in the face of literally generations of consensus that the United States should not be a place of inherited, dynastic wealth, with all the threats to democracy such wealth poses, this Republican Congress apparently possesses a special wisdom that such fears are totally misplaced.  But you need look no further than this very tax plan to see that those fears are in fact spot-on.  To pay the bill for inheritance tax repeal, the tax code is rejiggered to attack the very deductions that help people climb into the middle class: the interest on college loans would no longer be deductible, employer educational contributions would be taxed, and other tuition breaks for grad students would be taxed as well.  And it’s plain as day that, as in the past, the GOP will use the deficits their misguided tax legislation creates as an excuse to slash programs that benefit the middle- and lower-class, perpetuating the spiraling divide between American have's and have-not’s.

But as I’m writing today, I’m feeling the difficulty of talking about taxes in a way that feels meaningful in the way it should, in the same way that I’ve been bothered by the unhelpful abstraction of words like “deficits” and “national debt” and all the ginormous numbers associated with the U.S. budget.  So let’s try this angle: I’m pretty sure the upper classes in this country clearly feel entitled to every penny they get in tax cuts.  Indeed, that’s why they demand that their Republican legislators pass this sort of law.  Meanwhile, the middle and working classes of the U.S. never seem to match the rich with equally strong tax cut demands — even though, unlike the rich, they could actually make good use of the money.  In one sense, this is a sign of societal health: average Americans recognize that they’re helped by various forms of government spending on social programs, and so the desire for lower taxes is balanced against wanting those programs to continue.  Put another way: ordinary people intuitively understand the idea of social goods, while many of the rich are essentially indifferent or even hostile to these goods, feeling themselves beyond the need of them.

I think one step that ordinary Americans should take at this point is, somewhat perversely, to get a little more aligned with the mindset of the upper class.  For the upper class, every penny that does not go directly into their pockets is viewed as outright theft, a violation of the natural laws of the universe.  The great broad swathe of the rest of America would do well to start thinking in an analogous way: every time a choice is made to reward the rich over the common, it is a form of theft from both their own pocketbooks and from our collective future.  All these programs that benefit ordinary people, from Obamacare to the mortgage deduction, aren’t programs that government has doled out to us: they are benefits that we, through our government, gave ourselves, as part of our collective effort, however imperfect, to build the society we want.  

The effects of the tax legislation in its current form will arguably be bigger in its overall damage to our common good than a repeal of Obamacare (see this Forbes article about some of the possible dire side effects of goosing a relatively high-performing economy and hampering our ability to respond to future downturns); yet while progressives hammered back repeated Obamacare repeal efforts, the outrage over the tax bills has so far been more muted.  I think this is because health care repeal is so specific and felt viscerally, while the effects of tax legislation are not only more general and diffuse, but are intentionally wrapped in abstraction by those who want to get away with the resulting unfairness.  That’s why I think it’s also important for people to acquaint themselves with the specific ways the tax legislation will hurt them and people they know, and to weigh this against the way it showers wealth upon those Americans who are hardly in desperate need of extra dollars.

I am really hoping for a Thanksgiving Hail Mary in the coming days, that people will feast with their families and friends and talk a little politics, and then re-brand Black Friday as the day Republican congressmen caught holy hell from their constituents, in a turkey leftovers-fueled barrage of democratic outrage.

Why Is Donald Trump So Uncharacteristically Worried About "Insulting" Vladimir Putin?

At a session with reporters last week, President Trump addressed the ongoing investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.  He suggested that the Russia collusion story was a Democratic fabrication, that lives might be lost due to continued attention to the story, and that former intelligence officials who claimed its veracity were “hacks.”  Most provocatively, though, he spoke about his recent interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit: 

"Every time he sees me, he says, 'I didn't do that,' and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.  But he says, 'I didn't do that.'  I think he is very insulted by it, if you want to know the truth.  Don’t forget.  All he said was he never did that, he didn’t do that. I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”

Plenty of politicians and pundits have jumped on the president’s acceptance of Putin’s assertions as naive or dangerous — naive if the president actually believes Putin, and dangerous for implying his trust in the Russians over American intelligence and reporting.  But for the president to be naive is to assume that he doesn’t know any better, or doesn’t know about the Russian collusion with his campaign, both of which points are far from certain.  Along the same lines, the danger is not just from Trump inadvisedly trusting the Russians, but from what it says about the president’s overall entanglement with that country.  It’s hard to read the president’s remarks and not see him choosing at least to embrace the Russian version of events, which is deeply frightening considering the well-established fact that, putting aside the question of collusion for the moment, there is overwhelming evidence that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election and that they intend to continue such interference in the future.

