Prosecuting the Capitol insurrectionists

ProPublica has a series of investigative reports on The Insurrection, the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by violent pro-Trump insurgents who roamed the halls of Congress attacking Capitol police and chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" and "Kill the Infidels!"

Criminal investigations are proceeding. Dave Neiwert has been following the process and provides a status report in Oath Keepers, Proud Boys spun a web of conspiracy leading to Jan. 6 insurrection, filings show Daily Kos 03/29/2021:

It was already clear from external evidence that far-right extremist like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and III% [Three Percenters] militia groups played a central role in the violence that day, particularly in breaking down police barricades and entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Now the evidence clearly demonstrates that a conspiracy among the participants had been in the works for several weeks, and that the siege was not merely a protest that got out of hand, but a carefully organized assault on the American election process. [my emphasis]

He makes particular reference to the work of Marcy Wheeler ("emptywheel", who has also been doing detailed research into the cases, e.g., Days After and Oath Keeper Event with Roger Stone, Kelly Meggs Described Having "Organized an Alliance" with the Proud Boys Emptywheel 03/26/2021.

When it comes to the planners and high-level collaborators, it's not unusual that the evidence for their prosecutions are built up through testimony and other evidence from lower-level participants. But it's also important to remember that the violent radical right, like jihadist terrorists, have also been promoting "stochastic" terrorism for years. So tying legal culpability for individual acts of violence to senior Trump Administration officials could be very difficult. Although in a very practical sense, it's clear that Trump's January 6 speech was a direct incitement to the violent attack on the Capitol that immediately followed it. Whether or not it meets the legal hurdle for criminal charges.

At least we aren't hearing high-level statements that the Biden-Harris Administration intends to give the Trump Administration the kind of de facto impunity for criminal conduct that the Bush-Cheney Administration received. Even before Barack Obama took office as President, he was advocating for such impunity for the preceding administration.. David Johnston and Charlie Savage reported on this strong preference of Obama's for what became known as his "look forward, not backward" policy in a piece from January 2009, during the transition period between his and Bush's Presidencies (Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs New York Times 01/09/2009):

As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.

In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” [my emphasis]

Obama was a specialist in constitutional law, so he clearly understood the seriousness of what he was proposing. He is quoted in that same article as recognizing explicitly that waterboarding, a method infamously used by the Bush-Cheney Administration, was torture. And he knew he was thereby saying that it was a criminal act under US and international law.

This was a strong early sign of the conservative streak that Obama demonstrated throughout his Presidency. (Although it would be legitimate to ask whether it can be called "conservative" to not prosecute crimes for which there is strong evidence.)

But it was not only issues related to war and torture that led many Democratic and left-leaning activists to demand legal accountability for the Bush-Cheney Administration. As just one example, they (we) were also expressing major concern about evidence in the public record that the Administration had in fact pushed federal prosecutors to bring purely politically-motivated cases. The prosecution of the former Democratic Governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, was one of the instances that appeared to be most blatant. (See: Former Gov. Don Siegelman: How to fix the court system that got me AL.com 06/24/2020)

It was reported during the Bush-Cheney Administration that Karl Rove had pushed US Attorneys to bring malicious prosecutions against Democratic officials. Anyone who has followed the case of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva and other left-leaning Latin American political figures as part of the Lava Jato corruption investigation project, which we know now was pursuing malicious, partisan-political prosecutions. (Andrew Fishman et al, Breach of Ethics The Intercept 06/09/2019

John Dean discussed one action that Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder took to remedy a case of malicious prosecution. (The Strong Message Attorney General Eric Holder Sent to All Federal Prosecutors When He Dismissed the Indictment Against Senator Ted Stevens, and the Apparent Basis for the Dismissal FindLaw 04/03/2009) And his hopeful assessment seemed reasonable at the time: "Eric Holder's actions ... have now sent a message to the entire establishment of federal prosecutors. Holder is depoliticizing the Justice Department, to ensure fairness for Republicans and Democrats alike. And he has placed all federal prosecutors on notice that his Justice Department will play by the rules."

It's also worth noting that Ted Stevens had been a Republican Senator. As Dean pointed out emphatically, Holder's action was the right thing to do. But it could also have been a gesture of the bipartisanship that the Obama-Biden Administration pursued with so little positive result. Less generously but also plausible in retrospect was that it could have been intended also as a signal that Holder's Justice Department had no intention of prosecuting the torture crimes or even the type of abusive prosecution that Holder's action remedied in the Stevens case.

But the US justice system is set up to handle independent prosecutions of public officials, including elected officials, who violate the law. In fact, it would be misconduct, even criminal misconduct, for investigators or prosecutors not to proceed against such officials in cases where there is substantial evidence crimes have been committed.

That's one reason Obama's comments such as that above in the month before he was sworn in as President were so concerning. I know of no evidence that Obama as President directed interfered in any such Justice Department process. But by his public statements like the one quoted above, he was sending an unmistakable signal to his future Justice Department that he wouldn't look favorably on such a development.

It would also be interesting to know just how active a role the Obama Administration played in the prosecutorial and judicial misconduct connected with the Lava Jato investigations. What we do know presents an ugly picture, unfortunately in line with the longtime bipartisan US policy toward Latin American nations. (Andrew Fishman et al, "Keep It Confidential" The Intercept 06/09/2019

But it was only weeks later that Holder's Justice Department announced they would not proceed with prosecutions against CIA employees who had engaged in torture crimes. Because, to use a notorious phrase, they were just following orders. A Washington Post editorial at the time praised that more than dubious course of action (President Obama's wise decision on dealing with the legacy of torture 04/17/2009):

The Obama administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy. The pair of decisions -- one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States -- struck exactly the right balance.

The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. [my emphasis]

The Post editorial included this mealy-mouthed CYA comment, "Yet the decision to forgo prosecutions should not prevent -- and perhaps should even encourage -- further investigation about the circumstances that gave rise to torture."

The editorial at the time was titled "Dealing With a Disgrace." (This is part of why I use the somewhat cumbersome practice of citing full article titles in my posts.) I supposed someone realized that a title using the word "disgrace" was a little embarrassing for an editorial that was praising the Administration for not prosecuting known torture crimes.

I wish I could say that Democrats in Congress raised a big stink over this no-prosecution decision and held hearings on whether the Justice Department was deliberately excusing criminal actions. Which it seems pretty obvious that they were. But the Democrats didn't do that.

This neglect to hold the previous Bush-Cheney Administration responsible for crimes committed by government officials had destructive consequences for the rule of law and for politics. The Democrats signaled loud and clear that they were willing to let a Republican administration break the law blatantly and not hold them legally accountable. Obviously, the Democrats didn't demand impeachment hearings against President Bush over the torture program.

Which brings us to the Trump-Pence Administration and the January 6 Republican insurrection in pursuit of a coup attempt. Kim Ghattas writes about this issue of Executive impunity, both legal and otherwise (The Moral Cost of Choosing Stability Over Justice The Atlantic 03/27/2021):

What did the previously unimaginable experience of watching an attempted coup unfold in Washington, D.C., bring to Americans’ understanding of the fragility of democracy anywhere and, crucially, the quest for accountability everywhere? If America cannot go forward until there is justice, can other countries? Bypassing accountability in the name of “moving on” will not succeed—should not succeed—in the United States, in much the same way that making compromises overseas in the name of stability has failed to deliver either justice or stability.

