NY Times:
Just Days Into a New Congress, Liberal Freshmen Are Shaking the Capitol
But the newcomers’ mix of bold policy proposals and lighthearted personas has caught the nation’s attention — on Friday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 29, the youngest lawmaker in the chamber, surpassed Ms. Pelosi in Twitter followers. Their savvy, almost Trumpian use of social media may not pass a national health plan or a 70 percent income tax bracket, but it has helped muscle the policy conversation into the national discourse, and has nudged the party to the left.
Representative Jackie Speier of California, one of the more senior women in the House, praised the new women for “invigorating the Congress” and “having the guts to say these rules don’t make any sense.” Nodding toward their tools of communication, she added, “I think what we’ve learned from President Trump is that people like authenticity.”
The comparison to Mr. Trump may rankle, but their policy proposals bring to mind the Tea Party class of 2011, whose hard-right positions moved the Republican Party by making traditionally conservative proposals seem more moderate.
It’s not just AOC and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. It’s all of them and they will make their mark. And the value of the permission structure to discuss and debate these issues is priceless.
Great piece here:
NY Times:
Trump Has Promised to Bring Jobs Back. His Tariffs Threaten to Send Them Away.
“It’s killing us,” said the chairman of the company, Pat LeBlanc, 63, a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump. He now expects the president’s tariffs will chop his 2019 profits in half. “I just feel so betrayed. If we fail because the company is being harmed by the government, that just makes me sick.”
Across the industrial United States, including in the crucial political battleground state of Michigan, such complaints are intensifying as the trade war disrupts factory operations that depend on imported parts.
Republicans who voted for Trump have met reality and they don’t like it. Betrayed? He told you he was going to do this. We told you what it would mean. You don’t listen then, maybe now you will.
Emma Green/Medium:
One Country, Two Radically Different Narratives
A new poll by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute finds that Democrats and Republicans have wildly divergent views on core democratic issues, including Russian election interference
In one version of America, the country is headed in the totally wrong direction. Billionaires control politics. Foreign governments meddle in elections. And not enough people vote to demand a change.
In the other America, things are looking up, particularly with a good president in office. But some civic functions are still broken — especially the media, which is politically biased against certain candidates.
Americans having divergent views on the health of their country’s democracy isn’t a recent development. But a new survey, co-created by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), suggests that they have become radically split in their basic perceptions of reality, especially on controversial topics such as Russian interference in the 2016 election. “We only have the thinnest of agreements of what is plaguing our election system,” said Robert P. Jones, the head of PRRI. “After that, people are viewing whatever problems they see very strongly through their partisan lenses.”
Axios:
The WashPost called the Cabinet meeting "a fact-checking nightmare."
- Better rest up: The president believes he pays no price for escalating inaccuracies, even ones that have been repeatedly debunked. ("Bottomless Pinocchios," the WashPost Fact Checker calls them.)
- With most of his human guardrails gone, the unvetted language of Trump's rallies is once again a staple of his governing.
Perry Bacon, Jr/FiveThirtyEight:
We can stop obsessing so much about how Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are going to vote. Long the crucial swing votes in the U.S. Senate, they will still be crucial to the GOP’s majority, but for the next two years, when the Senate considers legislation that Democrats unanimously oppose, the real deciders are likely to be Cory Gardner and Mitt Romney. (And maybe Martha McSally.)
Thanks, Tom. AOC isn’t the only freshman who has a voice. But the right wing obsession with her makes her voice louder.
Paul Krugman/NY Times:
The Economics of Soaking the Rich
What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.
To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent.
NY Times quoting Cas Mudde:
Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist and leading scholar of populism, has predicted that the movement’s once-meteoric rise will become “modest” and “uneven” in 2019, with more setbacks ahead.
Populism is hardly dying. It holds power in the United States, Italy and a few Eastern European countries, as well as meaningful parliamentary minorities in much of Western Europe, where populist parties now reliably win about one in six votes.
Still, without a crisis to justify populism’s hard-line policies, its message has been stripped down to its most core element: opposition to liberal ideals of pluralism, multiculturalism and international cooperation.
The result is a new phase in the populist era, one that will test populism’s appeal — and that of its ideological rival, postwar establishment liberalism — as never before.
Ari Berman/Mother Jones:
Democrats’ First Order of Business: Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Buy Elections
House Democrats introduced their first bill on Friday and made clear where their priorities lay.’
House Democrats introduced a sweeping bill on Friday as their first order of legislative business that would expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, signaling their commitment to push back on Republican efforts to undermine the democratic process.
The legislation, known as HR 1: The For the People Act, would make it easier to vote, crack down on gerrymandering, and reduce the influence of big money in congressional races. It would also institute new ethics rules, including one requiring sitting presidents and presidential candidates to release their tax returns.
When you can’t get your hands on enough Vibranium: