Pelosi wants a commission on the Capitol insurrection to provide "Security, Security, Security"

The Democrats have a leadership dilemma. Today's example, Nancy Pelosi. 

Pelosi actually did take more progressive positions not so long ago. When she led the House Democrats to winning a majority in 2006, she wasn't notably aggressive in trying to reign in the Bush-Cheney Administration during its last two years. But when Obama was elected President, Pelosi was key in pushing hard for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and even for the public option at a moment when the Obama-Biden Administration seemed to be on the verge of throwing in the towel. Ryan Grim gives a substantial account of that process in his We've Got People (2019).

But becoming House Speaker again when the Democrats took the House majority again in the 2016 election, Pelosi spent half a year fighting against impeachment hearings for Trump, ludicrously talking about how Trump was "self-impeaching". And she was pushed into that by some of the most conservative Democrats, who had been her excuse for not wanting to alienate moderate voters by actually fighting Republicans. The mainstream media tend to treat her as a brilliant leader and "master legislator". But in a year where the Democrats won the Presidency with a record number of votes and even taking a majority in the Senate by (among other things) winning two Senatorial elections in Georgia, the Democrats lost seats in the House, leaving them with a more narrow majority than before.

After Trump sent a lynch mob to invade the Capitol, some of whom wanted to murder Pelosi in particular, chanting "Kill the infidels!" that galvanized her into the second Trump impeachment, during which she took a surprisingly resolute stand.

Apparently that's over now. She made a statement on the insurrection yesterday calling for ... appointing a independent committee to look into it (Dear Colleague: Security, Security, Security 02/15/2021).

The House and the Senate can and should investigate the January 6 insurrection. I'm not much inclined to criticize the Democrats for not calling witnesses in the impeachment trial. But they definitely should hold extensive public Congressional hearings to both uncover the facts and let the public see in detail what the witnesses have to say.

The Republicans during the Obama-Biden Administration held more hearings on the pseudoscandal of Benghazi! Benghazi!1 BENGHAZI!!! than Congress held on the Pearl Harbor attacks.

Now the Democratic Speaker of the House defaults to her version of, let's appoint a commission to look at it.

Lindsey Grahmm wants a commission, too. We know, because he said so in the same breath he said we need to find out what Nancy Pelosi knew about the insurrection and when she knew it. And Pelosi herself ... agrees with him.

We have to give Pelosi credit, though. It took her all of five weeks after the insurrection to revert back to her tired business-as-usual clichés.

And with that comes the "bipartisan" rhetoric than in the current asymmetric partisan polarization just sounds to Republicans like preemptive surrender. Here are a couple of excerpts from her statement:

George Washington was the patriarch of our country ... who with his prescience, cautioned against political parties at war with their own government, warning that through parties, “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

So parties are un-American? What? Yes, this is from the Democratic leader in the House of Representtives in 2021 in the wake of a lynch mob invading the Capitol to kill - among others - her. Also: George Washington was Patiarch as well as President?

The next paragraph is the kind of thing that gives the use of historical imagery in politics a bad name:

Abraham Lincoln saved our country from division by winning a war and the battle of ideas. He wisely said that if division and destruction ever come to America, it will come from within. In his Lyceum Address, he said, “If [danger] ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

We need to give her credit for getting that Lincoln quotation right, since it has often been quoted in a similar but not exact form.

But besides the Lincoln-quote trivia, the quote is from his famous Lyceum Address of 1838, which was dedicated to denouncing lynch mobs by defenders of slavery. It was very definitely polemical and partisan. It was not some nicey-nice appeal to bland nonpartisanship. (See also: Harold Reutter, Abraham Lincoln warned of mob rule in 1838 Grand Rapids Independent 02/16/2021)

What Pelosi is calling for is "an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission."

Civil libertarians and people on the left have been cautioning about knee-jerk reactions to the insurrection that gives police and security agencies new legal authority that could easily be abused. So it's woth taking notice of the ACLU's concerns over the recommendations along that line: 9/11 Commission n/d, a collecion of links to ACLU analyses. Note that Pelosi's statement is titled "Security, Security, Security", not "Defending Against Violent Rightwing Sedition and Terrorism."

Federal and local governments have been negligent in taking the violent far-right groups seriously enough and not using the substantial authority they already have to deal with crimes they commit.

But as concerned as I am about this being used as an excuse to violate people's rights, and as much as I realize that police and security agencies in the US are "blind in the right eye" and are therefore more likely to use their authority against left and liberal and antiwar groups than against rightwing militias, I'm not ready to say that we don't need any new laws. Finally passing a federal anti-lynching law, for example, is something that is still needed.

Politics of the COVID-19 relief bill and the new Republican obstructionist strategy against the Biden-Harris Administration

The Congressional Republicans and Democrats announced a COVID-19 relief bill that accomplishes only a fraction of what needed to be done in provided economic relief. It does apparently have some beneficial features. But the reality is that it a defeat for the Democrats after months of effort. Evaluating the Democrats' negotiating tactics may be "inside baseball". But the Republicans are actually good at showing that they are slapping the Democrats around in bad-faith negotiations. While the Democrats are just terrible at effectively stigmatizing the Republicans for their bad faith and destructive priorities.

David Sirota gives what I consider a fair summary of the actual results substantively and politically ($600 Is Not Enough, And It Won’t Get Easier Daily Poster 12/20/2020):

Though the legislative language of the final package has not yet been released, it appears the meager checks come in a bill that will give new tax benefits to corporate executives to write off their meals and provide other tax breaks to businesses that used the Paycheck Protection Program — which will be a windfall for the wealthy. Will the bill change the law to similarly exempt emergency unemployment benefits from tax levies? We don’t yet know, but there’s no indication it will.

According to a bill summary circulating on Capitol Hill, the legislation provides a mere $286 billion for the survival checks and unemployment benefits, and an additional $51 billion for food aid and rental assistance. That’s not nothing, but it’s obviously inadequate. For comparison, only three years ago, Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that enriched the wealthiest one percent of households.

Much of the blame for this debacle certainly goes to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who seems absolutely determined to starve the country. But much of it also goes to Democratic leaders who had one of the easiest political opportunities to forge a bipartisan coalition or a much bigger lifeline to Americans — and then decided to squander it.

The Republicans are disgustingly loyal to their campaign donors in the priorities on which they insisted. But as I've been discussing in recent posts, the Republicans were also successful at identifying the Obama-Biden Administration with unpopular corporate bailouts that the Republicans themselves, of course, supported enthusiastically because that's what their donors pay them for.

Other summaries of the deal: Caitlin Emma and Marianne Levine, Breaking down the $900B stimulus package and $1.4T omnibus bill Politico 12/20/2020: Jordain Carney, Congress clinches sweeping deal on coronavirus relief, government funding The Hill 12/20/2020; Andy Sullivan and Richard Cowan, 'Help is on the way' with U.S. Congress ready to pass $900 billion COVID-19 aid bill Reuters 12/21/2020.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader gave a presentation on the deal they just made, Speaker Pelosi, Sen. Schumer on COVID relief funding/Omnibus PBS Newshour 12/20/2020:

I've become so frustrated with Pelosi's hesitant strategies, her tiresome listing of things we're somehow supposed to be excited about, and her endless excuses for losing to Republicans - all without defining identifiable popular goals that listeners might remember five minutes later and without calling out Republicans on their deeply bad faith or clearly blaming them for bad policies.

In other words, she has spent so many years apologizing for being a Democrat that she can't message anything any more much beyond, "We lost again but it's not totally bad." It's especially frustrating to me, because she was much more effective as the House Democratic leader in the 1980s. The fact that Pelosi, a literal "San Francisco Democrat" from one of the safest Democratic districts i the country was selected as leader. Prior to that, the Democrats had somehow convinced themselves they should elect a Democratic leader from a more competitive district on the theory that they would present an image for the party more appealing to moderate voters. What it actually meant was they were limited in being able to be full-throated defenders of some important party positions and were more vulnerable to being unseated in elections.

Now, listening to Pelosi makes me nostalgic for the days of Tom Foley and Dick Gephardt.

In this presentation, she says after 5:15, "What took so long? What took so long is because we could not get our Republican colleagues to crush the virus". I couldn't understand it. Why would they not want to invest in the science that has told us so importantly that it requires testing, tracing, treatment, separation, sanitation, and the rest?"

"Why does Pelosi keep repeating the demand to "crush the virus"? It just seems like an odd metaphor. "Crush The Virus" doesn't really have quite the ring of "getting COVID relief cash directly to people affected" or "getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible."

It really seems to me that a message more along the lines of, we've been fighting for six months to get relief checks to the people and the Republicans fought against it tooth and nail. We're been trying to get funding to state and local governments to keep them operating in the pandemic crisis and to prevent the millions of layoffs that are about to happen because we could never get them to agree on anything sufficient." (Schumer does pick up the theme and then Pelosi after that, both long after most people presumably stopped listening.)

That might not sound very collegial. But it would be more useful in positioning the Democrats, including in the two critical January 5 Georgia Senate elections, and more helpful in fighting the Republicans' already-functioning strategy of trying to sabotage any economic recovery during a Biden-Harris Administration. Pelosi professes to be puzzled as to what they are doing. ("I couldn't understand it.") But it's darn obvious. And it's an even more belligerent version of the obstructionist strategy they ran against the Obama-Biden Administration.

Chuck Schumer gave his usual snoozer message, too. Although it did clear the bar of being not-as-bad-as-Pelosi's.

But this is a preview of a big part of the Republicans' political strategy for the next four years. Obstruct and misrepresent the Biden-Harris proposals, bargaining them down to more plutocrat-friendly terms and then opposed them anyway, show the public they can beat the Democrats up over and over, and - most importantly - attack the Democrats for supporting corporate crony-capitalist measures while blocking economic policies that provide visible and quick economic recovery, higher wages, and rapidly increasing employment.

That isn't speculation. It was the strategy they ran against the Obama-Biden Administration that ended up with Donald Trump as the Republican President. For the Republicans' point of view, that strategy was a success!

This headline from SFGate for a Washington Post story is a good example of the kind of thing that steps on the Democrats' messaging in a way Republicans will cynically but happily exploit: White House secures 'three martini lunch' tax deduction in draft of coronavirus relief package (Jeff Stein 11/20/2020):

The draft language of the emergency coronavirus relief package includes a tax break for corporate meal expenses pushed by the White House and denounced by congressional Democrats, according to a summary of the deal circulating among congressional officials and officials who are familiar with the provision. ...

Democratic leaders agreed to the provision in exchange for Republicans agreeing to expand tax credits for low-income families and the working poor in the final package, according to a Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of internal negotiations.

"Republicans are nickel-and-diming benefits for jobless workers, while at the same time pushing for tax breaks for three-martini power lunches. It's unconscionable," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

The progressive-vs.-establishment fights that we can expect in the Democratic Party going forward

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't waste any time after the election beginning the post-election fight against ... Democratic progressives (Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris, Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races Politico 11/05/2020):

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants had a stark warning for Democrats on Thursday: Swing too far left and they’re all but certain to blow their chances in the Georgia runoff that will determine which party controls the Senate.

Congressional Democrats are collectively pinning their hopes on a pair of Senate races in January in one of the most competitive states in the nation — an outcome that could determine whether Democrats hold all levers of power in Washington next year, despite a disappointing night on Tuesday. While Joe Biden is looking likely to win the presidency, Democrats were shut out of key Senate races, dashing their hopes of reclaiming control of the chamber, and lost ground in the House despite being expected to significantly expand their majority.

Pelosi has been advocating the notion that the way to grow the Democratic House majority was to - of course! - appeal to those invisible sprites and elves known as "moderate Republicans". Who of course once again remained largely undetected in the 2020 election. In fact, Trump's margin among self-identified Republicans reportedly increased in 2020 compared to 2016.

A word of caution on parsing the election results by demographic groups. Voter as a percentage of eligible voters in 2020 was the highest in 120 years in the US, a big increase which could affect some demographic breakdowns in unfamiliar ways. A higher percentage of black voters voting for Trump in 2020 probably result in part from the increased polarization that helped produced the higher turnout. Clinton critical loss in Michigan in 2016 featured historically low turnout among black voters in heavily black precincts in Detroit and Flint. If black turnout increased in 2020 enough to provide a sufficient number of votes to deliver Michigan to Biden, for instance, that is a more significant event than the national percentage of African-Americans voting Biden. Also, the voting demographics are heavily based on exit polls. More detailed analysis of actual voting results could provide a different picture. 

Benjamin Siegel of ABC News reports on the House results in 'It was a failure': House Democrats grapple over surprise 2020 losses 11/06/2020. The fact that Pelosi and the Democratic establishment automatically go to "hippie-punching" - blaming The Left - whenever their conservative, appeal-to-mythical-moderate-Republicans approach fails is sad. Typical, but sad.

But there were some notable Democratic House wins on Tuesday, as Mindy Isser reports in What Democrats Should Learn From the Spate of Socialist Wins on Election Day In These Times 11/05/2020.

Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur report on the inner-Democratic-Party discussion that will go on for the next four years and more in AOC Just Ethered This Centrist Democrat TYT 11/07/2020:



There will be plenty of surprises during the next four years. But my expectation right now is that during the next four years, the biggest push from the Democratic base - which in Beltway punditry is synonymous with The Left - will be over whether and how hard Biden and the Democrats in Congress fight for the platform they ran on.

There are two overlapping but distinct kinds of sentiment among base Democratic activists that will produce Democratic divisions. On is about policy, e.g., should the Democrats support national health insurance, aka, Medicare For All, or should they stick to advocating a "public option" for health insurance and extending Medicare coverage down to age 60. The other is over whether and how serious the Democrats fight for the positions to which they are committed. Progressives, for instance, would happily support extending Medicare coverage down to age 60, which Biden formally supports. But if Biden and Harris fail to pursue it as a priority, or if Democratic Senators and House members appear not to be serious about pushing for it, that will be a argument not about ideology or policy but of Serious-vs.-Not-Serious.

The policy disputes will often, though not necessarily exclusively, line up as progressive-vs.-conservative intraparty alignments. The disputes of priorities and tactics are likely not to line in in quite so clear a left-right divide.

Bracing for a Biden Presidency

Here are some various thoughts on the Presidential election, as Trump is Sieg Heil-ing himself as the winner. Although at this moment on Thursday, it looks like Biden will be the winner.



The class-vs-other-identities debate will go on. But the Democrats need to build the party infrastructure - and by that I mean get people involved at the grassroots level - and Biden as President needs to support that effort. Repeating the 2009-2017 approach is not acceptable: Mara Liasson, The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why NPR 03/04/2016; Stanley Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats? New York Times 12/23/2016.

The Democrats need leaders who will fight Republicans. Nancy Pelosi is no longer one of them: Alexander Sammon writes (It’s Time for an Overhaul of House Democratic Leadership The American Prospect 11/05/2020):

Votes are still being tallied, but we already know for certain that election night was a disaster for House Democrats. As it stands, on a night where Democrats were forecast to pick up as many as 20 seats in the chamber, not a single GOP incumbent has been defeated. The only two Democratic pickups thus far can be chalked up to court-mandated changes to congressional district maps in North Carolina. While Democrats will likely keep the House majority, it’s possible they will lose between 7 and 12 seats in total, underperforming optimistic projections by 30 seats or more. The final count, whenever it comes in, will merely tell us how bad the bleeding is.

