Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

A few hours after the Senate voted in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Saturday, I spoke to the lead impeachment manager, Jamie Raskin. He was crushingly disappointed. Despite Republicans’ indulgence of Trump over the last five years, despite the fact that three Republican senators met with Trump’s lawyers before they presented their defense, Raskin had so much faith in the overwhelming case he and his colleagues brought that, until the end, he held out hope of conviction.

 

“I’ve always been seen as a rose-colored-glasses guy,” he said. Raskin’s openhearted belief that Senate Republicans maintained a remnant of patriotic solidarity with their fellow citizens is part of what made his presentation so effective; he threw himself into it without fatalism or cynicism.

 

The House managers forced the Senate to reckon with the scale of the terror Trump unleashed on Congress. “I did see a bunch of the Republicans who voted against us, including Mitch McConnell, crying at different points,” said Raskin. The case was strong enough to win over even two Republican senators, Richard Burr and Bill Cassidy, who’d initially voted against holding the trial at all.

 

But when it comes to McConnell and his caucus, cynicism always prevails.

 

Because I’m less optimistic than Raskin, I was less disappointed. The 57-to-43 verdict against Trump was the biggest bipartisan majority for conviction in a presidential impeachment trial. And it seems to me that if McConnell couldn’t behave honorably, he did the next best thing with the speech he gave after voting to acquit.

 

“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of Jan. 6, McConnell said. The attack on the Capitol, he argued, was an effect of the “intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.” Once it began, said McConnell, Trump “watched television happily, happily, as the chaos unfolded.”

 

The senator’s excoriation could have doubled as the House managers’ closing summation.

 

To Raskin and the eight other managers, McConnell’s speech was at once a vindication and an insult, showing that they’d proved their case, and that it didn’t matter. McConnell voted to acquit on a manufactured technicality, arguing that a former president is “constitutionally not eligible for conviction.”

 

His bad faith is awe-inspiring; it was he who refused to move forward with a trial while Trump was still in office. With his split-the-baby solution to Trump’s manifest guilt, McConnell seemed to be trying to stay on the right side of his caucus while calming corporate donors who’ve cut off politicians who supported the insurrectionists.

 

But — and here’s the important part — McConnell signaled openness to Trump’s prosecution in other forums. “He didn’t get away with anything yet — yet,” said McConnell. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”

 

To Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, this is no comfort. “You’ve got to rewind to pre-Trump days,” he said. “Politicians should not be telling prosecutors who to prosecute.” Impeachment was a way for our political system to defend itself, and it failed. “We had an opportunity to deal with the clear and present danger that is Donald Trump in a bipartisan way through our constitutional system,” he said. “The Republican Party could not join the effort in sufficient numbers to make it completely successful, so now they are either going to have to fight him internally, or, more likely, they will become an autocratic political party that really does operate like a religious cult.”

 

This is true. But if we cannot restore pre-Trump norms, McConnell has at least stripped away some of the taboo about prosecuting a former president. In addition to the investigations of Trump’s business practices in New York, prosecutors in Georgia have opened a criminal investigation into his attempts to subvert the election there. Washington’s attorney general is reportedly considering charging Trump with violating a District of Columbia law against provoking violence. Joe Biden’s Justice Department could look into the countless federal crimes Trump appeared to commit in office.

 

Decisions to pursue charges shouldn’t be made by politicians, but they shouldn’t be blocked by them, either.

 

In the past, Republicans seemed ready to try to stop any federal Trump investigation. As The Financial Times reported in December, before Democrats won two pivotal Senate seats in Georgia, “Republicans have made clear that if they control the Senate, they would seek protection for Mr. Trump before approving any attorney general nominee put forward by Mr. Biden.”

 

Should Trump actually face legal jeopardy, plenty of Republicans will still howl about a witch hunt. McConnell might even join them. But his words can’t easily be taken back.

 

“There has to be a nationwide reckoning with the gravity and horror of these events,” Raskin said of Trump’s coup attempt. “I hope that the impeachment trial has started that educational process.” It has, and Republicans can no longer pretend that the trial should be the end of it.

Feels like this ain't over.

[akwoo]

Look - we have to keep the white supremacists believing they have some skin in the game and some ability to influence things. Otherwise, they resort to terrorism, and 25-30% of your population being terrorists isn't pretty.

