Impeachment and conviction is Congress' only power.

A president can do anything he wants, so long as a third of the Senate allows it.

Impeachment and conviction is the only check and balance. 

High school civics textbooks need to be revised and corrected. 

Trump ignores the War Powers Act in our war against Iran. The bill passed with bipartisan support in 1973, amid the public unease about the war against Vietnam. President Nixon vetoed the bill. The House and Senate overrode the veto, again with bipartisan support, making the War Powers Act the law of the land.  

--  A president is required to give advance notice to Congress of a planned attack; Trump didn't.

-- A president is required to give a report to Congress within 48 hours of a war in progress; Trump didn't. 

--A president is required to withdraw from a war if, within 60 days, he does not get affirmative approval from Congress for the war; Trump didn't.

There is a simple message coming from the president: "Make me."  Congress doesn't make him.

Same thing is happening with tariffs. The power to levy taxes are central to congressional power. Trump imposes tariffs on his own authority and volition, using an obviously false pretext that a state of emergency is in effect. Then when his authority to levy those tariffs under that pretext was stuck down by the Supreme Court, he imposed new tariffs using a different pretext. The real message was "Make me." Congress does nothing.

Congress itself publishes formal descriptions of its power. It is irrelevant make-believe, the suitable to be assigned to 14-year olds, being taught ignorant patriotism. 

Click: CONGRESS.GOV

--  Trump cut whole programs and departments that Congress authorized. 

--  He fires employees in contradiction to the Civil Service Act.

-- He ignores and breaks treaty obligations. 

Much of Trump's illegal behavior is done openly, proudly, unapologetically. These are not arguable cases, open to interpretation, such as whether his giving pardons to people who buy his meme coin, enriching him personally, is an out-and-out bribe, or it merely stinks to high heaven, but cannot definitively be called a bribe because there is no document proving it was a contracted transaction.

In the past presidents edged around the boundaries of congressional, and judicial power, pushing the edges, but with a show of good-faith acceptance of the law. Sometimes they were hypocrites, but they were not open scofflaws. They demonstrated recognition of an obligation to "faithfully execute" laws.

Trump redefined rules-based international relationships. He said that the supposed constraints on powerful countries set through the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, and treaties are just window-dressing obscuring what is really going on. The strong make the rules, period, he said. Trump does the same in relation to the institutions of government. Forget rules. Stop him, or let him do what he pleases.

There is one constraint on Trump, impeachment and conviction. As long as he has support of half of the Republican primary electorate in bright red states, he can do whatever he pleases. That is why the defeat of Thomas Massie is so consequential. It showed that even when a person confronted Trump on a weak spot -- Trump hiding the Epstein files -- voters supported Trump. This comes shortly after the primary election loss of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who had voted to impeach Trump five years ago following the January 6 attack of the Capitol. Resist Trump and lose your primary.

Trump has leverage and uses it. Republican officeholders know that activist MAGA, Trump-loving party faithful -- perhaps 20 percent of the total voting population -- control their political fortunes. A minority of voters in Arkansas, Alabama, Oklahoma and other bright red states are the only power-politics constraint on Trump. If Trump keeps 37 senators on board, he can ignore Congress and do as he wishes. And he does.

Norms, tradidition, and respect for the law don't constrain Trump. He says "make me." He exercises hard power.

Hard power is the only power Congress has left.

[I am grateful for Herb Rothschild's excellent report on the War Powers Act in his column this week in Ashland.news, a nonprofit news organization that emerged to fill the vacuum in local news coverage in Southern Oregon.]

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Memorial Day: We are fighting to get Trump out of a political jam

     "Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest."
          Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes, born circa 325 BCE

We aren't at war with Iran because it advances American interests.

We are at war because Trump thought it was good politics.  

George Friedman, the American geopolitical analyst who leads the think tank Geopolitical Futures, writes that one understands the jostling of nations as their power rises and falls not by looking at leaders, but by looking at geography and national interest. Leaders succeed because they act on behalf of their nations.

I disagree. I watch events shaped by the selfish politics of leaders.

President Nixon, White House aide Bob Haldeman, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sat in the Oval Office in 1971 and agreed that the Vietnam War was a mistake and they should cut their losses. They decided to pretend the war was being won for rest of 1971 and 1972 to avoid admitting a mistake prior to the 1972 election. They had agency. Ten thousand American lives was a good trade for an election victory, they decided. I was entering the draft pool in 1971. I might have been one of those 10,000. I lucked out. Someone else was in the 10,000.

Liberal media

Republican concern

Reuters

We are not at war with Iran because Iran might get a nuclear weapon. We had a nuclear deal in place negotiated under President Barack Obama, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and it did a better job of monitoring and containing Iran than will the agreement Trump can now make. We are weaker now, and Iran has better cards to play. Trump is scrambling to save face, to come up with something he can sell. It is show business and politics.

Iran demonstrated that it can block the Strait of Hormuz, that it can bomb the infrastructure of the Gulf States that the U.S. supposedly protected, that it can bomb our forward bases in the region, that it can force the U.S. to lift sanctions, and that it can get us to agree to return more frozen assets than Obama agreed to. Iran proved it possesses something better than a nuclear bomb -- an unusable tool that would invite immediate retaliation. Iran demonstrated it can hold the world hostage and cause crippling political damage to Trump. What is on the table now is whether Iran collects a toll and whether the U.S. pays reparations. Iranians have solidified themselves as the power that can open or shut the oil resources of the region at their discretion.The Gulf States now know that their glass cities of luxury survive at the pleasure of Iran, not the U.S.

So why did we do something so self-destructive to our interests?

--  Bibi Netanyahu has a political problem at home. To stay out of prison and manage a constituency at home he needed to be a super hawk within Israeli politics, and he needed to support settler expansion into the West Bank, which ensures perpetual conflict with Palestinians. Israel has a national interest of survival as a Jewish, not multinational, state and that requires close ties with the U.S. to achieve that goal, evern though it is contrary to the American creed of "out of many, one."

--  Netanyahu decided to team with the GOP in condemning an Obama deal, and it made the GOP the all-in-with-Israel party, while the Democrats became the Israel-but-with-reservations party, a position which pleased few people. It is Trump's nature to back his political friends, particularly ones with ample resources to contribute to the GOP and him personally, and that was congruent with his need to condemn anything Obama did. So Trump became the willing hostage of Netanyahu's interpretation of Israel's national interest.

--   Trump needed a diversion from Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, and he needed a big win to change the issue from Trump-the-Epstein-pal to Trump-the-Israel-helping-dealmaker. He thought Iran would work out like Venezuela, and he could replace an old, weak Iranian leader with a new, compliant one and that killing thousands of Iranians would accomplish this. Trump would have gotten advice warning him that Iran was capable of responding as it did, but Israel said there was an opportunity to strike now and kill lots of Iranian leaders, so the U.S. should seize the opportunity. That fit Trump's personality and political interest, so he did.

The New Yorker.  Trump will spin it as victory.

--  All wars eventually stop. This one will stop when Trump arranges something that he can spin as a victory, whatever that is, a story that will feed the narrative that he is great and that his predecessors, especially Biden and Obama, were weak and stupid. I liken Trump to a dog marking his territory with urine, fresh and higher up the tree trunk. Trump must be top dog.

The war with Iran was not fought to advance America's interests. It injured them, and we will settle for a weaker position than where we started. Trump will OK that, because it was not about our interests. He will pay a political price for his selfishness, but the U.S. will pay a bigger one. We have lost influence, credibility, alliances, national wealth, and lives.

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Easy Sunday: Part Two. The U.S. Department of Education suggests trade schools, not college

The U.S. Department of Education really did this poster. 

Look closely:

Notice the copper pipe work connecting nothing to nothing. And is this a radiator or a sink?

Notice the wrench in the woman's hand that morphs into a pipe.  Try buying one like that.

Notice the size of the pipe wrench the man is holding. The guy is strong!

Notice the odd blue-handled tool in her tool belt.  What does this do?

The two-part message embedded in this Department of Education advertisement is different from the denoted message that people might enter the trades, not go to college.

     1. When you use AI for anything, check its work. 

     2. The Department of Education, or at least with the people in the department left after Trump and DOGE gutted it, is exactly as worthless at Trump claimed it was. 

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Easy Sunday, part One: Trump's Saturday

This is what our president posted in the early hours of Saturday on Truth Social.

Stable genius.

1. A 22-second video depicting him throwing Stephen Colbert into a dumpster

Click

2. A reminder that Trump is still eying Greenland. It is longing? Menace?

3. Doubling down justifying his $1.776 billion theft of public money, a theft so corrupt that even some Republicans admit that it is wrong.

4. A doctored image of Democratic Representative Ro Khanna.

5. A gloating post insulting Republican U.S. Senator Thom Tillis -- who will be in office for seven more months.

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Heads up to Republicans: Trump is not a conservative.

Democrats cannot stop Trump's assault on our democracy.

Conservatives -- and there are a few left -- might. 

Democrats are largely unified in their opposition to President Trump's policies and actions. They oppose his tariffs, his wars, his abandonment of alliances, his ICE tactics, his politicization of the Justice Department, his attacks on health science, his pardons, and his openly corrupt self-serving grift. Lots to dislike.

Republican officeholders dismiss those criticisms. After all, the critics are Democrats, and the complaints are just partisan politics. 

Democrats' sputtering outrage is a feature in the minds of people who see politics as a tug of war between two parties.

Republican delight that Democrats lose battle after battle with Trump blinds inertia-Republicans to the fact that a Trump political victory is often contrary to what they really value. Trump isn't a conservative. He is a right-wing authoritarian populist, a very different thing. It is confusing for life-long Republicans because there is inertia to think that the GOP stands for smaller government, fiscal restraint, and freedom from government meddling in business and personal lives. The Republican brand has remained, but its policies have changed.

Republican conservatism still exists. The establishment Wall Street Journal and the libertarian-oriented Reason Magazine have partially broken free of Republican party inertia. The Wall Street Journal wants orderly, predictable government to support business; Reason magazine wants liberty. Trump wants neither. Both have been publishing commentary that sharply criticizes Trump for many of the things that Democrats criticize him for: tariffs imposed haphazardly and without congressional approval, ICE operations that ignore Constitutional protections, and crony corruption. Note the headlines in the top stories at Reason magazine the day before yesterday:

Here is the lead editorial for yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Neither the WSJ nor Reason changes thinking; they reflect thinking. They are bookmarks, showing that some ideas remain under the surface. The lawbreaking, authoritarian, crony-capitalist, corrupt part of the Trump government is offensive to conservatives. 

Conservatives don't share the ethnic and religious nationalism that is part of the Trump populist agenda. Trump's expresses a right-populist view of American heritage based on White, Protestant, English and Northern European ethnicity as the real American. Jews, Catholics, Latin Americans, Asians, and non-English speakers are inherently "other" in that view. Without acknowledging it openly, right-populism accepts the underlying premise of the Dred Scott decision: that some people are essentially and forever foreign. You are American by heritage, not by sharing a creed.

Conservatives favor consistency. They understand that if a Republican can abuse the rights of loathed Democrats and if a Republican can take away broadcast licenses of TV networks, and a Republican can play favorites with businesses, then amid the oscillation of political fortune, a Democrat can do the same to them. 

Democrats would profit by putting aside some of their own partisanship and see allies where they exist. In a Trump world, conservatives are allies. At some point Republicans who voted for Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Mitt Romney will wake up and realize they were enthralled by a con man. It is so obvious now that even a Republican senator can see it.

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Stay Classy

 

Election recap.

Denise Krause has almost certainly won.
It's a matter of math.

Chris Beck won.
Voters liked his voters pamphlet resume.

Denise Krause was one of five candidates for the Democratic nomination for state Senate District 3, the seat held by retiring Senator Jeff Golden.

Chris Beck was one of six candidates for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Representative in Oregon's 2nd congressional district. It is now likely that he had it won from the very beginning. The voters pamphlet won it for him.

It is theoretically possible that Tonia Moro could catch up with Krause, but I think it is nearly impossible. I don't know how many outstanding votes there are still to be counted, but it is likely a small enough number that it would take a massive shift of opinion in those final ballots for Moro to win. Candidate Kevin Stine reminded me of the likely number of votes outstanding:

--  In 2018, there were 16,212 Democratic voters that cast a ballot, amid a 49 percent turnout.

--  In 2022, there were 17,013 Democratic voters that cast a ballot, amid a 52 percent turnout.

--  In 2026, there are 17,215 Democratic voters tallied so far, amid a 54 percent turnout.

It looks like the overwhelming majority of the ballots have already been counted.

The post office delivered to the Jackson County election office all ballots they had as of election day. Let's imagine that there are as many as 1,000 votes still to be counted.  Likely about 30 percent of those will go to one of the other three candidates --  Ruvalcaba, Stine, or Crary -- the pattern of the currently counted votes. Only if those 700 remaining votes broke 450 to 250, or 65 percent to 35 percent, would Moro pick up the 210 votes needed to win. I am aware of no development that would change an essentially dead-even race into that kind of landslide among that group of voters who, in the last day or two of the election, decided to mail the ballot instead of dropping it off. 

Krause is smart to be patient and stand with the position that all the votes be counted before announcing victory, but behind the scenes she should be preparing her general election campaign.

Chris Beck won big, and he won nearly everywhere, even in places where he had a minimal campaign. 

He narrowly lost in the home counties of two of his opponents, but Beck won 18 of the 20 counties in the district, and won the two biggest ones, Jackson County by 19 points and Josephine by 14. He made himself visible across the district with some social media and a brief visit to each county, but the broad sweep of his win makes me think that the campaign was probably won on the day he filed and submitted his voters pamphlet material. 

Voters saw Democrats sharing the same essential message on policy matters and picked the candidate whose background shows some experience in government. He could mention having worked for John Kitzhaber and Barack Obama. He could mention degrees from Ivy League Brown University and Harvard's JFK School of Government. He had related job experience.

New York Times election coverage

He could have blown his advantage. His presence tailgating the town halls of U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley gave him some Eastern Oregon exposure, even in his short campaign. He has videos on social media showing him in Eastern Oregon settings. Those probably inoculated him from the charge that he had little current physical connection to the district, and none of his opponents hammered on this point. His home is now in the city of Phoenix in Jackson County, the largest county, and the one he did best in.

If any opponent had a chance to overcome the experience advantage reported in the voters pamphlet, it might have come from an opponent with a campaign highly focused on a popular issue for Democrats. This might have been a campaign like that of Republican gubernatorial candidate "Ed No Tax Diehl."

I don't know Diehl's overall policy goals -- I presume he is a typical Republican -- but at least a voter has clarity on one, clear, mentally sticky idea. If you know nothing else, you know that Diehl is anti-tax. Hate taxes, vote for Diehl.

Perhaps a Democratic opponent could have joined the other candidates in the usual policy array for Democrats, but concentrated his or her message on a singular idea that let voters "send a message." Perhaps the candidate would be the focused "anti-Iran-war" candidate, or the one stopping data centers that hog the region's electricity, or the one opposing the slow death of the region's hospitals because of diminished federal reimbursements. Could Mary Doyle, or more likely Rebecca Mueller, have won had she been understood by voters to be the expert on Medicaid reimbursements, and said that we had a crisis because Congressman Cliff Bentz's votes were putting Asante, Providence, Sky Lakes Medical, and St. Charles Medical out of business and it was literally a matter of life and death. Vote: Rebeca "Save our Hospitals" Mueller! It becomes an implied message: Vote Rebecca to save our hospitals. That approach might have firmly branded her to some meaningful outcome, refocusing attention away from who had experience in government, Beck's strong point. As it was, Beck had a point of differentiation in experience, revealed in the one piece of campaign material seen by every voter, the bare-bones voters pamphlet that leads off the description of each candidate with objective criteria of education, occupation, and prior government experience.

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