That result is stunning, after House leadership spent the summer all but assuring an expansion of the considerable mandate they won in 2018, when they flipped 40 seats in the House. Many of those freshmen who flipped those seats two years ago now find themselves on the ropes, struggling to hold on for the possibility of a second term. The vaunted rise of the suburbs, touted by moderate pundits as the surest path to Democratic victory, ran aground... [my emphasis]

The post-election moment is weird enough that the man Digby Parton refers to as Little Tommy Friedman, Age 6, manages to make sense. An additional case of the Rick Perry Principle: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

I mean, it's Friedman, so he can't resist tossing in a dig at those scary leftist colleges and their Political Correctness. But this part isn't bad (There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America. New York Times 11/04/2020)

... Democrats have a lot to rethink, said Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.”

“Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,” Sandel told me, “the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event a sa pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

“Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.”

Again, while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift.

The invisible elves and sprites known to establishment Democrats as "moderate Republicsns" still stubbornly fail to reveal their presence. Charlie Pierce goes to town on their most prominent advocates (The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election Esquire Politics Blog 11/04/2020):

Can we talk about Never Trump for a minute?

Its various iterations — The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump — made some fine commercials and a lot of noise. They raised a lot of money, especially TLP, which is now going to morph into a multi-platform media network that likely will become a permanent (and very conservative) factor in elections going forward. Starting from scratch, TLP raised $60 million. Republicans Against Trump got started late, but they hoovered up $10 million. This is nice work if you can get it.

The problem is that, despite their fat bank accounts and some terrific publicity, these people didn't materially affect the presidential race at all. Their entertaining commercials got great run, but they didn't move 10 votes. They certainly didn't materially affect the Republican side. What data we have at the moment indicates that the president* got more of the Republican vote this time than he did in 2016. He certainly got more votes generally than he did four years ago. Take them all in all, and Never Trump is about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. The problem for all the rest of us is that they should be.

Never Trump should have been a haven for Republicans and conservatives revolted by the notion that their party and the government had been appropriated by a vulgar talking yam. As should be obvious, there just aren't that many people like that. Most of the Never Trump movement is on salary to the Never Trump movement. Everybody else is completely With The Program. The president* has utterly subsumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular and, win or lose, he's not going to go anywhere. [my emphasis in bold]

On that last thought, I also assume that Trump will style himself as the American Juan Guaidó, President-in-exile who doesn't actually have to go into exile. Although if justice is allowed to run its course, Trump make seek asylum in a country with no extradition treaty with the US.

Asymmetric partisan polarization in the US and the Orbanization of the Republican Party

The asymmetric partisan polarization in the United States has a continually radicalizing Republcian Party facing off against a Democratic Party mostly controlled by leaders who would rather not have to be bothered to fight for anything that might discomfort the comfortable in any way. Or, for that matter, anything that might mildly irritate outright oligarchs.

The Republican Party has now been fully Trumpified. Or Orbanized, as Europeans might say. It's done with liberal democracy and wants something like a Hungarian-type "illiberal democracy" which maintains the forms of a democracy with competitive parties but institutionally arranged so that the oligarchical ruling party keeps a secure hold on power even when they lose elections. That includes installing a pliable partisan-political judiciary. An authoritarian government with at best formal democratic forms without the actual democracy and rule-of-law parts.

The Republican Party was well along the authoritarian road during the Cheney-Bush Administration. And once Trump became President, the party essentially collapsed as a democratic institution. It is now an authoritarian party that is even making open alliances with far-right political militias aspiring to be death squads.

Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote (The Republican Threat to the Republic Project Syndicate 10/02/2020):

Even more disturbing [than his secrecy about his taxes during his first debate with Joe Biden] his refusal to denounce white supremacists and violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys, whom he instructed to “stand back and stand by.” Combined with his refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power and persistent efforts to delegitimize the voting process, Trump’s behavior in the run-up to the election has increasingly posed a direct threat to American democracy. [my emphasis]

He calls attention to how even the most solid governmental and political institutions depend on sufficient support for them and for norms that sustain them being observed by sufficient numbers of people and politicians in order to properly function. And even to survive. Stiglitz notes:

When I served as chief economist at the World Bank in the late 1990s, we would travel the world lecturing others about good governance and good institutions, and the United States was often held up as the exemplar of these concepts.

Not anymore.

It's useful to recall that Hitler came to power in Germany as Chancellor in 1933 through the institutions of the Weimar Constitution, which had been eroded by President Paul von Hindenburg, who was not really a fan of the democracy of which he was the head of state, and by the conservative and parties who allied with him and eventually with Hitler, as well. The Nazi governmental institutions didn't stick with the forms of the Weimar Constitution - but never even bothered to formally abolish it.

The Republican Party's program bears less direct resemblance to Hitler's than to some mashup of that of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Mississppi's notoriously racist one-time Senator Theodor Bilbo. But there goal is to set aside liberal democracy as we have known it in the US. As Stiglitz explains:

The bad news is that Republicans know they are increasingly in the minority on most of the critical issues in today’s politics. Americans want stronger gun control, a higher minimum wage, sensible environmental and financial regulations, affordable health insurance, expanded funding for preschool education, improved access to college, and greater limitations on money in politics.

The clearly expressed will of the majority puts the GOP in an impossible position: The party cannot simultaneously pursue its unpopular agenda and also endorse honest, transparent, democratic governance. That is why it is now openly waging war on American democracy, doubling down on efforts to disenfranchise voters, politicize the judiciary and the federal bureaucracy, and lock in minority rule permanently through tactics like partisan gerrymandering. [my emphasis]

Stiglitz doesn't discuss there the GOP's demographic problem of being heavily dependent on older white voters. That demographic disadvantage is real. But it's not some kind of developing Malthusian determinism. After all, many people who were young during The Sixties not are counted among Trump supporters.

Paul Waldman wrote about the current state of that demographic shift in Is the Emerging Democratic Majority Finally Coming to Pass? The American Prospect 08/11/2019, with particular reference to the 2020 election, then well over a year away:

There is no mystery about how Trump plans to get re-elected: He believes that with enough race-baiting to encourage them, his supporters will flock to the polls as they did in 2016. But there’s an emerging fear among Republicans that Trump has been so personally repellent and spent so much time focusing on his project of racial revanchism that it could be putting the suburbs—where a majority of Americans now live—out of the GOP’s reach. ...

One can imagine a different kind of Republican Party that could compete better with suburban moderates, not to mention do better with non-white and younger voters. It might advocate for lower taxes and a lighter government footprint, but consent to more sensible gun policies and get rid of its race-baiting. The trouble is that the current Republican Party has decided that no priority is higher than holding on to its white, rural base—and in Donald Trump’s view, that requires a commitment to a white identity politics based on hatred and resentment. In an America that grows more diverse by the day, the GOP is actually getting whiter.

Three years into Trump’s term, it is no longer possible for any Republican voter to deny what their party is about. [my emphasis]

Never say never is always a good caution to keep in mind in politics. So it's always possible that the Republican Party will soon dramatically change itself and respond to Nancy Pelosi's plea last year, "To the Republicans in the crowd, I say: take back your party, the Grand Old Party." Although what she may have meant by that is less than clear. She continued, "America needs a strong Republican Party, not a rubber stamp." (Pelosi tells Republicans: 'Take back your party' The Hill 01/23/2019)

For rank-and-file Democrats, the Republican Party already looks way too "strong" as it is! Especially when it comes to rolling over Democrats on issue after issue after issue in Congress.