 

I live in a university town in a rural, "the government shouldn't keep me from shooting my bad neighbors if I want to" area. My state senator, a Democrat (and a bridge player), was elected with 50.5% of the vote, including a whopping 20% of the Election Day vote from out of town. We're well aware that a bunch of folks in the hills could easily burn down town and force us all to leave at gunpoint.

[y66]

Well, there is the Tucker Carlson/Sean Hannity poll question: A group of patriotic Americans were required to force their will on Capitol Police in order to engage with their elected representatives. Do you agree or disagree with their action?

Required by their contract with Roger Stone?

[pilowsky]

Look - we have to keep the white supremacists believing they have some skin in the game

 

Akwoo discovers humour!

[y66]

Earmarks are back! Democrats, with majorities in both chambers, have decided that Congress will once again specify how certain funds will be used, rather than allowing the executive branch to do so. This is … well, it’s marginally good news.

 

Earmarks were a regular part of congressional procedure for many years, but their usage increased over time and exploded in frequency during the Republican Houses beginning in 1995. That era ended in scandal (and the end of those Republican majorities), with some members of Congress implicated in corrupt use of the practice. When Republicans regained the House majority in the 2010 elections, they decided to eliminate earmarks altogether. In part, that’s because they were less able to campaign on — or at least believed they were less able to campaign on — winning specific benefits for their districts during the Tea Party era.

 

Many Capitol Hill insiders attribute the difficulties that House Republican leaders faced over the next eight years to the absence of those benefits. Although that’s probably overstated, political scientists who study Congress have generally found that the ability to distribute earmarks does make compromise easier to some extent. Molly Reynolds also points out that in a Congress that has become increasingly top-down, seeking and winning earmarks at least gives rank-and-file members something tangible to do.

 

All of those things are generally good, if not game-changing.

 

The downsides are even more marginal. Earmarks are budget-neutral — they offer instructions about how to disburse money that is already being appropriated — not new funding. In a way, they do add an arbitrary element to government spending, giving advantages to those lawmakers who sit on key committees or otherwise have the ability to bargain for them. Those who think spending should be purely by formula might not like that. But defenders of earmarks will point out that government spending formulas are never neutral or nonpolitical, and that direct decisions by the people’s representatives are a more democratic way of allocating funds than turning the decision over to the bureaucracy.

 

Congress has weakened itself over the past few years, in large part because lawmakers have chosen to abdicate their power — both institutionally and individually. Since Democrats regained the House majority two years ago, they’ve made some noises about reversing that trend, but the same incentives that brought us here — strong parties and risk-averse legislators who are willing to give up their own influence in exchange for avoiding tough votes — remain a problem. Bringing back earmarks is a step in the right direction. Let’s hope there are more steps to come.

[Winstonm]

Required by their contract with Roger Stone?

 

And Alex Jones.

[Winstonm]

It is not enough to just say Trump is gone, I completely agree with that.

Even so, I think the focus needs to be on Biden and what we do now.

 

Some problems: Immigration, Covid and the many related issues such as job loss and the mess the kids are in from the closed schools, economic issues, Afghanistan, the Middle East, global warming and, of course, the etcetera.

 

I hope the Rs will dump trump. I think this is far more likely to happen if Biden does a good job. Of course "good job" is defined in different ways by different people. We can acknowledge that without becoming obsessed with it. I hope.

 

This is what I mean when I say we cannot simply dismiss the losing side and move forward:

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Carolina Republican leaders on Monday voted to censure Senator Richard Burr over his vote to convict former U.S. President Donald Trump during his impeachment trial.

[y66]

Money > bipartisanship.

 

Are Americans actually willing to sacrifice larger stimulus checks for bipartisan cooperation? The short answer: not really.

 

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/2/10/do-bipartisan-endorsements-move-voters-on-covid-relief

[Winstonm]

A real concern.

 

 

A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he spent 28 years as a highway patrolman in Oklahoma, working his way up to captain before being elected sheriff of his native county in 2017. He earned the accolade “Oklahoma Sheriff of the Year” in 2019, and won a second term last fall, after running unopposed.

 

Then came Jan. 6.

 

West said he set his badge and his official role aside when he drove to Washington to support President Donald Trump. “I went as a citizen, as Chris West, the individual,” he told a news conference in El Reno, the county seat, after he returned.

 

By his own account, he marched on the Capitol waving a Trump flag and hollering slogans like “Stop the Steal!” and “We love Trump!” But he said that he did not participate in the storming of the Capitol, and he condemned the attack.

 

 

 

I really don't want anyone stupid enough to believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump to have the power to arrest me.

[pilowsky]

A real concern.

I really don't want anyone stupid enough to believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump to have the power to arrest me.

 

Here is a list of qualifications needed to join the Police (not the FBI etc) in the USA.

You must be older than 18, have no criminal record and (mostly) have a high school education.

Military experience is "well-regarded".

 

You do not get tested AFAIK for adherence to peculiar ideologies.

 

 

https://www.learnhowtobecome.org/police-officer/#:~:text=Most%20applicants%20will%20need%20to,their%20offences%20were%20very%20minor.

[y66]

Donald Trump urges G.O.P. senators to find new leader in biting attack on Mitch McConnell

 

It hurts to see the Republican party tearing itself to shreds.

[pilowsky]

Donald Trump urges G.O.P. senators to find new leader in biting attack on Mitch McConnell

 

It hurts to see the Republican party tearing itself to shreds.

 

Did anyone ever see the 'Aliens films'? They should remake them as "Republicaliens".

 

They mostly come out at night, mostly.

 

Starring Kamala Harris as Ripley.

[kenberg]

Money > bipartisanship.<br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);"><br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);">Are Americans actually willing to sacrifice larger stimulus checks for bipartisan cooperation? The short answer: not really.<br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);"><br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);">https://www.dataforp...on-covid-relief

 

This is a strange article. I have said a few things about the stimulus but it would never occur to me to say something such as "My support for the stimulus will depend on how many Republicans agree to it" There is something funny about the numbers as well. Take the last bar graph and look at the D support for a 600, a 1400, and a 2000 dollar stimulus when 0 to 3 Rs agree. Now the numbers are not exactly 80% , 60% and 80% but suppose for a moment that they were. As near as I can figure, the only way that could happen is if 60% would support in all three choices of amount, 20% would support only the 600 amount, and 20% would support only the 2000 amount. I suppose that's possible, and, as noted, the numbers are not exactly 80-60-80, but I find it strange.

I must be missing something, the whole thing seems weird.

 

 

My argument about the numbers goes like this: We see that there are (about) 60% who support 1400 and about 80% who support 600. This means that at least 20% of the dems would support 600 but not 1400. Similarly, there must be 20% who would support 2000 but not 1400. Ok, we have 60% supporting 1400 (and maybe other amounts) 20% who support 600 w/o supporting 1400, and 20% who support 2000 w/o supporting 1400. Well, 20+60+20 adds up to 100 (percent). Now we we need to get the number of supporters of 600 up from the 20% to 80% so that 60% has to come from somewhere. It's not reasnavble to think people would support 6-- and support 2000 but not support 1400, so I guess that 60% for 600 all comes from the 60% that supports 1400. Similarly, the needed 60% to add on to the 20% for 2000 must come from the middle group..

 

Ok, that's a bit complicated but try it this wy: How do you get those 80-60-80 numbers? Having 60% support all three and the 20% be for 600 only and 20% for 2000 only does the trick. What else?

 

Yeah, I know, they probably ran the experiments changing the groups of people so maybe that's it. But still I am very skeptical of this. Anyway, who would bas their support for a stimulus check on how many Rs (or Ds) agree to it?

[y66]

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?abVariantId=1&campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210216&instance_id=27193&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=51792&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F515bd9b7-48bb-519e-ada0-0401e78d74c0&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

The Biden administration has been quite cautious in setting its public vaccination goals.

 

During the transition, officials said they hoped to give shots to one million Americans per day — a level the Trump administration nearly reached in its final days, despite being badly behind its own goals. In President Biden’s first week in office, he raised the target to 1.5 million, although his aides quickly added that it was more of a “hope” than a “goal.” Either way, the country is now giving about 1.7 million shots per day.

 

I have spent some time recently interviewing public-health experts about what the real goal should be, and I came away with a clear message: The Biden administration is not being ambitious enough about vaccinations, at least not in its public statements.

 

An appropriate goal, experts say, is three million shots per day — probably by April. At that pace, half of adults would receive their first shot by April and all adults who wanted a shot could receive one by June, saving thousands of lives and allowing normal life to return by midsummer.

