James Gillen

“This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

– Donald Trump, quoted after hearing about the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller

So: it’s been a little less than a month since Robert Mueller submitted his investigation on the Trump team to Attorney General William Barr, at which point Barr presented a suspect summary that immediately drew attention to itself. Since then Barr appeared at an April 9 Congressional hearing where he said “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign.

And then on Thursday he felt the need to preface the official release of the actual report with a press conference where he invoked the calming mantra of “No Collusion” and actually said Trump’s actions were understandable in that he felt “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency” – prompting even Chris Wallace at Fox News to say that “the attorney general seemed almost to be acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president rather than the attorney general”.

Why is Barr going to such lengths to stand up for Trump in the face of the Mueller Report? Well, Trump needs all the help he can get.

As promised by Barr’s summary, the Mueller Report is over 400 pages and consists of two parts, the first being the subject of whether candidate Trump conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. On that score, while even Barr asserts that Russia did work to influence the election, and the Mueller Report goes into great detail on exactly what methods they used, they conclude that no direct coordination took place. So, Russian ops (a group called the IRA) “represented themselves as U.S. persons to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign” and that isn’t coordination because the Trump team could claim deniability. “Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts and other political content created by the IRA” and that isn’t coordination. “Less than an hour after the (Access Hollywood) video’s publication, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen by the GRU (Russian military intelligence) from the account of Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta” but that’s just a coincidence.

Legally prosecutors might not have met a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard, but to say that all the various efforts of the Trump campaign to get help from the Russian government were not deliberate or intentional is to stretch coincidence to the point that a Storyteller in Mage: The Ascension would slap Trump with an automatic Paradox Backlash and at least one Flaw.

(OK. Most of you didn’t get that. But the two or three people who did thought it was really funny.)

The second section is the kicker. The second subject of the report concerns whether Trump as president obstructed justice in the investigation of the first matter, Russian efforts to tilt the election.

Because if Trump simply happened to benefit from the fact that Vladimir Putin preferred him as president to Hillary Clinton, and that was the extent of their alignment, he could have left it at that. But once president, he continued to change foreign policy towards Russia even as Cabinet members, notably National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, turned out to have Russian ties. The fact that existing FBI investigations on the 2016 campaign continued into the Trump Administration concerned Trump, and he demanded that the serving FBI chief, James Comey, “lift the cloud” that he felt was interfering with his ability to act on foreign policy. When Comey refused to explicitly do so, Trump got Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write an opinion firing Comey specifying that the termination had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, only for them to see Trump tell NBC’s Lester Holt (on May 11, 2017) that the reason for the firing was over the Russia investigation. (Five days after being played by Trump, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel on the investigation, which is probably just another coincidence.) Among other things, Mueller cites Trump’s remarks and actions concerning Comey’s firing as having “the potential to affect a successor director’s conduct of the investigation.” The report cites Trump’s efforts to remove the special counsel from the investigation, telling Jeff Sessions “you were supposed to protect me” and when Sessions gave him a resignation letter, Trump did not accept the resignation at the time but kept the letter for several days, which then-Chief of Staff Reince Preibus told investigators was like having a “shock collar” on the Attorney General. When Flynn decided to cooperate with the investigation, Trump’s personal counsel asked Flynn to provide a “heads up” in case “there’s information that implicates the President”. At least one case of conduct towards a witness is redacted as “Harm to Ongoing Matter.” Trump’s first campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted on several charges, including witness tampering, after he broke the terms of his plea deal with the investigation.

During the investigation, Trump submitted to only written interview responses to questions on Russia-related topics. He refused to interview at all on the subject of obstruction or his actions during the presidential transition.

In the introductory portions of Section II, Mueller’s report is clear: “Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers” and: “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

And in the Conclusion, we get the full context of the quote that Barr’s summary made unnecessarily mysterious. Barr quoted Mueller as saying, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Many readers, including me, thought that this snippet revealed much by what it did not reveal. Under the presumption of innocence, why is there a need to specify whether an individual is exonerated? This is the actual paragraph, emphasis mine:

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Again: it was not Robert Mueller’s job to indict Trump. It wasn’t even the Attorney General’s job. The job of the Justice Department was to present the evidence of Trump’s activities so that Congress could make a proper judgment on whether to impeach the president, which is their responsibility. Contra some liberals, my problem with William Barr is not that he didn’t indict the president. It’s that he has done everything in his power to muddy the waters and stop Congress from making a proper judgment, not least by taking a Mueller conclusion of “we can’t prove that the president obstructed justice because his team eliminated trails of evidence” and presenting it to the public as “he’s totally clean, guys, No Collusion (TM), nothing to see here.”

Needless to say, “We Don’t Want The DOJ To Indict the President Over Shady Stuff That Would Get Anyone Else, Including Bill Clinton, In Front of a Grand Jury” isn’t as snappy as “No Collusion.”

But that isn’t the worst of it.

It doesn’t matter how corrupt or conscientious the Attorney General is when the real problem is that you have a full half of the political system, which represents somewhat less than half the population, openly declaring war against not only the Democratic Party but anybody who doesn’t agree with them all the time. This is of course, not just a matter of Trump, however noxious he is an an individual. It was a matter of Mitch McConnell refusing to even allow a vote on Merrick Garland’s appointment to the Supreme Court, effectively creating an extra-Constitutional precedent that stretches “advise and consent” to the width of a subatomic particle. It has to do with the attempts of various “conservatives” to get around established legal precedent. It has to do with them using their lame-duck time in state government passing last-minute legislation to neuter citizen initiatives and stop Democrats from passing laws when the Republicans in said states were thrown out precisely because voters wanted someone else in charge. And even the Republicans who are not moronic, racist and fascist are still willing to go along with all this, which only serves the actual morons, racists and fascists.

And yet, the Democrats’ House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, told reporters after the release of the Mueller report that impeaching Trump was “not worthwhile” especially since there is going to be an election on Trump next year. And realistically, what it comes down to is that pretty much every Republican in the Senate will vote against removing the president, so the House may as well not try. But THAT’s the issue that needs to be addressed. It never was about Trump. It was about a party that is so power-hungry and desperate that it will even accept a Trump as leader and do anything they can to keep him in charge.

And Democrats will not confront that issue because that would require them to abandon this fantasy that once they win another presidential election, American politics will get back to “normal.” Right. Because once Barack Obama defeated John McCain, the Republicans all sobered up.

Why are these guys not ratcheting up the fight? It’s not just because they’re afraid of losing impeachment in the Senate. It’s because the best and worst tradition of Washington is the bipartisan professional camraderie of the political class, and even though the “bipartisan” part is something of a joke now, Democrats still want to believe in the old sense of courtesy even if Republicans have effectively abandoned it. (This is another reason the old-time Democrats are cool towards Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the other ‘democratic socialists’, because they ran for office after growing up and watching the results of Washington in action, and they didn’t come to be nice and play around.)

There’s also the very relevant point that expecting the president to follow “the rule of law” rather than the precedent of an ever-more-powerful executive would put limits on the president’s power, regardless of which party he or she is in. Both parties crave the powers of the executive more than they fear what the other party would do with them.

But again, Democrats are still under the illusion that there’s a cycle of power-sharing in which they’ll get to turn things around if they wait their turn. These guys have partnered for so long with Republicans in killing any competition for the duopoly racket that they still aren’t willing to grasp that the Republicans are effectively turning them into a “third” party.

And one of the reasons Democrats can’t correct course is because their mindset has mostly worked for them. The strength of Democrats up to this point has been their ability to present their position as not only the “normal” position, but as the only respectable one. And they say, “let’s be sane. Let’s be sensible. Let’s all play by the rules and be normal.” And whatever you might think of Republicans, at least they had the guts to walk up to Democrats and go, “you know, we don’t like your rules, and we don’t think your position is ‘normal.’ So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just gonna throw all your rules in the air and ignore them like they didn’t exist, cause on paper, they really don’t. And we’re gonna make up our own rules as we go along. And we’re gonna call that the new ‘normal.’ So, how d’ya like them apples?”

Cause the response from the political establishment so far has been, “well, okay, as long as there’s a normal.”

Anybody who’s ever had to deal with a toxic relationship or a professional sociopath knows how this works. The aggressor basically tries to Stockholm-Syndrome you into accepting their predations as not only “normal” but good, and since they know how much you crave stability and calm, they stir things up and make a mess and terrorize you into succumbing to their demands. “Just give me what I want and everything goes back to normal. Just do what I tell you and then I’ll leave you alone.” (Until the next time they want you to enable them.)

I mean, if you’re not an illegal alien, a trans person in the military, or living in Yemen, none of this stuff Trump does affects YOU, right?
Unless of course it does. But if you’re not a Republican, you don’t count.

I’m just saying, that if liberals are going to keep chanting, “this is not normal,” then maybe they should ACT like it.

That doesn’t mean they should scream and cry and riot, or do anything un-Constitutional. It means they act according to the law, but they also act according to the stakes. If Capone puts one of yours in the hospital, you put two of his in the morgue. And rhetorically speaking, the next year or so leading up to the election presents a great opportunity to do that.

After all, if Mueller and his Crazy Democrat Trump Haters got nothing on Trump, if Trump had nothing to hide, and if the last time the opposition party impeached a president, they got shellacked at their next midterm election, why NOT push for impeachment, just to get it over with? Why was Barr trying so hard to spin this as being less than it was, if it was really nothing at all? If Trump’s got nothing to worry about, because all the Senate Republicans will take his side and put a cloud on the Democrats by giving Trump the win, why not call the Democrats’ bluff?

Because it’s really the Republicans who are bluffing.

Whereas in the 2018 midterms, Democrats had to defend 23 Senate seats and the Republicans only had to defend 9, in 2020, Republicans will be defending 22 seats and Democrats 12. Even though the Republicans had a net gain of Senate seats in 2018, the factors that favored them in 2018 – the staggered schedule of elections and the much tighter margin in a chamber of 100 versus the 435 in the House – now work against them. In the unlikely event that Democrats win seats while Trump wins election, Democrats will need a net gain of four seats to get the majority. If a Democrat is elected Vice President (and their Vice President is able to break ties) their party will only need three more seats for a majority.