But New York Daily Intelligencer writer Jonathan Chait has zeroed in on another part of Trump’s remarks — the part where he talks about how he thinks Putin is “insulted” by questions of Russian interference.  Chait asserts that this superficially odd wording suggests darker possibilities in terms of President Trump’s relationship to Russia.  First, he notes how out of keeping it is for Trump to worry about insulting another person — after all, Donald Trump’s main mode is one of dominance, in which insults of his enemies are tools of the trade; how odd for him to be worried about the feelings of another!  It is as if Putin is in the dominant Trumpian role, and the president doesn’t want to provoke him; as Chait evocatively describes it, “Trump is speaking to his country like a cowering mother warning her children not to upset their father.”

Chait brings up the possibility that the Russians have compromising materials of a sexual or financial nature on Trump, pointing to some of the more salacious allegations in the Steele memo.  This might nor might not be the case; but Trump’s most sensitive spot may just be the larger Russian influence effort in 2016, including the way it reached into his campaign; after all, this is a man who from day one has outwardly worried about his legitimacy and popularity on the basis of his popular vote loss and subpar inauguration crowds.  But the president’s otherwise odd desire not to anger Putin need not be entirely rational.  After all, no matter what the Russians say or do not say, the U.S. government and journalists have uncovered plenty of evidence that the Russians and the Trump campaign were working together.  Appealing to Putin as some sort of authority figure who might weigh in on his side could be seen as having a delusional cast, as if by puffing up Putin’s terrible power the Russian president’s denials could somehow overshadow the hard facts uncovered in the real world.

I will lay some of my cards out on the table here and say that I wonder, when we are looking back on these dangerous times with the advantage of hindsight, whether we will be struck by how obvious it all was: how a president compromised by a foreign country used the power of his office to derail investigations of that compromise; how when he spoke his strange, uncharacteristic words about the Russian president that sounded like he was scared of what Putin could do to him, there really was information possessed by the Russians that could do him great harm; that Trump, as dangerous as he was to our democracy, was also a criminal who could not help but telegraph his guilt through actions large and small, from his firing of an FBI director to his curious, self-implicating palaver.

Expulsion Revulsion

From just a quick glance at its title — “Don’t Be So Quick to Expel Roy Moore From the Senate” — you might think this post from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall is simply a contrarian or even pro-Moore argument.  But in taking a deeper look at what is emerging as a major Republican discussion — that the Senate might move to expel Moore in the event of his election — Marshall highlights the assumptions and dangers of this possible plan of action.

He starts by pointing out that in all of U.S. history, only 15 senators have been expelled from the Senate — but 14 of those were senators who supported the Confederacy, and the other was a senator expelled in 1797 for conspiracy and treason.  In other words, all 15 were expelled for treason against the U.S.

Marshall’s central argument is that expulsion is a powerful tool that risks setting an extremely dangerous precedent for the Senate to nullify the will of a state’s voters.  He points out that while Moore’s behavior — not just his alleged behavior against several women, but in his time as a judge — is repugnant, he hasn’t actually been convicted of a crime.  The overwhelming factor driving Republicans to consider the expulsion option is that Moore is a political liability to the GOP; and to open the Pandora’s box of Senatorial expulsion to salve their embarrassment is a dangerous bargain.  If Republicans truly oppose Moore, Marshall says, there’s already a remedy — they can encourage voters to elect Moore’s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones (and as he goes on to say, the GOP has a good chance of re-taking the seat in 4 years anyway).

