Speaking as a foreign observer, it’s so nice to see a competent, hard-working POTUS, who has no interest in making everything about him, or in riling people up on social media.
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Of course this idiot signed his oath affirmation M-A-S-K-L-E-S-S, putting the Senate staffer who handed out pens at risk.
He’s an ass.
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January 27, 2021 (Wednesday)
The contours of politics today look much like they did yesterday. President Biden is forging ahead through executive actions—today pausing oil and gas leases while switching the government to electric vehicles— while the two factions in the Republican Party claw for supremacy.
Dead center of both of these political fights is the future of this country. Will Trump and his supporters seize control of the government—by means legal or illegal—or will the country steer itself back to the norms and values of democracy?
The dangers of Trumpism are becoming clearer each day. Today, for the first time, the Department of Homeland Security issued a national terrorism bulletin that warned of violence from domestic extremists angry over “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives” and emboldened by the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The bulletin expires at the end of April.
Law enforcement has moved National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in part to guard against violence on March 4, a day that QAnon supporters who still believe Trump is part of an elaborate trick to reclaim the nation from the Democrats think will be the day on which the former president is finally sworn in for his second term. (March 4 was the nation’s original inauguration date; it changed under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937.)
In testimony yesterday, the acting chief of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington told the House Appropriations Committee that at least 65 officers filed reports of injury after the January 6 attack. The chair of the Capitol Police officers’ union, Gus Papathanasiou, put the number closer to 140. “I have officers who were not issued helmets prior to the attack who have sustained brain injuries. One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs. One officer is going to lose his eye, and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake,” he said. One officer died of injuries sustained on January 6. Two officers have since taken their own lives.
Meanwhile, a video emerged today of the new Republican representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, harassing David Hogg, who survived the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. Greene followed Hogg down the street in Washington, D.C., in March 2019, with an accomplice filming as she badgered him, called him a crisis actor paid by George Soros, told him she was armed, demanded he talk to her, and called him a coward. He walked on, without engaging her.
The video emerged the day after reporters discovered old Facebook activity on Greene’s page in which she responded positively to a commenter talking of hanging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama and another talking of killing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
While Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) has called for Greene’s expulsion from Congress, leading Republicans in the House responded to the Facebook news simply by saying they condemned violent rhetoric on both sides. Today, Republican House leadership assigned her to the Education and Labor Committee.
Republican lawmakers seem to be siding with Trump’s supporters, turning against the ten House Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment. In the House, Trump supporters are trying to throw Liz Cheney (R-WY) out of her spot in the party’s leadership, and the former president’s new political action committee is ginning up anger against her as it urges primary challengers to jump into the race in 2022.
Increasingly, Republican lawmakers are pushing to let Trump off the hook on impeachment. In the Senate yesterday, Rand Paul (R-KY) insisted that a former president could not be tried on an impeachment charge, and 45 Republicans agreed with him. This is not necessarily a signal of how the eventual Senate vote will go, but Paul said it was: he insisted this was a sign that Trump would not be convicted. Republican lawmakers seem to be coming down on Trump’s side as polls show that while most Americans are horrified by the attack on the Capitol and blame Trump for it, most Republicans- 78%-- don’t blame him. Republican lawmakers are accusing Democrats of divisiveness in their move to hold the president accountable.
Some Republicans are, though, alarmed at the idea that a president might get away with inciting an insurrection that endangered our elected representatives and our government itself—remember the next three people in line for the presidency were in the Capitol when the rioters stormed it—and which came perilously close to making good on threats against individuals, including then-vice president Mike Pence.
Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) dismissed the idea that the country could have unity without addressing the causes of the current anger. “I say, first of all, have you gone out publicly and said that there was not widespread voter fraud and that Joe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States? If you said that, then I’m happy to listen to you talk about other things that might inflame anger and divisiveness,” he explained to Dennis Romboy of Deseret News. “But if you haven’t said that, that’s really what’s at the source of the anger right now.”
Also notable is the firm stance of Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who has bucked his party to speak out against the former president’s attacks on the election and incitement of the rioters. “I’ve felt very isolated in my party,” Kinzinger told Ellen McCarthy of the Washington Post.
