Democratic donors and activists

Democratic donors and activists vs. Democratic voters.

I attend enough Democratic fundraising events to have a feel for who shows up to fund campaigns, and why.

Donors at wine-and-cheese events skew old. They are mostly Boomers who are involved because some good cause or issue attracts them. Some are engaged because they are appalled by Trump and disappointed that their Republican social peers tolerate and enable him. They may be old school Democrats who were against the war in Vietnam back in the 1960s. They watched and admired Martin Luther King and carry that admiration to the present. Some are feminists who broke into the professions in the 1970s, or the people married to those women. Some are  people who support reproductive rights because they remember the bad old days. Possibly they celebrated Earth Day back in 1970 and have considered themselves environmentalists for fifty years. They think climate change is real and important. In Oregon they bemoan the summer forest fires and drought. A lot of them drive hybrid cars.

I know those people. They are my friends. I am one of them.

I don't exactly understand the people in their 20s and 30s who staff the organizations that people like me fund, but I see these people at events holding signs, marching, protesting, knocking on doors.  They care a lot about these issues. They expect to be alive to see climate disaster. They are on Facebook, like the older group, but also on different social media sites, like Instagram. They text a lot, instead of telephoning. They are impatient for change, and that I do understand. I was young and impatient myself once. Peace now. 

I get daily messages by email and phone from advocacy groups: Planned Parenthood, Emily's List, NARAL, League of Conservation Voters,, Sierra Club, ACLU, and a variety of groups advocating for wider health access and LGBTQ rights.  I observe at a distance the activities of labor union groups. Their endorsements and money are huge influences on Democrats.

Individual and group donor/advocates send deceptive market signals to politicians. Potentially we are the tip of an iceberg of like-minded people, so we represent the larger body. Possibly the broader public will show up to vote as we urge, if they just see enough of the ads and door-hanger brochures that donors pay for and activists deliver.

The assumption is wrong. We are different from the rank-and-file Democratic voter, and in some respects the opposite of them. The vocal leadership of activist groups embraced #MeToo, "Defund the Police", the Green New Deal, abortion rights, de-commissioning nuclear power plants, banning drilling for oil and gas, stopping pipelines, and sharply reducing  timber harvests. They supported higher pay for public employees and more public benefits for everyone, including immigrants. The public hears that message from donors, issue advocates, and the most articulate and media-savvy of Democratic politicians. Those are people on the progressive, urban left. 

Ruy Teixeira's superb The Liberal Patriot newsletter reports on an NBC poll. A candidate who supports fully funding the police with the resources they need has 75% support; only 11% like hearing a message of defunding. A candidate who supports expanding domestic oil and gas production gets 69%-17% support. A candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders gets net-negative support, 33%-39%. AOC endorsed candidates lose 22%-39%. Trump is negative 33%-47%

The position of Democrats on abortion--at least in the early weeks of pregnancy--is popular. But Democrats who feel a moral urgency on climate, policing, gender, and other issues have not yet made the sale to the general public. Older donors and younger activists have every right to advocate for their positions, and we do so. I hear lots of talk about holding Democratic politicians' feet to the fire. Donors and issue advocates feel righteous about it. The problem is that Democratic candidates get burnt feet, then lose elections. 

Democracy, if we can keep it, is self-correcting. If Democrats lose badly enough presenting ideas people don't support, new articulate and charismatic leaders will arise from the ashes. 

Tomorrow: Democrats should not despair. Republican activists are worse. Trump may save Democrats again.

America is at War

Americans are looking at Ukraine. 

We are going through a period of moral clarity. Russia is uniquely bad. Ukraine is heroic. 

Americans forget: We are at war. We are nearly always at war.

With Ukraine front and center, other conflicts have dropped out of sight, but they are still going on. War is a tool in the great game of geopolitical advantage and disadvantage. We forget about the tragedy in Yemen. Could Americans find Yemen on an unmarked map? Do we know what is happening there?

In 2015 under President Obama, the U.S. began active support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition which had begun airstrikes against Yemen. We are the primary supplier of Saudi weapons and we provide intelligence and command-and-control operational support for their air campaign. Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, Amnesty International, and Médicines Sans Frontières all report intentional targeting of civilians, including hospitals and humanitarian aid facilities. They report the Saudi coalition uses cluster bombs in crowded civilian areas, a war crime.