And Republicans – certainly Mitch McConnell – know that they need the Senate as much as they need the White House, if not more so. That’s pretty much how they kept their party alive and kicking when Obama was president. They’ve been this shameless this long because as long as Trump is more asset than liability, they have no reason to abandon him. So he has to be made a liability. If, as strict evidence suggests, Trump merely benefited from Russian election interference without directing it, but he did and continues to work against any investigations of Russian activity in the US and elsewhere, past and present, then whatever one thinks about the 2016 election, Trump’s current conduct is a national security issue. And if Republicans are going to wrap themselves in the flag and defend “our” president against impeachment, it has to be emphasized that they are doing so in the face of that national security threat. If they want to make impeachment an issue against Democrats – and they will whether Democrats want to impeach or not – then Democrats need to make the Republican posture an issue against them. Make it clear: If you vote for a Republican for the Senate (or any other office) you are choosing Trump over your country. Make it clear that all the crazy evil that is happening to this country is only because the Republican Party – very specifically, the Republicans in the Senate – want Donald Trump to stay where he is. And make it clear to politicians and voters that the very same people who defend Trump now are the very same people who said, correctly, 20 years ago that a womanizing pathological liar and real estate cheat was morally unfit to be the president, and it is now time for those people to either live by their words or eat them.

If Republicans want Donald Trump so damn bad, make them OWN him.

No more of the Good Christians fretting and posturing that of course they want a godly president, but they’ll give King Cyrus a “mulligan.” Make them admit that Trump IS what they want because he is what they wanted years before he actually ran for office. Make them take responsibility for their mindset, of which Trump is merely the most obvious example. Of course, neither he nor they want to take responsibility for anything, so Republicans in the Senate will have to make a choice: Do they love Trump more than their own jobs?

I think we all know how they’ll answer that question, but forcing them to actually answer it in public will force them, and the Democrats, to acknowledge the stakes.

But, I could be wrong. Maybe Trump knows more than I do. He’s gotten away with everything so far. So given that the discussion of impeachment is inevitable, and he seemed to think that making himself the focus was how he saved the Senate (even as he lost the House) maybe forcing impeachment is how Republicans achieve victory. In fact, I’ve even got a re-election slogan picked out for him:

Trump 2020: Because You Can’t Spell “Impeachment” Without ‘Peach’

Among the over a dozen folks who have announced themselves as candidates for president in the Democratic Party race, one who’s been getting a lot of attention is centrist Pete Buttigieg, the well-regarded “Mayor Pete” of South Bend, Indiana. Having launched an exploratory committee in January, Buttigieg announced a fundraising total of 7 million dollars by April. This was followed up by a CNN town hall event in which Buttigieg’s performance impressed a lot of people, leading to greater press coverage and favorable attention.

This has led to consternation in some quarters. Paste Magazine writer Jacob Weindling, a self-declared socialist, wrote an article last week on the subject that “Pete Buttigieg Is Not a Progressive.” In the lead paragraph, Weindling lays out his thesis: “The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo. “

But that just gets to the point. I am NOT a “progressive.” I am not a Socialist. I am a conservative in the sense that I want to preserve the American system of government. I am a libertarian in the sense that I believe in The Law of Unintended Consequences, and in the sense of Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least” and what someone else believes “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words I am what Jefferson and F.A. Hayek would call a liberal.

But if “conservatism” has degenerated into the power-worship of wannabe fascists, the term liberalism has been co-opted by what would properly be regarded as social democracy in Western Europe. And really, it has even less to do with that than what Weindling describes as “the attitude that the status quo is the problem” because when American leftists talk about how (say) national health care is a radical leftist position here but a mainstream position in Europe, they elide the point that a social safety net IS a mainstream position in Europe – which in some cases has conservative roots. This model is certainly more redistributionist than how things are done in America, and thus problematic to the Right, but it is not “socialist” in the Leninist or even anarchist sense, because it does not result in the workers seizing the means of production – at best, workers’ parties seize control of the government and it redistributes the profits of business. The point is, you can’t redistribute capital if there is no capital to redistribute. European systems preserve the “status quo” that actual socialists wish to destroy because you can’t have all the things they say are good about socialism without a capitalist system to finance them.

To say nothing of the other issue with “progressivism”, a term I normally use only in quotes. The progressive movement is so devoted to its own analytic concept of “justice as fairness” that it disregards the context of things, such as, that not everybody regards the leftist position as self-evidently good, that not everybody agrees with the current fashions of gender theory, the demand for reparations, socialist economics, and so forth, and that even those who are moderate and tolerant will eventually be alienated by a movement that demands everything go its way. The words of Hayek are relevant here: “To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion. This may also explain why it seems to be so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal.”

Because the Left has that illiberal, fundamentally anti-American dark side – however sublimated it appears in comparison with right-wing lunacy – Republicans can still try to make hay out of how “socialist” the new generation of Democrats are. It’s just that that party has staked its future, and the world’s future, on the risk that their precious little boy will literally shit himself on national TV, which he figuratively did this week.

By contrast to Weidling, Andrew Sullivan had a Friday column in nymag.com that presented Buttigieg in a more positive light. Sullivan being Sullivan, he frets that any candidate who cannot address the immigration issue will lose to Trump, but he thinks that Buttigieg seems to be the most likely to support e-verification and a path to citizenship as opposed to effectively open borders. He also appreciates his demographics (‘my gay hack for pronouncing his name is to think of him as a ‘booty judge.’) and sees his political career so far as proof, like Obama’s, that “in America, we can still unite in a more humane consensus.” This is perhaps better explained in an earlier New York article by Ed Kilgore, “Without a Plausible ‘Theory of Change,’ Progressive Ideas Are Just Fantasies.” This piece in turn analyzed the interview that Buttigieg did with Ezra Klein at Vox, quoting Buttigieg as saying that the central lesson of Barack Obama’s presidency is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.”

This just gets to the point that the two-party process has reached its limit of absurdity as Republicans in particular campaign only on negative terms and in office can only act to stymie Democratic initiatives. Even if some Republicans knew better, they don’t want to be part of a process where a Democrat president could take credit for the results, and they certainly don’t want to be primaried out of office by people who think that Rush Limbaugh is a pinko. Now, I didn’t always agree with Obama, but I think he was temperamentally the sort of president I could get behind. It’s just that the Republican Party had already decided on its radical course by the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and they were going to oppose Obama for being a Democrat even if he wasn’t young and black (though obviously that didn’t help). I argued that Obama’s (generically) conservative temperament was good on the whole but left him unable to challenge his enemies even when it was clear that they wanted to destroy everything he supported. In his article, Kilgore says that the most important matter for the next president is not so much what a candidate wants to do as how they plan to do it, pointing out that Buttigieg, for one, would endorse “process” changes like eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster so that the results of the popular vote are better expressed in action, whereas the “radical progressive” Bernie Sanders would keep both institutions as they are, and thus be less likely to succeed in a country where Republicans have any support at all. The articles on Buttigieg aren’t very clear on exactly how he would enact these changes, since they would require both houses of Congress, but he is at least trying to size up the issue when Obama didn’t even seem to recognize it.

The fact that Buttigieg is gay and married to a man is by now incidential to most people, and obviously doesn’t give him extra weight with “progressives,” even as it would drive most “conservatives” up a wall. In that, Buttigieg resembles Obama, since most people didn’t care about his race, “progressives” still found reason to criticize him even though he was the first black president, but the conservative faction was driven literally insane by his very existence. What this really comes down to is not that the country is becoming “polarized” or skewing to the Left. Again, liberals: most of the country doesn’t agree with you, either. If you’ve now come to believe that a financially corrupt poon hound is unfit to be president, and that his presence in the office coarsens the culture, maybe you now realize that the conservatives were right about Clinton then. It’s just that since 1998, conservatives took the wrong lesson from that. Now they’ve come to believe that since power justifies everything, everything is justified for the sake of power. And if the rest of the country seems to be going more Left, it’s only because the Right is already radicalized and cannot be dealt with in good faith.

The other thing is that the setting is different than the 2016 election. Whereas the Democrats’ position in 2016 was “you’ll get meatloaf again, and like it” now you have the opposite problem where voters have a surfeit of choices. And in this case, every Democrat currently running in 2016, possibly including Joe Biden, could be nitpicked to death by “progressive” purists. But every one of them, including Biden, has a more actually progressive policy record than Hillary Clinton, and any one of them arguably has a better resume.

So Pete Buttigieg isn’t a progressive. Who cares? And why should anyone care if Joe Biden apologizes for being handsy? When the orange toadstool in the White House actually brags about how awful he is? Most of my social media friends don’t talk about Biden’s reputation with women, or Cory Booker’s history with Big Pharma, or Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of staff. They ask, “is this person better than Trump? And could they beat Trump?” The first goes without saying, the second has to be determined.

To reiterate: I’m not a Democrat. I am not a liberal in the American sense of the term, because I am not a “progressive.” So I don’t think I am going to change my Libertarian registration to vote in the Democratic caucus/primary round, because any one of these people not only would be better than Trump, more to the point they would be a better president than Hillary Clinton, and would be more likely to run a better campaign than Hillary Clinton. Ironically that’s why I gave up my principles and temporarily joined the Democratic Party in 2016, specifically to vote for Bernie Sanders, because if the binary thinkers are right in assuming that a third-party candidate can’t win, and the non-Democratic candidate was A, Republican, and B, Trump, that made it imperative that the Democrats nominated someone who could deal with Trump, and Hillary wasn’t it. If anything my resentment of Hillary was based on the suspicion in the back of my mind that Bill and Hillary’s old friend Trump was coached to be an anti-Hillary “straight out of Central Casting” to rally her feminist base and discredit the Republicans once and for all. What she didn’t anticipate is that Trump got more attention and praise than he deserved precisely because he was the anti-Hillary and could present himself as the opposite of what everyone hated about her. If Sanders had been nominated, that wouldn’t have guaranteed he’d win, but he would have had the populist credentials to compete with Trump on that level and would not have had the baggage that Hillary had and that Trump took so much advantage of. The other point in this coming election is that Trump no longer has the advantage of asking “what have you got to lose?” After two years of seeing what he’s actually like with power, a lot of people know exactly what they have to lose, and if all Trump had to do was present himself as the opposite of Hillary, it doesn’t matter how “socialist” or leftist or moderate the Democratic nominee is, since Republicans will present that person as the Commie Antichrist anyway. All said Democrat needs is to be the opposite of Trump.