Gattas invokes some parallels between American and Lebanese politics that I won't address here. But there are valid lessons that we can learn about accountability for political crimes, of the sort that are actual crimes committed by politicians and public officials. But what she says here is certainly relevant to the legacy of Trumpism, "Pursuing stability without justice achieves neither."

American values and American interests will never fully align, and the U.S. will always be accused of hypocrisy as it upholds human rights. But after the events of January 6, Americans must, more than ever, understand that unearned forgiveness and a lack of accountability can perpetuate the rot in the system, erode norms, and undermine long-term stability and governance, at home and abroad. ...

Democracy is a lofty goal, and a loaded word in the Middle East, after the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda.” But accountability is a worthy quest that can enable the building of institutions, judicial systems, and functioning governments, and pave the way to better governance and rule of law. ...

Accountability may appear divisive, but in some ways, that is the point. “It is intended to enforce a clear division between those who accept and are committed to democracy and those who are willing to turn to violence when the vote doesn’t turn out the way that they want it to,” Henry Farrell, a politics professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote after the Capitol insurrection. [my emphasis]

Here are links to some of my posts from December 2008-May 2009 on the need for accountability that the Obama-Biden Administration did not provide:

Cheney, the Dark Lord of torture 12/17/2008

Nixonism and Cheneyism 12/28/2008

Legal accountability 01/10/2009

Accountability and the rule of law 01/10/2009

Lead military commissions judge speaks out on torture 01/14/2009

The looming cloud of accountability 01/24/2009

Legal accountability: Nancy Pelosi supports it 02/27/2009

Cheney-Bush accountability 02/28/2009

Good news on the international law and domestic rule-of-law front 03/13/2009

This isn't going away 03/19/2009

Not going away 04/17/2009

PBS Newshour bungles the torture memos story 04/18/2009

How democracy dies, Chapter 423 04/17/2009

Torture and the rule of law 04/20/2009

The evidence for criminal behavior on the torture program was substantial: Credit where due 04/21/2009.

There were plenty of international precedents, including the Nuremburg Tribunal and many national trials for war crimes after the Second World War. Argentina also provides some recent examples: Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina: he also had to deal with his predecessors' torture crimes 04/22/2009.

The Beltway Villagers were aghast at the idea that criminal acts related to the torture program: A Twitter-plus thought on law and order 04/23/2009

GOP aggression techniques 04/24/2009: "honorary Democrat Joe Lieberman has joined with hardline Bush supporter a legendary Maverick John McCain to write to the Obama administration opposing any prosecution of lawyers criminally involved in the torture policy."

The reality of the anti-torture laws is becoming more clear to even our press corps 04/24/2009

The Altstötter war crimes case 04/26/2009

Going after all the torturers? 04/26/2009

Naomi Wolf on collective guilt 04/28/2009

Thinking about war crimes 05/01/2009

The Democratic push for bipartisanship and massive Republican resistance during the Obama Presidency

Obstruction works for Republicans opposing a Democratic President. It works because they are willing to do it. And it works because Democrats all too often are unwilling to use entirely legitimate tools at their disposal to overcome the obsttrucion.

In the introduction to their important 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than Itz Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, define the problem as follows. They use an example of what I would describe as really bad economic policy combined with really bad politics, a resolution known as the Conrad-Gregg proposal.

A contemporary article from The Hill described it this way (Gregg: Fiscal panel bill lacks the votes 01/12/2010):

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) told The Hill on Monday that the proposal he’s pushing with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) doesn’t have the 60 Senate votes necessary to pass. An amendment creating the fiscal commission will get a full Senate vote next week during a debate over a bill raising the debt limit.

Gregg and Conrad’s plan would set up a process to come up with a bipartisan fiscal reform package that would be ensured a vote on the House and Senate floors. The commission’s supporters, mainly centrist lawmakers in both chambers, have said that the special legislative process is necessary to any fiscal reform because lawmakers aren’t willing to consider the politically perilous tax increases and spending cuts necessary to bring down the deficit, which hit a record $1.4 trillion last year. The Senate bill has 33 co-sponsors in addition to Gregg and Conrad. [my emphasis]

Obama's push for the Grand Bargain

This effort was part of President Obama's pursuit of a "Grand Bargain," a fundamentally conservative idea that Obama held that was also bad politics. The idea was that Republicans would agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and the Democrats would agree to make cuts to "entitlements," which means primarily Social Security and Medicare, but is also used to include Medicaid. Obama floated this idea during his 2008-9 Presidential transition period, pointedly raising it to a group of conservative journalists. Digby Parton was sounding the alarm about it even at the time. (Fiscal Madness Hullabaloo 01/11/2009)

This is what Obama was telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos on national TV even before he was sworn in as President, but knowing that he was going to have very solid Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate ('This Week' Transcript: Barack Obama ABC News 01/11/2009):

OBAMA: So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient.

I'm not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And when will that get done?

OBAMA: Well, the -- right now I'm focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure that we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you describe is exactly what we're going to have to do.

What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?

STEPHANOPOULOS: And eventually sacrifice from everyone.

OBAMA: Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game. [my emphasis]

So Obama first pushed through a stimulus package that economists including Paul Krugman was about half as big as it needed to be to start an adequately strong recovery, and one heavily weighted toward tax cuts whose stimulative value was dubious, and one that despite his compromises with Republicans failed to win any significant Republican support in Congress.

And in a move that was a kind of apology for passing stimulus at all, Obama stressed the need for cutting the deficit, and appointed the notorious Bowles-Simpson Commission, officially called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, with a charge to come up with an austerity plan. Critics called it the Catfood Commission, as in "Let Grandma Eat Catfood," to highlight the fact that the two programs so critical for older people - and two programs that were and are spectacularly popular and successful and identified with the Democratic Party - Social Security and Medicare - were the prime targets of this austerity project. As Obama told Stephanopoulos, "Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." Especially people with old skin.

How did any Democrat ever convince themselves that this was good policy or good politics?

The economics of federal deficits

To be fair to establishment Democrats, for a long time even liberal economists held to the idea that the deficit was important to control or eliminate. Even in "pure" Keynesian terms, many liberals held to Keynes' own position that the federal budget should be balanced over the business cycle. That is, the government should run deficits to stimulate the economy in recessions and reduce deficits during expansions. John Kenneth Galbraith explained in his classic The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical problem with this, which is that it's easier for politicians to vote to increase spending and cut taxes during recessions than it is for them to reduce spending and raise taxes during expansions.

His son Jamie Galbraith explained in the same context that Obama was addressing in his 2009 Grand Bargain talk why the deficit obsession of that moment was wildly misguided in terms of real-world economics. (The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008)) Without getting into the weeds, the end of the Bretton Woods international currency system in 1973 meant that the dollar became a de facto international reserve currency, and it remains so. There is an accounting identity which he explained this way:

There is a basic relationship in macroeconomics, as fundamental as it is poorly understood, that links the internal and the international financial position of any country. A country's internal deficit, that is, its "public" deficit and its "private" deficit - the annual borrowing by companies and household - will together equal its international deficit.

Money flows are part of the international deficit, and as long as the US dollar is the world reserve currency, other countries will hold significant amounts of dollars as reserves. Along with the US trade deficits, this means that the US has run chronic international deficits for decades and will continue to do so. So the only way the federal budget goes into surplus, as it did briefly at the end of the Clinton Administration, is if private companies and households are collectively borrowing more than they are spending, i.e., creating a "private" deficit. That only happens at a time of net investment in the private economy, where the borrowing in a given year is higher than the spending.

In other words, the federal government doesn't actually control whether there is a public deficit or not. State and local governments are required to balance their budgets annually. So if spending exceeds borrowing in the private economy, the federal government will run a deficit. (Accounting relations like this sometimes sound downright mystical. But in this case, they reflect real-world macroeconomic effects.)

The 2011 "Grand Bargain" fiasco

Mann and Ornstein in their book describe how the Republicans obstructed the Conrad-Gregg proposal to force a vote on the kind of deficit reductions the Republicans had been saying they themselves wanted.

The true Republican positions on deficits since "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," as the former Bush-Cheney Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Dick Cheney told him. The Bush-Quayle Administration did cooperate with Democrats on a tax increase, but it was distinctly unpopular among the Republican base. "Deficits don't matter" has been the real position of the Republican Party since 1980.

How did the Republicans block the Conrad-Gregg proposal? By using the filibuster. With the full support of that legendary Bold Maverick John McCain, who always bragged about his ability to "reach across the aisle," i.e., work in a "bipartisan" way with Democrats:

But on January 26, [2011] the Senate blocked the resolution. Fifty-three senators supported it, but it could not garner the sixty votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Among those who voted to sustain the filibuster and kill the resolution were Mitch McConnell and John McCain. McCain was joined in opposition by six other original cosponsors, all Republicans. Never before have cosponsors of a major bill conspired to kill their own idea, in an almost Alice-in-Wonderland fashion. Why did they do so? Because President Barack Obama was for it, and its passage might gain him political credit.

Even after that setback, the Obama-Biden Administration continued to bang their heads against that wall, in pursuit of the chimaera of a Bipartisan Grand Bargain that was especially unpopular among Democratic voters. (Jay Newton-Small, The Inside Story of Obama and Boehner’s Second Failed Grand Bargain Time 07/23/2011)

David Atkins gave an idea of the wretched politics of this later effort in The New York Times reports. You decide. Hullabaloo 07/22/2011.

It was this political context that gave rise a few months earlier to what I like to call The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Mann and Ornstein themselves cautioned in 2011, "Maneuvering tirelessly to stake out some elusive political center, in other words, won’t help Obama win over swing voters. It’ll just set him up for another year of looking weak and ineffectual." (David Brooks’s Awful Advice to Obama New Republic 10/28/2011)

What Mann and Ornstein highlight throughout their 2012 book is the asymmetric partisan polarization of American politics. That involves the continual radicalization of the Republican Party which has not remotely been matched by a similar ideological polarization on the Democratic side. And still isn't today. (See: the January 6 Capitol insurrection directly incited by Republican President Donald Trump.)

And the seemingly eternal conservative Democratic argument for promoting conservative policies that their own Democratic base voters dislike is that it's a way to appeal to swing voters who supposedly love bipartisanship. Obama relied on this argument, although for him it seems to have been more than a cynical political argument. He really did seem to value "bipartisanship" as a good thing in itself. But he also claimed it was good politics. Whatever the ontological virtue of Bipartisanship may be, the latter assumption was clearly wrong in 2011, as Mann and Ornstein relate:

America got [a] crisis-the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression-and a pretty clear signal from the voters, who elected Barack Obama by a comfortable margin and gave the Democrats substantial gains in the House and Senate. What the country didn't get was any semblance of a well-functioning democracy. President Obama's postpartisan pitch fell flat, and the Tea Party movement pulled the GOP further to its ideological pole. Republicans greeted the new president with a unified strategy of opposing, obstructing, discrediting, and nullifying every one of his important initiatives. Obama reaped an impressive legislative harvest in his first two years but without any Republican engagement or support and with no apparent appreciation from the public. The anemic economic recovery and the pain of joblessness and underwater home mortgages led not to any signal that the representatives ought to pull together, but rather to yet another call by voters to "throw the bums out." The Democrats' devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, in which they lost six Senate seats and sixty-three in the House, produced a Republican majority in the House dominated by right-wing insurgents determined to radically reduce the size and role of government. What followed was an appalling spectacle of hostage taking - most importantly, the debt ceiling crisis - that threatened a government shutdown and public default, led to a downgrading of the country's credit, and blocked constructive action to nurture an economic recovery or deal with looming problems of deficits and debt. [my emphasis]

Good policy is often good politics for the policy's supports. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes - far too often, actually - bad policy can be good politics for its supporters, especially in the short run.

But the Democratic Party's decades-long fondness for Reagan-lite positions that were both bad policy and bad politics for their own party is a different sort of thing.

Related: Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult" Contradicciones 12/05/2020

The politics of economic rescue for the Biden-Harris Administration

One of the factors that Theda Skocpol emphasized about the politics of Obama-Biden Administration during its first term in Obama and America's Political Future (2012) was the way that Obama became identified with the unpopular "bailouts" of banks and large corporations. One way this happened was that Obama even as a candidate was doing what was arguably a very responsible thing: working closely with the Cheney-Bush Administration on anti-recession measures even before the 2008 election.

As Michael Kazin has explained, there was a big contrast from the time when Franklin Roosevelt became President in March 1933 (yes, March, the transition period was longer back then) three-and-a-half-years from the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and Obama's ascension to the office soon after the spectacular financial crash of September 2008. The recession in the US technically began in December 2007, but the financial crisis made the seriousness of it dramatically clear weeks before the 2008 Presidential election. That meant that Bush and the Republican Party were not nearly so clearly identified with the economic problems that worsened in the months after Obama's election.

One of 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain's favorite political stunt was to declare he was "suspending" whatever campaign he was running at the moment in order to go to Washington and be a statesman over some serious issue. How effective it ever was, I don't know. But he tried the stunt again after the September financial crisis. But Obama at least exploited the political optics of the moment more effectively. As Skocpol explains:

Obama’s electoral triumph over McCain gained momentum during the Wall Street meltdown that became apparent in September 2008, as conventional wisdom has long recognized. But looking deeper, we can see that candidate Obama was drawn into cooperation with the outgoing Bush administration starting well before the November election, as well as during the presidential transition. Decades earlier, FDR had deliberately avoided invitations to work together from outgoing Republican president Herbert Hoover. But in 2008, with the economic meltdown just getting started, Obama could not avoid transitional efforts to prevent the initial Wall Street crisis from spiraling out of control, a catastrophe that would have taken down the world financial system and plunged the United States into a massive and prolonged depression. FDR came into office when the patient was near death, while Obama wanted to keep the patient’s raging fever from turning into pneumonia. In consequence, just as he was winning the 2008 election and preparing to move into the White House, Obama seemed to be holding hands with the modern- day equivalent of Herbert Hoover, discredited outgoing GOP president George W. Bush. [my emphasis]

As she notes there, it was unavoidable for Obama to have some kind of involvement in economic policy deliberations during the transition. But the politics of it can also be tricky. Particularly with asymmetric partisan polarization in which the Democrats seek to model bipartisan cooperation while Republicans are highly ideological and intensely partisan, with a media network and real as well as "astroturf" grassroots organizations the party can easily mobilize.