The Bad Old Days

My post yesterday drew Herb Rothschild's attention. He has been an advocate for Civil Rights, the environment, and peace for over five decades.  Rothschild grew up in Louisiana and was a professor of English at LSU. He just published a book that describes his participation in the Civil Rights era in Louisiana, The Bad Old Days. He worked in the peace movement in Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, and now at his home in Southern Oregon.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

A day or two before you published yesterday’s blog about Tulsi Gabbard’s opposition to our nation’s foreign policy and particularly what she sees as our pushing Russia into invading Ukraine, there was an op ed in the New York Times about her by Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at The Newmark School of Journalism of the City University of New York (https://nyti.ms/37VYIme). Beinart faulted people on both the Left and the Right, including Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, Keith Olbermann and Whoopi Goldberg, for calling her (and Tucker Carlson) a traitor.

Beinart mentioned something about Gabbard you didn’t: she served on active duty in Iraq and her experience there made her a confirmed foe of U.S. militarism. He quoted her as saying that what she witnessed there “changed my life completely, as an individual as well as my perspective on the world.”

I can resonate with that. Unlike Gabbard, I won’t give Putin a pass for invading Ukraine. War is a crime, and I regard anyone who chooses to start one—including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Donald Trump—as a war criminal. But like her and many others, including NYT columnist Thomas Friedman (see https://nyti.ms/3LP4Agy), I wrote in Ashland.news about deliberate U.S./NATO provocation. See, for example, Ashland News and again here.

Beyond the immediate matter of whether we might have prevented the suffering of Ukrainians by acceding to Russia’s repeated requests that we pledge not to keep open the prospect of NATO membership for yet another country on Russia’s border, I resonate with Gabbard’s general denunciation of what you called “America’s military and foreign policy establishment” but which I would write as “military/foreign” policy establishment. The two are inextricably intertwined.

We go to war more than any other nation. Further, we promote war-making by selling weapons to other nations—for example, Saudi Arabia’s long-running war on Yemen, in which the casualties dwarf those in Ukraine. From 2017 through 2021, we sold over $52 billion of arms, more than twice what Russia, the #2 merchant of death, sold. Sales to the Saudis were 23% of our total.

The close nexus between the military-industrial complex and those who make our foreign policy isn’t hard to document. For example, a think tank named the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) lists its donors on its website. In FY2021, its two biggest donors (both >$500,000) were Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and the Dept. of Defense. I’ll conclude this piece by listing those associated with CNAS who’ve entered the Biden Administration:

· Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
· Ely Ratner, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense
· Susanna V. Blume, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense
· David Cohen, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
· Derek Chollet, Counselor of the U.S. Department of State
· Colin Kahl, Under Secretary for Defense
· Peter Harrell, Senior Director for International Economics and Competitiveness on the National Security Council staff
· Elizabeth Rosenberg, Counselor to the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury focused on international issues
· Kayla M. Williams, Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs

America is not done with Tulsi Gabbard

She says the elites are lying to us. 

The anti-establishment conspiratorial left meets the anti-establishment conspiratorial right.

Tulsi Gabbard was lost in the scrum of Democratic candidates in 2020. She isn't lost anymore. She has a niche. On Fox.

Bernie, Warren, Klobuchar, Moulton, Delaney, Booker, Harris, Gabbard, Steyer, Bennet, Williamson, Buttigieg, Gillibrand, O'Rourke, Yang, Swalwell, Delaney, Ryan, Inslee, Bullock, Sestack, de Blasio. 

  

That isn't all of the 2020 Democratic candidates. A close reader will notice that I didn't list Jeff Merkley, Julian Castro, John Hickenlooper, or Michael Bloomberg. They were bonafide candidates, but I only list the people I personally saw in New Hampshire. I also list John Delaney twice. I do that because he had far more Town Hall events than anyone else, not that it helped him. Like his name, he hardly got noticed once, much less twice. 

Tulsi Gabbard's name is there in the scrum.  She dropped out in March, 2020. She didn't catch on either.

The failure of a candidate to get attention is less due to candidate competence than it is to whether candidates had an established brand that caused them to stand out. To a casual observer, they all said approximately the same things. They all wanted to expand health care, thought billionaires should pay more in taxes, thought Black Americans faced prejudice, and supported Roe v. Wade.

The fact that Kamala Harris didn't get traction is not that she was a "poor candidate." She got lost in the crowd. So did Tulsi Gabbard.

Tulsi Gabbard had two elements that might have made her stand out. One is that she included the names of Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton but also Obama and Biden, in her denunciation of America's military and foreign policy establishment. She voiced attitudes I had not heard since the 1960s, a broad-brush condemnation of the whole American military-industrial-intelligence complex. She was unique in her partisan "disloyalty." It wasn't just Republican hawks who lied to us; Democrats did, too. They are all corrupt liars.

The second element was her striking appearance and manner. She is wears solid primary colors--red, white, blue, black. She has a calm, deep voice. She looks like a Fox News anchor or commentator, but she doesn't share their tone of high drama. She sounds serene in her earnest self-confidence. 

She comments regularly on Fox. I have not seen her praise Trump there, but a Fox commentator need not do that. She dislikes what Fox News dislikes, and that's enough. She criticizes Biden on foreign policy, saying America provoked Russian into invading Ukraine. She criticizes Kamala Harris on criminal prosecutions. She says the left is godless. She slams Mitt Romney and tells him to resign from the senate. She criticizes Ukraine and its medical labs. She criticizes the fact that she is criticized; she says she is a victim of cancel culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ--MV21WAc

She says American Democrats have "a F-You" attitude to the American public.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS7ggmWDOwc

She tells Tucker Carlson that Biden's comment hoping Putin would leave office reveals the truth that this is a war of regime change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8kHJ2-D5uA

She has a style: She looks straight at the camera. Like Liz Cheney, she is an uneasy fit for either political party. She has a platform and a popular message of profound distrust of political elites and the foreign policy establishment. They are lying to us, she says. They are trying to drag us into foreign wars and they hate us. There is a market for that view on the Tucker Carlson right: Populist, conspiratorial, obliquely-anti-Semitic, resentful of elites. There is also a market for it on the left. There is still an anti-war left. Like the right, it believes powerful elites are running the country and dragging us into wars. 

If things go badly in Ukraine--and maybe they already have--we will be seeing more of Tulsi Gabbard on TV, and maybe in New Hampshire. This next time she will get noticed.

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End of globalization

 End of an era. 

You don't know the tide has turned until you look back and see that it already turned.

     "Let's ride it up and sell it when it starts to go down."

I heard that sentence often from new clients during my career as a financial advisor. They would tell me to buy something that caught their interest because it had gone up in price. My clients were intelligent, reasonable people and their request sounded reasonable to them. However, there is an enormous contradiction embedded in the sentence. The going down trend is only evident after it has gone down. At the start the trend is still going up.

Lawrence Fink is the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world. His letter to shareholders caught attention. He said it was the end of an era for globalization. Several things happened simultaneously which reveal an enormous weakness in this sixty-year trend toward globalization in the post-WWII world. The world rode the trend up to the point where its fragility is too much to bear. COVID, war, and even a container ship stuck in the Suez canal exposed how delicate the world economy had become.

Businesses seek efficiency, and supposedly we all profit from the growing prosperity that results. Businesses want the lowest price from suppliers and they don't want the burden of inventory. Supply chains were getting so efficient and reliable that business sent the manufacture of parts, and sometimes final assembly, to Asia. Shipping by container is dependable and cheaper than paying American labor. Just-in-time inventory is efficient: Why pay to own and warehouse inventory when container ships and trucks could have goods ready when you chose. Capital, too, is globalized. Why invest in good opportunities in the USA when there are spectacular ones overseas, where companies have cheaper labor, where there is no EPA, no OSHA, no labor unions?

The transformation of global capital had consequences. Inflation declined and then disappeared. Business and final consumers had market power to insist on the cheapest and most efficient supplier. Walmart was notorious for insisting on the cheapest supplier, and then, when the supplier had made the factory investments to supply at the cheapest possible price, demand that they supply it yet more cheaply. Otherwise, they would shop for someone new, leaving stranded that company's investment made to supply Walmart. Walmart customers loved that. It was hardball capitalism. Customers, too, demand cheap.

Francis Fukuyama wrote the highly praised book, The End of History. It describes the final triumph of modern global interconnection and efficiency. We had largely solved the problem of war and conflict. We could get along in healthy, efficient prosperity. Countries would become liberal democracies because everybody's needs were being served. Things were so cheap at Walmart.

We know better now.

Fink may be right and now we are experiencing now the reversal of great multi-year trends. Treasury rates have moved up--but it may just be a jiggle in a trend that will continue indefinitely. We don't know yet.

Mortgage rates have turned faster than treasury rates. Were you waiting to sell your house until home prices stopped going up? That nice young couple who might have paid top dollar a few months ago, made possible by low principal and interest payments, may be rethinking their options.  Or this, too, might just be a jiggle in a long-term trend of low interest rates. 

The world is not as safe a place to live, to invest, to manufacture, as we had gotten accustomed. There has been a change in the trend of our thinking. That change has taken place. The invasion of Ukraine reminds us that wars and revolutions are not reserved for skirmishes between small countries. 

The trend of  putting a company's critical manufacturing offshore is now firmly understood to be a high-risk decision--perhaps a firing offense for a V.P. of manufacturing. American auto manufacturers cannot build cars because computer chips aren't being made and delivered from factories in South Korea and Taiwan. Customers are paying above sticker price. People have money and they want things that aren't being made. So we have inflation.

Maybe inflation, too, is a blip, but it doesn't feel insignificant or harmless. I paid $70 to fill up the tank of my Honda Ridgeline pickup truck. With inflation at 6%, while the cash in my accounts pays zero, I feel like I am falling behind, because I am. There is a mismatch between bond yields and inflation. The mismatch is what I would expect when the big trends turn. Eventually treasury rates, inflation rates, and mortgage rates will come into sync. Probably.  But not now.

Everything may be changing.

 

Reversing an "activist" court.

  Lincoln, in 1863: A restatement of American purpose:

    "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

That purpose was codified in the Constitution in the 14th Amendment, 1868:

     ". . .nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The purpose of the original Constitution was to construct a workable republic. The Bill of Rights amendments added a second purpose, the protection of liberties. After the Civil War the country added a third purpose: Guaranteeing equality.

Equality has been a troubling goal of national purpose. It is easier to recite as a catechism of belief than it is to express in daily life. Humans don't have equal feelings about one another and people aren't equal in biology, social standing, or abilities. Americans typically love themselves and their families more than others, i.e. unequally. Americans seek opportunity. We help our kids "get ahead." Our whole capitalist economic system is built around striving and self-interest. Humans tend to view differences in a hierarchical manner. Some things are better than others, some things are good and bad, some clean and unclean, some are customary and some are not. And yet, notwithstanding all that, we are equal, supposedly. 

Nashville Tennessean

The Supreme Court for the past 65 years has been described as "activist," especially by people who have disagreed with their decisions. In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 the Court found that racial segregation was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. The very fact of segregation created implicit disparagement. 

The Supreme Court in 1965 and 1967 decided two more cases, Loving v. Virginia and Griswold v. Connecticut. Both found constitutional rights that put issues beyond the power of legislatures to decide. Loving said the 14th Amendment guaranteed the right of people of different races to marry each other. Virginia and several other states prohibited it. The prohibition probably reflected the values of a majority of citizens at the time. The Court said that didn't matter. 

Connecticut in that era had retained a multitude of "Blue Laws" that reflected the power of the Catholic Church in Connecticut politics. Even in 1971-73, when I lived in Connecticut, stores closed on Sundays for every item except milk, diapers, newspapers, and other things. States--Massachusetts, too--had laws regulating and sometimes prohibiting the use of contraception. The Supreme Court said that the private acts of couples in the "marital bed" were part of an umbra of privacy found in the 4th Amendment.  Married people, at least, could get contraception. 

These Court decisions were back in the news, challenged this week by senators questioning the addition of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court. They cited as wrongly decided by an activist court their finding a constitutional right to use contraception, to marry outside one's race, to consensual homosexual acts, to same-sex marriage. Those are not the real target of the criticism. The real target is a constitutional right to abortion and the body of precedent before and after Roe v. Wade that guarantees the right to an abortion and later for homosexual rights. 

People who think "the Court went too far," are in political ascendance. They argue those "rights" should be subject to popular majorities to regulate or prohibit. Abortion and voting rights are already on the way out in some states. Gender transition and the equality of homosexuals likely are next, in some states. Attitudes have moved at different paces. I suspect no state will try to outlaw interracial marriage, although some people and institutions find it distasteful. People will move to compatible states. National businesses will make business decisions on what state laws are intolerable to customers and employees. We will see boycotts and claims that national companies are acting like bullies.

Whatever happens with the Griswold decision, no state will try to outlaw contraception. That ship sailed.

Clarence Thomas

We knew that judges are politicians in robes. 

We knew the Supreme Court wasn't fair and objective. We consoled ourselves hoping it was middle of the road and reasonable.  We can't pretend anymore. 

Media discussion of court decisions give the game away. Of course they were partisan legislators in robes. Controversial decisions make reference to "Republican-appointed" judges and "Democrat-appointed" judges. Congress is a place of gridlock on cultural issues. It can tax and spend because it must. Otherwise the government shuts down. Decisions regarding cultural mores--race, sex, marriage-- drifted to the judicial system to resolve. 

Clarence Thomas has become a problem for the court. He is like the little boy at kindergarten who insists on telling schoolmates that there isn't a Santa Claus. He reveals a secret: We are partisan, and I am shameless about it. Like the kindergarten teacher, the Chief Justice is powerless to stop him. The Bush v. Gore decision in December 2000 laid bare the naked power of the court to find some supposedly-neutral reason for making a partisan decision. The election in Florida was essentially a tie. The 5-4 Court voted Republican.  