In this regard, I don’t know if I’d put all my chips on Pete Buttigieg. He is still obscure, but unless we’re talking about Biden, or Bernie Sanders (or unless you watch a lot of MSNBC) most of these guys are obscure. He is not a progressive (at least if you’re one of those folks who defines ‘fascist’ as anything to the right of Che Guevara) but this whole year of pre-primary politics is about Democrats deciding if that’s the direction they want to go. But Buttigieg seems to have the qualities that I (and much of the country) liked about Barack Obama, along with an understanding of the current political situation that Obama didn’t have, and that the next president will need. That’s why I would keep an eye on him.

But I must confess, the real reason I’d like Pete Buttigieg to get the Democratic nomination is so that Donald Trump would have to spend the second half of 2020 trying to pronounce “butty geeg.”

“A new poll states that 55 percent of Americans want to get rid of the Electoral College. However, under the Electoral College, 55 percent of the country is not a majority.”

-Seth Myers, March 21, 2019

As happens on those occasions when Democrats don’t control the White House, liberals have suddenly decided that they need to get serious about killing the Electoral College. Let me do a review on the issues involved.

But first, you will note that I do not base my critique of the Electoral College on the premise that it was intended to be a defense of slavery. That is because too much of leftist critique of America comes down to “but slavery.” Like, all the things that Thomas Jefferson did in and out of public service are invalidated “because Sally Hemmings.” And really, if your whole argument with the founding structure of our government is “because slavery” then you need to acknowledge that the whole Constitution is based on the premise of classical liberals compromising with the slaveholder culture (which in the case of Jefferson, for one, was the same person). And that means that the stuff that you like about the Constitution stems from the same premise as the stuff you don’t like. The premise of the Constitution set the stage for what we now call “democracy,” but the government was never intended to be a democracy in either the modern or classical sense. And if you’d rather destroy the Constitution, you should really vote Republican, because they’re doing a much better job with that than the most anti-American leftists.

To be sure, a huge amount of why our government looks the way it does is because the people who wanted a strong central government (mostly in Northern ‘free’ states) had to convince Anti-Federalists and states-rights advocates (in Virginia and other slave states) that giving up some of their sovereignty was worth it. That led to things like the “Three-Fifths Compromise” and other atrocities. But it also needs to be considered that without such concessions we either would not have had a Constitution (and stayed with the ‘states-rights’ Articles of Confederation) or we could have ended up with a Confederate secession 76 years earlier.

In any case, most of the Constitutional rules specifically protecting slavery were ended by the Reconstruction Amendments. The Electoral College was not one of them. And that’s because federalism (the protection of states within a national government) was not the issue on trial. Critique of the EC on grounds including the protection of institutional racism is not automatically invalid, but is is also not automatically valid.

There are two reasons given in promotion of the Electoral College, only one of which has borne out.

The first is that by making the election of the president a state-by-state process rather than a national popular vote, we get a better representation of the country’s demands. If elections can be determined mainly by the votes in New York City and California, that would be “democracy” in the sense of gross popular vote, but people in the states in between wouldn’t find that very representative. This also undermines the ‘it’s all about slavery’ argument: one reason the Founders had to include the slavery faction in the debate on federalism is because the slave states had too much (white) population and influence to ignore. If anything, the white-supremacy faction in modern politics clings to the EC because their numerical advantage no longer exists. Which would seem to be a defense of the pro-slavery position, but if we’re going to say that the debate should no longer be in terms of the 1780s, we should also say that the original context no longer applies.

Which leads to the second point. The second argument for the Electoral College, enumerated by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist No. 68, was that:

“as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.

…The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.“

But as the 2016 election showed, this institution, intended to counter “cabal, intrigue and corruption”, and to prevent a creature of “foreign powers” from demagoguing his way into control of the Republic despite having no talents except “low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” was the very mechanism by which that undesired result occurred. And the best case that can be made against the Electoral College is that the only reason the event it was designed to prevent occurred is because of the very existence of that institution, and that the republic (as well as small d-democracy) would have been better served by a national vote.

The problem there is that just as the racist defense of an Electoral College system isn’t quite the same as the Anti-Federalist opposition to the federal Constitution, the leftist critique of the Electoral College elides the point that it is not quite the institution that the Federalists intended. I had already gone over this at least once, after the election, analyzing the opinion of Art Sisneros, a conservative Texas elector who ultimately wimped out and resigned rather than vote against Trump, but who indirectly explained why the Electoral College is not what it was intended to be. You see, the Founders, coming off their experience with the British parliamentary system, had decided (with some reason) that official partisanship distorted the political process, but rather than either account for it in the new federal Constitution or find some official counter for it in the checks-and-balances system, they simply ignored the possibility and hoped (like Washington) that people would simply choose to avoid it. That turned out not to be a realistic hope. After Washington left the Presidency, the original Constitution dictated that the second-place winner of the presidential (Electoral College) vote would be the Vice President, but this meant that in 1796, President John Adams had to serve with his political rival (second-place finisher) Thomas Jefferson as Vice President. Things got even worse in 1800 when Aaron Burr ran against Jefferson and tied the Electoral College vote. The matter went to the House, where things remained in deadlock until (ironically) Jefferson’s other rival, Hamilton, supported his election because he distrusted Burr more. This is why one of the first Amendments after the Bill of Rights, the Twelfth Amendment, was passed, confirming that the President and Vice President are to be elected separately. In the process, this also confirmed the partisan nature of the process. A separate but related development was the “evolution to the general ticket.” Hamilton’s Federalist proposal was that the people were ultimately voting for the Electors, who were better qualified to make a final decision on the Presidency. However some state governments decided that the presidential candidate favored in their state would have a better chance of winning if all Electors were pledged to the victor. In his column, Sisneros quoted Wikipedia:

“When James Madison and Hamilton, two of the most important architects of the Electoral College, saw this strategy being taken by some states, they protested strongly. Madison and Hamilton both made it clear this approach violated the spirit of the Constitution. According to Hamilton, the selection of the president should be “made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station [of president].” According to Hamilton, the electors were to analyze the list of potential presidents and select the best one. He also used the term “deliberate”. Hamilton considered a pre-pledged elector to violate the spirit of Article II of the Constitution insofar as such electors could make no “analysis” or “deliberate” concerning the candidates. Madison agreed entirely, saying that when the Constitution was written, all of its authors assumed individual electors would be elected in their districts and it was inconceivable a “general ticket” of electors dictated by a state would supplant the concept. Madison wrote to George Hay: ‘The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; & was exchanged for the general ticket.'”

The process of choosing electors in correspondence with popular vote began in 1789 with Pennsylvania and Maryland although district voting in other states continued through the 1800s. As of now only Maine and Nebraska use a district system for electors, although even these rules are fairly recent (Maine passed its election law in 1972 and Nebraska changed theirs in 1996).

To Hamilton, this process defeated the whole point of the Electoral College system; rather than rendering the heated process of popular vote subject to deliberation from an objective body, objectivity was eliminated in order to facilitate the partisan process, which he had warned would allow the “little arts of popularity” to prevail and encourage the selection of the unqualified.

The irony is that the attack on the EC is coming from liberal Democrats on the grounds that it thwarts democracy, but as Sisneros implies in his column, the change, along with several “Progressive” measures in American history, was intended to make the process more democratic. “Conservatives aren’t much better. They don’t mind that the representatives in a republic exist as long as, contrary to Webster’s definition, no “power is lodged in their representatives.” They want the power in the people directly. The representatives are only there to do what the people demand. They want a democracy, not a republic. They want the power to vote for Skittles for dinner. This is evident by how they approach their legislators. They want them to do X, Y or Z because that is what “we the people” demand. The Constitutionality of it only matters when the legislators are listening to another faction of their constituency. “

This touches on the point that in American politics, we confuse the popular and academic definitions of “democracy” and “republic,” a confusion that is often encouraged by the political class. It at least explains how the same people who bray “it’s a republic, not a democracy!” will in the next breath whine that anybody who wants a Republican president to follow the rule of law is “thwarting democracy!”

And if as leftists insist, it all comes down to racism, that’s not necessarily because that was the specific intent of the Electoral College system. Rather, the people who think that “democracy” means that only their people get the vote, and who opposed the Federalist Constitution because they would have less rights than they did in the Articles of Confederacy – which is why they later formed the Confederate States of America – are using the anti-majoritarian premises of the federalist republic to get their way against the greater majority nationwide. This only happens because of what George Washington described in his Farewell Address as the dynamic “for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views” and in which “(the) disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As I have said, if there was an Original Sin in the Constitutional system, it was not slavery, which could be and technically was corrected. The original sin was that it did not address the system of party loyalty which was contrary to the American project, and which reactionaries have used to maintain the spirit of institutional racism even when the Constitution allows for it to be corrected by law.

It’s not as though liberals (liberals in general, as opposed to the Democratic Party as an institution) are completely unaware of this, or have not proposed ideas. However, up until fairly recently, the prospect that a popular vote winner could lose the Electoral College was not something seriously considered by the political class. To the extent that it was, it was often Republicans complaining that they would not accept their candidate losing the Electoral College if he won the popular vote. But generally, liberal Democrats had gone along with the system because it is deliberately hard to change the Constitution (although obviously it’s not too hard to subvert it). Not only that, there had been a general impression that they could afford to lose Texas and roll the dice on Florida as long as California and New York were in the bag. Obviously that’s not the case anymore.

There’s also a new article in Vox about a specific alternative. The article by Lee Drutman goes over the various proposed alternatives including the gross national vote (which has much the same ‘first-past-the-post’ issue as non-presidential races). The main proposed alternative would be a two-round system (similar to France) which would basically be a national runoff. Drutman’s proposal is ranked choice voting: in this system, a voter would not vote only once for president but would place their first choice, then their second-preferred choice, third preference, and so on. This has certain advantages over the runoff; first obviously being that the election campaign doesn’t require a second round and would be less expensive. Another benefit is that while runoff voting still creates “first past the post” style issues where voters have to second-guess themselves to avoid “spoiling” a ballot with their preferred choice (which was a possibility for Democrats in California’s last all-party primary round), ranked voting still allows the possibility that a “minor” candidate can be in play without “spoiling” the vote for everyone else. While Drutman does not focus on this, the other implication is that this would also solve a lot of problems with other American elections that have nothing to do with the Electoral College.

All of which is academic (literally and figuratively) because not only is the Constitution deliberately hard to change on paper, the two party process makes it that much harder to change it.