While the Republican Party’s apparent embrace of Trump and all he now stands for is grabbing headlines, Biden and his administration officials are taking on the radicalization of his opponents in a new and promising way. They are demonstrating an approach to sidelining Trumpism by shifting the focus off the exhausting drama of the former president and his supporters and onto a functioning government that is working for ordinary Americans.
When a reporter today asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki if the administration had any comment on Greene, Psaki made it clear the administration was not going to give any oxygen to her or those like her. “We don’t, and I am not going to speak further about her, I think, in this briefing room,” Psaki said.
While Biden is starving the Republicans of oxygen, he is also working to address the conditions that have fed desperate conspiracy theories and divisions. In America, such societal breakdown is associated with periods in which ordinary people face economic hardship. Biden is moving quickly on a range of issues that are popular among ordinary voters of both parties, including addressing the country’s extreme inequality. After all, one of the complaints that drew voters to an outsider in 2016 was the belief that government no longer worked for the people and needed to be shaken up.
Today’s executive order on addressing climate change talks at length about creating “good-paying union jobs” and “tapping into the talent, grit, and innovation of American workers.” It calls for the government to buy zero-emission vehicles made in the U.S., and to rebuild federal infrastructure, creating construction, manufacturing, engineering, and skilled-trades jobs. Job creation and infrastructure development were both promises the previous president made in 2016 that boosted his support but which never really came to pass. If Biden can actually deliver on them, he could reclaim those Trump voters for the Democrats, as well as addressing climate change and our failing infrastructure.
Biden’s people are also making sure we see a White House that is addressing issues that created concern in the past administration. They are upholding old norms—holding daily press briefings, for example—honoring science, restoring government websites, and treating members of the media with respect.
They seem to be trying to remind us how our democracy is supposed to work.
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and that’s the reason mcconnell pushed to delay the trial, and compromised so much for it. even a little time for republicans to catch their breath and forget the immediacy of their own fears during the insurrection is all that was needed.
while his conviction seems unlikely, to paraphrase rep maxim waters, congress still needs to try because it’s the right thing to do
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In this age, that strategy doesn’t always work in their favor. There was so much video surrounding the events on the 6th that the content seems to get worse over time, not better. I get the feeling fear of exposure is the greater motivation. They want time to cover up evidence of complicity, and lesser punishments in case 45 decides to throw more of them under the bus.
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January 28, 2021 (Thursday)
It has been just three weeks and a day since a crazed mob, egged on by the former president and his supporters, stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
They smashed into the building, carrying handcuffs and searching for our elected officials, whom they threatened to harm. They killed one police officer and wounded 140 more. Our vice president, senators, and representatives, along with their staff, had to be evacuated to secure quarters, and then to hide, while rioters took over the building, rifling through their offices and smearing excrement on the floors.
That anyone is trying to downplay that attempt to destroy the central principle of our democracy—fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power-- is appalling.
And yet, Republican lawmakers are doing just that. Within the party, the pro-Trump faction and the business faction are struggling to take control. Those in the business wing of the party are not moderates: they are determined to destroy the government regulation, social welfare legislation, and public infrastructure programs that a majority of Americans like. But they are not openly white supremacists or adherents of the QAnon conspiracy, the way that Trump’s vocal supporters are.
Members of that second faction have risen to power by grabbing headlines with more and more outrageous statements that play well on right-wing media, although they appear to have no program except hatred of the “libs.” Members of this faction are going after the business wing of the party, seemingly with glee. Today Florida Representative Matt Gaetz held a rally outside the Wyoming state capitol to lead a challenge against Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, the third most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives. Cheney was one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the January 6 riot.
Cheney is no “lib”: she is a hard line right-winger. Trump and his supporters are targeting her to make it clear that no one is too powerful for them to go after. The former president wants loyalists across the Republican leadership. The dividing line in the party now is not between moderates and extremists; they are all extremists. It is whether a lawmaker supports the former president and his false accusation that the Democrats “stole” the 2020 election from him.
As if to underscore this reality, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who originally blamed the former president for the January 6 insurrection, has backed down and caved to the Trump wing of the party. Over the past two days, McCarthy met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, apparently discussing how to retake the seven seats the Republicans need to regain the House majority in 2022. To accomplish that, Republicans in Georgia as well as other states are backing laws to suppress voting.
Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi acknowledged that in this atmosphere Democratic members of Congress and staffers are facing harassment and violent threats. Representatives wrote a letter to leadership asking for stronger security measures, and Pelosi responded by agreeing that “the enemy is within the House of Representatives.” When asked to clarify her statement, she said: “[W]e have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.”
We’ll see how this plays out in the next two weeks as Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate approaches. Mounting evidence suggests that at least some members of the president’s circle planned for trouble on January 6—presidential adviser Steve Bannon, for example, and new representative Lauren Boebert from Colorado, both recorded on social media their expectation that January 6 would see a fight or a revolution—and it seems unlikely that an examination of the president’s behavior before and during the attack of January 6 will bear close scrutiny.
News broke yesterday that extremists began planning for an attack on the Capitol in November. The Alabama Political Reporter broke the story on Tuesday that new Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) met on January 5 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., with the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, an organization that backed the January 6 rally, and with members of the Trump family and the family’s advisors, including Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. One of the attendees wrote on Facebook that he was standing “in the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.”
Former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier noted yesterday in the New York Times that the United States is facing a violent insurgency and should apply the lessons we have learned about counterinsurgency to head off political violence. Grenier notes that the nation must insist on criminal justice, tracking and trying those responsible for crimes. We must also return the nation to a fact-based debate about issues.
Crucially, Grenier noted that it is a national security imperative to convict the former president and bar him from future elective office. “I watched as enraged crowds in the streets of Algiers, as in most Arab capitals, melted away when Saddam Hussein was ignominiously defeated in the Persian Gulf war,” Grenier wrote. “Mass demonstrations in Pakistan in support of Osama bin Laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after Sept. 11. To blunt the extremists, Mr. Trump’s veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed.”
In all my years of studying U.S. politics, seamy side and all, I never expected to see the name of an American president in the New York Times in a list comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But then, I never expected to see an American president urge a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election, either.
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And that is why calls for “unity” should be greeted with the derision they deserve.
Don’t even talk to me until you’ve cleaned up your own house.
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January 29, 2021 (Friday)
While the anti-democracy crusaders in the Republican Party are drawing headlines, President Biden has resolutely refused to engage with the craziness and has instead continued to move forward at a pace that feels remarkable after years of what seemed to be governmental inaction on matters ordinary people care about.
Pressed again today to speak about Republican congress members who are in the news for their antisocial behavior, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki refused to comment. “We don’t want to elevate conspiracy theories further in the briefing room, so I’m going to leave it at that,” she said.
The White House has also declined to comment on Congress, taking the constitutional position that the president should stay in the executive branch’s lane and let the legislative branch handle its own affairs.
Instead, Biden is moving his agenda forward quickly. He has signed at least 33 executive actions that direct the members of the executive branch on how they should implement laws. In addition to the military, the executive branch has more than 4 million people in it, and it includes the State Department, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Interior Department, and so on—a lot of people in a lot of positions.
The breadth of the executive branch is enabling Biden to turn the direction of the government by coordinating changes across a number of departments. So, for example, in an article in the New Yorker, environmentalist Bill McKibben called out Wednesday, January 27, as “the most remarkable day in the history of America’s official response to the climate crisis…. The Biden Administration took a series of coordinated actions that, considered together, may well mark the official beginning of the end of the fossil-fuel era.”
McKibben notes that Biden adjusted rules in the Justice Department, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency, and involved the Pentagon by making climate change a national-security priority. He also asked the Secretary of Agriculture to confer with farmers and ranchers on how to encourage adoption of “climate-smart” agricultural practices. Anticipating the usual accusations that ending the fossil-fuel industry will cost jobs, he explicitly tied jobs to the new measures, ordering new, American-made, electric vehicles for the government and promising “good-paying” union jobs in construction, manufacturing, engineering and the skilled-trades as the nation switches to clean energy.
Biden is using executive orders to undercut the partisanship that has ground Congress to a halt for the past several years. While Biden’s predecessor tended to use executive actions to implement quite unpopular policies, Biden is using them to implement policies that most Americans actually like but which could never make it through Congress, where Republicans hold power disproportionate to their actual popularity.