Even after the last year-and-a-half-plus, after the failed effort to remove Trump from office by impeachment, after Trump's spectacular failure on the COVID-19 epidemic, after the spectacular corruption, after seeing the Republican elected officials at all levels stick staunchly by his misdeeds, Pelosi was saying the same thing on Morning Joe just last week! "One of my prayers is that the Republicans will take back their party. "The country needs a strong Republican Party. It's done so much for our country, and to have it be hijacked as a cult at this time is really a sad thing for America. (Jason Lemon, Nancy Pelosi Says America 'Needs a Strong Republican Party,' Not a Hijacked 'Cult' Newsweek 09/30/2020)

He's Pelosi's sad segment itself, providing a great illustration of the Democratic side of the very asymmetric partisan polarization, Nancy Pelosi: I Pray The Republicans Will Take Back Their Party 09/30/2020:

But given the Republican Party's history of 30 years of basically continuously and severely radicalizing and moving further and further away from a commitment to liberal democracy, Steve M's observations at No More Mister Nice Blog, looking in particular at the examples of how the Republican Party handles school shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic, describes the state of the party speaks more to the present condition of that party (Don't Confuse Us With the Facts 10/03/2020):

Republicans are never abashed. They're never crestfallen. They never admit the error of their ways. They're the Double Down Party.

You can argue that this is why Republicans are successful or you can argue that this is a demonstration of their sociopathic tendencies. (Or both.) Just don't expect them to change in response to new facts -- ever.

We can find examples of authoritarian rightwing parties that have evolved into more traditional democratic parties. But it's a long and difficult process. When it happens at all.

Also with particular reference to Trump's explicit appeal to the far-right Proud Boys hate group, David Masciotrra gives this picture of the current asymmetrical partisan polarization There's only one political party in the United States — the other one has descended into madness Salon 10/03/2020

It's certainly true that Republican officials are afraid of the bloodlust of the Trump cult. But it is also true, and more important to recognize, that Trump's hatred for democracy — which critics and commentators view as a liability is largely an asset for his supporters. Many of those who hold office at the national level, as evident from the ghoulish statements of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and others, along with the voters who applaud Trump's every act of cruelty, are glad to see him waging war on a system designed to give representation and power to a diverse group of citizens.

If Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and their enablers in Congress can succeed in subverting the presidential election, and "making America great again" by enshrining the minority rule of white Christians, the average Republican will celebrate. There is no other reasonable conclusion to draw from the fact that between 80 and 90 percent of Republicans approve of Trump's performance in office.

Among Democrats, there is an ongoing, interesting and important argument between moderate figures like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, and progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez regarding the expansion of the social welfare state, federal regulation of economic activity and the extent of measures necessary to curb inequality and climate change.

The Republican Party offers nothing to the American people. They have no policy agenda. Despite Trump's meaningless and inane boasting of nonexistent "plans," they articulate no agenda to address the converging crises of American life. [my emphasis]

As John Dean and Bob Altemeyer writes in their excellent new book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers:

As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out, most of the democracies overthrown since World War II died at the ballot box when authoritarian leaders were voted into power. Usually these totalitarians did not even bother to throw out the country's constitution. They just subverted it bit by bit until they controlled everything, and it became irrelevant. We do not relish playing Paul Revere now, but it seems to us that American democracy is nearly at the point of no return in this process. Americans elected a very traditional type of authoritarian leader with Donald Trump - a demagogue. [my emphasis]

The collapse of the Republican Party as a democratic political institution does not mean that the Democratic Party as an institution is necessarily able to avoid its own kind of collapse. But it have a much better opportunity to do so at the moment than its counterpart.

Also, when I talk about the Republican Party having collapsed as a democratic political institution, that does not mean it has collapsed as an effective political organization. It means it no longer functions as an institution that supports a liberal democratic political system and the rule of law.

Republicans and Democrats on the Supreme Court fight: more asymmetric partisan polarization, of course

I don't like being defeatist about the immediate political situation. But the fight over the open Supreme Court seat is so far looking like a rerun of the show that we've had playing out pretty much since 1992: Republicans politicians fight aggressively for the "red meat" issues their base supports; Democratic politicians surrender.

Once again, we're seeing The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said played out in real time: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away last Friday. In the five days since, the Republicans jumped out immediately saying they were going to jam her replacement through during Trump's first term.

Senior leaders in the Democratic Party have basically taken two of their most promising procedural options off the table following options off the table for this fight: holding up the continuing resolution on funding the government (Nancy Pelosi, who sneered that only people "on the left" were suggesting that) and sending a series of impeachments to the Senate to gum up the process and create negative publicity for Republicans (anti-abortion-rights Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016). But Pelosi, Kaine, Joe Biden, and Biden surrogate Cory Booker all called on Republicans to be consistent and honorable and stand by their word from 2016 that they wouldn't consider Supreme Court appointments during Presidential elections. Threaten to pack the Court if they take the Senate? Please, this the establishment leadership of the Democratic Party we're talking about here. Although we're at least getting a bit of nothing-off-the-table talk from them on that option, for what that's worth.

Dahlia Lithwich comments, "The question to me isn’t so much whether structural court reform is on the table, of course it has to be. The question is whether to talk about it explicitly for election purposes." (What Should the Democrats Do Now? Slate 09/22/2020) She's right, although I'm not seeing much sign that the real existing leadership of the Democratic Party agrees with her.

Jamelle Bouie talks about some of the options the Democrats have to fight the Trump SCOTUS nomination, in some alternative universe whether the establishment Democrats are actually willing to fight for their own side: Democrats Can Still Play Hardball Slate podcast 09/23/2020.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) is technically correct when he says that the Democrats can't prevent the Republicans from jamming this through. (Suzanne Sammle, Top Dem: Republicans can't be stopped on SCOTUS nominee AOL/Yahoo News 09/22/2020)

Of course, defeating Trump's Supreme Court nomination will mean getting at least four Republican Senators to refuse to go along. And the only way to do that if for the Democrats is to put up a serious, visible fight. And the Democrats at this point show no obvious intentions of doing so.

The drama element of this is important, especially with a very critical Presidential election coming up on November 3. The Republican voters and potential Republican swing voters see the Republicans fighting and winning. The Democrats voters and potential Democratic swing voters see the Democrats basically surrender without a fight. Or even bluffing about putting up a fight.

Nancy Pelosi was on ABC's This Week (09/20/2020) saying she had "arrows in our quiver". ('We have our options' if GOP push a SCOTUS nomination before election: Speaker Pelosi) But one of the times George Stephanopoulos asked what some of those arrows were, she answered, "Good morning. Sunday morning." (?!) But wouldn't describe any of those "arrows". Except he asked her if she would use the House's fiscal power for leverage, she assured him that, oh no, they wouldn't even consider "shutting down government." She did mention that there was some "enthusiasm" and "exuberance" for that "on the left." (But of course if Biden loses she will happily blame it on those same dang hippie lefties.)

Cory Booker on "Face the Nation" was downright fascinating. Not because he gave any indication of being ready to fight, of course not. His top stratagem is to make "a moral appeal to people who clearly stated what they would do in these circumstances," meaning Senate Republicans. "For them to go against their word is pretty significant in the public space in terms of their own honor and legitimacy." He wants them to consider the "larger view of history" and "the long-term strength of our democracy." He is surprised at the idea that Republicans might "so severely violate their own words."

This means that our Cory Booker has been body-swapped with a Cory Booker from another dimension. Because the one on TV Sunday clearly isn't familiar with the Republican Party in this plane of reality, Face The Nation: Booker, Gottlieb 09/20/2020:

Here's anti-women's-rights Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, Sen. Kaine: GOP Trying To 'Bum Rush' SCOTUS Nominee MSNBC 09/21/2020:

This is Schumer, Senate Democratic leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Death and Supreme Court Nomination Process C-SPAN 09/21/2020

Here is Biden's first speech after Ginsburg's death. Which I have to say by Biden standards isn't bad. A call to make a serious fight, though, sounds different than this. Joe Biden Delivers Remarks in Philadelphia 09/20/2020:

Here is rightwing Republican Rick Wilson hosting a show for the rightwing but anti-Trump Republican Lincoln Project operation on the nomination, LPTV: The Breakdown—September 21, 2020. It's cute. Since they are Republicans, they can't quite believe the Democrats think an aggressive response is, "Gee, what can we do? Send us campaign donations." Their underlying assumption in this video is that the Democratic leadership will make a serious public stink over this, since that's what "their side" normally does. (It's 2020, so I guess anything is possible!):

How to shoot yourself in the foot while being right - yes, of course, I mean the Democratic Party

Establishment Democratic leadership is so inept even at being right that it's sometimes painful to see.