Skocpol further emphasizes the point:

Cooperation to deal with Wall Street woes started in earnest during the 2008 presidential campaign in mid- September, when GOP candidate McCain tried to call off the first presidential debate and hold a summit at the Bush White House. As Jonathan Alter reminds us in The Promise: President Obama, Year One, this campaign stunt backfired on McCain because Obama was the one who looked cool, calm, wise, and in charge. Another aspect of this episode mattered just as much, if not more. Soon-to-be president-elect Obama became engaged with Bush administration efforts to mitigate the financial crisis through the politically unpopular decision to build congressional support for a massive financial rescue plan, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Starting at that misguided September 2008 session at the White House, Obama gained confidence that he could master complex issues and work with financial experts. Ironically, the insurgent Democratic candidate who campaigned by promising a bottom- up approach to economic growth and renewal in America started his “presidential” economic efforts amid a bipartisan scramble to help Wall Street first. [my emphasis]

Joe Biden didn't have a comparable pre-election opportunity, because there was no comparable September financial crisis this year. And with the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump was careening down a muddy road in a rickety pickup trying desperately not to get stuck in the mud. About all the strategy he had to fight the pandemic was to call it a hoax and hope for herd immunity to take effect. A strategy of trying to coopt Biden into identifying with his COVID policy (such as it was) was not in Trump's bag of bombastic theatrical tricks and in any case wouldn't have been compatible with his hyperpartisan posturing.

But Biden's situation right now does bear some uncomfortable similarity to Obama's, in that a recission began in February 2020. Since the onset coincided with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, there is no strong identifiication of the recession with specific failures of the Trump-Pence Administration. And the Biden campaign was based on the theme of I'm Not Trump and it didn't emphasize the problems of Republican Party economics.

So Biden and Harris do face the risk of being blamed for the results of the recession/depression that began during the Trump-Pence Administration. The Republicans are currently working hard during the transition to limit any emergency aid or economic stimulus from being enacted. And they have already pivoted to warn of the horrible threat of the public debt and the budget deficit, a concern that only occupies the Republican Party when a Democrat is in the White House. The first President Bush actually did have some concern about the deficit, and his deficit-control efforts damaged his political prospects in 1992. In any case, they were based on faulty economic assumptions.

The Republicans are already pursuing the same strategy the used against Obama: block effective efforts to address the depression while blaming the Democratic President non-stop for the problems of the economy.

In that context, this posture of Biden's on which David Sirota and Walker Bragman report seems to be politically inept, assuming as I do that he actually wants to have a successful Presidency: Biden Goes To Bat For BlackRock, Stays Vague On Direct Aid To Struggling Americans Daily Poster 12/19/2020.

For weeks, Joe Biden’s team has tiptoed around the [stimulus bill being endlessly negotiated in Congress], and avoided strongly and consistently pushing for direct aid to Americans, even as the country faces mass starvation and rising poverty. But yesterday, Biden’s designee to run federal economic policy suddenly weighed in in an uncharacteristically forceful way — to demand Congress protect a program that has provided little relief to ordinary Americans, but has significantly benefited his Wall Street firm.

In a formal statement from Biden’s transition team, the president-elect’s designee to run the National Economic Council Brian Deese demanded Congress reject Republican-backed legislative language designed to curtain special Federal Reserve lending programs created in the first pandemic legislation passed earlier this year.

“It is in the interests of the American people to maintain the Fed’s ability to respond quickly and forcefully,” Deese said. “Undermining that authority could mean less lending to Main Street businesses, higher unemployment and greater economic pain across the nation.”

While the Fed programs have been criticized for being underutilized, they have significantly boosted BlackRock, the firm that was hired to advise the Fed and that has been employing Deese as a managing director.

For more on Brian Deese, see David Dayen's BlackRock Executive Brian Deese Could Get Major White House Position The American Prospect 11/24/2020.

The Democrats should oppose the malicious proposal on which the Republicans just started insisting to curb the existing power of the Federal Reserve to combat recessionary tendencies and financial crisis. This is part of the Republicans' program of economic sabotage against the Biden-Harris Administration. (And the moment of this writing, Congressional negotiators are announcing some kind of "compromise" on the issue, whatever that may mean. See: Marianne Levine et al, Stimulus deal in sight after compromise reached on Fed dispute Politico 12/20/2020)

But politics is not identical with policy. And if the Biden team is going to weigh in very publicly on that proposal, they need to be very careful to identify with genuinely popular measures like individual relief payments and aid to state and local governments. Unfortunately, the Biden team seems to be at least partially falling for the Republicans' Lucy-holding-the-football-for-Charlie-Brown trap:

At one point, he seemed to signal vague support for direct aid, but at another point when the House and Senate seemed close to reaching a deal that included state and local aid and a corporate liability shield, but no stimulus checks, he seemed to signal his support for such an agreement.

Asked about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ opposition over the lack of checks, Biden acknowledged that the deal would be better with checks and that those may still be “in play.” However, he said, “This is a democracy and you’ve got to find a sweet spot where you have enough people willing to move in a direction that gets us a long way down the road, but isn’t the whole answer.”

That rhetoric is a lot more squishy and noncommittal than the assertive demands to protect the program helping BlackRock — which tells us a lot about priorities. [my emphasis]

The dilemma that Skocpol identified in Obama economic policy image was real. And it had significant political effects, including contributing to the loss of the Democrats' House majority in the 2010 midterms. Outside of the Beltway press, nobody actually cares about having Bipartisanship for its own sake.

Theda Skocpol on successes of the first two years of the Obama-Biden Administration

Theda Skocpol analyzed the Obama-Biden Administration during its first term in Obama and America's Political Future (2012). It's obviously relevant today, since Joe Biden is now coming back as President with a White House team heavily populated with veterans of the Obama Administration. It's also facing the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic depression exacerbated intensely by the pandemic, both requiring immediate and massive federal action.

Both also came to office presenting themselves as conciliatory leaders to replace deeply unpopular, bitterly divisive Republican predecessors. Skocpol's work provides some helpful reminders of what kinds of obstacles Biden and Harris are likely to encounter from a highly polarized, politically reactionary Republican opposition. The asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics, with a highly combative and ideologically far-right Republican party confronting a comparatively timid, centrist Democratic Party that nevertheless has a more powerful and vocal progressive wing than in 2008, is still a central feature of the American political situation in 2020.

One important difference is that Obama-Biden came to office in 2009 with the considerable advantage of a solid majority in the House and a 60-vote majority in the Senate. If the Democrats win the two Georgia Senate elections on January 5, they will have a razor-thin majority in the Senate and a House majority reduced from what it has been the last two years. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer have proven themselves to be sadly weak and flat-footed in confronting the many outrageous misconduct of the Republican Trump-Pence Administration. Their leadership mainly based on their fund-raising prowess, their political strategy and messaging leave very much to be desired from a partisan Democratic perspective.

I plan to return a few times to Skocpol's Obama book in trying to illustrate the context in which Biden will be fighting - or choosing not to fight - with the Republicans. In 2009, the Republicans began pursuing from the very start of the Administraration what Skocpol calls "all-out opposition to Obama and Democratic initiatives" that she calls "a cold-blooded political bet." From the Republican partisan viewpoint, that strategy was effective for them. And they appear to be already taking the same approach to the incoming Obama-Biden Administration.