But still, some of these changes can be introduced on the state level without introducing constitutional amendments. It would in theory be easier to make electors proportional to the actual vote in each state, or to introduce runoff or ranked voting than eliminate the EC, and if we minimize the psychology of “first past the post” and blind party loyalty, that would address much of the complaints with the Electoral College right there.

But tribalism is a universal. Motivated ignorance is a universal. The American election system is a particular. And while it, like the Democratic Party, has “worked” well enough for most purposes, its existing weaknesses have only recently become critical, because only now did we have not only a candidate who was so unethical and power-hungry as to deliberately game the system to target its specific weaknesses, but had a сахарный папа with enough resources to help him do it.

And if the position of Democrats is that if you vote for the wrong party, the republic is endangered, then that is not a condemnation of the other party, however rotten and dysfunctional it is. It is a condemnation of a first-past-the-post, two-party structure that incentivizes perverse motivations. This is a structure that began as flawed but workable but due to the machinations of the two ruling parties – one of which has usually been the Democrats – it changed from being merely flawed to an active threat to the intent of a democratic republic.

Typically, Democrats only care about this now that their own self-preservation is the issue, and there are two ironies in that. One, it may be too late. Two, for Democrats to make any headway on electoral reform, they have to risk losing what built-in advantage they still have. And that is a factor that may influence their willingness to proceed.

After two years of Viceroy Trump living under the cloud of the Mueller investigation – a cloud of his own making, of course – Robert Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr, and as promised, Mr. Barr has just released a summary to Congress and the public. And it would seem to justify the position of the Trump Administration.

Sorta.

According to the letter Barr sent to Congress, the Special Counsel’s report consists of two parts. On the matter of whether Americans (including the Trump campaign) assisted in the Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election (the existence of such conspiracy being taken as a given by most of the government), the investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The second part of the report “addresses a number of actions by the President — most of which have been the subject of public reporting — that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns.” In the language of Barr’s summary, “After making a “thorough factual investigation” into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as “difficult issues” of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This left the matter at the discretion of the Attorney General, and in his report, Barr said that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded that there was insufficient evidence to establish an obstruction of justice offense.

The full text, of course, is in the hands of Attorney General Barr, which is why Democrats in government have called for, and continue to call for, the majority of the report to be made public so that its conclusions can be further examined. As they should.

What strikes me is that in a legal system with presumption of innocence, the question of exoneration should not be an issue. The point that the president is not exonerated seems to be an emphasis. The language seems to indicate that they saw a lot of smoke but couldn’t trace the fire.

But all the liberal commentators who emphasized how straight and by-the-book Robert Mueller is should have anticipated that he wasn’t going to go after Trump just for the sake of doing so. Such a person wouldn’t see it as his place to be the linchpin of the American government’s self-correction.
It is not the place of the Department of Justice to impeach and remove a president. If the only way to get rid of the were-yam occupying the White House was through the DOJ, all the little Trumpniks would whine that their enemies were subverting democracy, and for once they would have something like a point.

I mean, put aside the fact that the only reason Liddle Donnie Clown Boy is president is because we’re NOT a majoritarian democracy, but I’m going to get to the Electoral College in another post. There is still a representative process. And if Republicans are going to be accomplices in doing to the American Senate what the Roman elite did to their Senate, if the Democrats can’t strike oil with all the Congressional investigations they now have power to pursue, and if a Democratic nominee can’t defeat Donald Trump in a presidential race now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore and we KNOW what he’s like in charge, that would say more about the system than about Trump.

There’s also the point that, as many in the press have pointed out, that this is a long game. This is part of why some of Mueller’s initiatives were “farmed out” to the Southern District of New York and other state prosecutors’ offices that are subject neither to the federal Department of Justice nor a presidential pardon that can only apply to federal crimes. As Ed Kilgore points out in New York Magazine: “Just because Mueller considers a certain batch of evidence not grounds for a prosecution on his own motion doesn’t mean it might not create future legal and political jeopardy for Trump. Other prosecutors pursuing other angles could pick up on his findings. And to the extent that the Justice Department doubts a sitting president can be indicted at all, the report could produce evidence that will sit, ticking like a time bomb, until he leaves office.”

And just think: If the second most incompetent presidential candidate in American political history had just lost, none of this would be happening because he’d just be a whiny little nobody trying to flag his career in “reality” TV and right-wing grievance media, as opposed to a whiny little nobody with the nuclear codes whose pique and incompetence make him a threat to the Deep State, which prior to Trump was simply “the state.”

What that also means is that with all the investigations still ongoing – and with Trump and Jared Kushner still creating new causes for investigation – the stakes for the 2020 election have been raised, whether anyone wants to admit this or not. The turn of events implies that if, for whatever reason, one votes against Donald Trump to remain president, that is a vote for Donald Trump to be criminally prosecuted once he leaves office.

The problem being that some people aren’t willing to confront those stakes, and some of us are a lot more comfortable with turning the election into a referendum on Trump’s prosecution than others.

POSTSCRIPT: And in any event, why do we even need a “beyond reasonable doubt” case that Trump conspired with Russia to swing the election for their benefit when he has proven himself willing to interfere with or recall sanctions on North Korea, with no quid pro quo whatsoever? Which leads to the next question, when your president sucks up to socialists in North Korea (and post-Marxists in Russia and China), wants to build a new Iron Curtain on the border and wants to turn American government into a one-party cult of personality, how can “conservatives” claim to represent the opposite of socialism?

Why isn’t the political-media complex focusing on THAT?

A few thoughts on the mass murder in New Zealand.

It is ultimately too much to expect coherency and consistency from a racist murderer, but given that the individual, like most of his ilk, felt compelled to produce a written manifesto to explain his crimes, his words are still revealing of something.

For one thing, it’s been pointed out that the killer praised Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” What’s less emphasized is the full quote. Asking himself the question, “Are you a supporter of Donald Trump?” he answers, “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.”

So consider that even one of the radicals inspired by Trump and the alternative-to-being-right can see that Trump is great as a race agitator but knows he is a terrible leader and policy maker. Would that the Republican Party had as much integrity and common sense as a murdering conspiracy theorist.

The killer refers to his philosophy as “eco fascism.” The use of such a label is considered by some ecology activists to be a smear on the movement, but as with much else in the manifesto, such language itself implies an intention to antagonize – to troll.

Journalists had detected a similar intention in the racist’s inspiration by YouTube star PewDiePie and American alt-right activist Candace Owens (who is black). Again, there is a lack of coherency and consistency, but there is still a common element. This radical Right philosophy, especially in violence, serves to both support and undermine the concept that radicals of both Left and Right have a common philosophy. Both extreme leftists and extreme-right racists hate the generally liberal center more than they hate each other. Liberalism – both the right-wing “classical liberalism” and the more leftist sort developed through social democracy – endorses a marketplace that both socialists and racists find alienating. More than that, the marketplace philosophy is an outgrowth of Western individualist philosophy that both extremes find alienating and destructive to both the community and the ecology. In that regard, the killer’s philosophy has a certain theme in theory that breaks down in practice, as where he says the government system he most admires today is the Communist government in China, which (largely for political expediency) is one of the most business-oriented, and thus most polluting countries in the world, and has taken this course for the sake of preserving their collectivist political system.

However, the shooter’s actions also reveal a certain difference between the two political camps. The shooter claims to represent a beleaguered minority that can only achieve change through violence whereas more and more socialists embrace the “democratic” label in the hopes of achieving change through the political process.
That right there is another area where the shooter’s stated intentions contradict his actions. The killer, an Australian, said that he deliberately used guns to kill civilians in order to spark a gun-control debate, especially in the United States, hoping to radicalize white people who feel their gun rights are under assault. But to make this provocation, he went to nearby New Zealand, which already has strict gun laws. If anything, the point he makes to right-wingers is that this is what happens when a population can’t defend itself against a guy who didn’t care about the intent of gun laws, indeed, at the second mosque attacked, the shooter was driven off by a guy with a gun. (Granted, it WAS one of the killer’s empty shotguns, that a worshiper picked up and ended up throwing through the window of the shooter’s car.)

But even so, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did call for new bans on semi-automatic weapons in the country. Now did this massacre on the other side of the planet affect the Second Amendment debate in America? Uh, no.

And that’s because, after Sandy Hook, liberals seem to have figured out that the issue is less a debate on the need for gun rights or even the efficacy of gun control. It has to do with the fact that the Republican Party policy is arm-in-arm with the National Rifle Association, which is now more about selling weapons to civilians than protecting the Constitutional right to bear arms. The fact that our debates are more about transient politics than eternal principles can be demonstrated by the point that in 1967, Republican Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed the Mulford Act, which prevented the carrying of loaded firearms in public. At the time, this was supported by the NRA. But then, the radicals with guns were Black Panthers.

The fact of the matter is that the people who agree with the shooter are getting what they want through the political process in the United States, or at least they were before the 2018 midterms. And if such people wish to condemn democracy as flawed, they have a point, but not the one they intend.

So once again, there is a schizoid discrepancy between philosophy and actions, the only common element being a hatred of modernity and the conflation of ethnicity with culture.

On Friday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Khizr Khan, Pakistani-American and father of a fallen solider, said, “In this division and hate, there is a foreign hand. Our adversaries wish to sow this hate and this division so that we will continue to fight this for many years to come.” https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/khizr-khan-trump-politically-expedient-for-minimizing-white-nationalism-in-new-zealand-attack-1459232323610 (4:20 into the tape)

Now, Chris Matthews didn’t think to ask Mr. Khan what he meant by a foreign hand. But we can ponder which foreign power would have cause to pursue such a grand strategy. It would have to be a country that, like the white reactionaries, is objectively powerful but considers itself persecuted and outnumbered. It would have to be a country with no sympathy for “cosmopolitan” Western values, instead oscillating between radical autocracy and radical Marxism (and back). It would have to be a country that sees its foreign policy goals as threatened by the Western alliance and the global order it organized, and therefore seeks to undermine that system wherever possible. To that end, it not only would sponsor political parties abroad that seek to end association with the European Union, it would fund gun-rights lobbies, not because they actually care about gun rights in their own country, but because they see that as a wedge issue with high potential to cause division and violence.

Which country would that be? As Nathan Lane would say, “Do the math.”

And with that – since this is St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a song to get your Irish up.

“You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now. “

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

-Ann Coulter

I will get to Viceroy Trump’s national “emergency” in a bit. But I had been thinking of a prior recent event, which caused me to think of a more distant event, which ties into the current situation.

