It makes me wonder if the donors who are supporting candidates for the House in supposedly “safe” GOP districts are on board with that. The RNC will probably be unable or unwilling to help anyone other than 45. What can convince those billionaires that the cost of putting/keeping MAGA supporters in power is too high?
I don’t know. I mean, Koch was supporting Haley until recently, so at least some of the big money clearly doesn’t like Trump and MAGA. They do tend to be of the “anything is better than a Democrat” mindset, though, so that’s a good question.
March 1, 2024 (Friday)
Today, President Joe Biden signed the continuing resolution that will give lawmakers another week to finalize appropriations bills. Lawmakers will continue to hash out the legislation that will fund the government.
Republicans have been stalling the appropriations bills for months. In addition to inserting their own extremist cultural demands in the measures, they have demanded budget cuts to address the fact that the government spends far more money than it brings in.
As soon as Mike Johnson (R-LA) became House speaker, he called for a “debt commission” to address the growing budget deficit. This struck fear into the hearts of those eager to protect Social Security and Medicare, because when Johnson chaired the far-right Republican Study Committee in 2020, it called for cutting those popular programs by raising the age of eligibility, lowering cost-of-living adjustments, and reducing benefits for retirees whose annual income is higher than $85,000. Lawmakers don’t want to take on such unpopular proposals, so setting up a commission might be a workaround.
Last month, the House Budget Committee advanced legislation that would create such a commission. The chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey C. Arrington (R-TX), told reporters that Speaker Johnson was “100% committed to this commission” and wanted to attach it to the final appropriations legislation for fiscal year 2024, the laws currently being hammered out.
Congress has not yet agreed to this proposed commission, and a recent Data for Progress poll showed that 70% of voters reject the idea of it.
This week, a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a nonprofit think tank that focuses on tax policy, suggested that the cost of tax cuts should be factored into any discussions about the budget deficit.
In 2017 the Trump tax cuts slashed the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and reined in taxation for foreign profits. The ITEP report looked at the first five years the law was in effect. It concluded that in that time, most profitable corporations paid “considerably less” than 21% because of loopholes and special breaks the law either left in place or introduced.
From 2018 through 2022, 342 companies in the study paid an average effective income tax rate of just 14.1%. Nearly a quarter of those companies—87 of them—paid effective tax rates of under 10%. Fifty-five of them (16% of the 342 companies), including T-Mobile, DISH Network, Netflix, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors, and Nike, paid effective tax rates of less than 5%.
Twenty-three corporations, all of them profitable, paid no federal tax over the five year period. One hundred and nine corporations paid no federal tax in at least one of the five years.
The Guardian’s Adam Lowenstein noted yesterday that several corporations that paid the lowest taxes are steered by chief executive officers who are leading advocates of “stakeholder capitalism.” This concept revises the idea that corporations should focus on the best interests of their shareholders to argue that corporations must also take care of the workers, suppliers, consumers, and communities affected by the corporation.
The idea that corporate leaders should take responsibility for the community rather than paying taxes to the government so the community can take care of itself is eerily reminiscent of the argument of late-nineteenth-century industrialists.
When Republicans invented national taxation to meet the extraordinary needs of the Civil War, they immediately instituted a progressive federal income tax because, as Representative Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) said, “The weight [of taxation] must be distributed equally, not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.”
But the wartime income tax expired in 1872, and the rise of industry made a few men spectacularly wealthy. Quickly, those men came to believe they, rather than the government, should direct the country’s development.
In June 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie published what became known as the “Gospel of Wealth” in the popular magazine North American Review. Carnegie explained that “great inequality…[and]…the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few” were “not only beneficial, but essential to…future progress.” And, Carnegie asked, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?”
Rather than paying higher wages or contributing to a social safety net—which would “encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” Carnegie wrote—the man of fortune should “consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer…in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”
“[T]his wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums to the people themselves,” Carnegie wrote. “Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among themselves in trifling amounts through the course of many years.”
Here in the present, Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts after their scheduled end in 2025, a plan that would cost $4 trillion over a decade even without the deeper cuts to the corporate tax rate Trump has called for if he is reelected. Biden has called for preserving the 2017 tax cuts only for those who make less than $400,000 a year and permitting the rest to expire. He has also called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, which would generate more than $2 trillion.
Losing the revenue part of the budget equation and focusing only on spending cuts seems to reflect a society like the one the late-nineteenth-century industrialists embraced, in which a few wealthy leaders get to decide how to direct the nation’s wealth.
In other news today, Alexei Navalny’s parents held a funeral for the Russian opposition leader and buried him in Moscow. Navalny died two weeks ago at a penal colony in Siberia where Russian president Vladimir Putin had imprisoned him on trumped-up charges after failing to kill him with poison. Navalny fought against Putin’s control of Russia by emphasizing the corruption and illicit fortunes of Putin and his associates.
Russia specialist Julia Ioffe of Puck News noted that a million Russians have fled the country since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and that many of them were Navalny supporters. Still, many thousands turned out for the funeral and the procession, throwing flowers at the hearse as it made its way to the cemetery.
A woman at Navalny’s funeral compared Navalny and Putin. “One sacrificed himself to save the country, the other one sacrificed the country to save himself.”
I, too, would be a great God-Emperor, look upon my greatness and despair…
It’s really astonishing every single time I hear that stuff. It never gets old. Sadly.
March 2, 2024 (Saturday)
On February 25, 1901, financier J. P. Morgan’s men filed the paperwork to incorporate a new iron and steel trust, and over the weekend, businessmen waited to see what was coming. Five days later, on March 2, the announcement came: J. P. Morgan was overseeing the combination of companies that produced two thirds of the nation’s steel into the United States Steel Corporation. It was capitalized at $1.4 billion, which at the time was almost three times more than the federal government’s annual budget.
While the stock market was abuzz with news of the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, Vice President–elect Theodore Roosevelt was on his way from New York to Washington, D.C., where he and his family arrived at 5:00 in the evening. The train was an hour behind schedule because the crowds coming to see the upcoming inauguration, scheduled for Monday, March 4, 1901, had slowed travel into Washington.
Two days later, President William McKinley took the oath of office for the second time, and Roosevelt became vice president.
McKinley was a champion of big business and believed the role of government was to support industry, dismissing growing demands from workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs for the government to level the economic playing field that had tilted so extraordinarily toward a few industry leaders. McKinley had won the hard-fought election of 1896 handily, but by 1900, Republicans were so concerned about the growing demand for reform that party leaders put Roosevelt, who had won a reputation for standing up to business interests, on the ticket, at least in part because they hoped to silence him there.
Roosevelt hoped he could promote reform from the vice presidency, but he quickly discovered that he couldn’t accomplish much of anything. His only official duty was to preside over the Senate, which would not convene until December. He was so bored he asked the chief justice of the Supreme Court if it would be unseemly for him to enroll in law school to finish his degree. (Horrified, the justice offered to supervise Roosevelt’s studies himself.)
But then, in September, an unemployed steelworker assassinated McKinley, and Roosevelt became president. “I told McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia,” one of McKinley’s aides said. “I told him what would happen if he should die. Now look. That damned cowboy is president of the United States.”
Two months later, on November 13, J. P. Morgan and railroad magnates brought together the nation’s main railroad interests, which had been warring with each other, into a new conglomerate called the Northern Securities Company. Even the staunchly big business Chicago Tribune was taken aback: “Never have interests so enormous been brought under one management,” it’s editor wrote.
Midwestern governors, whose constituents depended on the railroads to get their crops to market, suggested that their legislatures would find a way to prohibit such a powerful combination. Northern Securities Company officials retorted that they would simply keep all business transactions and operations secret. When Roosevelt gave his first message to Congress in December, industrialists watched to see what the “damned cowboy” would say about their power over the government.
They were relieved. Roosevelt said the government should start cleaning up factories and limiting the working hours of women and children, and that it should reserve natural resources for everyone rather than allow them to be exploited by greedy businessmen.
But Roosevelt did not oppose the new huge combinations. He simply wanted the government to supervise and control corporate combinations, preventing criminality in the business world as it did in the streets. He asked businessmen only for transparency. Once the government actually knew what businesses were up to, he said, it could consider regulation or taxation to protect the public interest.
Senators and businessmen who had worried that the cowboy president would slash at the trusts breathed a sigh of relief that all he wanted was “transparency.” According to the Chicago Tribune, the “grave and reverend and somewhat plutocratic Senators immediately admitted in the most delighted fashion that the young and supposedly impetuous President had discussed the trust question with rare discrimination.”
But they were wrong to think Roosevelt did not intend to reduce the power of big business. In early January 1902, Minnesota sued to stop the Northern Securities Company from organizing on the grounds that such a combination violated Minnesota law. While the Supreme Court dithered over whether or not it could rule on the case, the Roosevelt administration put the federal government out in front of the issue. In February, Roosevelt’s attorney general told newspapers that the administration believed the formation of the Northern Securities Company violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and that he would be filing a suit to keep it from organizing.
Businessmen were aghast, not only because Roosevelt was going after a business combination but also because he had acted without consulting Wall Street. When J. P. Morgan complained that he had not been informed, Roosevelt coolly told him that that was the whole point. “If we have done anything wrong,” said the astonished Morgan, “send your man [the attorney general] to my man [one of his lawyers] and they can fix it up.” The president declined. “We don’t want to fix it up,” explained the attorney general. “We want to stop it.”
“Criticism of President Roosevelt’s action was heard on every side,” reported the Boston Globe. “Some of the principal financiers said he had dealt a serious blow to the financial securities of the country.” For his part, Roosevelt was unconcerned by the criticism. “If the law has not been violated,” he announced, “no harm can come from the proposed legal action.”
In late February, the Supreme Court decided it would not hear the Minnesota case; on March 10, the United States sued to stop the organization of the Northern Securities Company.
In August 1902, Roosevelt toured New England and the Midwest to rally support for his attack on the Northern Securities Company. He told audiences that he was not trying to destroy corporations but rather wanted to make them act in the public interest. He demanded a “square deal” for everyone. As the Boston Globe put it: “‘Justice for all alike—a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor,’ is the Roosevelt ideal to be attained by the framing and the administration of the law. And he would tell you that that means Mr Morgan and Mr Rockefeller [sic] as well as the poor fellow who cannot pay his rent.”
In 1904 the Supreme Court ruled that the Northern Securities Company was an illegal monopoly and that it must be dissolved, and by 1912, Roosevelt had come to believe that a strong federal government was the only way for citizens to maintain control over corporations, which he saw as the inevitable outcome of the industrial economy. He had no patience for those who hoped to stop such combinations by passing laws against them. Instead, he believed the American people must create a strong federal government that could exert public control over corporations.
In a famous speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1912, he called for a “new nationalism.” “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being,” he said. He warned that “[t]here can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains…. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know…whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public.”
Roosevelt had come to believe that a strong government must regulate business. “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” he said.
After all, he said, “[t]he object of government is the welfare of the people.”
I find it interesting though that then the claim was “Rich people will use their money to do things for the public good”.
Then we got trickle down economics which was just “Rich people will spend money on expensive stuff for themselves and that will eventually mean some money for poorer people.”
I mean there’s a huge difference in ideology there even if the actual behaviour is the same.
Many elites in the pre-20th century US paid at least lip service to what amounts to the notion of noblesse oblige. Wealthy men often felt a duty, for instance, to not only be what today’s wealthy would think of as flamboyantly charitable, but also to serve for basically free as a politician.
March 3, 2024 (Sunday)
This week seems likely to be packed with news.
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke about the crisis in the Middle East with strong words for both Hamas and Israel, calling for a ceasefire of at least six weeks, the return of hostages, and increased aid to the Palestinians. Such a deal is on the table. According to the U.S., Israel has agreed to it, and negotiators are waiting for a response from Hamas leaders.
Benny Gantz, a centrist officer in Israel’s war cabinet, is in Washington, D.C., where he will meet tomorrow with Vice President Harris and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, and on Tuesday with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He did not have authorization from hard-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the visit. As growing numbers of Israelis are voicing dislike of Netanyahu, polls show that Gantz could command enough support to become prime minister if a new vote were held immediately.
This evening the U.S. Supreme Court indicated it will issue an opinion tomorrow. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket commented that it is “[v]ery likely the case involving Donald Trump’s disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”
Also today, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley won her first primary, winning 62.9% of the Republican vote in Washington, D.C. Trump won 33.2%. This victory makes Haley the first woman in history to win a Republican primary. It also illustrates that Trump’s support is terribly soft. Over the weekend, Haley picked up the endorsements of Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
Headed into the week, Tuesday, March 5, is so-called Super Tuesday, when voters in fifteen states and one territory will vote for their choice for president. Those states are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. In American Samoa, Democrats will vote on Tuesday, Republicans on Friday.
It seems likely that Super Tuesday will shift so many delegates into Trump’s column that he will have virtually locked up the Republican nomination.
But that timing poses a real problem for the Republican Party. Trump has to post a bond to cover the $83.3 million he owes writer E. Jean Carroll no later than Friday, March 8. His lawyers have been trying to get out of this requirement, asking for a “substantially reduced bond.” This suggests that he might have trouble covering the amount. And after he comes up with this sum, he still has the $454 million to pay in the civil fraud case against him in New York.
March 8 is also the day that Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel steps down. The only people running to replace her are Trump loyalist Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who hope to be co-chairs. Trump’s senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita is running to be the RNC’s chief operating officer.
So Trump could clinch the nomination and control of the RNC just as it becomes crystal clear he has devastating financial and legal problems.
Also this week, far-right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is scheduled to meet with Trump at the Trump Organization’s property at Mar-a-Lago.
And Congress still must pass several appropriations bills. Meanwhile, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has suggested Democrats will protect House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) from a vote to oust him if he will bring up for a vote the national security supplemental bill that provides aid to Ukraine.
Thursday, President Biden will deliver the State of the Union address.
I’m already tired just thinking of it all, but this week might well provide some new clarity on a number of major issues.
Holy shit, really? That’s a really interesting, and possibly dangerous, development. (I confess i do not understand fully the structure of Israeli government power, but i can’t imagine this would fly!)
I hope it means that Ganzt believes that Netanyahu is on his way out the door.
[ETA] Here is Spencer Ackerman’s discussion of this…
While I get all the caveats, what Gantz as PM would mean is someone in that job who the US can negotiate with. As much as I love Mehdi Hasan, his statement that the US could stop Israel’s abuses with one phone call is nonsense. Bibi is all-in on T**** and the Biden Admin can’t trust anything he says, if he’d even listen. That’s why they haven’t bothered - he’d stab them in the back with a nod and wink to Clownstick McFuckface.
Bet you it would do more than scolding them while vetoing UN resolutions and shoveling them ammo, though. 
Truth.
Yeah, I don’t see that happening either, not with Netanyahu in office. But I don’t know if Gantz would be much better, either. The entire war cabinet seems all in on the destruction of Gaza plan. 
Maybe, but I like our chances better with anyone who isn’t dependent on Israel remaining at war to stay out of prison.
March 4, 2024 (Monday)
Today the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states cannot remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot. Colorado officials, as well as officials from other states, had challenged Trump’s ability to run for the presidency, noting that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits those who have engaged in insurrection after taking an oath to support the Constitution from holding office. The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment leaves the question of enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment up to Congress.
But the court didn’t stop there. It sidestepped the question of whether the events of January 6, 2021, were an insurrection, declining to reverse Colorado’s finding that Trump was an insurrectionist.
In those decisions, the court was unanimous.
But then five of the justices cast themselves off from the other four. Those five went on to “decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy,” as the three dissenting liberal judges put it. The five described what they believed could disqualify from office someone who had participated in an insurrection: a specific type of legislation.
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in one concurrence, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in another, note that the majority went beyond what was necessary in this expansion of its decision. “By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson wrote. Seeming to criticize those three of her colleagues as much as the majority, Barrett wrote: “This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency…. [W]ritings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote that “in the course of unnecessarily deciding all of these questions when they were not even presented by the case, the five-Justice majority effectively decided not only that the former president will never be subject to disqualification, but that no person who ever engages in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States in the future will be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, notably did not recuse himself from participating in the case.
There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking.
For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts.
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
Yep. And if they scrap Chevron deference, which seems likely, they will move rule making from the executive branch to the judicial branch, making the federal court system the most powerful lawmaking body in the country. And they’re all unelected and appointed for life.
Ugh… what really irritates me is that for literally YEARS the GOP was screeching about “legislating from the bench” by more liberal judges… Bunch of fucking hypocrites.
Every. Damn. Time.