In this post, I'm quoting her summary of Obama's accomplishment during his first two Presidential years:

Given all of the difficulties the president and Democrats faced in 2009 and 2010, if we are just toting up legislative and regulatory accomplishments, the bills passed and decisions issued, Obama’s ambitious agenda for policy change progressed quite remarkably — to institute comprehensive health reform, reform higher education loans, tighten regulation of financial institutions, and tweak many other realms of law and regulation. A new New Deal of sorts was successfully launched by President Obama and congressional Democrats in 2009 and 2010. But much of what happened was either invisible or ominously incomprehensible to the majority of American citizens. Big, worrisome, and easily caricatured — especially at a time of economic stress when people know one thing for sure: the national economy is not getting stronger fast enough to ensure that a rising tide lifts all boats. To advance major governmental reforms in such a context was an impressive accomplishment — but it was also a recipe for endless political controversy and electoral blowback. [my emphasis]

There is a UC-Berkeley lecture from 2012 by Skocpol on "Obama, the Tea Party, and the Future of American Politics". Podcast available here. This is the YouTube version (dated 10/25/2012):

In the book and the lecture, she uses the experience of the Roosevelt Administration and the New Deal to frame the experience of the first term of Obama-Biden.

Lessons from the Obama-Biden Administration's blundering Libyan intervention

One of the more significant foreign policy decisions of the Obama-Biden Administration was the military intervention in Libya in 2011, playing a decisive role but formally doing so in support of NATO allies France and Britain. This BBC News report has a helpful timeline of the US intervention from February 2011 to January 2015: President Obama: Libya aftermath 'worst mistake' of presidency 04/11/2016.

Today, nearly 10 years after the Obama-Biden "humanitarian" military strikes began in March 2011, Libya is widely regarded as a failed state or something close to it. We're coming off a year in which conflicting involvements in Libya's internal military and political power struggles by Egypt, Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have caused diplomatic complications well beyond Libya's borders.

Earlier this month, "At least 20,000 foreign fighters and mercenaries are in Libya causing a “serious crisis” as weapons continue pouring into the war-ravaged North African nation, a United Nations official warned on Wednesday." (‘Serious crisis’: 20,000 foreign fighters in Libya, UN says Aljazeera 12/02/2020) That is from a report on the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, "part of UN efforts to end the chaos in Libya, a major oil producer, which has been gripped by violence since a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 overthrew and killed veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi."

Akram Kharief reported in Libya’s proxy war (Le Monde Diplomatique English Sept 2020):

Libya has been torn by conflict ever since 2011, when a rebel coalition with NATO air support began a civil war against the Gaddafi regime. Since 2014, the country has been split between forces loyal to the Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli and the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Benghazi-based Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. This has grown into a proxy conflict between Haftar’s allies — Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Russia — and Turkey and Qatar, who support the GNA. It has also become a battleground for international mercenaries. [my emphasis]

Turkey's involvement has been a topic of significant problems within NATO, as Ali Bakeer and Dylan Yachyshen discuss in France and Turkey: When NATO allies collide Responsible Statecraft 10/15/2020. France has been a partisan of Haftar's LNA faction.

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, an advocate of what is known as "communitarian" political theory, wrote a analysis of that intervention in the Jan-Feb 2012 issue of the US Army's Military Review, The Lessons of Libya.

The 2012 piece is fascinating in that Etzioni argues that the action showed the military effectiveness of a limited external intervention into an outgoing internal clash between contending parties in a country, which can be achieved with minimal immediate risks to the intervening external powers. But he also identifies how strong the pressure can be for mission creep, including obvious problems that were already apparent in the Libyan situation. But he seems to imply that the US/NATO intervention should have been more intensive. We also from his account that the US/French/British intervention rapidly expanded its goal from Obama's original public justification of preventing an immediate humanitarian crisis from an alleged impending massacre of rebel forces in the Benghazi area by government troops.

Four and a half years later, Etzioni wrote about the Libyan intervention, arguing against deeper involvement then being advocated by neocons and by "humanitarian" interventionists, The Illusion That America Can Fix Libya The National Interest 08/29/2016.

Today, this from the 2012 article has special relevance:

The Libya campaign showed that a strategy previously advocated for other countries, particularly Afghanistan, could work effectively. The strategy, advocated by Vice President Joe Biden and John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, entails using airpower, drones, Special Forces, the CIA, and, crucially, working with native forces rather than committing American and allied conventional ground forces. It is sometimes referred to as “offshoring,” although calling it “boots off the ground” may better capture its essence. [my emphasis]

In the later piece, he is specifically arguing against increased US involvement in Libya in 2016, drawing on the lessons of the failed "nation-building" attempts in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The notion that the United States can engage in nation building in the Middle East is a sociological illusion. The United States sank half a trillion dollars into nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq over fifteen years. In Afghanistan, it “succeeded” in transforming the country from one of the most corrupt nationsin the world to the most corrupt. It has become the leading producer of opiates, which are flooding Europe. And it has a regime that cannot protect itself or pay for itself. In Iraq, since it was liberated by the United States, at least three hundred thousand civilians have been killed, many more maimed, and still more forced out of their homes. The military and the police trained and advised by the United States for over fifteen years are often used by the Shia government to kill and harass Sunnis. [my emphasis in bold]

One important conclusion we can take from the 2012 analysis is that a US/NATO intervention that involves tipping a military situation toward one side in a conflict can seemingly impressive results in the short term. But war is always about political results on the other end. Obama himself recognized that the outcome of the Biden-recommended approach in Libya was not a desirable one for the US. Dominic Tierney reported in The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’ The Atlantic 04/15/2016:

In a Fox News interview last Sunday, Obama was asked about his “worst mistake.” It’s a classic gotcha question, but he had an answer ready. “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” This was yet another act of presidential contrition for the NATO operation in 2011 that helped to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi but left the country deeply unstable. In 2014, Obama said: “[W]e [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions.” In recent interviews with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the “Obama Doctrine,” the president bluntly said the mission in Libya “didn’t work.” Behind closed doors, according to Goldberg, he calls the situation there a “shit show.” [my emphasis]

Part of this strikes me as a classic Mugwump position by Obama, when he admits that the assumptions behind his Libya decision turned out to be disastrously wrong but still doesn't want to state that his intervention was a mistake. To his credit, he did resist the pressure that Etzioni describes in his 2016 piece that was brought to bear on him to compound the mistake by getting more and more deeply involved.

In the absence of a major peace movement, the press gives pitifully little attention to predictable difficulties. Etzioni's observation in the quotation above, for instance, that US intervention had transformed Afghanistan "from one of the most corrupt nations in the world to the most corrupt" was not surprising to people familiar with the Vietnam War or with the war in Iraq. But the mainstream press and TV pundits didn't put much emphasis on pointing out those lessons.

Yes, when the US pours in military personnel and massive resources into a much poorer country in pursuit of an urgent military mission, massive corruption in the local institutions is one of the extremely likely results. Practically inevitable, when there is an immediate military mission to be achieved whose practical considerations require working with whatever institutions are available, "corrupt" or not, or even deliberately corrupting them if it helps the immediate military objective.