In actual news south of the border, the socialist nation of Venezuela is in the grip of mass starvation because of its economic and political actions, and thus the US and other nations have not only recognized Juan Guaido, the challenger in the last elections, as the legitimate President over current leader Nicolas Maduro, they are sending in convoys of food and humanitarian aid through US ally Colombia. Maduro, seeing Colombian action as a means of undermining his regime, has militarized the border to stop aid from getting through.

And this reminded me of something else, actually. A time long ago. Live Aid.

The actual concert has been given more attention recently because of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, but it was the culmination of Bob Geldof’s relief efforts for Ethiopian famine relief, starting in 1984, with the production of the all-star single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The single was specifically recorded so that all sales would go to famine relief. I remember David Bowie getting on TV to tell people to go out and buy the record, saying “you can throw it away afterward if you want to.” And that’s exactly what I did. I went to the record store, bought the disc (you did that in those days) and then immediately threw it in the trash can outside. It was a shit record. But still better than “We Are The World.”

But anyway. The Live Aid broadcast had all sorts of telethon-like fundraisers in the middle of the concert performances in which Geldof and others pointed out that with the resources available in developed countries it was indeed possible to “feed the world.” It was the most utopian I’ve ever felt about life. There did indeed seem to be a practical means of solving the world’s problems, if we could just get enough volunteers together to do the right thing. The Live Aid project has been estimated at raising 150 million British pounds for famine relief. The problem is what happened afterward.

Much of the relief shipments ended up waiting on the docks in Africa, some of it eventually being used by Ethiopia’s Marxist Derg government to buy arms from the Soviet Union, other aid being used to fund leftist rebels against that government. It later turned out that much of the food shortage was created or exacerbated by Derg government policies, such as the confiscation of food to prioritize urban populations, and the resettlement of people to state farms, which actually reduced food production as people were moved from productive areas. So while the famine relief did do some good, it was used by a monstrous government in order to preserve itself and draw out people’s suffering.

Reading about this at the time is in retrospect one of the things that confirmed my position as an anti-communist and anti-socialist, at least as much as any theories by Ayn Rand. And overall, it’s a good example of why I point to government as a primary source of blame if things go wrong in the world, because even when private actors and public collectives wish to do good, the local government can either make things more organized or make things a whole lot worse.

You might ask, what does any of this have to do with Trump’s declaration of a national emergency? The February 15 announcement in itself was just more of a racist-uncle-on-Thanksgiving-telling-shaggy-dog stories than usual. And I’d seen several people on social media saying that this country is already under the effects of various emergencies, and it hasn’t led to the death of the Republic yet. My response to those people is that the fact that this latest “emergency” is in many ways no big deal is exactly the problem. The government under the Constitution was kept limited for a reason. A free people should not have to think about their government all that much. It’s sort of like your health: you only notice it when something’s wrong. If the government can do anything – like put you in a secret prison just because you’re a Jew – you have to care more about who runs it. This applies even if you think the government is supposed to be an active force for good, because you have to use politics to make it provide things (like national healthcare) that aren’t specifically enumerated in the Constitution. If we had been more serious about such limits in the past, we would not be reaching a point where we seriously have to ask whether the President can seize Congress’ power of the purse just because he feels like it. But whereas Republicans used to be the main people screaming about Democratic control of the process, now they’re going along with Trump’s power grab – apparently as a consolation prize to Trump nationalists who otherwise would have forced a second government shutdown.

There’s a theory I have that applies to the workings of government in general and the Trump Administration and current Republican Party in general. In game terminology, (mostly in role-playing games but also traditional board games) there’s a difference between the “rules as written” and the game as it’s actually played. For instance, in Monopoly, it’s usually assumed that all the miscellaneous fees that get paid due to Chance/Community Chest cards, utility fees, etc., get put into a “kitty” in the middle of the board and whoever lands on the Free Parking space gets whatever’s there. In standard Monopoly, that’s not a rule. Another Monopoly example, when the game is starting and you land on an unowned property, you have the option to simply not buy the property and if you pass that option, your turn just ends. However, in Rules As Written, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Monopoly/Official_Rules if you choose not to buy the property at listed price, it must be auctioned and given to the highest bidder. Most people dispense with this rule because they don’t want to do all that fiddling around. However, if the game were played as written, all the properties on the board would be snapped up more quickly and the game would move to its natural conclusion more quickly. Thus, a house rule that is intended to save time and hassle compared to Rules As Written ends up doing the opposite.

Well, in terms of the US government, the Rules As Written are the US Constitution. And in the Constitution, the three separated and equal branches of government are the judiciary, executive and legislature. However the Founders either disdained or did not consider the fact that party politics are the political default in most representative governments (certainly in the British Parliament). And because of how party politics turned out here, the real three branches of government are the judiciary, the Republicans and the Democrats. And the judiciary is chosen by the dominant party of the other two. And there are various examples of how arranging the government around their “house rules” skews the rules as written. For instance, only the Congress can declare war, but they decided by the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that they didn’t want to follow that rule cause it was too much fiddling around. So we’ve house-ruled the status quo where the president effectively declares war and the Congress rubber-stamps it, and that ends up causing more complication (and death) than the system everyone wants to avoid as being too complicated.

One corollary to this is that in practical terms there are other “branches” that preserve or affect the balance in politics beyond what is enumerated in the Constitution. State governments, for example, have some leeway to act except where specifically mandated by federal law. But there are also private actors who influence politics. Organized labor is another one of these “branches”, and as it has become largely obsolete, that helps to explain a large measure of how the Right was able to consolidate power in the US. (The factor of organized labor in politics is also why one of the first things any Leninist or fascist regime does is to nationalize the unions.)

Another critical factor in this balance is the role of the press. As has often been said, the press is the watchdog of liberty and the enemy of tyrants. But if liberal writer Jim Wright concedes that “the Press is not required to” be responsible, that also means that this lack of responsibility can have effects. I have talked several times about how the sensationalist, nominally liberal mainstream media are largely responsible for Trump’s presidency, largely because they treated him as a more serious candidate than the third-party choices, let alone Republicans who had better resumes, because he himself was a sensationalist on their level. As Les Moonves (formerly of CBS) said of the Trump campaign, “it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” More directly, much of Republican policy, especially Trump’s, is affected by what I call the “grievance media,” the right-wing counterculture of Fox News, talk radio, Ann Coulter and similar types who are not working in government now, usually never were in government, but think that the main problem with the Republican Party, no matter how much it alienates everyone else, is that it’s too compromising and not hardass enough. In fact, this was a prime cause of the last government shutdown; Mitch McConnell had raised a voice vote to pass a 2018 budget bill and a bill was going to be approved by the House without funding for Trump’s wall, but then Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh heard about it and went berserk, telling all their listeners to give the Republicans what for. Thus Trump shut the government down, with support from the House, and McConnell, who suddenly refused to support his own bill.

But this association between right-wing government and right-wing media – perhaps one could call it collusion – took a more sinister turn recently. It’s been known for quite some time that the National Enquirer, America’s biggest “tabloid” paper, has been in the tank for Donald Trump. The Enquirer’s publisher, David Pecker, is a personal friend of Donald Trump, and in 2016, the paper published several articles attacking Hillary Clinton’s moral and physical fitness to be President, while also defending Trump and his family. Since Trump became President, it has been revealed in court (thanks to Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen) that the Enquirer had a “catch and kill” policy of protecting Donald Trump from sex scandals by buying the silence of his former liaisons. Partially due to these incidents, federal prosecutors granted Pecker immunity in exchange for his testimony on pending cases.

In contrast, one of the (many) media people that Trump has decided to hate on is Jeff Bezos, an actual billionaire (as opposed to the TV kind), most famous as the founder of Amazon.com but who also bought the Washington Post in 2013. Since then the property has become profitable for the first time, partially because of an investment in online subscriptions, and largely because in the wake of Trump’s election, it has cast itself as a watchdog on the Trump Administration, with the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Well, Bezos recently announced a divorce from his wife, ahead of revelations from the Enquirer in January of “sleazy text messages and gushing love notes” between Bezos and his mistress. Mr. Trump, as always, felt obliged to comment in a January 13 Tweet: “So sorry to hear that the news of Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better and more responsible hands!” After this, Bezos decided to have his people investigate exactly how his private communications got out. Bezos also had reason to believe the Enquirer was antagonized by the Post’s investigations of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was responsible for the killing of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and is also involved in close business deals with both the Trump Administration and Pecker’s media company, AMI. According to Bezos, once AMI found out he had a private investigator on them, they sent him a communication that they had specific nude photos of him and that they would be released if he did not back off. Bezos responded with an expose’ in medium.com entitled “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker.” (In the Trump Era, the jokes just write themselves.) And in this piece, Bezos makes his case as to how it all adds up, including the “CONFIDENTIAL & NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” email sent to Bezos’ investigator. He also says at an earlier point how Pecker and AMI had an immunity deal based on their involvement with the Trump campaign – a deal that may now be endangered because part of the terms is the following: “should AMI commit any crimes subsequent to the date of signing of this Agreement, or should the Government determine that AMI or its representatives have knowingly given false, incomplete, or misleading testimony or information, or should AMI otherwise violate any provision of this Agreement, AMI shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of this Office has knowledge, including perjury and obstruction of justice.”

This is apparently a long-established pattern in which the National Enquirer has defended its interests – now including Trump’s interests and allegedly Saudi Arabia’s interests – by blackmailing both celebrities and journalists. As Bezos said in his article: “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? “

Given how anti-labor Amazon can be, and given the image Bezos has developed, it is very easy for the Left to target him. (The most famous example of this was Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a new bill against low-benefit corporations to be called the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act or ‘Stop BEZOS Act‘). And yet, Bezos as owner of the Post is by his own influence preserving a major part of the media against Trumpist pressure, and the attacks on him illustrate how bad that pressure can get, and what could happen to the media if he were not resisting it. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.

It may seem odd for socialists to think of self-centered billionaires as “good guys” or Resistance leaders, and it is not an ideal state of affairs that the private sector has more public spirit and responsibility than the government. But that is where we are right now. Various government and non-government actors have their own motivations and agendas, and (as I hope liberals are finding out now) government is not automatically good because it is government, and private actors are not automatically evil because they’re not government. By the same token, business is not automatically good and government is not automatically evil (as I hope right-wingers are finding out now).

