ProfJerry's Weblog

On Lawfare Ben Berwick, Jamila Benkato, and Cameron Kistler describe Trump’s pattern of shifting his defense from one venue to another and creating a circular reasoning to deny that none of them has jurisdiction. In the end he is arguing he’s not accountable to anyone. Here’s their summary:

To summarize: President Trump’s view—advanced by his personal and executive branch attorneys—is that the president cannot be subject to even the most indirect criminal investigation, because impeachment is the only remedy for presidential misconduct. But the House cannot demand any information from the president in support of an impeachment investigation. And federal courts cannot enforce House subpoenas against a stonewalling executive branch, because the remedy for such stonewalling is impeachment. But the president cannot be impeached for obstruction of Congress, because that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal activity. And, the president, because he is president, is incapable of committing a crime. And in any event, federal and state law enforcement can’t investigate whether he did.

He really does believe that he’s above the law and no one can do anything about it.

Charles M. Blow writes in the New York Times:

There is no evidence that then-Vice President Biden or his son did anything illegal. There is, however, clear evidence that Trump has broken the law – both in the conspiracies to pay off women who allege sexual affairs with him and in obstructing justice over Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

But that doesn’t matter to this man. For him, “real” is relative. The only truth, the only thing that matters, is what you can make people believe. Facts are not absolute; they have alternatives.

This is the chief executive officer of the country, and he is single-handedly mutilating it.

Not that it will make any difference to his “base” for whom he can do nothing wrong. But still . . .

And much of the media will still try to present a “balanced” account by implying that Biden did something wrong also.

Opinion | Trump, Unrestrained – The New York Times

Andrew Sullivan offers a helpful and cautionary history lesson. It is not, as he notes, a new idea; others have drawn the parallel. But it is one that bears thinking about.

Of course, in so many ways, ancient Rome is profoundly different from the modern U.S. It had no written constitution; it barely had a functioning state or a unified professional military insulated from politics. Many leaders were absent from Rome for long stretches of time as they waged military campaigns abroad. There was no established international order, no advanced technology, and only the barest of welfare safety nets.

But there is a reason the Founding Fathers thought it was worth deep study. They saw the destabilizing consequences of a slaveholding republic expanding its territory and becoming a vast, regional hegemon. And they were acutely aware of how, in its final century and a half, an astonishing republican success story unraveled into a profoundly polarized polity, increasingly beset by violence, shedding one established republican norm after another, its elites fighting among themselves in a zero-sum struggle for power. And they saw how the weakening of those norms and the inability to compromise and mounting inequalities slowly corroded republican institutions. And saw, too, with the benefit of hindsight, where that ultimately led: to strongman rule, a dictatorship.

So when, one wonders, will our Caesars finally arrive? Or has one already?

Our Caesar

On Vox, Matthew Yglesias has some interesting reflections on the popularity — or lack thereof — of various “progressive” proposals.

A new Marist poll testing the popularity of a bunch of progressive ideas leads to a slightly tedious truth: Some are popular and some are not popular, and there’s not much of a pattern determining which are which.

The latest progressive activist fad on immigration policy, changing unauthorized entry from a criminal to a civil offense, for example, is badly underwater. But the old progressive standby of offering a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents of the United States polls very well. Massive investment in clean energy polls very well, but taxing dirty energy is much less popular. Free college is in between.

And he offers some advice on what he believes would be a winning strategy for the Democrats in the next election.

The worry that committing to unpopular ideas will somehow guarantee Trump’s reelection is silly (he has lots of unpopular ideas of his own). But what is true is that popular ideas are better than unpopular ones for winning votes, and precisely because many progressive ideas are popular, there’s no good reason to let the unpopular ones drag them down.

I hope the Democratic candidates are listening.

Progressive policy ideas are popular — sometimes! – Vox

The Republicans have just blocked legislation designed to protect our election from foreign interference. And this happened right after Robert Mueller had indicated that a foreign adversary is even now at work to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. One Republican Senator tries to explain:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), chair of the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees aspects of election administration, laid out McConnell’s opposition during a hearing earlier this year. “I think the majority leader just is of the view that this debate reaches no conclusion,” Blunt said, noting that he didn’t see the point in considering any election security bills in committee if they simply weren’t going to go anywhere.

McConnell’s decision is likely driven by a few factors: He’s acknowledging President Donald Trump’s aversion to the subject – which the president sees as too closely tied to questions about the outcome of the 2016 election – and he’s maintaining concerns he’s long held about getting the federal government too involved in states’ efforts. Link

Sometime during the past week I overheard a commentator saying, “Trump is just too little for the job.”

I immediately thought, that’s true. He doesn’t have the knowledge, the experience, the intelligence, or the character to be President.

My next thought was: on some level we knew this even before he became President.

And yet millions of my fellow citizens voted for him.

Depressing.

Jamelle Bouie writing in the New York Times points out that attacks on Muslims and Islam have been a part of Republican rhetoric for a couple of decades. Trump just brings a new level of vitriol.

It is easy to tie these attacks to Trump’s history of anti-Muslim rhetoric. But anti-Muslim prejudice was common in Republican politics before he stepped on the political stage with his “birther” charges against President Barack Obama.

It was an important force among Republican voters — in one 2004 poll, for example, about 40 percent of self-identified Republicans said that Muslim Americans should be required to register with the government and 41 percent said that Muslim-American civic groups should be infiltrated by the government. Well before Obama was a household name and Trump a political figure, a 2006 Gallup poll found wide anti-Muslim prejudice “with Republicans ascribing more negative political and religious qualities to Muslims, and being more opposed to having Muslims as neighbors than are Democrats and independents.”

…

Donald Trump has simply brought this rhetoric to the bully pulpit of the American presidency. He has taken everything coursing through the last 20 years of Republican politics and made it explicit. It now has an official seal of approval. And if Omar is a target, it has little to do with what she said and everything to do with who she is: A black Muslim woman — and an immigrant — whose very person disrupts the exclusionary ideal of a white Christian America.

The difference between the pre-Trump era and the present, in other words, isn’t the substance of belief but its expression — and the force of the venom, contempt and hatred behind it.

Over the last few weeks as I’ve listened to the many (and still growing) number of Democratic candidates for President, I’ve come to realize that what’s missing is the articulation of specific, workable policy proposals.

Several of the candidates have signed on to the Green New Deal. And that’s fine with me (I’ve been reading about and writing about environmental issues for some time). But the Green New Deal is aspirational; it lays out broad goals. What I want to hear from the candidates are clear legislative proposals that will move us toward those goals. For example, zero carbon emissions? Fine, but how specifically do you propose we achieve that goal. And that proposal needs to be not only effective — i.e., present evidence explaining how your proposal will help achieve the goal — but it also needs to be enactable — I.e., show me that it has a better than 50-50 chance of being adopted and made into law.

Likewise, several candidates have proclaimed they want affordable health insurance for all and that’s certainly a worthwhile goal and eminently desirable. But again, I’d like to hear from you some specific proposals — with supporting evidence — that shows how the proposal will help achieve the goal and evidence that shows the proposal stands a good chance of being enacted.

Finally, several candidates have declared they want free college for all. Having spent a good deal of time in higher education, I modestly believe I know something about the finances of our higher education system. So again, while the goal of free college for all is sure to resonate with many, I want to know how we’re going to get to that goal. And I’d like to know how the colleges and universities are going to pay the salaries of their faculty, buy books for their libraries, obtain and maintain all the technology that has become so important, etc.

In sum: the current crop of Democratic candidates for President have articulated some wonderful goals, but as I try to decide which candidate I will support I need to hear some specific proposals that describe what the candidate will do, if elected, to achieve those goals.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has an interesting post about the rich resources available on the internet. He also provides several examples such as sites that give one access to: the Codex Sinaiticus, historical maps, photograph collections, the papers of Frederick Douglass, etc.

He also discusses the problems faced by those who provide these digitized resources.

All in all, a good read and a reminder that not everything on the web is simply garbage.

An op-ed piece in today’s New York Times lays out the case for some needed reforms to reign in the expanding presidential power and provides some examples.

Whatever one’s feelings about the end of the Mueller investigation, the Barr letter makes one thing clear: The guardrails that were established after Watergate against these types of abuses have been smashed. We still need to see the full Mueller report, but unless corrective steps are taken, Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr will have changed, perhaps profoundly, the shape of presidential power, and in troubling ways.

It’s therefore up to Congress and the 2020 presidential candidates to step in and harden the policies that for 40 years prevented improper political interference in law enforcement.

Link