Category Archives: History and Politics

Biden…

Here’s Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times, on Biden’s so far uninspiring defense of the most fundamental principles of democracy.

Biden, Tepid in the Face of Catastrophe

Oct. 24, 2021

Charles M. Blow

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

After months of tiptoeing around the issue of altering or eliminating the Senate filibuster rules to protect voting rights — and therefore democracy itself — after an unprecedented year of Republican assaults, President Biden has finally said that he is open to changing the rules. And on Thursday, he said it in the most weak-tea, weak-kneed way possible.

At a CNN town hall, Anderson Cooper asked Biden: “On voting rights, if it is as important to you as you say, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who look at the filibuster and would like to see it changed, even if it’s just on this one case. Why do you oppose that?”

Biden basically said that trying too hard at this point to save democracy would endanger his ability to save his spending bill, telling Cooper: “Here’s the deal. If, in fact, I get myself into at this moment the debate on the filibuster, I lose at least three votes right now to get what I have to get done on the economic side of the equation, on the foreign policy side of the equation.”

Biden then proposed bringing back the talking filibuster “immediately.” “I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster,” he said, framing the craziness of the Republican filibuster to prevent Democrats from raising the federal debt limit as a possible catalyst for reforms. He concluded: “But it still is difficult to end the filibuster beyond that. That’s another issue.”

Cooper pressed on: “But are you saying, once you get this current agenda passed on spending and social programs, that you would be open to fundamentally altering the filibuster or doing away with it?”

Biden said that he would be “open to fundamentally altering it,” but when Cooper again raised the idea of doing away with it, Biden responded, “Well, that remains to be seen exactly what that means, in terms of fundamentally altering it, and whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up.”

Cooper again pressed Biden on whether he would “entertain the notion of doing away with the filibuster” for voting rights, to which Biden answered, “and maybe more.”

Why was this like pulling teeth? Why is Biden so reticent to say unequivocally that we must protect voting rights at all costs, even if it means altering or eliminating the filibuster? (Being “open” to something or “entertaining” it is not the same as demanding it.) Why does deciphering what Biden is saying here feel like working through a riddle?

Furthermore, why is it that Biden believes that he will lose whatever momentum he currently has on the spending bill by entering the debate over filibuster reform now? Won’t he also be lost if he enters it later? Also, why did he keep bringing up the debt limit debate as the filibuster destroyer, even though Cooper kept directing him to voting rights?

Biden is talking out of both sides of a mealy mouth.

You can’t move in the course of one exchange from saying that we might soon have to fundamentally change the filibuster, to saying you’re “open” to fundamentally changing it, to saying “it remains to be seen” what that change would or should look like.

Defenders of the administration’s approach tell us that this is all part of the choreography of Washington. This is the dance that must be danced. And, in the end, it will all work out: Some version of the spending bill will be passed, which will free the president to defend voting rights more forcefully.

I hope that all of this is true. I think we need what’s in the spending bill. It’s just that we need voting more.

I hope that my panic and exasperation over the Biden administration’s lack of urgency on voting rights turns out not to have been warranted. I want to be wrong on this. Being right would be cataclysmic.

Biden and the Democratic leadership want us to trust, to trust them, to trust Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. They want us to trust a system that has not earned that trust and often betrays it.

I can imagine a moment after the social spending bill vote in which Biden cranks up the pressure on passing a voter protection bill, having public meetings with stakeholders, traveling the country to lobby for it and possibly even giving an address from the Oval Office in support of it.

He could do all of that. He should have done it already.

But responses like the ones he gave at the CNN town hall are more infuriating than instructive.

Consider someone feeling like he is drowning and you do nothing until the last minute, until that moment before the panic overtakes him and he loses consciousness, and only then do you snatch him from the water saying, “Why were you freaking out? I had this under control the whole time.” How would you expect him to feel? Happy that you finally saved him, at the last minute, or bitter that you first watched and waited while he felt like he was drowning?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Charles M. Blow joined The Times in 1994 and became an Opinion columnist in 2008. He is also a television commentator and writes often about politics, social justice and vulnerable communities. 

Bully Politics

Historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman discuss the rise of bully politics, a GOP style as prevalent now as it was in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War, when Southern Congressmen threatened, intimidated and physically attacked their northern colleagues. Here’s a nice slice, to whet your appetite:

Heather Cox Richardson

Because defaulting on that debt is essentially for the country to commit financial suicide, and all the things we’ve talked about in the past that would come from that. But what was really interesting about the way that the media talked about it and the way that pundits talked about it was they talked about it as if it was a Democratic problem. When in fact the Republicans were simply saying, “No, we’re not getting anything to do with this. We’re just not going to play.”