If absolute, unchecked power is a danger with a socialist government (like Venezuela, or 80’s Ethiopia) and also with a right-wing plutocracy like the Trump Administration, then what you see is not so much that a “left” or “right” politics in themselves are destructive, but that any politics becomes destructive once one camp gets control of both the private sector and government. In this regard, the differences between the two sides are indeed based on their ideology and premises even if the results on the extremes are similar. On the leftist extreme of Marxist-Leninism, fusion of capital and state is the entire point, and however much this is stated as a vehicle towards “pure communism” or statelessness, anything that is appropriated as a “public” resource necessarily cannot belong to all in common, but must be administered by a separate group – in short, a government. On the Right, you have fascism, which has been broadly defined (not necessarily by actual Fascists) as a fusion of state and corporate power. It is a subject of hot debate as to what the economic policies of fascist countries even were, since they were expedient and not terribly consistent. But they are clearly in contrast to Leninism in that private property and wealth are allowed to great degree, even if everything is ultimately controlled by the State. A more salient element of fascism is that in comparison to Marxism it preserves social inequities and actually promotes traditional human desires for status-based cultures, making a virtue out of sexism, racism, and the exploitation of resources, even as fascists sought to justify such on nationalist-collectivist rather than “selfish” terms.

However, leftists in this country have traditionally not seen much danger in Big Government or the threat that Big Government could be turned toward fascist ends (even as they seek to deconstruct the whole American project as inherently unjust). This is partially based on the assumption that they would always be politically dominant, and partially because they see the growth of government as necessary to their social goals. Given their antipathy to capital, between the two they would prefer a government that was ascendant over the private sector, possibly to the extent of making it irrelevant. For their part, American right-wingers only fear Big Government when they aren’t in charge of it, and since they have not only spent long years out of the political mainstream but are falling prey to a persecution complex that is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the idea that they may have to stand in opposition to democracy is an idea that many on the Right will seriously entertain. They are hardly afraid of collectivism as long as it, like fascism, preserves the trappings of property and capitalism, since most “capitalists” these days would rather have the rewards of capitalism without the risks. It stands to reason that the only way such rewards and protections can be guaranteed is to already be of the elite. That too, is hardly a barrier and is in many ways a selling point, since fascism and its imitators deliberately or otherwise seek to preserve existing power structures. The risk that an all-powerful government might end up turning against you, despite your own power and privilege, is real, but these days Republican elites are finding a way around that; rather than merely financially propping up the government in exchange for favoritism or contracts, they can simply buy into the existing Administration.

What this comes down to is that both political camps can see the same problem – the concentration of power and the fusion of capital and state – but neither Left nor Right wants to do anything about it because each sees the fusion of capital and state power as a great thing when THEIR side is in charge. The other reason that they don’t do anything about this threat is that this would require some ability to cooperate between tribes, which the drive to power makes impossible. And so each side becomes steadily more miserable and paranoid about the other, each convinced that Apocalypse will result if the Enemy gets control. And in the process, each creates more evidence for the other’s fears. And neither considers that the real reason that neither can get all they want is not just that the American government is a institution for sharing power, but that most Americans do not share their ideological commitments and many think that the two ruling parties are just organized clods and thugs.

“God said, take what you want, and pay for it.” -A Spanish proverb, supposedly

What is remarkable about the obsessive media coverage of Howard Schultz (president emeritus of Starbucks Corporation) announcing his desire to run for president is not the fact that he made the announcement (since everyone in the Democratic Party is running for president) but that the pro-gay, pro-choice billionaire is NOT running as a Democrat. Here’s just three (out of maybe thousands) of media reactions: “Howard Schultz May Be Even More Disingenuous Than Donald Trump” “Howard Schultz Doesn’t Understand American History” and – horror of horrors – when pressed, he can’t say how much a box of Cheerios costs.

If half the reason for Donald Trump’s support is the sentiment, “he may have problems, but he’s got the right enemies” then this apparent media mass phobia toward Howard Schultz would seem to indicate that rather than support Trump or divide the vote against him, all the redcaps ought to go out in 2020 and elect Schultz president, since he offends at least as many liberals as Trump and unlike Trump hasn’t proven to be a complete fuckup.

Obviously my problem with Schultz isn’t that he’s too liberal for the Republicans but not leftist enough for the Democrats. (Indeed, that seems to be his main selling point, if anyone’s buying.) It’s not that he’s an independent, or even that he allegedly would allow an otherwise vulnerable Trump to win re-election. My problem is that I look at this guy and go… why him?

I have an old-school liberal friend who’s such a partisan Democrat that he told me, “I’d rather vote for an empty pizza box than any Republican.” And I told him, “I agree. Unfortunately, Democrats didn’t nominate an empty pizza box in 2016, they nominated Hillary Clinton.” I later said that this is why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson, because he was the closest thing we had to an empty pizza box.

I look at Howard Schultz and I don’t even see an empty pizza box.

I didn’t even know that Howard Schultz was the name of the guy who turned the old Starbucks Seattle coffee shop into a megacorporation, because he, like Starbucks, has no bearing on my life.

Whatever you think of Gary Johnson now, he did have a resume as an elected official and was generally considered to be a good governor of New Mexico, back when Republicans actually cared about good government. And on that score, how am I supposed to believe that Schultz is a “fiscal conservative” when his company charges more for coffee than Ben & Jerry’s does for ice cream?

That’s the real problem with the anti-Schultz hysteria. If somebody like me who seems to be his target audience looks at Howard Schultz and goes, “neh,” then how is he supposed to get enough votes to “spoil” things for the “right” (Democratic) candidate?

This fear and loathing on the part of the commercial intelligentsia has little to do with whether Howard Schultz has any merit as a presidential candidate and everything to do with liberal fear that they’ll lose a sure thing yet again. “Besides, he’d never win.” So why then is a candidate who can’t get enough votes to win guaranteed to pull enough votes to make sure the “right” person doesn’t win? It’s like saying, “Nobody drives in New York, there’s too much traffic.”

Believe it or not, libs, there is nothing in the Constitution that says, “Thou shalt only vote for Democrats or Republicans” nor even a subclause saying “and if you do vote Republican, you’re just a racist meanie who wants to force women to give birth so that the Koch Brothers can eat their babies.” Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein ran for president before 2016. Your candidate lost in 2016 for the same reason that Gore lost in 2000 and Kerry lost in 2004: Because they sucked. You want to know how you can win presidential elections, Democrats?
NOMINATE A CANDIDATE WHO DOESN’T SUCK.

It’s not that hard. I mean, you did it only ten years ago.

One point of the criticism that does make sense is that there really isn’t that much constituency for people who care much about deficits (in either major party), nor is there a pivotal constituency for people who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” It used to be that such people – like myself – could at least pretend that they had representation in the Republican Party, but the party in practice never honored that classical liberalism. And since Trump it’s become very clear that the Republicans are animated by the opposite spirit: socially conservative and fiscally statist. Which is why another Slate article suggesting that Schultz, the anti-tax liberal, ought to run as a Republican is either clueless or straight-up disingenuous. Ben Mathis-Lilley, referring to Nate Silver’s tweets for FiveThirtyEight, says that Schultz ought to appeal to the fiscally conservative voter who won’t vote for Trump but thinks Democrats have gone too far left. I think this was written before Schultz went on The View and immediately alienated Meghan McCain by saying he was pro-abortion rights. That right there is why Howard Schultz can’t run as a Republican even if he wanted to, because there are two things Republicans will never forgive: being pro-choice and not willing to lie your ass off about how anti-choice you are even if everyone knows you spent half your time banging New York models for at least 30 years and may have had to pay for abortions as a result. Not that this description applies to any Republican, I’m just speaking hypothetically.

But even that just gets to the real point, which is the erroneous idea that the Republican Party gives a rat’s tail more for fiscal conservatism than it does for social libertarianism. Mathis concludes: “By running as a Republican, Schultz would almost certainly not defeat Trump. But by giving GOP voters a chance to vote for a fiscal conservative who isn’t a raving conspiracy idiot, Schultz would be selflessly providing a model for a sane Republican Party that is more like the conservative parties elsewhere in the developed world, and he’d be directly challenging the guy who is most personally responsible for the “toxicity” he says he deplores in national politics. ” But the reason the formerly grand old party is what it is now is that they were raving conspiracy idiots before Trump showed up. They LIKE being raving conspiracy idiots. Being pro-market and socially tolerant would be more like the conservative parties in the rest of the world, but that only demonstrates that that is not what Republicans want, any more than Democrats want a billionaire who is socially tolerant but anti-tax and pro-business. But yet to Mathis-Lilley, it’s okay if Schultz tilts at the other team’s windmill, just not at his. He doesn’t consider that after years of dealing with windsock Republicans In Name Only, most Republican voters have gotten smart enough to see through this presentation. (They’re just not smart enough to look for a better alternative than Trump.)

This does raise the question of whether there even is a political constituency for people like us, where it’s going to go, or even what it is. Libertarianism? The New Whigs? What? Because if the last few years have proven that we have no place in the Republican Party, we are if anything more hated by the “tolerant liberal” Democrats.

In Reason, Nick Gillespie addressed the question of why Howard Schultz couldn’t just run as a Democrat: “(In) other interviews, Schultz is perfectly clear on why, if he runs, he will do so as a “centrist independent.” He openly disagrees with a lot of ideas that dominate Democratic Party discourse and he doesn’t want to be forced into accepting those policies… In his various interviews over the past week or two, he never misses an opportunity to talk about how a $21 trillion debt is the single biggest problem we need to reckon with. He’s right to say it not only ties the hands of government (and the ligatures get tighter as interest rates rise) but also that it inhibits broad-based economic growth, the best way to increase living standards. He also refused to be penitent about being rich last night, at one point saying he helped to create a great company and wasn’t going to apologize for his or anyone else’s success. He called the class-warfare rhetoric used by so many Democrats “so un-American”! In other words, he doesn’t fit very well in today’s Democratic Party.” “There’s almost no way he can actually win, especially if he runs as an independent, but since when should getting elected be the main goal of politics?”

This is actually close to the sentiment from the other side of the argument. Referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ recent proposal to bring back the 70% marginal tax rate,

Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Atlantic: “Most Americans—myself included—probably don’t have a well-thought-out position on whether a 70 percent marginal tax rate is a good idea. But it probably doesn’t matter whether it is, or whether it would “work.” To argue that “workability” is secondary might sound odd to many Democrats, particularly party leaders and experts who have long prided themselves on being a party of pragmatic problem-solvers. This, though, could be the most important contribution so far of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the new crop of progressive politicians—the realization that the technical merits of a particular policy aren’t the most relevant consideration. For these new Democrats, the purpose of politics (and elections) is quite different.”