The Court, especially under institutionalist Chief Justice John Roberts, attempted to repair the damage to the Court's legitimacy. Roberts leaned against his own partisan ideology to stop the Court from over-ruling Congress to end the Affordable Care Act. That made the Court look objective and reserved. After all, it didn't overrule a law that got a House majority, 60 votes in the senate, and a presidential signature. It also served a partisan political purpose. By the time the ACA got to the Supreme Court, the law was popular. He protected the GOP from itself.

The nomination process that put Trump-appointed judges onto the court revealed the partisan reality under the veneer. Roberts could talk "balls and strikes objectivity," but the entire GOP message was partisan victory. Elections have consequences, Lindsay Graham crowed. We won, you lost. Still, there was opportunity for pretense. The selection process might be partisan, but once on the Court, judges supposedly change. They put on black robes of impartiality. 

Clarence Thomas spills the beans. His wife actively lobbies the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows with multiple text messages urging overthrow of the 2020 election. She pushed Q-Anon theories of sending boatloads of Democrats to GITMO. She said the future of the republic required voiding the election. Mark Meadows returned the messages and reported what the White House was doing. These messages were already revealed to the committee, but Justice Thomas later voted to allow Trump to keep more communications like these, by others and perhaps his wife, secret. Democrats are appalled. Republicans praise Thomas. Republicans insist there is no conflict of interest, no legitimate reason to investigate what Trump and others did, and no reason for Thomas to recuse himself.

It is a high-visibility, high-stakes partisan mess. There is no hiding it. Hereafter, any Supreme Court decision relating to Trump and January 6 will be tainted. If Thomas is part of a majority, it is tainted and illegitimate, because Thomas was defending Trump and his wife's reputation and perhaps freedom. If he is part of a minority and outvoted, then it suggests the alternative, that Thomas was wrong and outvoted by more objective conservatives, but still a bad apple on the Court.

There is no time to rebuild the credibility of the Court for non-controversial objectivity. Its docket will revisit some of the most controversial items in the culture war: Abortion, homosexual rights, inter-racial marriage, contraception, and affirmative action.

The Supreme Court will announce their rulings. They will have as much credibility for objectivity and fairness as Clarence Thomas has. Not too much.

Profile in courage and compassion.

Good job, Utah Governor Spencer Cox.  

He is a Republican. 

 

     "When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion."

                 Spencer Cox

I praised Utah's governor once before, in January.  He was Utah's top election officer for the 2020 election, and a witness to Utah's election, held by mail. He said publicly it was fair and free. He was elected governor in that election. Vouching for an election conducted by mail made him a target for criticism. Speaking as Utah's new governor, he went on to make the broader point, that claims of widespread fraud elsewhere in the country were false and dangerous. I quoted from his State of the State address:

As a conservative, I believe that we should always work to make constitutional rights more accessible, not less. I am very proud that voter participation has increased since I became lieutenant governor and now governor.

Governor Cox is an outlier. Republicans nationwide remain wary of saying anything positive about the operation of the 2020 election or efforts to make voting more accessible. That includes officeholders who were elected in that very election. Cox surprised me again this week. He expressed empathy for Utah youth dealing with gender dysphoria. The issue of gender transition is one of the talking-point issues we see voiced this week in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. GOP senators positioning themselves for a 2024 presidential run are trying out accusations about child pornography, GITMO, and issues relating to gender. "What is a woman?," Ted Cruz asked. It was a "gotcha" question. 

Gender is a slam-dunk issue for Republicans, especially this week. There is little political risk for piling on in disapproval or a rush to prohibit trans women participating in sports, something that seems uncomfortably weird to some people. Boys in the girls' locker room! Junk hanging out! ! Unfair advantage! Homosexual agenda! Predator! Deviant!  There is an unusual and difficult case in the news. Swimmer Lia Thomas had been a male varsity college athlete before transitioning to a woman. She then began competing in women's events as a varsity athlete and is breaking swimming records. 

In the face of this political opportunity Governor Cox vetoed a bill passed by the Utah legislature that would have banned transgender girls and women from participating in girls and women's sports in Utah. The law treated a problem that didn't exist. It targeted and further stigmatized vulnerable people. His words project a tone that is almost totally absent in today's politics. Compassion. 

He explains his veto:

"I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion. I also try to get proximate and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56. 

75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah. Four transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah. One transgender student playing girls sports. 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality. 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide. Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That's what all of this is about. Four kids who aren't dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.