And so, the Democrats finally said, “Okay, we’ll do it on our own, even though you people ran up almost eight trillion of this in a 28 trillion debt. We’ll go ahead and do it ourselves.” And then the Republicans filibustered it, and said, “No, no, you can’t do it that way, either.” The Democrats go ahead and on a straight party line that is only Democrats vote to raise that debt ceiling, they go ahead and they buy the country until about December 3rd, to go ahead and figure out a way to raise the debt ceiling more permanently. And so, what happens?

Joanne Freeman:

So, following the agreement on raising the debt ceiling, Majority Leader Schumer gave a speech on the House floor, and he basically criticizes the Republicans for the brinkmanship, the game playing that they showed on this issue. And these are his words, Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans insisted they wanted a solution to the debt selling, but said-

Charles Schumer (archival):

Republicans played a dangerous and risky partisan game. And I am glad that their brinkmanship did not work. For the good of America’s families, for the good of our economy, Republicans must recognize in the future that they should approach fixing the debt limit in a bipartisan way.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, I will point out that’s a statement of fact. Schumer says, this is what the Republicans did. They had this risky reconciliation process that put a lot of things at risk and the brinkmanship didn’t work. So Heather, what was the response to that statement?

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is what made us want to do this episode. The response was that McConnell came out absolutely swinging. And now there’s a number of reasons he might have done that. He’s actually not operating from a position of strength right now in a number of different ways. But he says, “Last night in a bizarre spectacle, Senator Schumer exploded in a rant that was so partisan, angry and corrosive, that even Democratic senators were visibly embarrassed by him and for him. This tantrum encapsulated and escalated a pattern of angry incompetence from Senator Schumer.”

And then he goes on to say, this is in a letter to President Biden, “I am writing to make it clear that in light of Senator Schumer’s hysterics.” Important word there. “And my grave concerns about the ways that another vast, reckless, partisan spending bill would hurt Americans and help China, I will not be party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement.”

Now, what jumps out at you there is that the Republicans did everything they possibly could to make it almost impossible to pass the raising of the debt ceiling and to throw the country into default. That’s not negotiable. That’s actually what happened. Schumer said, “Hey, this is what happened.”

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m glad it didn’t work. That’s the extent of that statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And McConnell comes back with, “This is a bizarre spectacle. It is hysterics. Look at how we had this moment.” And this is actually how a lot of the media portrayed it. We had this moment in which we were all getting along so nicely. And now he’s gone ahead and thrown a monkey wrench into that, “And I’m not going to play anymore.”

Joanne Freeman:

The striking thing about that then is, if you’re talking about ranting and hysterics, and pumping up the emotion, that’s coming out of McConnell’s statement, that’s really not coming out of what Schumer is saying. So, he’s basically very upset that Schumer just made a blunt basic statement of fact about what happened. He doesn’t like that they were called out.

The Rise of Bully Politics

Three mutts

Stop me if I showed you this one already

History is often made by severely damaged, delusional creatures who dream of massive revenge against their imagined enemies and can inspire millions to share their grievances.

Voting Rights?

Republican senators voted 50-0 against DEBATE on a voting rights bill worked over by conservative Democrat and coal millionaire Joe Manchin.

Every Republican from Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Roy Blunt, Ben Sasse, John Thune, to Mike Braun, Richard Burr, John Boozman, Shelley Capito, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton, Mike Crapo, Joni Ernst, to Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Fist Raising Josh Hawley and the rest of the Senate Insurrection Caucus had clear and obvious objections to Joe Manchin III’s “bipartisan” compromise bill. Manchin’s rewrite threw a few bones to Republican voter fraud mongers, notably a national voter ID requirement (not an unreasonable thing, if the IDs are easy for everyone to get). 

We can only imagine their objections since they voted unanimously to prohibit discussion of the bill on the floor of the Senate.  Here are some of the principled problems their party likely has with the Democratic compromise bill:

Election Day as a holiday is objectionable to all Republicans because it’s unAmerican, working people should have to take a day off without pay to wait on long lines to cast their vote, even during a pandemic spike.

Automatic and same day voter registration is unfair because it allows people who miss an arbitrary registration deadline to still vote.

Two weeks early voting– totally UNFAIR!

Anyone can vote by mail — an OPEN INVITATION to the massive electoral fraud Bill Barr stated was “obvious”  (before finding no evidence of it anywhere) and that Ted Cruz gave as justification for blocking confirmation of Biden’s electoral college count — widespread Republican belief in massive “Democrat” voter fraud in the Contested Election of 2020. 

Insulating election officials makes it difficult to put direct pressure on them to alter undesirable tallies!

Taking away the partisan advantage the GOP gains with gerrymandering puts the GOP at a terrible disadvantage!

Disclose!   Honest Ads!   FUCK YOU!  How dare you!