He continues: “Few people actually vote based on policy. As I recently argued in American Affairs, even the better educated don’t primarily vote based on policy. In fact, higher levels of education can increase polarization. (In other contexts, such as the Middle East, the advent of universal education and higher college attendance fueled ideological divides.) … Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives appear to understand instinctually what (a) growing body of research on voter preferences suggests. And its implications are potentially far-reaching. Once you accept that voters are rationally irrational, you can’t help but change how you understand political competition. Incidentally, this is one reason that right-wing populists across Europe (and India and the Philippines and many other places) have been surprisingly—or unsurprisingly—successful: They seem to have relatively little interest in what works.”

I am not quite so sure that disregard for what works is acceptable. More times than I can count, I have gone over how Republicans made repealing the Affordable Care Act the center of their domestic policy, and then once they actually had a Republican president to do so, they didn’t have anything to replace it with. And that lack of a plan wasn’t just not constructive, it was actually destructive – whether you’re a liberal who wants healthcare as part of public policy or a right-winger who thinks we could have done better than the ACA. Where I will agree with Hamid is where he says that setting the terms of debate – or shifting the Overton Window, as he later discusses – is ultimately just as important as hammering out the policy itself.

However libertarian I am, I’m not fanatically opposed to some level of public support, especially (as with healthcare) the alternative would be even more costly in the long run. But if we actually want a valid democracy, decisions have to be made by an informed electorate. My opinion is that if you want all kinds of stuff to be covered by the government, you had better be prepared to pay for it. And by “you”, I mean YOU. If you’ve read history (or at least Wikipedia) you’ll know that the whole premise of the 16^th Amendment (legalizing a progressive income tax) was to move away from tariffs as a means of financing the government, since they disproportionately affect the poor. A gross income tax was presented as applying only to the upper percentile of income. When first enacted in 1913, the base rate for most people was 1 percent and the top rate was 7 percent. That didn’t last long. Currently, Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax that would only affect the “tippy top 0.1 percent”. Odds are, that wouldn’t last long, either. And that’s why right-wingers are always asking how much government we’re supposed to have, because desire is infinite and funding is limited. Even if we do soak the rich and reverse the Trump-Ryan tax cuts (which we probably need to do anyway), it won’t cover all the new stuff “progressives” want to do. And while Republicans have successfully played this game of telling Americans that they can have all the Big Government they want without paying for it, the reason they can get away with their anti-tax stance is that it’s just a variant of the Democrats’ stance: “Someone else will pay for it, not you.”

In this regard, Howard Schultz is just like the rest of us in that he doesn’t want to pay more in taxes than he absolutely has to. But unlike the rest of us, he has the money and influence to affect public policy. And I’m sure that counts for a lot of leftist resentment. But if the unpopularity of redistributionist policy is grossly overstated, that does not make it universally popular, if the need for such policy needs to be seriously debated, that debate will not necessarily make the policy more popular, and if it is implemented, it won’t necessarily work, or be a political payoff for Democrats.

Because even the moderate liberal Affordable Care Act was compromised and badly implemented, such that it became a political liability to Democrats who lost record numbers of Congressional seats under Obama, also losing the Senate in 2010, with results that are still being felt now. The only reason the ACA survived is because it was clear that Republicans had no clue, or desire, to come up with anything better.

The problem is that Democrats can’t just win every policy argument by default, or by going “But Republicans are worse.” After all, they tried that in 2016, and that’s how we got Trump.

And that, I suspect, is the real reason that the Left is panicking.

I do not like Nancy Pelosi. I do not obsessively HATE her like Dennis Miller, but I am generally not impressed. I’m sure that someone who’s been an elected official for as long as she has must have some virtues and skills that are not readily apparent, but as a public figure, Pelosi is almost as dull as Chuck Schumer and that much more gaffe-prone than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unlike AOC, Pelosi isn’t so media-savvy and quick on the uptake that she will recognize and correct her gaffes as quickly as possible.

So I have to give Pelosi credit for her polite disinvitation of Viceroy Trump to the State of the Union speech scheduled for January 29, “given the security concerns” as long as the government is shut down and Secret Service people are not paid. This hits Trump where he lives. Not only is he deprived of (yet another) opportunity to make his case for the shutdown on TV, he is deprived of a traditional aspect of our increasingly imperial presidency. Now Trump won’t get to penguin-waddle up the aisle, get up to the speaker’s podium, and show all the TV cameras how big his hands are. Pelosi did give Trump the traditional option of presenting the speech in writing, which is an even bigger insult. Not that Trump, or any other president, is going to write his entire State of the Union speech, but now Stephen Miller is going to have to do the hard work of searching Trump’s tweets to come up with enough typos and unneeded capitalizations to make it look authentic.

Some Republicans, like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (who seems to equate ‘libertarianism’ with ‘kissing Trump’s ass’) have suggested that Senate leader Mitch McConnell offer his chamber of Congress for the SOTU speech, but apparently he hasn’t considered that this would simply be inviting a mass Democratic boycott of the event, which Pelosi’s action effectively is.

Instead, Trump decided – about 24 hours after Nancy’s maneuver – to be clever and cite his own security concerns as a pretext for cancelling the military escort for the trip that Pelosi and other Representatives were scheduled to make to an Afghanistan war zone, apparently timing the decision after the Congressmen had already gotten on a bus to the airport. No doubt that impressed many of those moderate Democrats that Trump is trying to get on his side. It didn’t even seem to impress some of Trump’s usual defenders, like Senator Lindsay Graham (R.-S.C.) who opposed Pelosi’s manuever but said, “One sophomoric response does not deserve another”. And the fact that Trump was not terribly serious in his opposition to the use of military escort during a shutdown was confirmed when Melania Trump took a military flight to Trump Mar-a-Lago in Florida, after King Donnie’s royal proclamation.

Seriously, how DID this man sire five kids with such a teeny weenie?

Perhaps realizing that all of his posturing is getting him less than nothing in the polls, Trump spent some time between Wednesday and Friday conferring with Republicans and confidants including Jared Kushner (but not Democrats), Trump declared on Friday that there would be a “major announcement” about border security and the budget standoff on Saturday afternoon. This turned out to be a plan with several points: while still demanding $5.7 billion for a wall, Trump is offering a three-year extension of status for DACA recipients and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders with $800 million more to address humanitarian issues at the border (which Trump’s policies had exacerbated). The problem being that these concessions are of a temporary nature while the wall is intended to be permanent. More importantly, at this stage, Democrats have no reason to trust Trump (but then, neither would Republicans, if they weren’t so desperate). Specifically, when Pelosi and Schumer tried to shut down the government to protect DACA “dreamers”, and were at a disadvantage because they didn’t have a majority in either house of Congress, they’d offered Trump his wall with a $25 billion budget in exchange for offering Dreamers a path to citizenship. Trump, apparently at the last minute, went back on the deal. So now Trump is escalating his demands with less leverage to work with (because now Pelosi has a majority). So normally one would give the president some credit for moving toward common ground, but you can never assume good faith with Trump. And now, not only do the Democrats know this, they are in position to act on that knowledge. So the major announcement comes down to a big fat nothing. Just like Trump.

It’s amazing that our nominal president did even this much to negotiate, but it’s still of a piece with his generally lazy, grudging and half-assed approach to governance. It probably explains why he made his announcement on a Saturday, when there weren’t going to be that many national media folks covering it. Of course the other danger of staging your event on a non-news day is that not only are people going to be focused on other things, the media may end up focusing on something even more marginal.

In my case, when I woke up late on Saturday and checked social media, the buzz wasn’t about Trump’s pseudo-concession. Rather, most news articles were going on about another incident in Washington.

Friday afternoon, some teenagers (allegedly) from a Catholic school in Kentucky were attending a March for Life rally (which hadn’t gotten that much attention in the media) and confronted a group of tribal native protestors of the Indigenous Peoples March (which got even less media attention). Everyone was focused on a particular moment when social activist and Omaha elder Nathan Phillips walked up to the kids and got in a face-off with this one Andy Samberg lookalike. By Saturday it was the only thing anyone could talk about, including Trump’s “deal.”

Now, there are a lot of the usual suspects on conservative websites and YouTube claiming to present the “real” story, such as the fact that the kids (who were all wearing MAGA hats, and not that much Christian or pro-life gear) were being provoked by some left-wing extremists called the Black Hebrews. At one point this group noticed a black student with the “pro-life” group and taunted him saying “when you get old enough, they gonna steal your organs” and then telling him, “get out, nigga.” Phillips himself told reporters that his group noticed the confrontation, although blaming the mostly white kids for it, saying: “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals.” At that point Phillips and his group walked up to the crowd and began chanting. At which point one of the Indians got in an animated but civil discussion with one of the whites there, telling him, “this is not your land.” Videos taken by the black protestors tend to confirm the position that Phillips intervened on their behalf, with one guy saying “he came to the rescue.” During the event some of the kids were jumping up and down in imitation of the Indian chant, which one YouTube apologist captioned as “kids clearly having fun & making light of a tense situation”.

And while other apologists bought into the narrative that the media were editing the presentation to make conservative Christians look bad, it again raises the point why these kids were almost all wearing “Make America Great Again” or “Trump 2020” hats instead of carrying Christian or pro-life signs. And if Rod Dreher thinks that Nathan Phillips “seeks out these opportunities for confrontation, and then (goes) to the media with them,” well again, this was a lot more publicity than either the Indigenous march or the March for Life had gotten up to this point, and the result reflected far more badly on the latter.

So that’s the other reason that Trump’s gesture of conciliation failed. Not only did it not attract enough attention with the limited emphasis he gave it, Trump’s fan club gave the media a more vivid example of what the movement is really about.

Ironically, this incident just proves that we really do need a strong immigration policy for this country. After all, the Omaha didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

Something to consider as this country heads toward Martin Luther King Day, the only federal holiday that celebrates an individual who was not a member of the military, not an elected politician, and used his First Amendment rights to protest for change within the system.

If for no other reason, that makes King a better example for libertarians than Rand Paul.

As of Saturday morning, we have officially reached the point where the current government shutdown is the longest in American history, all for a manufactured crisis because Edward Babyhands wanted to have something tall and hard in his life for once.

