E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—How will we repair our democracy after Trump? H.R. 1 offers a clue:
A central challenge of the Trump era is how to deal urgently with the president’s transgressions while also taking steps to prevent politicians from abusing power in the future. [...]
So here’s a challenge to citizens and the media alike: Pay attention this week to the House debate over H.R. 1, perhaps the most comprehensive political-reform proposal ever considered by our elected representatives.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that Trump and his antics will always get more attention than any bill that includes lots of provisions. Legislation makes us work our brains a lot harder than Trump does.
But let’s not hear the excuse that there’s no point spending much time on legislation that, while likely to pass a Democratic House, has no chance in the Senate. That less representative body — always remember that Wyoming has as many senators as California — is controlled by Republicans and led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who
hated campaign finance reforms when they were proposed in the early 2000s by his late GOP colleague John McCain and despises them still.
The House proposal, sniff the cognoscenti, is merely a “messaging bill.”
Actually, no. It’s a marker, a bill worth fighting for in the future. Recall that versions of Medicare, the Tennessee Valley Authority and more expansive civil rights proposals all languished in Congress or were defeated before they passed.
Eric Levitz at New York magazine writes—Ilhan Omar Has a Less Bigoted Position on Israel Than Almost All of Her Colleagues:
It should be “okay” for Americans who want their country to have a close alliance with a foreign power to form political organizations that advance their views. The problem with AIPAC is not that it pushes American lawmakers to show deference to the interests of another country. The problem is that it pushes them to show deference to a country that practices de facto apartheid rule in much of the territory it controls. If there were a lobby pushing Congress to put the humanitarian needs of Bangladesh over the immediate economic interests of Americans — by imposing a steep carbon tax and drastically increasing foreign aid to that low-lying nation — would the left decry the idea that such lobbying was “okay?” Of course not. Because progressives aren’t hypernationalists. And I don’t think Omar is either. So she shouldn’t frame her opposition to the Israel lobby in nationalist terms. The problem isn’t Congress’s “allegiance to a foreign country,” but its complicity in Jewish supremacy in the West Bank, an inhuman blockade in Gaza, and discrimination against Arab-Israelis in Israel proper.
So, Omar said a needlessly tone-deaf sentence, and she should strive to avoid saying stuff like that in the future.
Tom Scocca at Hmmm Daily writes—Deciphering the Hidden Messages Around Ilhan Omar:
Bigots speak in code or in tropes not simply to hide or deny their message, but because speaking indirectly requires the audience to recognize and draw on the underlying beliefs—to become participants in the bigotry. Representative Ilhan Omar, Henry Olson wrote in The Washington Post yesterday, “has already created significant controversy for her anti-Semitic tropes.” This made her, in Olson’s account, the Democratic equivalent of Representative Steve King, the Republican white nationalist from Iowa—proof that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” and that “bigotry can be a deep-rooted plant.” [...]
There is a vigorous and expanding debate about the meaning and the limits of the language people use to criticize America’s policy toward Israel in general and the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in particular, and about the role of anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism in that discourse. Are mentions of “allegiance” unambiguously slurs? Is it necessarily loaded to mention AIPAC’s lobbying work?
But there’s a comparative and corresponding silence around the question of why, exactly, these long-running debates are suddenly focused so emphatically around Ilhan Omar. Omar is not, as some people have noted, even necessarily “the most outspoken critic of Israel’s settlements in the Minnesota delegation.” Yet, only two months into her career on the Hill, Omar was the one a Washington Post column was equating with Steve King, a notorious repeat sympathizer with neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate causes and figures.
There is nothing in Ilhan Omar’s record that comes remotely close to Steve King’s history—no remarks about replacing our civilization with other people’s babies, no trips to fraternize with European extremist politicians, no expressions of support for ethno-nationalists. To claim any resemblance between the two is to pretend King didn’t do all the things he did; that is to say, it is to protect and defend a bigot. It doesn’t make sense.
The Editorial Board of The Washington Post concludes—Trump is covering up for MBS. The Senate must push for accountability:
IT HAS been a month since the Trump administration flouted a legal requirement to report to the Senate on the responsibility of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. [...]
The bipartisan outrage is justified. In his zeal to cover for Mohammed bin Salman, who the CIA concluded ordered Khashoggi’s murder, President Trump is defying Congress’s authority under the Global Magnitsky Act, which provides for U.S. action in cases of gross human rights abuses. The law allows legislators to require a finding by the president in specific cases; that provision was invoked last year by then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and ranking Democrat Robert Menendez (N.J.), who asked for a determination of Mohammed bin Salman’s responsibility. The Senate’s view is already clear: It unanimously approved a resolution in December holding the crown prince responsible.