The problem for any citizens who want to take a critical and responsible view of proposed military interventions is that the Pentagon and the State Department and various other government agencies will always have a superficially plausible claim that US security is at stake, they will always offer humanitarian reasons for the intervention, they will always claim that US power will make the war quick and easy, they will always claim that some brad spanking new technology makes it easier than ever before, and will always try to make critics sound like they are sympathizing with evil people.

The validity of the claims will vary from case to case. But without informed critics to address them and with a press that is more eager for the drama of the conflict and the glamour of the heroic Pentagon presentations of its goals than for parsing the facts for citizens to make well-informed decisions, it will be way too easy to blunder into more misguided military interventions.

Michael Kazin on Obama's Presidency, the left, and the Republican Party

Michael Kazin wrote an evaluation of the development of the US left during the Obama Administration in his chapter of the book The Presidency of Barack Obama ("Criticize and Thrive: The American Left in the Obama Years", Julian Zelizer, ed; 2018)

He explains that the progressive left did grow during the years of the Obama-Biden Administration. He argues that this is consistent with what happened in the US in the 1930s with the union movement and the 1960s with the civil rights and antiwar movements. Because in all those cases, the President and the national Democratic Party gave credibility to policies and ideas that grassroots groups used to push those same Presidents to enact progressive changes. And, of course, they were more inclined to consider left-leaning ideas than conservative governments.

Kazin isn't presenting that observation as some kind of general Law of History or the like. As a historian of the Populist movement in the US, he's very aware that the growth of left movement does not depend solely on a left or center-left national government being in power. A long-standing political science trope is that third parties in American don't last too long because when the start gaining political traction, one of the two big parties coopts their appeals. Which is true as far as it goes, though other factors like the winner-take-all electoral districts and outright repression of radical political groups have played a big role, as well.

Kazin notes of Obama, who was generally understood as the more progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, "With his bracingly progressive rhetoric and activist biography, the first African American president had raised expectations among leftists of nearly every stripe."

He provides a helpful list of criticisms that Obama received from the progressive left, which I have formatted here into bullet points:

The most salient criticisms — whether voiced in sorrow or anger or contempt — included:

• Obama’s failure to fight for a public option in the Affordable Care Act;
• his reluctance to boldly protest an upsurge in racist talk and police killings of unarmed black men;
• his refusal to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan and to abandon the surveillance regime accompanying the unending “war on terrorism”;
• his lack of support for legislation that would have made it easier for unions to organize or to do anything else of significance to attack economic inequality;
• and his persistent attempts to compromise with the same Republicans in Congress who - backed by a large and well- funded network of right- wing groups like the Tea Party - sought to defeat him at every turn. [my emphasis]

The last point is particularly important for the Democrats in general and the Biden-Harris Administration in deciding how to approach their governmental and party decisions if they want to more effectively counter the intransigence and authoritarian bent of the Republican Party.

He also provides this broad summary of accomplishments with which progressives could be at least partially satisfied, that I've also arranged in bullet-point form:

• The economic stimulus plan
• the ACA [Affordable Care Act, aka, Obamacare]
• the Dodd-Frank regulation of high finance
• the beginning of a serious effort to stall or reverse global warming
• And, on climate change, the executive orders Obama issued, the international pacts he spearheaded, and the Keystone and North Dakota pipeline projects he halted (if only temporarily) were enough to cheer even most radical environmentalists.

And Kazin does give a practical description of real considerations facing the Obama-Biden Administration. One issue that progressives projected their hopes for change onto a guy who wasn't actually all that activist or progressive:

Those who saw him as a stalwart progressive impatient to launch a New Deal or Great Society for the twenty- first century and to denounce and defy anyone who got in his way did not take an accurate measure of the man. ... [Obama] was an instinctive pragmatist who believed that only patient, empathetic deliberation could generate beneficent change.

Another is the contrast he notes between FDR coming to power in 1933 three an a half years from the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and Obama's coming to power soon after the spectacular financial crash of September 2008. The recession in the US technically began in December 2007, but the financial crisis made the seriousness of it dramatically clear weeks before the 2008 Presidential election.

When FDR took office in 1933, more than three years after the stock market crash, no one blamed him for the millions of unemployed or the thousands of banks that were in danger of going broke. But Obama had to weather the inevitable decline of the economy and so he reaped less credit from the slow recovery that followed. If Roosevelt had been elected in, say, 1930, he surely would have struggled mightily to enact the New Deal programs that became keystones of the modern liberal state. [my emphasis]

E.J. Dionne made that argument in real time in a 12/30/2010 column (Liberals should accept defeat and get back to their goals Washington Post):

The economic downturn began on Bush's watch, but its bitter fruits were harvested after Obama took office. By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt took power after Herbert Hoover had presided over three of the most miserable years in American economic history. Blame was firmly fixed on Hoover by the time FDR showed up with his jaunty smile and contagious optimism.

Kazin also notes that the Bipartisanship that Obama seemingly fetishized as an end in itself was a very different thing in earlier times:

Most of the president’s left critics also neglected the fact that he had to cope with much smaller majorities in Congress than FDR and LBJ enjoyed — and unbending opposition from nearly every GOP lawmaker in both houses. This was a stark contrast with the relative bipartisanship that prevailed during earlier liberal heydays. A sizable minority of Republicans had voted for such signature programs of the New Deal as Social Security and the G.I. Bill as well as for such pillars of the Great Society as Medicare and the Civil Rights Act.

In those times, ideological divisions int he US cut across both parties in ways hard to recall in 2020. During the Presidencies of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson, there actually were moderate and even liberal Republicans. Those two now-vanished political species were represented in Congress. And some of the more hardcore reactionaries were segregationist Southern Democrats.

Making that problem much worse for Obama was his apparent fixation on consensus building in pursuit of that impossible ideal of Bipartisanship. "Alas, when he got to the White House, this exponent of consensus- building took far too long to understand that neither he, nor any other president, could effectively govern that way. Driven by ideological conviction and electoral self-interest, his Republican opponents had no intention of making deals." (my emphasis)

That was the case in 2009 when Obama and Biden took office. It's gotten dramatically worse since.

The new round of "Green Lantern" arguments begins

One of the tropes that was particularly prominent during the Obama Administration was something called "the Green Lantern theory of the Presidency". This was a phrase used mainly as mockery of calls by progressives for Obama to more openly confront bad Republican ideas or to highlight real problems and focus attention on them. (For anyone wondering, Green Lantern is a comic-book superhero who has been around since 1940.)

Politics is politics. And the "Green Lantern" trope was part of an entirely normal and necessary part of politics. Partisans have different priorities, and elected officials have to prioritize which issues are more urgent than others and they have to make decisions on how hard to fight over them. In any negotiation, the participants have to "know when to hold 'em" and "know when to fold 'em," to recall Kenny Rogers' famous song.

With the Biden-Harris Administration coming into office in January, the Democratic version of partisan infighting over positions and priorities they want the President to take is now back on stage. Since the "Green Lantern" trope was used by establishment Democrats against progressives during the Obama-Biden Administration and the Republicans didn't pick it up during the Trump-Pence government, it's worth recalling for a moment how it works.

Greg Sargent hauled out the GL trope during the Obama years in Why the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power persists Washington Post 04/30/2013.