 

Biden struck a somewhat more ambitious tone yesterday, telling CNN that anybody who wanted a vaccine would be able to get one “by the end of July.” But Dr. Anthony Fauci also said that the timeline for when the general population could receive shots was slipping from April to May or June.

 

The shots are on their way

The key fact is that the delivery of vaccine doses is on the verge of accelerating rapidly. Since December, Moderna and Pfizer have delivered fewer than one million shots per day to the government.

 

But over the next month and a half, the two companies have promised to deliver at least three million shots per day — and to accelerate the pace to about 3.3 million per day starting in April. Johnson & Johnson is likely to add to that total if, as expected, it receives the go-ahead to start distributing shots in coming weeks.

 

Source: New York Times estimate

Very soon, the major issue won’t be supply. It will be logistics: Can the Biden administration and state and local governments administer the shots at close to the same rate that they receive them?

 

“I’m not hearing a plan,” Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, told me. “In the public statements, I don’t hear that sense of urgency.”

 

Bankers’ hours for vaccine clinics

The experts I interviewed said they understood why Biden had set only modest public goals so far. Manufacturing vaccines is complex, and falling short of a high-profile goal would sew doubt during a public-health emergency, as Barry Bloom, a Harvard immunologist, told me. If he were president, Bloom added, he would also want to exceed whatever goal was appearing in the media.

 

But setting aside public relations, experts say that the appropriate goal is to administer vaccine shots at roughly the same rate that drug makers deliver them — with a short delay, of a week or two, for logistics. Otherwise, millions of doses will languish in storage while Americans are dying and the country remains partially shut down.

 

“We should be doing more,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said. “I am kind of surprised by how constrained we’ve been.” Many vaccine clinics operate only during business hours, she noted. And the government has not done much to expand the pool of vaccine workers — say, by training E.M.T. workers.

 

The newly contagious variants of the virus add another reason for urgency. They could cause an explosion of cases in the spring, Hotez said, and lead to mutations that are resistant to the current vaccines. But if the vaccines can crush the spread before then, the mutations may not take hold.

 

“We need to be laser focused on getting as many people vaccinated now as possible,” Dr. Paul Sax, a top infectious-disease official at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told me.

 

As my colleague Katie Thomas, who covers the vaccines, said: “The future looks bright — if we can do vaccination quickly enough, if people actually want the vaccines and if the variants don’t mess with the plan.”

 

‘Our historic moment of crisis’

Nobody doubts that vaccinating three million Americans every day for months on end would be a herculean task.

 

When I asked Biden about his virus plan during a December phone call, he used the term “logistical nightmare” to describe a rapid national vaccination program. “This is going to be one of the hardest and most costly challenges in American history,” he said.

 

Since then, his aides have emphasized the challenges — the possibility of manufacturing problems, the difficulty of working with hundreds of local agencies, the need to distribute vaccines equitably. They also point out that they have nearly doubled the pace of vaccination in their first month in office, accelerated the pace of delivery from drugmakers and have plans to do more, like open mass-vaccination clinics and expand the pool of vaccine workers.

 

Part of me wonders whether the White House knows that three million shots per day is the right goal and simply doesn’t want to say so.

 

When Biden and his advisers talk about the fight against Covid-19, they sometimes compare it to wartime mobilization. And the U.S. has accomplished amazing logistical feats during wartime. A single Michigan auto plant figured out how to manufacture a new B-24 bomber plane every hour during World War II, and a network of West Coast factories built one warship per day — for four years.

 

“This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,” Biden said during his inaugural address. “We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we have acted together.”

 

Near the end of the speech, he added a question: “Will we rise to the occasion?”

[y66]

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial provided little closure. “If you looked to the U.S. Senate for a full measure of accountability, you did not receive it,” my colleague David Frum wrote over the weekend.

 

But Trump himself still lost, Frum argues: Polls show support for the former president’s actions dwindling—“not the numbers on which to base a Grover Cleveland–style comeback tour.”

 

Even if Trump’s political career is currently lagging, what does the future hold for his base—and the ideology he rode to office on?

 

Here’s what history tells us about what’s next for Trumpism. “From Berlusconism in Italy to Perónism in Argentina and Fujimorismo in Peru, personality-driven movements rarely fade once their leaders have left office.”

 

A skirmish in Oregon shows the deep imprint of Trump’s ideology on the GOP. “To the frustration of those Republicans who want to steer a new course, state-party committees have become the strongest redoubts of Trumpism,” Russell Berman reported last week.