Empower the Federal Electoral Committee (put out of business by Trump for four years)?   The FEC makes criminal referrals for illegal electoral tactics! DEEP STATE! CANNIBAL PEDOPHILES!   SOROS!  GLOBALISTS!

Ballot paper trail rule is an INVITATION TO MASSIVE COLORED AND POOR PERSON FRAUD!!!

The GOP, party of only the highest democratic principles.

Rope A Dope, fascist style

Muhammad Ali coined the term “rope a dope” to describe his fight plan for winning a fight against a more powerful opponent.   He exhausted his opponent by laying against the ropes round after round, head and torso covered by forearms and gloves, goading the opponent and letting him take out his fury as Ali leaned back against the ropes, resting while he let his furious opponent exhaust himself and then, when the time was right, whuppin’ him.  Rope A Dope is a stalling tactic that allows you to survive round after round against someone who’d otherwise beat you like a drum until the bell rings.  In the end, if you are able to delay things as long as you need to, your opponent is exhausted and frustrated and you have a good chance to win the fight by the end.

While Bill Barr auditioned for his role as Trump’s gunsel, with a memo stating that Mueller’s entire investigation was “untenable,”  Federalist Society favorite Don McGahn, Trump’s then White House Counsel, was busy getting first Gorsuch, then Kavanuagh, on the Supreme Court.   Barr devised a Rope A Dope strategy for the serial obstructor of justice, the 45th president, advising him to assert unlimited, absolute, blanket protective immunity against any testimony or document release that could hurt the Unitary Executive in any way.  The president instructed his faithful to defy Congress, under this untenable legal theory.   

Barr knew in the end this overbroad assertion of limitless privilege was doomed, like Trump’s ridiculous all-inclusive, lifetime non-disclosure agreements that have now started falling in courts, but the main thing was to buy time for his boss, to run out the clock as Trump continued to work his magic for the far right.

During Mueller’s “untenable” investigation he encountered numerous attempts by the Polyp and his myrmidons to obstruct justice.   Trump flatly refused to answer the last question of the interrogatories he agreed to answer for Mueller, left it blank and there was simply no consequence for failing to provide an answer to the most potentially incriminating question.   Manafort and Stone, two of the most cynical and evil fucks on the scene, repeatedly lied to Mueller, which was no problem since they had pardons dangled in exchange for their obstruction to protect the man who would pardon them.   Quid pro quo, defiance, silence and lies in exchange for a pardon from their co-conspirator. 

In one instance of apparent obstruction of justice documented by Mueller, McGahn (who we recently learned collected and trashed every tip called in during the short sham FBI investigation of Boof Kavanaugh) refused his boss’s request to fire Mueller, tendering his resignation instead.   The following day Trump instructed him to write a memo for the record stating they never talked about McGahn firing Mueller.  McGahn, in an uncharacteristic show of integrity, refused.   He told the story to Mueller’s investigators, under the penalties of perjury.    When he was called to testify during the impeachment inquiry he cited the absolute privilege Barr had pulled out of his capacious ass and piously announced that he would abide by the eventual decision of the court.

McGahn’s public testimony would have been devastating to Trump.   As McGahn’s court case meandered through the courts the public never saw him (or any others) confirm the damning details they’d revealed under oath to Mueller’s investigators.   In the end the court ruled that McGahn must testify, but it was two years later, both impeachments were history.   When he did finally testify, he negotiated the rules for his testimony, including that he would not take an oath to tell the truth.   You can read the transcript of him cagily confirming the truth of what he’d told Mueller, but it is a purely academic exercise.  Rope A Dope works again.

The Democrats, a party firmly controlled by its corporate donors, are not known for the stiffness of their collective spine.  Technically they have a razor thin majority in the House and Senate, but they are being Rope A Doped and played by a party that has shown its willingness to embrace any tactic and any lie that will keep them in power.   Our government’s ability to pass needed laws is being held hostage by a united mass of 50 Republican senators and by two basically Republican Democrats, “moderate centrists” Manchin and Sinema.  If one of the two contrarian Democrats (both defenders of the “bipartisan” filibuster, naturally, and well-paid for their steadfastness) flips to the other party, it’s game over for Biden.   If one of the two holds fast against what 49 other Democrats vote for, it’s game over for Biden.  A lot of power for one contrarian to hold over their party’s policies. 

When Steve Bannon worked for his billionaire patrons the Mercers, they supported Lyin’ Ted Cruz, until Trump knocked him out of contention for the GOP presidential candidate and was the last turd standing.  Throwing their support behind the new GOP candidate they introduced the flailing Trump campaign to Bannon and Kellyanne “Alternative Fact” Conway.   The rest, as they say, is history.  Strategist Bannon is a thinking man’s fascist, straight up, he doesn’t even attempt to hide it.   The administrative state?  Enemy of freedom and of the people.    We need 20,000 shock troops for January 6 2.0 and I call for them now.  Jews, not for my kids. Bannon will say whatever he needs to in order to advance his radical right wing agenda of securing a one-party state eternally hospitable to the Mercers and their privileged ilk.

Now Bannon, pardoned by the Polyp for ripping off the Polyp’s most loyal supporters in a fake “Build the Wall!” scam, is doing the McGahn Rope A Dope.   It may be a fanciful, even frivolous, claim that a man who hasn’t worked for Trump directly as a government official since the summer of 2017 is protected by Executive Privilege, but that’s for the courts, not the administrative state Bannon is devoted to destroying, to decide.   

The Democrats current plan is as practical and principled as the one the democracy supporters of the Weimar Republic employed to reign in Mr. Hitler and his top guys.   The law provides for criminal contempt penalties that Bannon can fight in court well past the 2022 election, at which time, Biden having passed no meaningful legislation, might have Trump as Speaker of the House.

The solution to this Rope A Dope doesn’t take much guts, but it takes seeing and fighting sworn lockstep marching enemies as the danger they are.  Congress has the power of inherent contempt which allows it to send marshals to arrest and detain any  contemptuous motherfucker who tells Congress to stick their subpoena where the sun don’t shine.    Send a couple of marshals to arrest Steve Bannon, and, while you’re at it, get his equally handsome autocracy-loving co-conspirator, The Orange Polyp, who has publically told Bannon and others to tell the illegitimate Congress to go fuck themselves.  Lock him up. 

The answer to someone who punches you hard in the face is not a careful study of the best way to react, it is an immediate, strong reaction to prevent another blow to the kisser. Unless, of course, a kingmaker like Manchin or Sinema gives the saucy thumbs down, with a wink to their equally compromised buddies across the aisle (not that either of these shitbirds have anything to say about what the House does to enforce its powers).

In other Rope A Dope news:

The 1860 election

The last time this country was as divided as it is right now, it was the monetary interests of the tiny minority that owned slaves that decided the two sides needed to settle the Constitutional question of chattel slavery on the battlefield. Today it is a tiny minority of “Right to Work” billionaires who would, in many cases, be happy to employ slave laborers, who are driving a zero-sum culture/legal war to decide the fate of our long experiment in balancing the privileges of our wealthiest and “majoritarian tyranny”.

In 1860, Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln was excluded from the ballot in every state that would soon secede from the Union and prepare for The War of Northern Aggression excluded A candidate must circulate a petition to get on the ballot and the future Confederacy would not cotton to such traitors in their midst, so candidate Lincoln had no public advocates and few signatures down south. He was therefore legally left off of the ballot in 1/3 of the then 33 states.

When he won a plurality of the vote anyway (there were four candidates) and a majority of the Electoral College, the slaveholders had enough, Lincoln was illegitimate, their states quickly began to secede and prepare for a violent struggle against the tyrant Lincoln.

Today reasonable Republicans, like 88 year-old Chuck Grassley (running for reelection, because why the fuck not?), took only five or six weeks to freely acknowledge that Biden won the election on November 3, 2020. It took him only a day to denounce the MAGA riot, rioter rage fueled by a long-promoted, many times debunked lie, that brought business in the Capitol to a halt. Of course, once he said these self-evident things he got on board with the mastermind of the Big Lie and voted in a bloc to block an investigation into the January 6 MAGA riot, and anything else Biden and his party try to do. That’s politics!

But make no mistake these “Second Amendment, fuck the lazy poor and don’t let them kill their unborn, no need for a living wage, keep our borders closed, climate catastrophe skeptical, no budget for enforcing tax laws against the rich, partisan state legislatures not courts decide national election outcomes” motherfuckers are determined to see blood in the streets, come hell, high water or even criminal prosecutions of the conspirators most hell-bent on installing a permanent one-party oligarchy.

One such conspirator, contemnor [1] Sloppy Steve Bannon, is publically calling for a gigantic army of “shock troops” (storm troopers) for the next round of political violence, exercising his First Amendment right to talk the ugliest possible shit.

USA! USA!!!

[1]

Contempt of Congress

Definition

Congress has the authority to hold a person in contempt if the person’s conduct or action obstructs the proceedings of Congress or, more usually, an inquiry by a committee of Congress.

Contempt of Congress is defined in statute, 2 U.S.C.A. § 192, enacted in 1938, which states that any person who is summoned before Congress who “willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry” shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a maximum $1,000 fine and 12 month imprisonment.

Before a Congressional witness may be convicted of contempt, it must be established that the matter under investigation is a subject which Congress has constitutional power to legislate.

Generally, the same Constitutional rights against self-incrimination that apply in a judicial setting apply when one is testifying before Congress.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contempt_of_congress