I refer again to the tweetstorm by writer Matthew Chapman: https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1002502139367837702

“The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy. Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con. Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you’re not ripping someone off, you’re getting ripped off. … This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn’t believe in mutual benefit. The second anyone tells him ‘this is your end of the deal’ he’ll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn’t be him.”

Chapman said this in June 2018. He went on to say:

“This explains his behavior over DACA, spiking two bipartisan deals even though they were what he asked for. He assumed if Democrats were willing to talk, his deal wasn’t ripping them off, ergo it would rip him off. That implies if Democrats win Congress, we are going to enter an all-out legislative standstill like we’ve never before seen. Our system is entirely reliant on compromise and compromise isn’t compatible with Trump’s beliefs. We will struggle to pass even basic reauthorizations.”

Where is the lie, Trumpniks?

This is of course not the first time that one party (usually it’s the Republicans) has refused to approve a budget and forced a shutdown hoping to get their way. And when this happens, the shutdown is really more rhetorical than actual. In this case, about a quarter of the government and 800,000 workers are either furloughed outright or expected to work without pay.

Because various agencies (including Defense and Social Security) were already pre-funded by December, Congress, acting without foresight, has thus decided that not only are there non-essential functions that are no longer done and do not get paid, there are essential functions that do get paid, and then there are essential functions that do NOT get paid. Got it?

This makes sense, really. If you actually shut down the government, its truly essential functions would no longer be covered, and basic stuff like border security – which remember, is what this whole squabble is supposed to be about – would be suspended. So we’re still doing that stuff, right? Wrong.

Yet, rather than focusing on how this national security “emergency” is threatening national security in the here and now, the mainstream media is focusing on the hardship to employees of the TSA, the IRS and even the Border Patrol, because they’re among the “essential” agencies who are still not budgeted or getting paid. Since the entire raison d’etre of the TSA is security theater, the fact that TSA agents are having their paychecks held hostage to the newer, bigger and louder iteration of security theater is kinda ironic. If the Resistance is hoping to pull the tear ducts of the average American by asking them to sympathize with the average TSA employee or IRS agent… well, they’d better get used to six more years of this.

Because that’s what the Very Stable Genius said could happen when he hoped that this could go on for “months, even years.” And I kinda hope it does too. Well, not two whole years. Just 22 months. So that on November 2020, Trump can go to the cameras and ask the general electorate if they think his shutdown is still worth it. I think he will be truly amazed by the response.

What’s essential? Apparently the salaries of Congress. And the president who started this whole mess in the first place. So the people who are actually serving the public are not being paid while they do so, meanwhile the people who could stop this at any time but refuse to vote for a budget are being paid for not doing their jobs.

If y’all wonder why libertarians hate government, here you are.

The “solution” that Trump and his sycophants are waving around is the idea of using presidential powers to declare a national emergency and appropriating funds from elsewhere, such as the money that is supposed to go to disaster relief in California and Puerto Rico. As even Fox & Friends (the closest thing to a panel of trusted advisors that the president has) said, making a national emergency out of a partisan demand would set the stage for the next Democratic president to declare (say) climate change a national emergency and bypass opposition in Congress to reorder the government to his liking. Thereby giving the “liberal” Big Government movement more precedent and support than it could have achieved by its own efforts. Nevertheless, even though Trump seems to have backed off this idea for now, there are supposed to be just as many Republicans who would like Trump to do this, because by making the standoff a matter of executive action, Congress won’t have to deal with it anymore, the government can get back in session, and in the (not guaranteed) event that the courts strike the initiative down, the Republicans can go to their base and say “at least we tried.”

So we’re supposed to give the president emergency power (that he says he already has) because of an “emergency” that was not pressing enough to do something about through constitutional means when the Republicans held all branches and the opportunity existed. What this really amounts to is a desire by the executive to bypass the legislative process and by the Republican contingent of the legislature to dodge responsibility for its role in the government. If they allow this to occur, then they are asserting that the standard for what constitutes a “national emergency” is whatever gets a bug up the current president’s ass.

The party of small government, ladies and gentlemen. As Rachel Maddow would put it, a government just small enough to fit in your uterus. In this case, it’s so small it may not even reach the uterus.

As I’ve stated, while many of us want to believe in natural rights, as a practical matter, “rights” are only those things we can convince the government to support and enforce. In the same regard, government itself is not an a priori thing that exists outside politics. In part, this is just a matter of ontology. People on the Right are (broadly) individualists rather than collectivists because the individual is pre-existing and necessarily existing. The collective does not necessarily exist. Any collective is just an empty set without its constituent individuals. In that regard, government, as a collective, does not pre-exist the people of the nation. If we ceased to exist, the government would not exist. If the government did not exist, we would still continue to exist. We would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, yes, but we WOULD exist.

That being the case, everything government does is not truly “essential”, except in terms of descending priorities. A government needs to be able to collect revenue to do anything else, including enforce laws. To enforce tax collection, it needs to have various levels of law enforcement (for all the laws deemed necessary, including taxation). And to have a territory in which to enforce laws, it needs to be able to enforce borders and standards of citizenship. Even the Right should be able to agree that taxes are necessary on that level, and even the Left should be able to agree that borders and standards are necessary. But to confirm even these minimal standards, there has to be a political consensus. In a republic or representative system, we elect people to serve a party agenda that is stated in advance. But if Republicans elect people for the sake of law enforcement and border security (and Democrats do the same, just not so self-consciously), and they end up thwarting both law enforcement and border security for the sake of one man’s emotional pique, then even the most minarchist right-wing conception of government is rendered non-essential, because fripperies like border security, law enforcement and taxation have been rendered into negotiables.

We have not needed to consider this because up until now it was considered a given that all the things approved by government were always going to be funded (whether the money was there or not). Now that’s no longer the case. Conversely, even during the New Deal, it was not automatically assumed that government would be involved in all endeavors of life. Now most people (other than libertarians) can’t imagine government NOT being involved in all endeavors of life. But now they’ll have to, not necessarily by choice. Now the question is not the hypothetical “how much government do we need” versus “how much government do we want?” Now it’s the practical question, “how are you going to get along without the level of government that we’ve had?”

When even the funding of the IRS is just a matter of priorities, this only makes it clear that the only difference between “essential” and non-essential services is the ability to reach a political consensus. This can be demonstrated by the simple fact that some “essential” services did get funding resolutions in 2018 while others did not. If Social Security had not been funded for next year before Ann Coulter took Donnie to the woodshed, then that Trump would be dancing on that “third rail” hard enough for us to know how much of his scalp is still naturally covered. Liberals might think it is “essential” for government to provide a national health care system, or to have a comprehensive plan to deal with climate change. But not only do we not have either now, we have never had either. And that’s because of the political environment. While the Constitution puts a limit on what government is allowed to do, most of what it does reflects the political consensus more than the limits of the law.

So while a libertarian might question how much of this government is actually necessary, the fact of the matter is that we have as much government as we do because a lot of people did consider it necessary, and a lot of voters elected politicians to create a certain level of government. The Republican sellout to the Trumpnik cult of personality has short-circuited that connection between public demand and the political system. And since even libertarians don’t want to live on the level of wolves and cavemen (most of us, anyway) we need to find some way around that.

There are points for debate that we need to have now, not just in terms of the current shutdown but in future cases where the president isn’t acting like the paid agent of a foreign power yet where politicians are on a pre-Trump standard of discourse and are still not able to reconcile. One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default.

An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more. They might ask, “Wait – wouldn’t this also mean there’s no incentive to reduce the size of government?” Yes. But that would force them to acknowledge that the Republican Party has never cared about this. However much they may hack at the base of tax revenue and pretend that even steeper hacks to the safety net will make up the difference, the overall size of government never goes down. And that’s partially because for all the cuts they make to infrastructure, regulations and social services, Republicans throw in a few more wasteful, intrusive pet projects like the TSA and the YFW (Your Fucking Wall). Like all good redistributionists, they are less about taking money for the common good (if that exists) and more about shunting it to preserve their political machine and benefit their favored demographics, in this case the people who pay for their campaigns. The problem, as the budget standoff will soon make clear, is that however much money Republicans get from the donor class, their actual votes are outnumbered by the number of voters living paycheck to paycheck, which is that much harder when the government wants to not issue paychecks because the day of the week has a Y in it.

One of the reasons that intelligent Republicans continue to goosestep in line is that, however apostate Trump is with regard to the free market, he still ends up giving the donor class what they want: tax cuts for the upper percentile (at the expense of everyone else) and cuts to regulations on business. That’s much more Paul Ryan’s vision than Trump’s, but Ryan needed a Republican president to get what he wanted. Thing is, though, this is not out of line for right-wing economic philosophy, which holds that a hands-off approach to business is better than a high-tax approach that might pay for a comprehensive safety net but could also depress the economy and thus the revenues that are needed to pay for that safety net. Various liberals like Paul Krugman attack this policy because of its effects on the deficit and government’s ability to pay for existing projects. Conservatives claim that the low-tax policy will pay for itself because the resulting economic growth will be just that high. Well, Krugman is right at least in the respect that the US budget deficit grew 17% in 2018. That is largely because of the change in tax policy. In 2017, just after Trump took office, corporate taxes paid for 9 percent of government revenue and individual income taxes paid for 48. Last year (2018) corporations paid 7 percent and individual returns paid for 49 percent. And yet, economic indicators are good. You wouldn’t know from the government website, bea.gov, since “Due to a lapse in Congressional Appropriations for fiscal year 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is closed. This website is not being updated until further notice.” But indicators seem to be improving. Yearly inflation continues to average under 3 percent. In Fall 2018, the unemployment rate reached a historic low of 3.7 percent. US GDP per capita has gone up from $53,399.4 in 2016 to $54,225.45 in 2018, with average wage going up from $22.34 at the beginning of 2018 to $23.05 by December 2018. Economic indicators for 2018 were going that much better, before somebody decided to start a tariff war with the Chinese.

It would seem that, whatever the long-term fiscal costs, the right-wing approach to the economy is working. Why then is it that so many people think this country is on the wrong track?

Perhaps because the party which claims to have the trademark on “small government” is currently run by a squalling man-baby and wannabe authoritarian whose only concept of public service is that the public serves him while he loots the Treasury, assisted by an entire Cabinet of private sector rent-seekers with similar attitudes.

Likewise, if people are discovering that they don’t actually need all the government that they’re paying for, that doesn’t mean they have to like the way that knowledge came about.