Now the question is whether the Senate will act to uphold its authority under the law and prevent the Saudi ruler from escaping accountability for the gruesome murder and dismemberment of a journalist who was a Virginia resident and a contributor to The Post.
Greg Grandin at TomDispatch writes—Bread, Circuses, and Duct Tape Bound at the Border, or How to Make Border Porn:
By narrating the “crisis” on the border in a pornographic manner, painting it as a hellscape ruled by MS-13 murderers and rapists, President Trump is undoubtedly using ever more salacious fables to sublimate guilty desires, as well as his and the nation’s complicity in hellish atrocities.
Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has nearly 50,000 migrants in custody. That’s roughly the number of people Canada incarcerates in its entire prison system. And no one knows how many migrant children the U.S. is detaining, except that the number is much higher than the 2,737 listed in court documents. The Department of Health and Human Services can’t even provide journalists with an accurate count: “The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown” is all its spokespeople can say. [...]
Some of the incarcerated migrant children are then delivered to a Christian adoption service with links to Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has all but given up trying to reunite children placed in “sponsor” homes with their actual families, since returning them, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, “would present grave child welfare concerns.”
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News writes—Trump’s ‘shadow impeachment’ began Monday. Will the truth save America from itself?
Another day, another report of a high crime in the Trump White House.
The source was the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, a national treasure of modern journalism. In the middle of a deep dive into the dangerously symbiotic relationship between the Fox News Channel and the 45th president, Mayer dropped a bombshell: Trump had repeatedly pressured a then-top aide, Gary Cohn, on convincing the Justice Department to try to block the pending merger of AT&T with Time-Warner, the parent company of CNN, because POTUS was unhappy with CNN’s reporting on him.
"I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened!” Trump told his then-chief of staff John Kelly, according to the New Yorker. “I’ve mentioned it 50 times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!” Although the story posits that Cohn and Kelly balked at making that call, the Trump Justice Department — contrary to its normal pro-big-corporation stance — did try, unsuccessfully, to prevent the merger in court, exactly as the president wished.
The Justice Department’s insistence that the president’s blind hatred of a network that he’s blasted as “fake news” on hundreds of occasions had nothing to do with its decision to intervene with AT&T and Time-Warner strains credulity. But even if that were the case, Trump’s demand for using the levers of the executive branch to squelch the 1st Amendmentrights of journalists who report critically on his administration is the kind of stunning abuse of presidential power that motivated the Founding Fathers to insert an impeachment clause into the U.S. Constitution 232 years ago.
Roge Karma at The American Prospect writes—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Myth of American Innovation: “”
Pharmaceutical companies routinely engage in price gouging (not to mention research misconduct and public manipulation)—unsavory practices for which there is virtually no oversight. The political justification for allowing these entities to engage in such practices—and reap most of the profits from drug research and developmentin the process—is that pharmaceutical companies drivethe innovation behind vital drugs. As a result, pharmaceutical companies should be able to charge what they wish—otherwise, Americans would not benefit from these drugs at all.
Martin Shkreli, the former pharma CEO and current federal inmate, epitomized this mindset in 2015 when he defended his decision to raise the price of Daraprim, the only approved drug for a rare disease called toxoplasmosis, by 5,000 percent. "No one wants to say it, no one's proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules," he said. "And my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half or go 70 percent but to go to 100 percent of the profit curve."
Ocasio-Cortez unearthed a very different story about pharmaceutical innovation that is not widely understood by consumers: most of these drugs would not exist if it weren’t for public investment. This does not mean that the private sector is completely inept or that the public sector is anywhere near perfect, but it does mean story we tell about economic prosperity in America is deeply flawed. Every single one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2010 to 2016 was developed thanks to NIH’s taxpayer-funded research.
In her 2004 book The Truth About Drug Companies, physician Marcia Angell notes that for decades, the NIH has backed research into the most promising drugs in the United States to the tune of $30 billion every year. Meanwhile, executives and shareholders combined receive 99 percent of the over $500 billion profits generated by the industry’s largest 18 drug companies, leaving relatively little room for new spending on research.
David Goodner at In These Times writes—Will 2020 Be the Year Presidential Candidates Actually Take Labor Issues Seriously?