Women's sports rules have not yet figured out how to deal with the competing interests in a complicated situation. It is a work in progress. The politically smart thing is to join the crowd and denounce trans females in athletics. Pick on the oddballs. Cox did the hard thing instead. The compassionate thing.

Good for him.

Republicans in the state legislature are preparing today to override his veto.

Ka-POW! Poor Mo Brooks

Mo Brooks hitched his wagon to an ingrate. 

Brooks gave him everything. It wasn't enough. Trump dumped him. 

Just three days ago I posted how Alabama's U.S. Senate candidate Mo Brooks published a 90-second video swearing allegiance to Trump. He criticized his primary election opponents for not being all-in with Trump.

Brooks was already exceptional in his fidelity to Trump. U.S. Representative Brooks had spoken at the January 6 rally wearing body armor. He urged the faithful to go to the Capitol and take names and kick ass. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?," he asked the crowd. “Will you fight for America?” 

He wholly endorsed the Big Lie. As a member of the House, he led the effort to discard Biden electoral votes. If elected U.S. senator, he promised to vote to replace RINO Mitch McConnell.  

Click Here

I chose Mo Brooks as the example of  division within the GOP: The Trump team versus the not-quite-Trump team. The GOP division would be hard to repair so long as there were people like Brooks condemning the less-than-100% Trump faithful, and so long as a majority of Republican voters believed Trump.

Ka-POW. Trump sucker-punched Brooks.

Trump withdrew his endorsement. Brooks wasn't good enough for Trump. 

Brooks fought hard for Trump through January 6, but said the last chance for Trump was whether or not Congress accepted the Biden ballots on that day. Trump disagrees. The 2020 election should be voided, now and anytime, Trump says. Trump noted that Brooks had told a rally crowd in August that the America should put the 2020 election behind us. Brooks got boos from the crowd. That speech appears to be the breaking point for Trump. Brooks said the voters should "move on." Trump isn't moving on. 

Trump said Brooks had gone woke.

Mo Brooks was a leader on the 2020 Election Fraud and then, all of sudden, during the big rally in Alabama, he went “woke” and decided to drop everything he stood for—when he did, the people of Alabama dropped him, and now I have done so also. The people get it, but unfortunately, Mo doesn’t.

The backstory emerges from Mo Brooks. Trump kept pressuring Brooks throughout 2021 to do something, somehow to rescind the 2020 election, now. Nothing less.

 Brooks says Trump asks for the impossible.

President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency. As a lawyer, I've repeatedly advised President Trump that January 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period.

Republicans keep being taught a lesson, but they don't learn it. They keep being burned. Trump is a taker. A user. He is in this for himself. He is the worst of bad leaders. He demands of Brooks--like he demanded of Mike Pence and Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp and Doug Ducey and Bill Barr—they do something illegal and dishonorable with the spotlight of the law and the judgement of history on their faces. 

This is a good sign for Democrats for 2022 and 2024. No one is better at staying center stage than Donald Trump. Trump isn't giving up and he is publicly breaking with Republicans who try to "move on." GOP candidates in anything like competitive districts need to distance themselves from Trump. Trump isn't cooperating. Trump isn't moving on. 

 

Return to States' Rights

   14th Amendment: 

      ". . . nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The North won the Civil War. Black Americans are Americans, and states need to protect equality.

Then the long war of resistance began. The weapons of that war are "states' rights" and federalism.

In some arenas of life federalism works well and makes sense. Imagine 20% of the students living in college dorms are smokers, while 80% of students want to live in a no-smoking dorm. The university might ban smoking in the dorms; majority rules, and besides, smoking is a nuisance. That decision leaves 20% unhappy.  Another tactic is for a university to label 20% of the dormitory space as "smoker dorms," and the rest no-smoking. Students can choose the dorm situation they prefer. 

Or imagine 20% of the students want a dorm with an 8:00 p.m. curfew and quiet zone for undisturbed study; 80% think that is ridiculous. Can the university designate a quiet dorm? The point isn't about smoking or curfews. It is about recognizing people want different things.

We are undergoing a major reversal of national policy as regards constitutional rights and state discretion. The impetus is coming from the political right, and it is showing up in their success getting Federalist Society judges placed on courts, especially the Supreme Court. It is returning power to the states. They are using federalism as the mechanism to roll back equal protections for racial, sexual, and other marginalized minorities. 

U.S. Senator Michael Braun, Republican of Indiana, was on a rhetorical and philosophical roll. He was touting federalism as a happy solution to the politics of abortion. The Supreme Court is already letting Texas effectively ban abortion. Other states are following suit. 