Here's the Democratic Senate leader (Richard Cowan, Democratic leader Schumer criticizes Trump's call for $1,000 checks Reuters 03/18/2020)

“The coronavirus is slowing our economy to a near standstill and we are almost certainly anticipating a recession,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor. He added that expanded unemployment benefits would be a more effective way of helping workers than a $1,000 check from Washington.

He's right. At least a small bit right. Expanded unemployment insurance would be a more effective, targeted way to provide assistance immediately to the many, many workers who are being hammered by the Trump Virus Recession that now seems to be underway. And the distribution system is there in every state. You just expand the coverage.

The very capable economics journalist Frances Coppola recently explained why $1,000 drops of money to everyone is suboptimal, even in this moment, in Is 'helicopter money' the answer to the looming economic crisis? OpenDemocracy.net 03/17/2020.

Noting that in the 2008 crisis, she advocated for such a response at the time and still in retrospect thinks it would have been an appropriate response in that situation:

There are two specific reasons why I think helicopter money is the wrong policy for this crisis. Firstly, the amounts of money proposed by Furman, Roubini and Mankiw, and by Prime Minister Morrison in Australia, are totally inadequate. $1000 isn’t even a month’s wages for Americans, and nor is AU$750 for Australians. Those who lose their jobs, or are self-isolating, or are ill, need their incomes maintained. Unconditional basic income, not discretionary handouts, is the right solution for them.

The second reason is that spending more is actually the last thing we want people to do right now. Prime Minister Morrison’s proposal to give pensioners additional money is particularly bad. Pensioners are the highest risk group, and therefore need to retreat into their houses and protect themselves, not take the grandchildren to Disneyland. Giving them money to encourage them to spend sends completely the wrong message and is potentially dangerous for them.

But it’s not just pensioners for whom helicopter drops right now would be a bad idea. The companies worst affected by the pandemic are those that provide leisure services – airlines, cruise ships, travel companies, restaurants and bars, event organisers. These businesses all bring people together in one place for relatively long periods of time, increasing the risk of infection and potentially turning those people into disease vectors for the rest of the population. This is why countries are shutting restaurants and bars, banning events, closing borders, and advising vulnerable groups not to travel. Yet these are exactly the sort of activities on which people might want to spend their helicopter money. If they were able to do so, then helicopter money would not only be completely counterproductive, it would be dangerous.

She adds, "And if people couldn’t spend the money on leisure activities, what might they do? Well, they might stockpile goods. There is already a run on loo rolls, pasta, baked beans and flour. Why do we want to fuel this?"

She favors the helicopter-money move "when the virus has passed and people start emerging from their cocoons." Right now - presumably speaking for the US and Europe - she argues: "The top priority must be healthcare, not money. Countries that don’t currently have free universal health care need to provide it. And countries whose healthcare services are underfunded and overstretched need to throw money at them. Staffing and equipment shortages urgently need to be resolved."

And this is how she would like to see governments address income maintenance:

Gig economy workers and the self-employed are particularly vulnerable, since they are always the first out of the door when hard times arrive and many live hand to mouth. It will be some time before the incomes of these workers recover, and many are not eligible for existing benefits, or if they are, the benefits are wholly inadequate. They need unconditional basic income.

Government also needs to support business cash flows as sales fall, so that they can continue to pay workers and maintain supply chains. Some countries are already heading in this direction: for example, Ireland is introducing a scheme to enable companies that have ceased to trade due to the pandemic to continue paying their workers at least the unemployment benefit rate, and Denmark is proposing to support workers’ wages at 75% of full pay in return for companies agreeing not to lay them off.

Maintaining people’s incomes protects landlords, banks and utility companies from defaults. And helping companies to maintain employment and supply chains should enable them to recover quickly when the virus has passed.

But, why, why, can't the Democrats put out a message that doesn't come across as, Trump wants to give everyone $1000 right now and we're against it? Matt Lech dramatizes the problem on Twitter:

That Common Dreams article is by Eoin Higgins, Refusal by Pelosi to Consider Universal Cash Payments in Response to Coronavirus Pandemic 'Maddening,' Say Progressives 03/18/2020.

Part of what's going on is that Congress is trying to push through emergency measures to address the current crisis. And that means the tactical manuevers that are a standard part of Congress doing business suddenly get more public attention than usual. The Democrats need to manage this better.

A lot of longtime loyal Democratic voters are soothed to think that we're now likely to have Joe Biden as the Democratic Presidential candidate campaigning to Make American Boring Again and don't much notice when the Democratic leadership does things like this. But less diligent Democratic voters and actual swing voters are likely to perceive this kind of thing in a different way that Democratic Bidenistas do.

Michael Brooks talks about this issue on The Hill's Rising podcast in the second video below. This is the introductory report, Krystal and Saagar BLAST Pelosi for holding up cash to workers 03/19/2020:

Michael Brooks issues DIRE warning to Establishment Dems:

Is Pelosi playing complex poker with McConnell over impeachment? Or just trying to make the whole thing go away?

Digby Parton is optimistic that Nancy Pelosi's current stance about not sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate is a great move, as she explains in Nancy Pelosi turns up the heat on Trump and the Republicans — and it's working Salon 12/20/2019.

Considering how conservative and buttoned-up Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been about this whole thing — keeping the charges narrowly focused on Ukraine, and resisting every attempt to include Robert Mueller's material or the emoluments violations in the impeachment inquiry — it came as something of a shock on Wednesday night when she abruptly announced that she would not name House managers for a trial or send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until she knew how that body planned to proceed.

It was an unexpectedly bold power play, upending what Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his lieutenants had hoped to turn into a dull, perfunctory affair in order to spare their vulnerable swing-state Republican incumbents as much damage as possible. They know that holding a real trial with witnesses could be disastrous, and they have been fighting both the Democratic leadership and the White House on that point.

I hope something good comes out of this approach. But I just don't understand why Pelosi thinks she has leverage over McConnell. The whole plan seems to turn on this assumption: "Trump also wants to stage a full trial because he believes that what he did was perfect and wants 'total exoneration' on TV."

We'll see if that works. But if Pelosi doesn't send the charges to Senate for trial, the Republicans will declare complete exoneration for Trump anyway. It's possible that Trump is so intensely fixated on having the Senate find him innocent that he will insist on having witnesses called, for which Pelosi is supposedly holding out.

But to me, this looks very uncomfortably like Pelosi finding an excuse to make the impeachment just go away, which was her position in her first six months as Speaker this year.

The impeachment train

This has been a strange and exciting week in US politics. And it's only Thursday. Trump has basically admitted, once again, breaking the law, this time in connection with using US aid money to pressure the current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to manufacture political dirt against Joe Biden and the Democrats. The memorandum of a phone coversation between Trump and Zelensky the White House released on Wednesday shows to pretty much everyone who's not a diehard Trump partisan that Trump broke the law both by asking a foreign government for assistance in a domestic election (a crime in itself) and by offering a quid pro quo in exchange for that help (a separate crime).

Nancy Pelosi caved in to pressure from even the more conservative members of her House caucus and announced she approved pressing for impeachment. (Ryan Grim, Why the House Democratic Caucus Was Able to Move So Rapidly Toward Impeachment The Intercept 09/256/2019) But lest anyone think she might aggressively push for it, she almost immediately stepped on her own message by trying to limit the focus of impeachment to the Ukraine-Trump scandal and his conversation Zelensky that recently broke. (Kyle Cheney et al, Democrats look to narrow impeachment focus to Trump-Ukraine scandal Politico 09/25/2019)

This not only gives credence to this suggestion by Peter Daou:

TIME FOR REAL TALK

I'm very relieved to see Dem leaders give in to massive grassroots pressure on #impeachment. But it wasn't until Trump came for #Biden that the establishment finally woke up. Apparently torturing brown babies wasn't enough to #impeach him.

So let's be real.

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 26, 2019

When Pelosi made such of a mess by caving in to Trump on the concentration camp funding this past summer, I pretty much lost hope in her ability to lead the impeachment inquiry. At least for a few hours this week, she seemed to rise to the task, however reluctantly. But she may still sabotage the whole thing.

Jeet Heer makes a case for the Ukraine-only approach to impeachment here, The Case for Keeping Impeachment Clean and Simple The Nation 09/25/2019.

David Dayen has a good analogy on why even a stubbornly reluctant Nancy Pelosi decided to move ahead with impeachment (Trump’s Impeachment and the Era of No Accountability The American Prospect 04/24/2019):

Here’s the best way of putting it: Trump is Wells Fargo.

The big bank was among those who contributed to the near implosion of the entire U.S. economy in 2008, and despite that, none of its top executives were held accountable. And Wells Fargo, consciously or unconsciously, got the message that they could continue their practices with relative impunity. And they did. They signed up customers to fake accounts, falsified records in mortgage cases, charged people for junk auto insurance they didn’t ask for, and even charged overdraft fees on accounts that were closed.

Why did this unending series of scandals cease to end? Why did the overt PR promises from Wells Fargo add up to nothing, as the corporate culture still trended toward ripping off customers? Well, what would be the point of Wells Fargo changing its policies? Nobody went to jail, no executive had their assets seized and ended up destitute, and no penalty served as anything more than giving away a small cut of ill-gotten profits. Amid this lack of deterrence, the crime spree continued, and continues.

It's hard to imagine enough Republican Senators voting to remove him. But if the House impeaches him, the Senators will have a choice to make. If the House does the impeachment inquiry even half right, especially if they make public a small fraction of Trump's financial dealings with Russian entities, it will put huge pressure even on Republicans Senators not facing election to show they are not entirely subservient to Trump. Bob Kuttner predicts, "As flat-out illegal behavior is documented, expect more Republicans to defect." (Trump’s Death by Self-Regard The American Prospect 09725/2019)

I hope he's right. But the Mueller report documented multiple instances of Trump's obstructive justice. And the Republicans didn't turn on him over that. The Democrats, on the other hand, do already have that documentation of multiple impeachable offenses, so it would be silly and irresponsible not to use those in impeachment proceedings.

If the Democrats do blow the impeachment process by, for instance, limiting the charges only to the appeal to Ukraine to make up dirt on Joe Biden, it's will really be time for progressive Democrats to start thinkig seriously about some way to effectively refound the Democratic Party.

Impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one. As Alexander Hamilton explained it Federalist 65:

A well constituted court for the trial of impeachments, is an object notmore to be desired, than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties, more or less friendly, or inimical, to the accused. In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side, or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger, that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.

But I also really think the House has a responsibility to act when an official is so brazenly breaking the law, and even admitting it publicly, as Trump did again this week. I think impeachment will actually help the Democrats politically in 2016, not least by showing people that they are actually willing to fight for their own side. But even if it hurts them politically, I really do believe the House has a Constitutional responsibility to impeach him.

Joe and Hunter Biden

James Risen recalls his own story from 2015 about Joe Biden and Ukrainian corruption investigations in I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down. The Intercept 09/25/2019

The original story was Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch New York Times 12/08/2015
Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holding in April 2014, i.e., the month after Russia formally annexed Crimea. (See Ukraine crisis: Timeline BBC News 11/13/2014) Risen's Times article described it as "one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies." It was headed by Russian Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. Risen's 2015 article noted that Hunter Biden's position potentially undermined the crebility of Vice President Joe Biden, who was traveling to Urkaine "to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs."

But as Risen also reported, Joe Biden was encouraging more aggressive anti-corruption prosecution at a time when one of the main cases of apparent neglect of corruption involved Burisma Holding and Mykola Zlochevsky. If Joe Biden was trying to shield the company with which Hunter Biden was connected, on the surface it seems a strange way to go about it. Risen wrote, "The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate [in a British investigation of bank accounts they claimed were connected to Zlochevsky] was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September."

Risen's article did not mention any evidence of illegal action by either Joe or Hunter Biden. It just pointed out that it was an awkward aspect of Joe Biden's push on behalf of the US Government for Ukraine to be more diligent in enforcing its anti-corruption laws. Which, for any rightwing trolls who may be reading, is an entirely legitimate foreign policy goal for the US.

Authoritarianism and its enablers

Paul Waldman has a useful if somewhat eclectic look at the current American authoritarianism, The Trump depression (and we don't mean the economy): Key symptom of autocratic regimes Salon 09/15/2019.

What particularly resonates with me in Waldman's piece is his discussion of the enablers, as district from supporters. One of the lessons of the Weimar Republic to me is that if enough people want to do away with democracy, and enough people are indifferent to it.

One of the most significant things about the end of the Weimar Republic is that in a technical, constitutional sense, Hitler's regime never did away with it. The Weimar Constitution was never formally abolished under the Nazis. The government just ignored it.

He quotes Elizabeth Mika:

The Democrats' ambivalent response to Trump's lawlessness contributes to the problem:

Demoralization and disillusionment with the Democrats' ability to understand and respect the wishes of their supporters, and to effect change, are likely to result. ... Their ambivalence of course serves to embolden Trump and legitimize his actions. One necessary action to take is to contact and confront our representatives, let them know what we think and publicize it through social media. We are the people. They work for us, after all.

This is true. Sam Seder on The Majority Report has recently said that the Founders of the US Constitution foresaw a President like Donald Trump, but what they didn't foresee was a Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House or Chuck Schumer as Senate opposition leader who would simply decline to use their available powers to effectively counter a President like Trump.

I don't think that's literally true, but it makes an important, realistic point. The famous separation-of-powers enshrined in the US Constitution and now generally considered to be essential for any constitutional democracy was based on a Montesquiean/Madisonian idea that setting up parts of the government as having complementary but also competing institutional roles would allow the effects of personal ambitions and institutional self-protection to have not only the usual corrosive and inevitable side-effects, but would also serve as a check on tyranny and on one Branch of the government overstepping its proper role.

The concept is not that everyone would put aside politics and "divisiveness," because it basically didn't occur to them to rely on an idea so foreign to everything they knew about human history. And they certainly didn't think that functioning of the government would always be benign. That was the whole point of having checks-and-balances and a democratic electoral basis for the government, so that it would limit the worst abuses and force the government to pay attention to the demands of the public.

Yes, it's important to remember that they were making a government for a political community of property-owning white men. But it was the world's most far-reaching experiment in democracy at the time. And was so perceived by other nations in the world, especially Europe and the Americas. And the Constitution is still in effect, so what the Founders understood about it is still very relevant to today's politics.

Did the Founders think that it was possible that the politicians elected under that system might do such a bad job that they the system itself might fail? They clearly did. So in that sense, they understood the potential for fecklessness on the part of leaders of the Pelosi-Schumer kind. Heck, they were familiar with female sovereigns in Europe, including queens of England, so at least some of them must have imagined the possibility of a female Speaker of the House, too.

I wonder what Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) would have thought of Pelosi's defense of Trump and presumably Kavanaugh against impeachment.

Here is Madison channeling Montesquieu in Federalist #47:

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. ...

From these facts, by which Montesquieu was guided, it may clearly be inferred, that in saying, "there can be no liberty, where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates;" or, "if the power of judging, be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," he did not mean that these departments ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over the acts of each other. His meaning, as his own words import, and still more conclusively as illustrated by the example in his eye, can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted.

Pelosi and the House Democrats have a real Constitutional responsibility here. If they are capable of managing it right - not a foregone conclusion! - an impeachment process against Trump and/or Kavanaugh would benefit them politically. But there are no guarantees. Wht they do have is a Constititional responsibility.

Democrats' Reagan PTSD and their big money donors

Paul Rosenberg gives a good summary of the attitude that leads establishment Democrats to their how-quickly-can-we-surrender approach in Democrats' Trump-era quandary is familiar: Play offense or defense? It ought to be obvious by now Salon 07/28/2019:

Republicans live in fear. “Fear of a Black Planet,” fear of strong women, fear of people with different faiths (or the “wrong” version of their own) — those three fears were the cornerstones of “The Long Southern Strategy” ...

But Democrats live in fear, as well: Fear that Republicans will say mean things about them — and won’t vote for them.

Indeed, actual Republicans almost certainly won't vote for them. But there are plenty of other folks out there. Not just independents and "swing voters," but large numbers of non-voters and only-sometimes voters, as well as the Democratic base. Non-voters overwhelmingly support Democrats ...

Furthermore, a broad range of progressive policies have majority support — sometimes supermajority support ...

For decades, Democrats have been obsessed with winning the votes of people they’re unlikely to win, while mostly neglecting, and sometimes actively attacking, those whose votes are much more easily within reach. Republican attacks on Democrats are aimed at energizing the GOP base and depressing the Democrats', both psychologically and operationally: Depressing activism, engagement and turnout.

Democrats’ attempts to placate Republicans, or win them over, not only fail to counter the GOP’s strategy but actively support it. By striking a defensive stance they implicitly validate Republican attacks, always acting as if they’ve got something to apologize for. No wonder the Democrats have so many more non-voters on their side: they’ve given them so much less reason to vote. [my emphasis in bold]

This is a great description of the current establishment Democratic approach to politics, epitimized today by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

It's consistent with the analysis Ryan Grim makes in Haunted by the Reagan era Washington Post 07/05/2019:

The way the older and younger House members think about and engage with the Republican Party may be the starkest divide between them. Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Joe Biden, Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer were shaped by their traumatic political coming-of-age during the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of Ronald Reagan — and the backlash that swept Democrats so thoroughly from power nearly 40 years ago. They’ve spent the rest of their lives flinching at the sight of voters. When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle, they’re crouching into the defensive posture they’ve been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again. [my emphasis]

But together with this defeatist attitude comes the mutually reinforcing drastic dependence of the Democratic Party on corporate donors. Grim in his book We've Got People (2019) describes the pivotal turn twoard dependence on corporate cash in the 1980s associated with California Congressman Tony Coelho, California Democratic liberal wheeler-dealers John and Phil Burton, and their "San Francisco Democrat" Nancy Pelosi. John Burton as a Congressman fought against the remaining power of Southern Democrats in the Congress. Grim portrays his death from a heart attack at 56 as a tragic lost opportunity:

Burton's untimely death cut off the potential of a counter history for Democrats. At the time, said John Lawrence, Burton was one of the few Democrats who understood that the party did not have a permanent lock on the House of Representatives, and it was that overconfidence that stunted the party's ability to think strategically about what kind of a coalition it wanted to be a post-Civil Rights era. Instead, Coelho strip-mined the [Democratic Congressional] majority for every corporate dollar it was worth - until it collapsed.

The Burtons had worked with Pelosi on fundraising. And, of course, San Francisco was then as now a staunchly Democratic city. So the real political contest in Pelosi's first Congressional election contest, a special eleciton in 1987. Her main opponent in the Democratic primary was Harry Britt, a democratic socialist and left activist. Ryan relates:

The Los Angeles Times reported it as an establishment versus insurgent candidate. "The Democratic establishment backed Pelosi, a 46-year-old mother of five who has raised large sums for her party's candidates. Younger, more liberal activists and the city's powerful gay community backed Britt," the paper wrote.

Pelosi ran on the prophetic and on-brand slogan "a voice that will be heard," and on election night she beat Britt 36 to 33 percent, with the rest of the votes scattered among lesser candidates. In the top-two system California uses today, both Pelosi and Britt would have moved to the general election. That electoral innovation, for better or worse, was 25 years away; and Pelosi's total was enought to move to the general against a hapless Republican. Big money and establishment power, in her first race, had beaten grassroots, leftwing energy.

And, as he also notes, Reagan's tax rerforms favoring the One Percent "made it so there were many people tht had the means to pay up big."

The wealthy donors on which the Democrats were now far more dependent were amenable to civil rights concerns and supportive of public investment in education, somewhat less militaristic, and the extractive industries (oil, mining) tended to favor the Republicans. But they wanted what we now call "neoliberal" tax and regulatory policies, much the same as Republicans.

So the Democrats' defeatist attitude is real. But it's also true, as Cenk Uygur likes to say, that corporate Democrats are paid to lose.

Rosenberg provides a useful set of bullet-points on why Pelosi's anti-impeahment stance is such a bad approach. Althoug, perhaps surprisingly, he also says, "I’ve long believed that she’s been the most effective legislative leader of the last 40 or 50 years. But she’s lived her whole political life in the disintegrative phase of our political system, adroitly pushing back against disintegrative forces. She has excelled at that."

In other words, she has been operating from a point of institutional conservatism, trying to preserve policy gains of the Democrats that are acceptable to big donors while maintaining her own position in the party and that of other corporate Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi and that sinking feeling over impeachment

Elizabeth Spiers has done a good analysis of why Nancy Pelosi is currently acting as Trump's most important defender by stauchly blocking impeachment proceedings in Beyond Pelosi New Republic 07/24/2019.

I recently re-read Erich Fromm's 1941 book Escape From Freedom (Fear of Freedom outside the US). And something he says there keeps occurring to me when I read articles like Spiers'. In that book, he draws on the work he did with the Institute for Social Research on an innovative study about the effects of personal and social psychology on political attitudes. (Studien tiber Autorihit und Familie, 1936)

Fromm in Escape From Freedom poses the question of why there was not more resistance to Hitler's takeover in Germany in 1933 among workers, i.e., unions, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD), and their supporters. He doesn't discuss the various options he may have had in mind, though a general strike may have been one of the measures he had in mind. Instead he focuses on the fact that the unions and parties had shown themselves to be unable to effectively counter setbacks like the brutal austerity politics of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, the "Hunger Chancellor", in 1930-32. The SPD supported Brüning's government by "tolerating" it, i.e., voting to give it a majority in Parliament but without participating in the government with SPD ministers.

Fromm's observation there is that, while economic and social factors shape political actions, there are important psychological factors at work, too. And when people see their party continually failing to fight for their interests or even their own political program, the emotional bond to those leaders that would be required to take drastic actions in a crisis may not be strong enough.

How that resonates with the current US political situation is probably pretty obvious. Nancy Pelosi presents the Trump Administration as a basic danger to the US Constitutional system, and Democrats along with TV pundits point to his Russia connections as a key danger to American national security. But Pelosi is also dead set against impeachment proceedings against Trump:

When forced to comment, she’s fearless, but only in her willingness to insult the intelligence of other Democrats. We’re told that the plan, whatever it is, is working because Trump is “self-impeaching”—a nonsensical claim belied by the daily onslaught of cascading horrors that the administration continues to unleash upon Americans with no consequences whatsoever. (If he is self-impeaching, however that happens, it’s happening so slowly and incrementally that it’s not visible to the naked eye, and it’s doubtful that he’ll have completed the process before the end of a second term.) [my emphasis]

Spiers also stresses how Pelosi is leaning on anti-Trump sentiment for fundraising:

It’s not clear whether Pelosi even thinks people actually believe this line of reasoning. She just doesn’t seem to think it’s her job to convince them. Voters handed Democrats a meaningful avenue for holding the executive branch accountable in 2018, but Pelosi seems to have no interest in the hard work of doing that, except inasmuch as it means Democratic Party elites will issue public statements condemning the president’s actions, and effectively fundraise off of those public statements. As far as she’s concerned, her assurance that she’s in some distant fashion righting the wrongs of Trumpism by hoarding her own symbolic political power should be action enough for now. ...