At today’s press conference, President Obama spent a fair amount of time pushing back on what some of us are calling the “Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.” This theory — which seems to hold broad sway over many in the press — holds that presidents should be able to bend Congress to their will, and any failure to do so proves their weakness and perhaps even their irrelevance.

What accounts for the persistence of this theory? The answer, I think, lies in the tendency of reporters and analysts who are trying to remain a neutral, nonpartisan posture to feel comfortable making process judgments, but not ideological ones.

Now, Greg Sargent was primarily focusing on a lazy mainstream press posture of focusing on process rather than policy, which actually is a chronic shortcoming of the corporate press. I would say he was making a solid point in that column:

This isn’t to absolve Obama of all responsibility to move Congress. Surely presidents have the power to set the agenda and get the public to think more about an issue. But as many others have explained at great length — see Jonathan Bernstein and Kevin Drum on this — the president’s influence over Congress is currently quite limited, historically speaking, for a host of reasons.

But progressives also legitimately criticized Obama for falling back on empty invocations of bipartisan cooperation and not using his own position and popularity to rally public pressure not only to put pressure on Republicans over specific legislation but to encourage public awareness of serious problems.

One instance where I think Obama failed in both ways was on the Citizens United decision in January 2010, one year into Obama's eight-year Presidency. Obama's initial rhetorical response was excellent, and very memorable. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Obama Turns Up Heat Over Ruling on Campaign Spending New York Times 11/23/2010) In his State of the Union address that month, he said, "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections." (Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address Obama White House Archives 01/27/2020)

But after a failed attempt at a legislative fix that year when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, , the issue was essentially put on the standard list of issues using in Democratic Party fundraising appeals but de facto accepted as the way things work and should work. (I discussed several such issues in Was the Obama Presidency a "last chance"? 04/16/2020)

The "Green Lantern" sneer can but used to dismiss such criticisms by conservatives who actually don't want to see the Democrats eliminate our oligarchical system of campaign finance. But it can also be employed by those who indulge the establishment Democratic habit of avoiding staging highly visible losing fights as a way of calling out unpopular Republican positions and laying the political grounds for later winning on that issue. There's nothing radical or exotic or magical-thinking about that concept. It's basic politics. The Republicans do it all the time, and sadly they are often effective in doing so. Yes, such fights involve prioritization and judgment calls like everything else in practical politics.

But in such matters, the Democrats need to practice more "Green Lantern" and less Bert the Turtle (Duck and Cover):

Again, Greg Sargent did have an important point about how mainstream pundits used that criticism in a lazy way:

Perhaps this is how the public will view Obama; perhaps it isn’t. What is clear, however, is the basic imbalance here. While neutral commentators often hold up compromise, abstractly, as the Holy Grail, the process/ideology dichotomy makes it much easier for those commentators to fault the president for failing to work the process effectively enough to secure compromise than to pillory the opposition for being ideologically uncompromising.

Brendan Nyhan, who claims to have coined the phrase, made a similar critique For the Columbia Journalism Review, The Green Lantern Theory of Sequestration 02/27/2020. In 2019, he defended the theory from criticism based on Trump use of active demagoguery as President, A Weak President Can Still Be a Dangerous One Medium 02/26/2019. He states the basis of the theory as the "premise that presidential compromise and policy failures are not the result of a lack of will but of the limitations of an office that is constitutionally weak, especially in domestic policy."

But somehow, Republican Presidents are more willing to use the powers of what the "Imperial Presidency" to fight for their own policy positions than the last two Democratic Presidents have been. The heads of governments of most democracies would presumably be surprised to hear that the American Presidency is a "constitutionally weak" one!

Ryan Cooper argues against the "Green Lantern" theory in Liberals need to stop pretending the president has no power The Week 02/11/2020:

Back in the Obama years, Democratic partisans had a contemptuous slogan for leftist critics of the president. People who insisted that the president could and should be doing more were adherents of the "Green Lantern Theory" of the presidency, after the comic book where someone in possession of a particular ring can do anything, limited only by their imagination and will. By this view, the presidency is an inherently weak office and leftists who think putting a more progressive person in the White House will make a big difference by itself are naive and foolish.

He looks at three of Obama's most consequential decisions, the bank bailout with minimal bank reform, the foreclosure crisis, and the initial economic recovery package as examples of where Obama made explicit decisions to go for a more conservative approach when a more activist approach that would have been much more beneficial for working people and the Democratic base voters than the one he chose. Those decisions were not driven by some vaguely-defined Constitutional weakness of the Presidency because those were his policy choices.

Big donors and lobbyists will be making plenty of demands on the Biden-Harris Administration. Labor and progressive groups have to do the same. And let the critics sneer about Green Lantern fantasies. Who cares, so long as the right policies get enacted?

This strikes me as a current example of the "Green Lantern" sneer

I get that people are pissed. So am I! But at Biden? Apparently people think the President-Elect has powers before he’s sworn in. Hearing a lot of suggestions that would either achieve zero or make Biden look weak by demanding things he can’t force Trump to do.

— Tim Fullerton (@TimFullerton) November 20, 2020

Uh, hello? Joe Biden is the President-elect who just won the election with a strong Electoral College margin and a popular vote lead of well over six million! Yes, he has political power! That literally makes him one of the most influential on the planet already. What he says, the priorities he sets, the people he selects to staff his administration, how he approaches Congressional relations - all of that matters. A lot!

Conservatives and corporate lobbyist know this. And there's no reason at all that labor, progressive groups, and grassroots activists should think otherwise, either. Unless they are not serious about their demands.

Here's someone who I believe is still nominally a Republican, John Dean, a longtime critic of the authoritarian trends in the Republican Party not only during the Trump Presidency but also in real time during the Cheney-Bush Administration, making a demand on the, yes, the already extremely powerful Joe Biden:

Trump is openly and actively violating federal criminal laws in his efforts to overturn his defeat. President-elect Biden should put Trump on notice that he will request his attorney general investigate criminal efforts to undo the election. Trump is playing Biden as a weak fool!

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) November 21, 2020

Farred Zakaria on legislative fixes for some of the problems of Trumpism

I'm by no means a particular fan of Fareed Zakaria. He too often buys in to superficial cliches of the punditocracy or the Washington foreign policy "Blob," as Stephen Walt calls it.

But when he's right, he's right. At least here, when he's talking about the failure of the Obama-Biden Administration's obsession with Bipartisanship as a value in itself, Fareed: Trump spotlighted great weakness of US democracy 11/21/2020:

He also has a decent point about the need to formalize some of the procedural traditions that have governed Presidents, like those concerning the Presidential transition period and requirements like the President putting his business holdings in a blind trust and tax form disclosures for Presidential candidates.

Precedents on Presidential impunity for crimes - bad precedents that need to be changed

Alexander Sammon addressed the issue of Presidential legal accountability in the context of the implications of the "Look Forward, Not Backward policy of impunity for crimes committed during the Bush-Cheney Administration that the Obama-Biden Administration decided to pursue in Biden Must Bring an End to the Bush Era The American Prospect 07/21/2020

Many Democrats, for some reason, have spent the past 12 years forgetting the actual impact of the Bush presidency. One of the least popular presidents in history at the time of his departure, mastermind of the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and more, Bush’s approval rating among all Americans sunk as low as 25 percent, which still somehow seems high. Fast forward not even a decade, however, and a majority of Democrats now say they view him favorably.