Call it a sin of omission, but the historic decline of labor union power was on full display during recent CNN town hall meetings with 2020 Democratic presidential aspirants Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar.
All three nationally televised forums featured questions on a range of issues from students, nonprofit directors, community leaders and other traditional Democratic constituencies (including undisclosed lobbying firms), but not a single question was asked about national labor law. [...]
All of the declared candidates who are considered front runners have strong ties to organized labor. [...]
The more explicit presidential politicians are about labor rights on the stump, the more likely union power will become a “day one” issue if a Democratic president takes power in 2020. In the long run, this may be one of the only effective ways to both win progressive social change and defend workers’ gains from the inevitable right-wing counterattack.
Niaz Dorry at Common Dreams writes—Rural America Is Reeling. What’s the Remedy?
We can’t talk about the state of rural communities without recognizing the underpinnings of their struggle. Our visits last year taught us that their real struggles are rooted in:
- Corporate consolidation and concentration of power and wealth, leading to diminished or lost access to essential inputs such as clean water, affordable land or fishing rights, infrastructure, markets, capital, and assistance from federal agencies.
- Economic disempowerment, stemming from a lack of fair prices to farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, and their inability to cover costs of production -- much less make a profit and put aside savings.
- A feeling of disenfranchisement and isolation. Many of our hosts were surprised that we chose to visit them. The sentiment we heard many times was, “Nobody comes here.” [...]
In the absence of political leadership, those of us who eat must step up to the plate. We must speak loudly enough so Secretary Perdue and Members of Congress understand that they can no longer reach for bandaids to fix what’s ailing rural communities. Major interventions are needed, and many of the local leaders in rural farming, ranching, and fishing communities have ideas and strategies that can fuel these solutions. Public officials must work with rural communities to develop thoughtful plans, provide them with skilled practitioners, and ensure well-funded and directed programs.
Reverend William Barber II and Phyllis Bennis at The Guardian write—If America can find $716bn for the military, it can fund the Green New Deal:
This year the US military budget is $716bn – and boy is it ripe for slashing.
Military spending cuts are virtually never mentioned as an option for freeing up funds for social good instead of war
That military budget represents about 53 cents of every discretionary dollar in the federal budget – and it’s one of the biggest reasons that people so often throw up their hands and shake their heads when they think about funding innovative ways to end poverty.
They don’t need to throw up their hands, though. The politicians and pundits should just start listening to children.
When young organizers from the Sunrise Movement recently challenged Senator Dianne Feinstein to support a Green New Deal, she told them “there’s no money to pay for it”. She probably didn’t expect those eight- and 10- and 11-year-old kids to respond immediately: “Yes, there is, there’s tons of money going to the military.”
Feinstein responded condescendingly that the military does “important things” with that money. Our never-ending wars say otherwise.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—Winning the White House Won’t Fix Our Democracy. More than a dozen Democrats are chasing the glory of the presidency, but some are missing the bigger picture:
For the past 20 years, Republicans have exploited structural flaws in American democracy to amass disproportionate political power in Washington. The challenge for Democrats is how to reform that system to achieve their goals. While winning the presidency is an important step in that process, Holder’s decision shows how some of the presidential candidates could better advance a liberal policy agenda by staying out of the 2020 race.
The current crop of Democratic candidates seems to understand this, to varying degrees. Some have said they will support statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which would give representation in Congress to almost four million Americans and dilute the influence of conservative rural states. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren built her campaign around the theme of anti-corruption and proposed a wide-ranging legislative package to undermine special interests’ grip on Washington. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s central theme is how extreme wealth inequality has warped the American democratic process. Without tackling these structural issues, major policy initiatives like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All don’t stand a chance of becoming law.
But not every Democratic contender seems to be taking a strategic approach to this problem. Beto O’Rourke’s near-upset of Texas Senator Ted Cruz in last year’s midterm elections shocked the state’s political scene and turned the former congressman from El Paso into a national figure. Top Democrats tried to persuade O’Rourke to challenge John Cornyn, Texas’s other incumbent Republican senator, for his seat in 2020. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly pressed him to enter the race.
Those pleas apparently fell on deaf ears. O’Rourke announced last week that he won’t challenge Cornyn in 2020, and said he plans to make an announcement soon on whether he’ll run for the White House. It’s entirely possible that he will break through a crowded Democratic field, become the party’s nominee next summer, and topple Trump in next fall’s presidential election. But it’s more probable that he fails to secure the nomination, and he will have given up the Democrats’ best chance to capture a key Senate seat and potentially retake the chamber.