According to a roundup by polling site FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s executive actions cover issues that people want to see addressed. Eighty-three percent of Americans—including 64% of Republicans—support a prohibition on workplace discrimination over sexual identification, 77% (including 52% of Republicans) want the government to focus on racial equity, 75% want the government to require masks on federal property, and 68% like the continued suspension of federal student loan repayments. A majority of Americans also favor rejoining the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords, and so on.
Republicans are insisting that Biden is not practicing the unity he promised in his campaign, but here’s the interesting thing: work by political scientists Dr. Shana Gadarian and Dr. Bethany Albertson shows that most Americans actually agree on problems and solutions so long as politicians do not take on those issues as partisan ones. But as soon as politicians adopt a partisan stance on an issue, voters polarize over it. So it is possible that by keeping these issues out of the current partisanship in Congress and handling them from the White House, Biden is doing exactly what he promised: creating unity. He is also making Americans feel like the government is doing something for them again.
This attempt to avoid partisan polarization will be tested by his determination to pass a new, $1.9 trillion economic aid package through Congress. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve and the chair of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, has urged a fast injection of stimulus into the economy after it slowed down significantly at the end of 2020. Republicans have expressed concern at the passage of another large spending bill, but some are willing to negotiate, especially since the Democrats can pass a bill without them through a process called reconciliation (it will almost certainly be significantly pared down from this first version).
Today, as he went to the Walter Reed hospital to visit wounded soldiers, Biden said, “I support passing COVID relief with support from Republicans if we can get it…. But the COVID relief has to pass. No ifs, ands or buts.” Psaki said that the White House would not agree to breaking the package up and passing only the parts the Republicans like. “But the size and the scope of the package – this is the legislative process, this is democracy at work now.”
The Democrats’ hand has likely been strengthened this week by the media frenzy over the so-called “GameStop short squeeze,” in which hedge fund managers got squeezed by ordinary investors driving up the price of the stock of a video game retailer so that the hedge funds could not cover short sales. Investment firms promptly cried foul, only to be greeted with derision, since it is not at all clear that their own stock purchases have a better effect on the markets than those of the smaller investors, and since they made huge money betting on the Covid-19 crisis. Observers see the short squeeze as a populist attack on unscrupulous Wall Street types.
While the entire story behind the short squeeze is not yet clear, it does already have a political meaning. The GameStop story reinforced the growing sense that the system has been rigged for the wealthy. People from across the political spectrum are demanding more thorough regulation of the stock market, a dramatic cultural change.
It didn’t help that Leon Cooperman, a hedge fund trader worth $2.5 billion, took to CNBC to vent his fury. “The reason the market is doing what it’s doing is, people are sitting at home, getting their checks from the government, basically trading for no commissions and no interest rates,” he said, referring to relief for people thrown out of work by the pandemic.
With calls for unity in the air, Cooperman offered his own definition. Democrats’ suggestion that the rich should pay their “fair share” of taxes is “bullsh*t,” he said. “It’s just a way of attacking wealthy people, and you know I think it’s inappropriate…. We all got to work together and pull together.”
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And he is blind to how those two statements are incompatible. Paying your fair share is the first step in working together and pulling together. The next step is looking at what you have and peeling off some to give to other people who need it more.
What he really means is for poorer people to suck it up and work even harder together so he can be richer.
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Yep. Another wealth hoarder who should be dragged out into the sunlight for some disinfecting.
Maybe we’re making some progress toward seeing that kind of hoarding as far worse than the kind exposed on those reality shows?
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“Defeated”, he said. Grenier sure tiptoed through that one.
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January 30, 2021 (Saturday)
No news dump last night, no big breaking news today.
I could learn to like this.
Tonight is an early night for me… and it’s a lovely one here on the coast of Maine.
Sleep well, everyone. I’ll see you tomorrow.
[photo by Buddy Poland]
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January 31, 2021 (Sunday)
The most prominent story these days is that the Republican Party is sliding toward a full-on embrace of authoritarianism. Former president Trump’s exit and ban from his favorite social media outlets has left a vacuum that younger politicians imitating Trump’s style are eager to fill by rallying people to the former president’s standard.
Notably, Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have tried to step into the former president’s media space by behaving outrageously and becoming his acolytes. Gaetz last week traveled to Wyoming to attack Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the third most powerful Republican in the House, for her vote in support of Trump’s impeachment. Not to be outdone, yesterday Greene tweeted that she had spoken to Trump and has his support, although neither her camp nor his would comment on her statement.
Republican state parties have also thrown in their lot with the former president. In Arizona, the state party voted to censure former Senator Jeff Flake, the late Senator John McCain’s wife Cindy, and Governor Doug Ducey for criticizing the former president. In South Carolina, the state party formally censured Representative Tom Rice for voting to impeach Trump, and Republican lawmakers are starting to consider stripping Cheney of her party position, a development that led former President George W. Bush to indicate his support for her this weekend. She has already drawn a primary challenger.
Across the country, Republican-dominated legislatures are trying to suppress the voting that led to the high voter turnout that fueled Democratic victories in 2020. According to the Brennan Center, which tracks voting rights, 28 states have put forward more than 100 bills to limit voting. Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, whose voters chose Biden this year after going for Trump in 2016, all have introduced plans to lower voting rates. So have other states like Texas, which have voted Republican in recent years but show signs of turning blue.
The former president would like to solidify power over the party, but he has his own problems right now. The top five lawyers in his team defending him against the article of impeachment in his Senate trial all quit this weekend. Trump apparently wanted them to argue that the attack on the Capitol was justified because Democrats stole the election from him. Recognizing that this is pure fantasy—courts have already thrown this argument out more than 60 times—which could put them in legal jeopardy, the lawyers instead wanted to argue that it is unconstitutional to try a former president on charges of impeachment.
Tonight, Trump’s office announced that David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor, Jr., will lead his defense. Schoen represented Trump advisor Roger Stone when he challenged his convictions; Castor was the district attorney who promised actor Bill Cosby he would not be prosecuted for indecent assault. The impeachment trial is scheduled to start on February 9.
There are signs that some Republicans have finally had enough of their party’s march toward authoritarianism, especially as pro-Trump Republicans grab headlines for their outrageous behavior, including shutting down a mass vaccination effort at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for about an hour yesterday.
Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a 2010 Tea Partier but now one of the ten Republicans in the House to vote in favor of impeachment, told Anthony Fisher of Business Insider that “My dad’s cousins sent me a petition — a certified letter — saying they disowned me because I’m in ‘the devil’s army’ now….”
Kinzinger announced today that he has started a political action committee (PAC) to finance a challenge to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Calling Trump’s loyalists in the Republican caucus “political terrorists,” Kinzinger said in the video launching the PAC, “Republicans must say enough is enough. It’s time to unplug the outrage machine, reject the politics of personality, and cast aside the conspiracy theories and the rage.”
It also appears to be sinking in to Republicans that momentum is on the side of the Democrats. Biden’s executive actions have generally been popular, and his support for workers threatens to shift a key constituency from the Republicans to the Democrats.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus proposal offers to give to ordinary Americans, hurting badly from the coronavirus recession, the kind of government attention that has lately gone to wealthier Americans. Among other things, it calls for $1400 stimulus payments, extends unemployment benefits, provides funds for state and local governments, and establishes a higher minimum wage. While Biden has said repeatedly that he would like Republican support for this measure, the Democrats have enough votes to pass a version of it without Republican support.
This would put Republicans in the position of voting against a measure that promises to be popular, and at least ten Republican senators would prefer not to do that. Today, they offered their own $600 billion counterproposal, and asked for a meeting with President Biden to discuss it.
In their letter to the president, they hinted that they think the nation has devoted enough money to the economic crisis already, noting that there is still money unspent from the previous coronavirus packages. But they did not state that reasoning explicitly, perhaps recognizing that this argument will not be popular from people who voted for Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which disproportionately benefited the wealthy, when one in seven adults say their households don’t have enough food to eat.
“We want to work in good faith with you and your administration to meet the health, economic and societal challenges of the covid crisis,” the senators wrote. After years in which Republican senators refused to discuss bills with the Democrats, this is a change indeed.
But perhaps not enough of one. In the Washington Post, James Downie noted that a proposal that is less than a third of Biden’s package is not a compromise. It also cuts stimulus checks down to $1000, cuts supplemental unemployment insurance, gives no local or state aid, and kills the minimum wage increase.
When asked why Democrats should compromise rather than go ahead without them, as Republicans repeatedly did when they held the majority, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) told “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” respectively, that Biden should honor his call for unity and that refusing to do so would kill future hopes for bipartisanship.
In an article in The Guardian today, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich dismissed Republican concerns about the national debt, noting that if they were worried about it, they could just tax the very wealthy. “The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has grown by… $1.1 [trillion] since the start of the pandemic, a 40% increase,” he noted. Those billionaires could fund almost all of Biden’s proposal and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic hit.
Reich suggested that “[t]he real reason Republicans want to block Biden is they fear his plans will work.” A successful government response to coronavirus, the economic crisis, inequality, the climate crisis, and poverty would devastate modern-day Republicans’ insistence that the solution to every problem is tax cuts and private enterprise. If Biden’s plans succeed, Reich wrote, Americans’ faith in government, and in our democracy, will be restored.
Tonight, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that Biden has spoken with Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and has invited her and the other nine signers of the letter to the White House (we later learned they will meet tomorrow).
But Psaki’s statement did not give ground. It reiterated the need for fast action, and noted that “$1400 relief checks, a substantial investment in fighting COVID and schools, aid to small businesses and hurting families, and funds to keep first responders on the job (and more) – is badly needed. As leading economists have said, the danger now is not in doing too much: it is in doing too little. Americans of both parties are looking to their leaders to meet the moment.”
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“They fear that it will work.” That pretty much sums up Republicans in a nutshell.
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Right?
The great god Reagan said government is bad!
I’ve known Republican voters who parrot that shit.
Everything and anything that has to do with government is something I try my damnedest to stay away from!
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Remember these ignorant asshats?
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Ah, yes. 
And I’ve also heard people say that railing against tax cuts for the rich is “stupid,” because those cuts just mean all that much less money for government to waste on destroying people’s lives. 
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February 1, 2021 (Monday)
Today’s two big domestic stories are developments that will help to determine the future of our democracy: President Biden’s insistence on a major new coronavirus relief bill and Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection.
President Biden has proposed a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, called American Rescue Plan, to get the country over the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. This is a bold move that rests on the idea that the government must help to manage the economy. Republicans abandoned this idea in the 1980s and even today continue to insist that tax cuts and private enterprise are the keys to a secure economy.
But that theory took a beating even among previous adherents under the previous president, as corporate leaders invested money from tax cuts into stock buybacks, driving money upward, and as the administration refused to coordinate a coronavirus response and thus helped to create a disaster that has led more than 440,000 Americans to their deaths. Biden’s attempt to pass a big coronavirus bill that supports ordinary Americans, as well as cities and states, contradicts the Republican orthodoxy that has come to dominate the nation.
Republicans don’t like the plan, and even the Republicans willing to entertain the idea of another relief bill think Biden’s proposed number is far too high. For nearly two hours today, Biden met with ten Republican senators who offered a $618 billion counterproposal. This was Biden’s first meeting with lawmakers of either party, and giving that first meeting to Republicans was a sign that he is willing to entertain good-faith bipartisanship. After the meeting, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) expressed optimism that the two sides could continue to work together.
But the tide seems to be running away from Republicans toward the Democratic plan. On Friday, a bipartisan group of more than 400 mayors across the country begged Congress to provide aid to cities, aid that is in Biden’s package and not in the plan of the Republican senators. Mayors and governors actually have to make government work and thus are often more practical and less ideological than national lawmakers.
Explicitly calling for Congress to pass Biden’s plan, the mayors noted that “American cities and our essential workers have been serving at the frontlines of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic for nearly a year” without direct federal assistance. Because cities and states cannot borrow to cover budget shortfalls, they look to the federal government—which can—to tide them over in times of crisis. This time, though, that aid was not forthcoming. Left with no choice, local governments have cut nearly a million local government jobs. Direct, flexible aid to cities will help suffering families and fuel a recovery, the mayors say, as well as enabling cities to vaccinate people. “Your quick action on President Biden’s plan is a crucial step to making meaningful progress in one of the most challenging moments in our country’s history,” the mayors wrote to congressional leadership.