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee donor inboxes are littered with appeals signed by the speaker to, all caps, stop Trump, as if the critical brake mechanisms are being controlled by donors and not by the officials whose elections they support. It’s like watching a person drown while the lifeguard sits in her tower, performatively noting with alarm that someone is sinking into the sea and surely someone—someone!—must save the swimmer. [my emphasis]

Spiers connects Pelosi's stance with patterns the Democratic Party have sadly developed over decades.

Since Pelosi's disappointing surrender on the concentration camp funding earilier this month and her renewed attacks on progressive Congresswomen have left me worried that the Democratic Party in the face of a genuine Constitutional crisis is frittering away the willingness of many Democratic supporters to actively mobilize behind the party's leadership. A symptom of this sinking feeling is that I didn't see any need to elaborate in the previous sentence what I meant by "concentration camp." This is our political condition in the US in 2019.

So is this:

Compare this incredible passivity with the offensive maneuvers frequently adopted by the Republican Party and its leaders, who have always taken it for granted that the only way to win is to run roughshod over any Democrat who hesitates to use the power they have. Recent political history shows that the Democratic model of continual retreat into watchful, timorous bunker-mode is a losing proposition.

Is wishing for boring good enough motivation for the Democratic Party to seriously fight Trump?

The current state of the fight against Trumpism is disturbing to anyone who wants to see the Constitutional system of democracy stay in place.

The Presidential campaign obviously does offer some home. But it also offers Joe Biden. (Joe Biden says he didn't think anyone thought Trump 'would be as bad as he is' during the 2016 presidential election Business Insider 07/23/2019)

Trump is already in full campaign mode and continuing to radicalize the government and the Republican Party.

The language we are hearing from Trump and his defenders foreshadows a fresh incoming tide of hate crimes.
https://t.co/QC5WlBpe28

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) July 20, 2019

And House Speaker Pelosi's level of "resistance" seems to have reached its high point last November.

Republicans in Congress have blocked efforts to hold the Trump Administration accountable. The new Democratic House will confront the #CultureOfCorruption in the Administration, just as the Constitution requires. pic.twitter.com/RKh467jn3M

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 9, 2018

Last week's PBS Newshour's Political Wrap segment with Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks was a fairly grim spectacle, Shields and Brooks on Trump’s attacks, Biden vs. Sanders on health care 07/20/2019:

That segment is one for the "democracy had a nice run" file. In summarizing the political week which included Trump's "send her back" Nuremburg rally, the most telling moment in this segment is Judy Woodruff saying "Al Gore" when she means "Joe Biden". Josh Marshall wrote years ago that our mainstream press is wired for Republicans. (Wired TPM 02/19/2009)

We’re coming off of, or at least we’ve had a period of (because who knows about the future) thirty plus years of conservative dominance of Washington. By some measures you could say forty years. But at least thirty, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. That conditions a generation of people with mindsets based around Republicans being the party of power, the party whose ideas get vindicated at the polls. Most of all Washington is a city that coddles up to and worships power. But a generation of one party holding the reins selects for certain kinds of journalists in key positions of power, the policy experts at the think tanks who get the journalists calls, the lobbyists who move the most money and so forth. You build up a set of assumptions about what kinds of people and ideas are respectable and which aren’t. Which are old-fashioned, which are ‘cutting edge’ and so forth. Who defines conventional wisdom?

In all of these respects, DC remains overwhelmingly wired for the GOP. [my emphasis]

Now it's more that they are wired for boring, for the good ole days when everybody could have a good chuckle over the latest Maureen Dowd column quoting what the voices in her head were saying about what a sissy Al Gore is.

The Political Wrap team wants to Make America Boring Again. Because, hey, everybody they talk to is doing fine, so why are those colored girls in Congress complaining about Master Legislator Nancy Pelosi? What Shields says about the economy could literally be used in a Trump campaign ad. He and Bobo also agree that people passionately love their health insurance companies and that ever'body knows once you git that thar Medicare thang you cain't git no insurance no how.

They aren't "wired" for dealing with the radical anti-system party the Republican Party has become.

Trump's white nationalism: A menace that needs to be effectively resisted

Will Bunch uses the (political) f-word in I can’t stop thinking about the little girl behind Trump and the hate she’s being taught Philly.com 07/21/2019:

And so the bigger point raised by Wednesday’s American hatefest is the question of what are we going to do about American fascism? The signs right now are not good. The leaders of the Democrats in Congress — the ones with the most leverage to actually do something — are not only running out the clock on impeaching this unfit president but putting a lot of their eggs, at least this week, in one basket: Wednesday’s long-delayed testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller.

But the Mueller gambit could backfire, and in fact it probably will. ...

America’s weak body politic is absorbing Trump-Russia and other presidential wrongdoing that same way that it once absorbed the Access Hollywood tape, when Trump’s own words about sexual assault didn’t derail his election. The ability of Team Trump to steamroll congressional subpoenas and basic requests for information are making the Democrats look weak, because arguably they are. It hardly helps that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems stuck in the 1990s, seemingly unable to grasp the severe threat to American democracy on inglorious display in North Carolina last week. [my emphasis]

n other words, normalization of Trump continues even as his white nationalist focus intensifies.

Jeff Merkley and Pramila Jaypal on the detention camp funding fiasco

I'm atttending the 2019 Netroots Nation conference in Philadelphia.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and Congresswoman Pramila Jaypal (D-WA) spoke to the Friday afternoon keynote session in an interview format moderated by the Huffpost's Amanda Terkel.

Amanda asked good questions and pressed them on important points. A very large part of the discussion was around the fiasco in which the House passed the Senate bill on financing the border concentration camps without even trying to negotiate improvements based on the version the House passed, which incorporated specific legal provisions to protect prisoners from the most serious forms of abuse.

Both Merkely and Jaypal were diplomatic about criticizing the Senate and House Democratic leadership. But they both made it clear that the handling of that funding measure was a massive flop for the Democrats. They did confirm speculation that I've heard from Sam Seder on The Majority Report, which is that because most Senate Democrats voted for the Senate bill, that gave House Blue Dogs an excuse to not insist on confronting the Senate, i.e., voting for the Senate version without using the reconciliation procedure to negotiate improvements, claiming they didn't have any cover after so many Democratic Senators voted for it.

Merkley explained that the Senate Dems negotiated as much as they could get on their initial version and thought they had an understanding that the House Democrats would send back an amended version of the Senate bill, which they could then support in the Senate in the hope they could get enough Republican votes to pass some of the protective features. (Merkley himself voted against the Senate version.)

I don't recall Chuck Schumer's name coming up at all. Pelosi's did. You didn't have to read too hard between the lines to hear that they were both saying that Pelosi dropped the ball badly and that Schumer didn't handle it so smoothly, either. Merkley stressed that the worst-case scenario for now and next year would be for Trumpist bills to be consistently passed by a minority of House Democrats voting with House Republicans. But both clearly agreed that Senate and House Democrats need to be voting in coordination with each other.

And both Merkley and Jaypal, despite putting in in diplomatic terms, both made it clear that the House not pursuing impeachment of Donald Trump is a dereliction of Constitutional duty as well as political malpractice on Pelosi's part.

On the PBS Newshour, Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru both agreed that Nancy Pelosi is an awesome leader and that progressives are foolish and should be ignored except to gripe about them, Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru on Democratic divisions, citizenship data 07/13/2019: