E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Gorsuch’s big fat lie:
With a shrewdly calculated innocence, Judge Neil Gorsuch told a big fat lie at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Because it was a lie everyone expected, nobody called it that.
“There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch, the amiable veteran of many Republican campaigns, is well-placed to know how serious a fib that was. As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) noted, President Trump’s nominee for Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat actually received a citation for helping win confirmation for Republican-appointed judges. [...]
It’s frustrating that so many minimize opposition to Gorsuch as merely the payback for Garland the Democratic base yearns for. This content-free way of casting the debate misses what’s really going on: Thanks to aggressive conservative jurisprudence, we have a Supreme Court that, on so many issues, continues to push the country to the right, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House.
Eric Levitz at New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer writes—Regretful Trump Voters Are (Mostly) a Myth:
The months since the election have produced no small number of “regretful Trump voter” stories. And these narratives have grown even more prominent as news outlets have sought to dramatize the gap between the health-care plan Trump described on the stump, and the one he is trying to push through Congress
But while such “#Trumpgrets” do exist, they are aberrations: Only 3 percent of Trump voters regret their decision — and fewer than 1 percent wish they had voted for Hillary Clinton last fall — according to a new poll from Penn State’s McCourtney Institute of Democracy and YouGov.
What’s more, the poll doesn’t find all that much ambivalence among the 97 percent of non-regretful Trump backers.
Michael Winship at Moyers & Company writes—‘There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air’:
Monday’s hearing of the House Intelligence Committee was proof positive of the absolute need for both a special prosecutor and an independent, bipartisan commission with subpoena power to conduct a full investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections with Russian intelligence — as well as Russia’s multipronged attack on our elections and Trump’s business connections with that country’s oligarchs.
And it’s proof more than ever that even if we get that prosecutor and inquiry, a free and independent press may be the only real way to ever get to the bottom of what ranking committee member Adam Schiff said may represent “one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history.” [...]
And yet, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told The Washington Post, “There’s a smell of treason in the air. Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mindboggling event.”
But here we are, adrift in a Cloud Cuckoo Land of prevarication and incompetence in which little seems capable of boggling or driving our minds agog these days and where the truth shall not set you free but subject you to ridicule from the rabid trolls of the right.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Birth of the biggest lie:
Individuals who were associated with the president of the United States’ winning campaign are under criminal investigation. That is an extraordinary sentence and one that no American can allow to be swallowed up by other news or dismissed by ideologues.
Depending on the outcome of this investigation, we could be facing a constitutional crisis. Oddly, it is likely that the reason Trump is even in the Oval Office is Comey’s original, extraordinarily inappropriate and unprecedented action. The Trump machinery then used that action to scare Americans about Clinton, in one of the most astonishing acts of deflection and hypocrisy in American history. [...]
The lie these people promoted about Clinton and shielded about Trump are two of the biggest lies ever told in this country in service of electoral advantage.
No act of this presidency — good or bad, beneficial or detrimental — can ever be considered without first contextualizing that this presidency itself was conceived in deception and is being incubated under an extraordinary lie.
The Trump presidency is a corruption that flows from corruption. It is damned by its own damned lies.
Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—Devin Nunes Intends to Obstruct Justice:
When Nunes arrives at the White House and begins sharing information about which Transition officials were captured on “incidental surveillance,” he will be committing what appears to be an obvious crime.
He claims that the surveillance is unrelated to Russia, and that may be his only criminal defense. He better hope that it will stand up in court. His press conference performance was a dishonest attempt to suggest that perhaps Trump wasn’t completely wrong when he said that Trump Tower was wiretapped at the behest of President Obama. He couldn’t assert either of those things but he made it seem like he had evidence pointing in that direction.
And his failure to share this information with the Democrats or notify them that he would be holding the press conference shows just how disingenuous his “alarm” really is.
But it’s his intent to share classified investigatory information with the subjects of a counterintelligence (and potentially criminal) probe that constitutes a crime. He must not be very bright. And he’s just destroyed his own committee’s investigation.
Jonathan Freedlund at The Guardian writes—Rex Tillerson is clearly out of the loop and out of his depth in Trumpland:
There is a charitable reading of Rex Tillerson’s interview with the previously obscure Independent Journal Review. When the secretary of state told the IJR that “I didn’t want this job, I didn’t seek this job,” that he was “stunned” when Donald Trump offered it to him, and that he only did it because “my wife told me I’m supposed to do this,” it’s possible that he was displaying a charming modesty. Think of it as an elaborate version of the formulation favoured by celebrities on receiving an award: “I’m humbled.”
A more sceptical reading would suggest this was the former Exxon CEO’s way of signalling that he is not a politician, that he exists on a higher plane than the usual crowd of jockeying Washington careerists. [...]
Alternatively, Tillerson’s remarks could be read as an altogether less confident statement: a coded admission that he knows he is not qualified to be secretary of state, that he’s in way over his head – but we shouldn’t blame him, because it wasn’t his idea. [...]
It’s tempting to see it that way, especially for those who want to believe cracks are becoming visible in the hull of the Trump ship, even from the inside.
The Editorial Board of The Guardian concludes—Rex Tillerson: a sidelined secretary of state:
Of course, Mr Tillerson has only just begun. It’s possible that apparent errors – such as parroting Chinese language on the bilateral relationship, and missing a key Nato meeting to meet the Chinese president Xi Jinping in the US – are not the result of chaos at the department, but deliberately taken actions designed to send clear messages. Generous interpreters suggest he is smart and capable enough to play the long game, taking a back seat while he builds his relationship with Mr Trump, his links to Generals Mattis and McMaster, and his understanding of foreign policy and government. But until and unless the day comes when he is ready and able to steer his own course, American foreign policy is subject to a combination of dangerous drift and equally alarming spurts of activity unchecked by institutional expertise. In the meantime the state department will have been shredded, its carefully acquired knowledge and understanding – boring, unglamorous, unremarkable but essential – left in tatters. And other powers around the world will step into the vacuum.
“I didn’t want this job,” Mr Tillerson told his interviewer. The president gave it to him anyway – but is not very interested, it appears, in allowing him to actually do it.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times opines—President Trump’s Reckless Shame Game:
President Trump’s Homeland Security Department turned its immigration purge — and assault on the Constitution — up a notch this week. It posted the first of what it says will be weekly online reports identifying state and local law enforcement agencies that decline its requests to keep immigrants in jail to give federal agents time to pick them up.
The idea is to name and shame these agencies, accusing them of recklessly loosing dangerous aliens onto the streets. The report, on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, trumpets itself as a “Public Safety Advisory.” It includes a grim warning from the acting ICE director, Thomas Homan, about the agency’s requests, called detainers: “When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect the public safety and carry out its mission.”
The accusation is dishonest. The report is a sham. And the claim of protecting public safety is ridiculous — dangerously so.
Kate Aronoff at In These Times writes—How the Left Is Using Tea Party Tactics To Take On Both the GOP and the Democratic Establishment:
Coverage of groups like Indivisible has tended to focus on people who look a lot like the original Tea Party’s base—for the most part, middle-aged white people, many of them having their first experience in activism. Yet the people behind #AllOfUs are almost exclusively millennials, most having cut their teeth in places like the Howard Dean and Sanders campaigns, and uprisings like Occupy Wall Street and the Movement for Black Lives. For Pierce and Sandberg, it’s important that any “Tea Party of the Left” formation be thoroughly multi-racial, with ample room for leadership available to millennials.
Having also seen the boom and bust cycle of different campaigns and social movements, #AllOfUs sees the PAC, in part, as a way to keep post-inauguration resistance energy up over the long term.
“People are coming out to town halls,” Pierce tells me, “but what are they doing next? How are they staying involved? How are we building beyond 2017 and 2018, and starting to ask questions about 2020 and beyond?”
It’s also, of course, a way to take back state power for progressives, and turn the Democrats into a party capable of beating Trump’s agenda. Accordingly, #AllOfUs endorsed Keith Ellison’s failed DNC leadership run, with several members signing off on a statement shortly after the defeat ensuring Tom Perez knew that “there’s still a fight within the Democratic Party,” and promising to push for “a Democratic Party that can actually be a vehicle for resisting Donald Trump and solving the crises in our country today.”
Kai Wright at The Nation writes—The Health-Care Bill Embraces the GOP’s Scariest State-Level Experiments:
Ryan’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) has rightly been called a tax break for the wealthy masquerading as reform. But it’s much more than that—it’s a vehicle for Ryan and other traditional, pre-Trump Republicans to achieve their decades-old goal of taking apart the Great Society. They colluded with neoliberal Democrats to end welfare, defund public education, and deregulate a predatory financial industry in the 1990s and 2000s. What’s left now is Medicare, Medicaid, and their promise that no American is too poor to get health care. Ryan’s bill would unambiguously end that promise.
The AHCA’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate” is the least of it. Ryan would not just halt Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion; he would shrink it by at least 14 million people over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Given the sweeteners with which the administration is enticing far-right lawmakers, even that estimate is likely too rosy.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—The Donald Trump Show Is Flopping:
The Donald Trump Show is suffering from a ratings collapse unlike any since Arnold Schwarzenegger took over The Celebrity Apprentice.
The show—loosely defined as the circus-like environment Trump thrives in and tries to manufacture with unrepentant, outrageous conduct—was critical to his success in the Republican primary and general election, both winner-take-all contests where the ability to command attention is invaluable. Intentionally or not, his Twitter antics, campaign rallies, and TV interviews were so transgressive, so defiant of categorization, that they tilted the traditional playing field. A standard opposition—rooted in debate over ideas, fitness, likability—could not gain foothold on those terms. The political media, drawn to what’s new and compelling, was ill equipped to convey the stakes of the election, or at least erect guardrails for Trump to operate within. [...]
His presidency is paying many of the dividends he and conservatives in Congress sought. The catch—where we were wrong—is that Trump is getting away with murder not because of the Donald Trump Show, but in spite of it.
Alex Shepard at The New Republic writes—If true, this CNN report about Russia could destroy Trump’s presidency:
On Wednesday afternoon, an enraged Adam Schiff went on television to lash out at fellow House Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes, for his handling of the committee’s investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. (Earlier that day, Nunes had presented Donald Trump with related information without first briefing other members of the committee.) “There is more than circumstantial evidence now” that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians, Schiff told MSNBC.
We may have a hint of what that non-circumstantial evidence is. On Wednesday evening, CNN published a bombshell—a vague bombshell but a bombshell nonetheless—alleging that the FBI has evidence suggesting coordination between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials in the release of “information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
While this is a very big deal indeed, the report is thin on actual details and heavily caveated. It is not clear which Trump campaign officials were allegedly speaking to Russian officials (Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn are all being investigated). We don’t know the roles the Russian officials held, or even what the damaging information was, though it is presumably the information leaked by Guccifer 2.0, the entity that hacked the Democratic National Committee. It’s also unclear if Trump campaign officials knew they were speaking to Russian officials, or if the campaign was unwittingly infiltrated.
Still, this report looks bad.