As it happens, I’d had the passing thought earlier today of whether it would be the worst thing in the world for Moore to be in the Senate if he were to defeat Jones, and have to admit I hadn’t thought too much about the downside of expulsion in itself.  But after reading Marshall’s piece, I think I may actually be more on the anti-expulsion train than he is (Marshall says he’s not 100% sure expulsion would be the wrong course of action — it seems he’s convinced me, but not himself!), for both the most cynical and most idealistic of reasons.

Let me preface what follows by saying that the best outcome by far is for Doug Jones to win this race; that’s why I’d encourage any readers who can spare a little cash to make a donation to Jones today.  But learning that the Senate has pretty much not expelled any senators except those who committed treason in the Civil War has grabbed my attention, bigly.  This is a quite anti-democratic power, particularly when applied to a senator who has just been elected; it is clearly a reversal of democratic processes for the Senate to block the will of voters in the matter of who represents them.  That it was previously used basically to defend our country against secession and the destruction of our democracy seems like the exception that proves the rule.

While the Senate does have the expulsion power under the Constitution, the fact that it’s a) only been used for acts of treason and b) is suddenly being considered by the increasingly anti-democratic GOP should be a big flashing warning sign that everyone needs to proceed with extreme caution and attention.  Once dusted off and employed in this special case, who’s to say that a Republican majority couldn’t use it to reject Democratic senators in the future — for instance, if a senator faced allegations similar to those Moore faces?  With Trump in the White House and the GOP continuing to enable his proto-authoritarian tendencies, such possibilities must be taken very seriously, even if just a few years ago it would have seemed paranoid to raise such questions.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such an extreme and anti-democratic maneuver is being considered by the current leaders of the Republican Party.  Some GOP members had already explored the possibility of delaying the Alabama vote, in order to provide more time for Republicans to replace Moore.  It sounds like the state's governor has the discretion to do so with a special election, but as many have pointed out, canceling elections is a banana republic con, not standard operating procedure in the U.S. of A.  And as The Hot Screen has pointed out too many times to count, the GOP’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies are found in everything from racist voter suppression and gerrymandering to a Republican president who bashes our court system and seems not to care about defending our elections against Russian meddling.

So that’s the idealistic/patriotic argument against helping the GOP along its merry way to expelling Moore if, god forbid, he wins election (a decent number of Democrats would need to go along with an expulsion vote, as it requires a two-thirds majority).  Now here’s the partisan one: getting stuck with Roy Moore in the Senate is just the fate the Republican Party deserves, and one that would bring great potential benefits to the Democratic Party.  Moore is a monster of the GOP’s own making; he’s just a slightly more extreme version of the tendencies we already see throughout the party: the racism, the anti-Islam slurs, the hypocritical pseudo-Christian bullshit.  Also, in the past few days, he’s gone from being a figure who wasn’t so well known, to a person of national infamy — and why?  For being a pedophile and a sexual predator.  If Alabama votes him in, then such is the will of the people.  If the Democrats have to lose that race, then the consolation prize can be a new GOP senator who tars and feathers a hapless party that literally could not run a better candidate than a mendacious, absurdist holy roller whose basic attitude seems to have been, If it is not literally proscribed in the Ten Commandments monument that I erected at the Alabama state supreme court, then I can damned well do it to underage females.  Moore in the Senate would, somewhat ironically, be a powerful argument for why it’s time to return the GOP to the minority.

Embracing "Fake News" Lie, Supporters of Moore Make Themselves Accomplices to His Sexual Depredations

The ground has already shifted quite a bit since we weighed in this weekend about loathsome lothario Roy Moore.  A fifth woman has accused Moore of sexual impropriety, alleging that he sexually  assaulted her in 1977 when she was 16 years old.  There have also been reports that he was banned from an Alabama mall in the 1970‘s due to his habit of propositioning underage females.  And several Republican senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have called for him to step aside in the Alabama Senate race.  Meanwhile, Moore remains defiant, saying he will be suing the Washington Post for running the story with the original allegations against him.

As many of Moore's supporters continue to defend him, Moore is using the Trumpian cudgel of "fake news" to defend against the charges, and the notion that the Washington Post and the media at large have made up these stories appears central to many supporters’ continued backing of his candidacy.  In this clash between an extremely well-reported and -documented piece of journalism, and Moore’s baseless accusations that the Post is simply out to get him, we see the right-wing ploy of “fake news” in all its moral bankrupcty and anti-democratic splendor.  In disregarding the accusations as part of a larger elite conspiracy, Moore’s supporters have been recruited as accomplices to his immoral and illegal actions.  Unable to see outside a framework of propaganda and manipulation, they are made to abet the depredations of a troubled but powerful man.  Unable to accept facts over ideology, they are made into dupes and fools.  This is what the fake news lie ultimately delivers to the right: a cadre of citizens who cannot separate fact from fiction, and who become the enablers of agendas that foil the common interest and defy basic morality.  We see it with Moore, and we see it with Trump.  When a politician cries fake news, be assured that he or she has something to hide.

Hedging on Accused Child Molester Roy Moore Shows Power is All That Matters to GOP

A month ago, we made a case here that the Democrats should make a real run for the Senate seat in Alabama vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Republican candidate Roy Moore, though popular in the state, embodied so many un-democratic, un-American beliefs that disqualified him for office that that Democrats’ had a baseline moral obligation to oppose him.  There were also urgent political considerations as well: Moore would help push the GOP even further to the right, not simply into deeper conservatism, but to a place of theocratic radicalism and clearly un-Constitutional aims.

To briefly review some of this man’s greatest hits: Moore argued that Representative Keith Ellison should not be allowed into Congress simply because he’s Muslim, and has also argued, against all facts and common sense, that Sharia law has been imposed in the states of Illinois and Indiana.  As chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he installed a massive sculpture of the Ten Commandments at his courthouse, and then was removed from office when he flouted an order to remove it.  After a political comeback and return to his position as chief justice several years later, he was suspended for disobeying a federal court when he directed other state judges to continue enforcing a state ban on same-sex marriage.  And as for his proposals for what he’d do if elected, they run like usual right-wing fare: tax ideas that would penalize the poor and benefit the wealthy, elimination of Obamacare, more persecution of non-straight members of the military.  

Matthew Yglesias has written a pretty decisive article that hits on some of the points we had made, plus a bunch of additional important ones.  First, he outlines the benefits to the Democrats from engaging more fully in this race: not only would they be taking a stand against retrograde ideas and arguing for their own principles, which is good for the party’s identity generally, it would also help build the Democrats’ strength in Alabama over the longer term even if Democratic candidate Doug Jones loses.  Yglesias also makes the very crucial point that Democratic focus on this election will force the Republicans to place energy and resources in it as well, which will increase the degree to which the GOP becomes more generally associated with Moore’s hideousness.

He also points out that Doug Jones is a strong candidate with a legitimate chance at winning this race.  As a U.S. attorney, Jones headed up the prosecution of Eric Rudolph, the domestic terrorist who bombed the Atlanta Olympics, abortion clinics, and a gay bar.  Jones also prosecuted and gained the convictions of KKK members involved in the murder of four African-American girls in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Yglesias’ article had persuaded us that the case for running hard against Moore was already airtight.  But then the Washington Post broke its story about pedophilia allegations against Moore, and what had been merely an airtight case became an overwhelming moral and political necessity for the Democratic Party.  Please read the Washington Post report.  To The Hot Screen, it seems entirely credible and well-documented.  Based on recent interviews with these women, the article recounts Moore’s dating of four teenage girls back in the 1970’s.  The details are internally consistent, deeply creepy, and morally repugnant.  One of the women, who was 14 at the time, describes sexual contact with Moore, who was 32 at the time.  Such contact would have been a crime in Alabama in the 1970's, and would be a crime now.  Moore denies all the allegations, and has no plans to step aside from the race.

It’s not just that the Post has provided strong evidence that Moore committed sex crimes — which hideously explode his pretensions to upright Christian behavior and any possible claims to hold political office in one grotesque swoop — but that the Republican Party as a whole has now implicated itself in his moral turpitude by its foundering response to the allegations.  While a few senators have withdrawn their endorsements of Moore, a few more have condemned him as unfit for office, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has withdrawn from its joint fundraising agreement with the campaign, the larger Republican establishment has hedged its bets.  Many GOP politicians say that Moore should step aside if the allegations are true — but what standard of proof would they ever accept, given that they’ve largely signed on to Donald Trump’s fiction that the media is simply fake news?  And the statute of limitations has run out on Moore’s alleged crimes, so this will never be resolved in court.

It is no surprise, given the numerous accusations of sexual harassment and worse against Donald Trump, that the White House qualified its statement on Moore by saying that “Like most Americans the president believes we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person’s life,” even as it said that “Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside” if the allegations are true.

But it only goes downhill for the GOP from here.  Where approval or condemnation of Moore’s alleged behavior really counts, in Alabama, prominent members of the state Republican Party have issued insane and abhorrent defenses of Moore.  State Auditor Jim Zeigler attempted to defend the candidate by citing, of all things, the story of Mary and Joseph.  As in, the Bible story.  “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter," said Zeigler.  "They became the parents of Jesus.”  Now, I’ve seen some smart progressives go full Bible exegesis in attempting to rebut Zeigler’s point, and I don’t begrudge them this approach (and yes, the fact that Zeigler is unfamiliar with the immaculate conception is odd).  But I don’t think we need to get into the theological weeds about the nature of the relationship between Jesus’ parents to say that when someone tries to defend pedophilia because it’s supposedly in the Bible, you have launched your political party into an embrace of such gross stupidity, moral grotesquerie, and universally-condemned practices that no further discussion is necessary.  

Then there are two county chairmen who say that they’d support Moore even if the allegations are true.  Let’s quote the Toronto Star at length here to get the full impact of their positions, in their own words:

Five Republican county chairmen told the Star they believed the allegations were false. One of them, moreover, said he would vote for Moore even if there were proof Moore had abused a girl.

“I would vote for Judge Moore because I wouldn’t want to vote for Doug,” said Bibb County chairman Jerry Pow. “I’m not saying I support what he did.”

Covington County chairman William Blocker also said he’d consider voting for Moore even if hard evidence of sexual abuse emerged.

“There is no option to support Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee. When you do that, you are supporting the entire Democrat party,” he said.

Geneva County chairman Riley Seibenhener said he did not think Moore should withdraw even if the allegations were true.

“Other than being with an underage person — he didn’t really force himself,” Seibenhener said. “I know that’s bad enough, but I don’t know. If he withdraws, it’s five weeks to the election . . . that would concede it to the Democrat.”

“It was 40 years ago,” said Marion County chairman David Hall. “I really don’t see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14.” He added, incorrectly, “She’s not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.”

“He didn’t really force himself.”  Let that sink in for a bit.  Ultimately, apart from playing the fake news angle against the Washington Post and other reports, this is the logic that the GOP as a whole would have us embrace: That no crime against women is ever possible.  That women always lie.  That a grown man could not possibly have forced himself on an underage girl.  This isn’t really logic, though, but an ideology of misogyny, hate, and power.

Under Alabama election rules, it's too late for the GOP to choose another candidate for the Senate race (though some state legislators floated the utterly undemocratic idea of delaying the election, only to have the idea shut down by the governor); at best, it seems that they could suggest a write-in candidate, such as primary loser Luther Strange — but it seems likely this approach would guarantee a Democratic victory.  This likely loss if he drops off the ballot may help explain some of the GOP intransigence on Moore, but not in their favor.  The Republicans Party is willing to literally put an accused child molester in office, so long as he's a reliable vote.  If the GOP won’t disown Roy Moore, then it would be political malpractice for the Democratic Party not to hang this fake moralizer around the neck of the Party, for the duration of this race, and, God forbid, afterwards, were he to win election to the Senate.  

Pondering the Connections Between Sexism and Our Current Political Crossroads

Some recent pieces of writing have provided powerful orientation and insight around the sexual harassment scandals that have been cascading into our culture and collective consciousness ever since the New York Times Harvey Weinstein exposé helped blast the door a month ago.  Roxane Gay’s “Dear Men: It’s You, Too” concisely links together the way individual responses to sexual harassment and sexual violence work to sustain a societal environment where such behavior is rampant.  The essay is something of a primer on the subject: how it’s about power, not sex; the ways women justify acceptance of this behavior by men; and perhaps most strikingly, how men continue to shape the discussion about how to respond to these evils.  Referring to the anonymous on-line list that circulated for a few days identifying male harassers and abusers, and to its critics, Gay remarks, “More energy was spent worrying about how men were affected than worrying about the pain women have suffered.”  Indeed.

Though she’s aware of the ways women contort and accommodate themselves to widespread harassment and predation, Gay places blame for the problem squarely on men.  “It’s time for men to start answering for themselves because women cannot possibly solve this problem they had no hand in creating.”  As a remedy, she asks that individual men begin owning up to the harms they’ve caused women, and that men who have witnessed such acts actually talk about it.  In identifying the overriding male role in this issue, and identifying some common-sense openings that will surely be resisted by the great majority of men, she gets at the paradoxical and maddening dynamics of behavior that is officially verboten but unofficially condoned.  Men need to change; but how will that happen?

In an essay titled “Our National Narratives Are Still Being Shaped by Lecherous, Powerful Men,” Rebecca Traister highlights the flood of recent reports of sexual harassment in the news media, which include allegations against notables such as journalist Mark Halperin and New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier.  She also importantly points out that for every story of such abuse being reported, there are dozens not making it to publication for various reasons, including the relative lack of status of the perpetrators.  Traister makes the case that there is a deep and irrefutable connection between the sexual attitudes of these pundits and critics, and many others like them, and the way their institutions have covered politics and the arts.  She writes:     

In hearing these individual tales, we’re not only learning about individual trespasses but for the first time getting a view of the matrix in which we’ve all been living: We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories [. . .] The media is breaking the news here; the media is also deeply implicated in this news and still shaping how the tale is getting told.

That final observation feels disorientingly true to me: even in this moment of massive airing of individual stories, the very way they’re being reported and framed is something that everyone should be conscious of.  As a concrete example of this phenomenon, Traister zeroes in on Halperin:

They are also the men with the most power to determine what messages get sent about politicians to a country that then chooses between those politicians in elections.  Mark Halperin co-authored Game Change, the soapy account of the 2008 election (excerpted in this magazine), which featured all kinds of history-making candidates who were not powerful white men.  Halperin’s view of Hillary Clinton in particular was two-dimensional: Through his lens, she was a grasping and scandal-plagued woman; her exaggerated misdeeds and the intense feelings she engendered were all part of propelling his profitable narrative forward.  His coverage of Trump, meanwhile, in this last campaign cycle, was notably soft, even admiring: Halperin once argued that the sexual-assault claims leveled at Trump would only help the now-president’s brand [. . .] Yet his view of the history we’ve just lived through was the one that was amplified and well compensated; there was not just the book deal but Showtime and HBO deals, too, and a regular perch on Morning Joe.

Traister judges the damage not just in the past, but actively shaping our reality through the present:

We cannot retroactively resituate the women who left jobs, who left their whole careers because the navigation of the risks, these daily diminutions and abuses, drove them out. Nor can we retroactively see the movies they would have made or the art they would have promoted, or read the news as they might have reported it.

This tsunami of stories doesn’t just reveal the way that men have grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it shows us that they did it all while building the very world in which we still have to live.

I’ve also been particularly affected by recent pieces about close encounters with Harvey Weinstein written by a pair of actors turned writer/producer/directors whom I've been a big fan of for years.  As Sarah Polley recounts, hers took place when she was 19 years old — before she’d embarked on her directing career, but at a point when her acting ambitions were dialed back in part because of the sexism she’d already encountered in filmmaking.  She refused Weinstein’s advances, but notes that she may well have responded differently had she seen herself as primarily an actress; in part, she was immunized by her alternate ambitions, as well as by having encountered episodes of sexism before.  And as she began to direct movies, she began to grasp “how little respect” she had received as an actress; in an ironic turn of events, though, her experience directing Julie Christie in Away From Her was so positive that Polley decided to give acting another try.  Unfortunately, she discovered that as an actress, her status remained a diminished one; she writes that, "One producer, when I mentioned I didn’t feel a rape scene was being handled sensitively, barked that Dakota Fanning had done a rape scene when she was 12 — 'And she’s fine!' A debatable conjecture, surely."  This exchange seems like something out a grim Hollywood satire, yet it was part of Polley’s reality.  

Brit Marling relates a traumatizing meeting with Weinstein that took place after she’d already co-written and starred in two movies.  As she recounts, she’d headed down the writing path partly because of her dissatisfaction with the sexist power dynamics of Hollywood; she’d concluded that to shift those dynamics for herself, she’d have to be the one telling the stories.  It was her success that had gained the attention of Weinstein, or so she thought.  Marling concludes that she was able to walk out of the encounter — which echoes the sleazy come-on’s recounted by so many women at this point — without giving in to Weinstein’s advances because her identity as a writer meant that at a fundamental level, Weinstein could not blacklist her creative endeavors, as he’d be able to do were she only an actress.  Like Polley, then, she’s acutely aware of the way her own particular circumstances protected her from making a different decision that day.  But Marling digs deeper into the question of consent in such encounters, arguing that an economics perspective is key.  She writes: 

Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families. He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world.  They knew it.  He knew it.  Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him.  That’s not just artistic or emotional exile — that’s also economic exile [. . .] [C]onsent is a function of power.  You have to have a modicum of power to give it.  In many cases women do not have that power because their livelihood is in jeopardy and because they are the gender that is oppressed by a daily, invisible war waged against all that is feminine — women and humans who behave or dress or think or feel or look feminine.

Like Traister, Marling zeroes in on the way that men, very much including men with actively sexist frameworks for viewing and acting in the world, structure our sense of reality.  This reality informed her decision to write scripts, and it’s part of what she sees as the way out for our society — for people to begin changing the stories we tell (to borrow the title of a Sarah Polley film):

Another important step forward would be for all of us to start telling and consuming different stories. If you don’t want to be a part of a culture in which sexual abuse and harassment are rampant, don’t buy a ticket to a film that promotes it.

Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself.  In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends.  The real danger inside the present moment, then, would be for us all to separate the alleged deeds of Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly, or Weinstein from a culture that continues to allow for dramatic imbalances of power.  It’s not these bad men.  Or that dirty industry.  It’s this inhumane economic system of which we are all a part.  As producers and as consumers.  As storytellers and as listeners.  As human beings.  That’s a very uncomfortable truth to sit inside.  But perhaps discomfort is what’s required to move in the direction of a humane world to which we would all freely give our consent.

As Marling indicts our economic system as a root cause of this pervasive and ongoing assault on women’s persons and dignity, you get a sense of why our culture may be stuck, why it’s been so repressed and schizoid on these harassment and assault issues for so long.  Being able to exploit women is indeed an economic benefit to the exploiters; but conversely, to begin to truly push back against the degradation of women means to ask serious questions about the larger system that is incentivizing such exploitation.  As Polley notes, “What else have we accepted that, somewhere within us, we know is deeply unacceptable? And what, now, will we do about it?”  In the snowballing series of allegations since the Weinstein story exploded, it seems that women are collectively deciding that the harassment is no longer acceptable, has in fact never been acceptable.

In the Gay essay I began with, she notes that women often rationalize their abuse “because that is what we need to tell ourselves, because if we were to face how bad it really is, we might not be able to shoulder the burden for one moment longer.”  But I am wondering if we are at the point where women are facing how bad it really is, but rather than collapsing under the burden they no longer want to shoulder, are throwing it off, and letting the cards fall where they might.  I read somewhere that there must be a connection between Donald Trump’s evasion of sexual assault charges and subsequent election, and the absolute shitstorm that has engulfed Weinstein and so many other famous and not-so-famous figures.  I’ve seen a lot of worry, expressed by both men and women, that we’re just going to go back to business as usual; but nothing on this scale of truth-telling has happened before.  Who ever said that revolutions can’t take us by surprise sometimes?  Trump’s election was a political earthquake that told us that the tectonic plates of our country had shifted without enough people taking notice; what we’re seeing now may be evidence that not all the tectonic shifts have been bad, and that many, many people have yet to have their say.