Joe Biden was elected alongside Barack Obama with a powerful mandate to undo the abominable handiwork of the Bush administration. But Obama and Biden did nothing of the sort. They insisted on looking forward, and prosecuted no one involved in crimes of finance or war. They pledged to close Guantanamo Bay, but didn’t. Looking forward, it turned out, meant letting many of Bush’s great sores continue to fester. [my emphasis]

We either have now or we are close to having a de facto situation when Republican Presidents and their officials who break the law enjoy impunity for those crimes because they will prevent the Justice Department from prosecuting them, or have the Republican President pardon them or commute their sentences, which is what we've seen under Trump these last four years.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are willing to use the machinery of justice to pursue crassly political prosecutions against Democrats. And even blackmail foreign governments like that of Ukraine to manufacture evidence for that purpose. The latter is what got Trump impeached, making him only the third President to be impeached.

Sammon was very right when he wrote earlier this year, "So if Joe Biden is going to take Trump’s place, he’s not merely going to need to undo the pernicious impact of Trumpism, he’s also going to need to undo the legacy of George W. Bush." But doing that is not compatible with a sentimental and unrealistic pursuit of Bipartisanship:

Biden’s pitch to voters around the country is that he’ll undo the shameful acts of his Republican predecessor. But because he and Obama failed to accomplish exactly that during his first sojourn in the West Wing, a second trip will require him to do double duty. If Trumpism is going to be overhauled, Biden is going to have to be willing to tear down Bushism, too. That may not align nicely with Biden’s warm embrace of Republicans ready to abandon Trump, but it’s the job he was elected to do in 2008, and it will still be before him if he’s elected in 2020. [my emphasis]

Coup attempt in Venezuela, backed by the Trump-Pence Administration

"Venezuela is Latin America's biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world's largest petroleum reserves." - Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne, Venezuela death toll rises to 13 as protests flare Reuters 02/24/2014

"Venezuela claims the world’s largest proven reserves of petroleum, an estimated 298 billion barrels of oil." - Michael Klare, The Desperate Plight of Petro-States TomDispatch 05/26/2016

The Trump-Pence Administration has officially recognized an opposition figure as the legitimate government of Venezuela: Jim Wyss and Carlos Camacho, Venezuela now has two presidents. How long will the uncertainty last? Miami Herald 01/23/2019; Marco Teruggi, Las claves del golpe Página/12 (Argentina) 24.01.2019; Ana Langner, México no desconocerá al gobierno de Maduro: SRE La Journada (México) 23.01.2019; Venezuela, entre protestas y un presidente autoproclamado Melenio (México) 23.01.2019.

Mike Pence, the rightwing theocrat who the TV commentariat will annoint as the Savior of the Republic when he takes over after Trump's removal from office, tweeted:

As I told @Trish_regan, the Maduro regime has oppressed its people & @POTUS has taken decisive action over the last 2 years to bring sanctions on officials in the Maduro regime. Today, freedom broke out in Venezuela with the recognition of a new interim President in @JGuaido. pic.twitter.com/eJKJz4wsSS

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) January 24, 2019

It's telling - a Freudian slip, or maybe very conscious - that future Great Statesman Pence said that "freedom broke out in Venezuela with the recognition of a new interim President." The normal diplomatic convention with this kind of move is to declare that the coup has already liberated the country involved and now the foreign government is just recognizing and supporting the new, legitimate government. But for Savior of the Republican Pence, freedom in Venezuela broke out the moment the US declared that was the new reality.

This is a policy which in some ways continues the Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton Administration's distinctly conservative policy toward Latin America. And their policy toward Veneuela was also reckless. Obama declared a state of emergency for the United States over Venezuela: Declaration of a National Emergency with Respect to Venezuela 03/09/2015

Let's take a moment here to note that this was one in a long chain of abusives of Executive power via declarations of emergencies that Congress seriously needs to curb. Obama's 2015 action involved blatant threat inflation:

Pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), I hereby report that I have issued an Executive Order (the "order") declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela. [my emphasis]

Anyone who thinks that Venezuela's oil isn't the main consideration in US policy toward Venezuela has already lost the thread of this story.

Venezuela is a petrostate whose prosperity or lack thereof is driven by world oil prices. That was true 20 years ago, it's true today, and it will be true whether or not this coup attempt succeeds. And it will be true 10 years from now whether it has a Maduro-style socialist government or a Bolsinaro-type authoritarian one.

But we also shouldn't be simplistic about the oil factor. There are also distinct political and diplomatic reasons for US hostility to Maduro's government. To summarize, that government has never seen its primary role as doing what Washington orders them to.

American-backed coups in Latin America have a seriously bad history. (See: Augusto Pinochet.) How many Americans noticed after 9/11 that the expressions of sympathy from Latin American governments to the US were more restrained than most others? There's a reason for that. (Iran was more enthusiastic in expressing sympathy, for God's sake.) Answer: almost no Americans noticed because we were too busy howling to bomb somebody and because US news coverage of Latin America (even Mexico) is pitiful.

How many Americans remember the coup the Obama-Biden Administration backed in 2009 in Honduras? Also not many. (See US Media, Coverage of Latin America.) But here 10 years later, the President of the US has shut down the government demanding a wall to protect us from the refugee "caravans" from Central America, which are in very significant part due to that 2009 coup and the ensuing destabliization. Huge numbers of refugees from Venezuela are already in Colombia and a civil war in Venzuela will generate more. Wow, wars and coups generate refugees? Who could have guessed?

The most recent blog post I did about Venezuela was one on a rogue's gallery of authoritarians in the Austrian magazine Profil (What does a democracy under internal threat look like? 10/16/2018):

Nicolás Maduro can legitimately be called a populist. But, to put it generously, the constant American polemics against Maduro and Hugo Chávez before him as dictators was always overblown. Prior to 2016, international observers of Venezuelan elections under both Chávez and Maduro, including the Carter Center, regarded their national elections as legitimate with strong safeguards against fraud. The US is openly engaged in a regime change effort against the current Venezuelan government and Trump has threaned to militarily invade the country. And the US government always become intensely concerned about human rights and democracy in countries that it is preparing to bomb and kill lots of their people. Also, not at all incidentally, Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves of any country in the world. Anyone who think that hasn't been the overriding concern of American policy toward Venezuela is disregarding the entire history of US dealings with Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Venezuela is a petrostate heavily hit for years by falling oil prices and facing a protracted period of civil disorder that makes it particularly difficult to compare Venezuela's situation in 2018 with any of the other country's whose leaders feature in the Profil rouges' gallery.

I'm outraged over Russian interference in the 2016 US election and over their malicious meddling in European politics and I think it all needs to be thoroughly investigated and Trump should be impeached and removed from office. But the Trump-Pence Administration and allied governments in Latin America just officially backed a coup in progress in Venezuela against an elected goverment. And, yes, Maduro was legitimately elected, however horrible you may think his government is.

Americans should be angry about Russian meddling in our politics because nations have to defend their sovereignty. But did I mention that the US just formally backed a coup attempt in progress in Venezuela against an elected government?

One last thought: the next time there's a foreign terrorist attack on an American target, how many of the politicians and pundits wringing their hands and asking, "Why do They hate us?" will mention any of this? Sadly, we all know the answer to that one, too.