He was specifically asked by reporters if he agreed with Supreme Court decisions that determined there was a constitutional right for married couples to use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut) and for inter-racial marriage (Lovings v. Virginia). He said abortion "should never have been federalized." He applied the broader federalism philosophy to the contraception and inter-racial cases. He said letting states "express themselves" is the "beauty of the system." He went on: 

Well, you can list a whole host of issues, when it comes down to whatever they are, I’m going to say that they’re not going to all make you happy within a given state, but we’re better off having states manifest their points of view rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did.

Oops. This wasn't a mistake. It was a "tell." He was stating a political philosophy and had not thought through its implications. Indiana voters don't want to outlaw inter-racial marriage. Braun realized his error. 

But Braun's slip here is a window into a larger philosophical movement in the GOP. The Court has already agreed that states can gerrymander congressional and state legislative districts to reduce the voting power of minorities. Several justices agree that state legislatures have plenary power to assign electoral votes regardless of the outcome of the presidential election in that state. There may be a majority for that. Nationally voters seem to have accepted a right to same-sex marriage, but there are some states, and certainly areas within states, where that is unpopular. The constitutional right of same-sex marriage is recent and perhaps unsettled within a conservative Supreme Court. This could become a matter for local control. 

April, 1969

Use of contraception by married couples had been a local matter until the Griswold decision in 1965. Their use by married couples is a federal constitutional right based on a thin excuse of marital privacy. The Griswold decision has strong critics. They say it may be a popular policy outcome, but it is not a right found in the constitution. I don't expect any state to ban use of contraception if the matter lost its federal constitutional status. However, the constitutional right to contraception could be a test case for reversing a multitude past decisions.

There are two limiting factors on widespread return of power to the states. One was revealed by Senator Braun. It is bad politics to say a state should have local control to ban something popular. The other is guns. There is significant overlap between the people who want states to be able to ban abortion and the people who do not want states to be able to ban guns. Supporters of states' rights have that in the back of their minds. Let's not get carried away here.

Federalism isn't a principle. It is a device for getting the policy outcome one prefers. 

 

Democratic Candidate: 2024

Jon Stewart for President. Seriously? Yes.

      

     "The Democratic nominee might be someone from politics. A governor or senator. But maybe someone new. A businessperson, or someone from entertainment." 

          Senator Ron Wyden, February, 2022

I had expected Senator Wyden to suggest names of fellow senators. He didn't. He thought Democrats would do well to look outside the box of usual suspects.

Click here: 50 minutes

I will suggest a name. Jon Stewart.

I heard Jon Stewart on a podcast for an hour with journalist Kara Swisher, which brought him back to mind. I first mentioned his name as a potential candidate five years ago. He was then closing out a long run as a comedy host on TV. He was a celebrity. He did serious commentary, but his brand was comedy. He would make bank-shot comments on the hypocrisy of American politics, culture, and especially the media. He was ironic. He did satire.  He put distance between himself and his comments, which is the whole point of irony. Did he really mean that???? Jon Stewart back then always had an "out." Don't take me seriously, I'm just a comedian. 

That was then. Now his behavior--and increasingly his brand--is social commentary. He sounds like an earnest man aching for America to be its best. He sounds like a president.

Some things have changed in the past five years. 

****He isn't a brash young kid who got older on his show, but still the guy teasing the grown-ups. He is a healthy-looking 59. 

****He has been off the air and quietly shed his brand as a comedian. He now has a serious show, The Problem With Jon Stewart, on Apple TV.  

****Zelenskyy* happened. Zelenskyy opened the eyes of the world that comics sometimes have the skillset of a serious leader, a person with depth who can deliver a serious message.

****We saw the maturation of the kind of political comedy show Stewart pioneered, with successors like Jon Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Samantha Bee. They changed how Americans understand political comedy. The proliferation of knock-off shows clarified that their purpose isn't simply to make people laugh. It is to make people think. 

Stewart has a drain-the-swamp willingness to take on both Republican and Democratic shibboleths and hypocrisy. He can "press reset" on the Democratic orthodoxy, and call "BS" where he sees it. He has been doing it for three decades. His brand is truth-teller, not loyalist to inertia. Jon Stewart has been dealing with serious public policy issues, on a national stage, for most of his adult life. He is not a newcomer to the issues and problems facing America. He has been doing what officeholders, serious journalists, and academic policy analysts do. They gather information, draw conclusions, and share their opinions.  We know Jon Stewart's take on the world far better than we do 95 of the 100 senators. Stewart is prepared for the job in a way that Donald Trump was not. We are prepared for Jon Stewart in a way we were not prepared for Donald Trump.

What would Jon Stewart need to do to make the transition into a serious contender for the Democratic nomination for president? He would need to go to New Hampshire and hold Town Halls. 

This isn't hard. Would people show up? Yes. For him they would.  Lindsay Graham got five people to attend his events. John Delaney, a former U.S. Representative, got dozens to come to his. Jeb Bush got several dozen. Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar got about a hundred. Pete Buttigieg got several hundred. Candidate Donald Trump got two thousand. I expect Jon Stewart to do as well as Donald Trump, or better.

What will he say?  I would like to find out.

I wrote two posts making the argument for Jon Stewart back in 2016.  It was a good idea then and a better one now:

Jon Stewart for President:    http://peterwsage.blogspot.com/2016/11/jon-stewart-for-president.html

Yes, Jon Stewart:     http://peterwsage.blogspot.com/2016/11/yes-jon-stewart-television-worth.html

Ukraine President Zelensky's name is transliterated imperfectly into American English.  The "yy" sound at the end of his name is pronounced in the "soft ee" form, as I learned to pronounce it at Russian class at Medford High School.  This is how it is spelled in the official English language version of the Ukraine government website.  I will spell it this way hereafter in the blog.

MAGA versus RINO

      "That's the battle across America, McConnell versus Trump, in a war for the heart and soul of the Republican Party."

             Alabama Senate candidate Mo Brooks

Click HERE; 90 Second ad

Donald Trump may seize defeat once again.

MAGA vs. RINO.

Democrats are in a tough spot politically. The well-educated White progressives in liberal strongholds are confident they have the moral high ground on climate, borders, policing, racial justice, gender fluidity, and reproductive rights. Democratic candidates who are compliant with the orthodoxy have first claim on campaign money from unions and issue-oriented activists.  

This creates a problem for Democrats outside urban and college-town settings. Democratic orthodoxy is ahead of the median Democratic voter, and more so the general election voter. Democratic orthodoxy is more royalist than the king. It is more anti-racist than are most Black Americans. It is more indulgent of immigration illegality than are voters in immigrant communities. The orthodox are more critical of race-conscious policing than are voters in communities of color. Democrats are in sync with the leaders of issue groups, not voters. 

Oregonlive.com

Oregon is a microcosm.  The money and organizational support that makes a plausible primary candidate hurts them with voters outside cities and with voters who are less committed to the positions of interest groups. Not every Democrat is adamant that abortions at 23 weeks are OK. Not every Democrat thinks Lia Thomas should compete as a woman. Not every Democrat is on board that climate is an immediate crisis. Both Oregon Democratic gubernatorial candidates Tobias Read and Tina Kotek have told me they know they must present themselves as agents of change, in better touch with rural Oregon. They say they know vandalism and homeless encampments in Portland, COVID shutdowns, and state government delays in processing unemployment checks exhausted Oregon voters. They know it but cannot abandon their base voters. They quibble. It isn't reset.

The national Democratic message is in sync with Democratic interest groups, not with the wider voting public. Joe Biden's limitations as a spokesperson exacerbates the problem. He communicates plodding mediocrity and weakness. Democrats cannot pass legislation, and if they do, they cannot explain it. They chase doomed legislation, highlighting what they could not accomplish. There is a national consensus: Democrats will lose big in 2022. Maybe not.

Trump may save Democrats. 

Trump has not let up. He is Captain Ahab: Relentless and maniacal. He calls Mitch McConnell a weak, corrupt RINO. He engages actively in GOP primaries to purge the Republicans of Reagan, Bush, Cheney, and Romney elements. Trump endorses the most extreme loyalists in primaries. A Republican voter cannot help but see Trump's work. Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, tells the story of the pressure put on him to overturn the election. Bill Barr tells his story of an "unfit" president. 

Republican officeholders and voters are losing their safe harbor of "Not-Trump, but Trump-adjacent." There had been a middle ground position expressing concern about Trump's tweets. A candidate could say they acknowledge "Biden is president" without saying he won the election. They could say they are anti-Biden so will vote GOP, period. It could work but would work better if Trump would disappear. He doesn't.  Republican primary fights are flushing out the mumblers. A candidate is either with Trump or against him. A candidate is MAGA or RINO. 

In 2016 there was talk of "grownups in the room" and the likelihood that Trump would become "presidential." That potential is mostly gone. Trump won't surround himself with moderating forces. Trump has gone to war against them. 

Both political parties seem determined to lose the 2022 and 2024 election. Voters may have a choice. Democrats are weak and ineffectual, but Republicans are dangerous and crazy.