This morning, West Virginia Governor Jim Justice, a Republican, also backed the larger coronavirus package. “I absolutely believe we need to go big…. We need to quit counting the egg-sucking legs on the cows and count the cows and just move. And move forward and move right now.” Justice’s interview on CNN puts pressure on West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, who has expressed concerns about a big relief package.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders began the process of advancing the Senate process that will enable the Democrats to pass their own proposal without Republican votes. This process is known as “budget reconciliation,” and it requires only a simple majority to pass. When they were in power, the Republicans used it to advance policies like ending the Affordable Care Act, so the Democrats’ invoking of this rule is not unprecedented.
“Congress has a responsibility to quickly deliver immediate comprehensive relief to the American people hurting from covid-19,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in a statement. “The cost of inaction is high and growing, and the time for decisive action is now.” Later Schumer tweeted: “Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen just told us: ‘The smartest thing we can do is act big.’ And that is just what this Senate is going to do: Act Big.”
Tonight, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a statement that gave generous credit to the ten Republican senators who offered the counterproposal for “a substantive and productive discussion” and a “shared… desire to get help to the American people, who are suffering through the worst health and economic crisis in a generation.”
But the statement also gave notice to the Republicans that the Democrats were willing to go it alone on a bold package. It noted that Biden had told them Congress must respond “boldly and urgently,” and that their proposal did not address major issues. He told them he is eager to find common ground and to strengthen the measure, but he is willing to pass it with Democratic votes alone if he must. “He reiterated… that he will not slow down work on this urgent crisis response, and will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment.”
If Biden gets this bill passed and Americans feel that it relieves the economic crunch, it will go a long way toward erasing people’s distrust of government action to regulate the economy.
While the Biden administration moves forward with an aid package, a clearer picture is emerging of the events of January 6, as well as of the road to them. Yesterday, the New York Times published a long exploration of the relationship between the Trump campaign and the January 6 rally that led to the attack on the Capitol; today it published a shorter synopsis of that material. The shorter article, written by Matthew Rosenberg and Jim Rutenberg, began: “For 77 days between the election and the inauguration, President Donald J. Trump attempted to subvert American democracy with a lie about election fraud that he had been grooming for years.”
The picture they paint is of a man who insisted on a lie—that he really won an election he clearly lost—until he found enablers who would agree with him. Key lawmakers, including former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, indulged the former president because he wanted Trump’s help electing two Republicans to the Senate in the Georgia runoffs. As reality-based Republicans backed away from the challenge to the election outcome, more radical lawyers and financiers stepped in to support the former president.
A coalition put together by activists in a group called Women for America First, funded by Trump advisor Stephen Bannon and the founder of the MyPillow company, Mike Lindell, pressured key senators to contest the election outcome. Women for American First began to organize the January 6 rally, but Trump decided to take it over. Several former members of the Trump campaign and the administration—including the former president-- began to work on the event. They were the ones who added a march from the rally to the Capitol.
The nonpartisan Coup D’état Project at the Cline Center of the University of Illinois, which analyzes and categorizes political violence, last week determined that the storming of the Capitol "was an attempted coup d’état: an organized, illegal attempt to intervene in the presidential transition by displacing the power of the Congress to certify the election.” Its statement about the coup warns that “coups and attempted coups are among the most politically consequential forms of destabilizing events tracked by the Cline Center.”
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wait wait. who now?
so they acknowledge human driven climate change is happening, that masks are good for you, that welfare queens aren’t a thing, that tax cuts aren’t always good, that government isn’t always bad, that obama was born in america, that the drug war isn’t helping, that iraq didn’t have wmds, that systemic racism exists, that being gay or trans isn’t a choice, that america was founded on keeping religion out of politics and vice versa?
like reality reality, or just the basic acknowledgement that clinging to trump will cost them their careers?
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The latter, I think.
Reality Lite, as it were.
And OTOH, it may be that nearly all DC Republicans are aware that their party’s future is in serious jeopardy, and none of them are completely sure just how best to shore up its current power, let alone its future viability.
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