 

America’s next authoritarian will be much more competent. As Zeynep Tufekci warned back in November: "It won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president."

[Winstonm]

The Crazoids are still in charge of a majority of states - and that is very bad news.

 

Seven Republican members of the U.S. Senate voted to find former President Donald Trump guilty of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. By the end of this week, six of the seven may have faced censures from local and state Republican parties back home because of those votes.

[y66]

 

One day -- it's like a miracle -- Trump will disappear too.

[Zelandakh]

I really don't want anyone stupid enough to believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump to have the power to arrestshoot me.

You must be white Winston. I FYP for the rest of the population.

[Zelandakh]

This is a strange article.

You are not thinking like a statistician Ken. Look at the premise of the study. Each of the 50 Senators for each party was asked one question. There are 9 questions so that means that each bar represents roughly 5 Senators. The variance (noise) for such a small sample size outweighs any useful data response you are likely to get. So take the results with a pinch of salt. It's a bit of fun for mass media consumption but do not think for one moment that it actually holds any mathematical relevance. Maybe Helene should apply for a job at Data for Progress; it seems like they need a new statistician there badly.

[Winstonm]

 

One day -- it's like a miracle -- Trump will disappear too.

 

This is a picture of:

A) Trump Library? B) Rush Limbaugh Memorial C) Laura Ingraham's soul? D) Sean Hannity's moral compass?

 

 

[kenberg]

You are not thinking like a statistician Ken. Look at the premise of the study. Each of the 50 Senators for each party was asked one question. There are 9 questions so that means that each bar represents roughly 5 Senators. The variance (noise) for such a small sample size outweighs any useful data response you are likely to get. So take the results with a pinch of salt. It's a bit of fun for mass media consumption but do not think for one moment that it actually holds any mathematical relevance. Maybe Helene should apply for a job at Data for Progress; it seems like they need a new statistician there badly.

Now I really don't understand. Senators were asked? I didn't, and don't, think so.

 

I saw

In an experiment for Data For Progress, we told respondents that Congress was considering a COVID-19 stimulus proposal supported by all 50 Democratic senators. Via random assignment, respondents were told that the proposal would include direct payments of either $600, $1,400, or $2,000. To analyze the salience of bipartisanship, respondents were then told that the plan had support from a randomly assigned number of Republican senators between 0 and 10. We asked respondents whether they would support or oppose the proposal.

I did not take that to mean that senators were asked, I understood "respondents" as random people who were told a story about what senators had agreed to.

Whatever the case, it all looks fishy to me (where "fish" means carp, not trout). But they were polling senators?

I skimmed it quickly and I still think the respondents are random people. The study tells random people about how many Republican senators agree to a given proposal, but the numbers are artificial, randomly chosen from 0 to 10. Then these respondents are asked if they support that proposal. I do not see that any senators were asked anything.

Anyway, we seem to agree that there is not much of value in this. I am curious if I am really misunderstanding something basic here as to who was asked what.

[helene_t]

Yeah, Ken is right, they polled some random people, first manipulated them by telling them that X republican senators supported it, and then asked the same random people whether they would support the stimulus. The objective was apparently to investigate to what extent people let their stand on issues influence by partisanship.

[pilowsky]

This is a picture of:

A) Trump Library? B) Rush Limbaugh Memorial C) Laura Ingraham's soul? D) Sean Hannity's moral compass?

 

 

 

I think that with Limbaugh dying of smoking-related lung cancer, and Trump being tossed from the White House, we could be witnessing the start of the Decline and Fall of the Loman empire.

 

I think that's what happens to salesmen in the end.

 

As for C and D, If Ingraham has a soul she stole it from someone else, and Hannity's moral compass only points in one direction.

[kenberg]

Yeah, Ken is right, they polled some random people, first manipulated them by telling them that X republican senators supported it, and then asked the same random people whether they would support the stimulus. The objective was apparently to investigate to what extent people let their stand on issues influence by partisanship.

 

Right. And while I believe the answer is that partisanship plays a big role, I am finding the numbers very weird. There seems to be broad agreement that something is off, and so I will drop it.

[Chas_P]

Hannity's moral compass only points in one direction.

 

LMAO. And Rachel Maddow is open-minded? Gimme a break.