Ron Brownstein/CNN:
Here's the next political truism that Trump might overturn
Even amid record-low unemployment, robust economic growth and a roaring stock market, President Donald Trump has shown no signs of expanding his support beyond the roughly 46% of the vote that he carried in 2016.
National surveys now routinely find a huge falloff between the share of Americans satisfied with the economy and the percentage that approve of Trump's performance as President. And new academic research has concluded that attitudes about the economy were much less powerful in driving voters' decisions in 2016 and 2018 than their views about fundamental cultural and social changes, particularly race relations and shifting gender roles.
Each of these dynamics underscores how the economy's role in politics may be shifting as the basis of each party's political coalition has evolved. Increasingly, the parties are bound together less by class than by culture. As I've argued,
the fundamental dividing line between the parties has become their contrasting attitudes toward the underlying demographic, cultural and economic changes remaking American society.
Arthur Allen/Politico:
How the anti-vaccine movement crept into the GOP mainstream
'Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.'
The GOP tilt is more pronounced among state lawmakers than among federal ones; many prominent Republicans in Congress including most of the 16 GOP doctors have endorsed vaccines. The most visible and voluble exception is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an ophthalmologist who says his own kids were vaccinated but the decision should be left to the parents, not the government.
But in states where legislators have advanced serious efforts to tighten restrictions, such as Maine, Washington, Colorado and Oregon, nearly all of the opponents are Republicans who’ve taken a medical freedom stance.
As the GOP sees their hold on power threatened, they look to alternative sources of votes. But it is a really, really bad idea to politicize vaccines.
Hey, read this thread on William Barr:
Molly E. Reynolds and Margaret Taylor/Lawfare:
What Powers Does a Formal Impeachment Inquiry Give the House?
Several experts have argued that the House might have a stronger legal position in disputes with the executive branch over information and witness appearances if it were undertaking impeachment proceedings rather than investigations. Michael Conway, who served as counsel on the House judiciary committee during the Watergate investigation, has advanced a similar argument. In particular, he points to a staff memo written in April 1974, which argues that “the Supreme Court has contrasted the broad scope of the inquiry power of the House in impeachment proceedings with its more confined scope in legislative investigations. From the beginning of the Federal Government, presidents have stated that in an impeachment inquiry the Executive Branch could be required to produce papers that it might with‐hold in a legislative investigation.” Others are more skeptical—like Alan Baron, a former attorney for the House judiciary committee on four judicial impeachments, who has cautioned that impeachment proceedings don’t “make all the problems go away.” Certainly—as was suggested during our conversation on the Lawfare podcast last month—we would expect members to ask different kinds of questions during hearings if the goal is to establish a case for impeachment than if they are doing more general investigative work. But that is a separate issue from whether impeachment proceedings would meaningfully change the process members can use to obtain information in committee, the kind of material the committee could obtain and the speed at which the committee would be likely to obtain it. The answer to all these questions is: It depends.
Kevin Kruse/USA Today:
Democrats need to get past impeachment jitters. It's not 1998 and Trump is no Clinton.
Relatedly, the men who investigated these two presidents were seen in starkly different terms. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr, a Republican investigating a Democrat, was widely perceived as a partisan. According to an April 1998 poll, 56% of Americans thought Starr’s goal was “hurting Clinton politically” while just 32% thought he wanted “to find the truth.” By late 1998, polls showed that almost 60% of the public disapproved of his work.
By contrast, special counsel Robert Mueller, a Republican investigating a Republican, has not been seen as a partisan. While public attitudes have been mixed, Mueller’s net approval has remained positive throughout the inquiry, and the public has seen his work as a worthwhile cause. According to a March CNN poll, only 38% of respondents said the Mueller probe was “mainly an effort to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency” while 56% said it was “a serious matter that should be fully investigated.”
Here’s some Euro-analysis in the wake of the elections.
WaPo:
European Greens surge as voters abandon old parties over climate
And they have been particularly successful at capturing energy from young voters. Fridays for Future, a global movement of students who skip school to protest climate inaction, has been active in Europe for months, inspired by a 16-year-old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, who has become an influential activist.
“The new generation has been re-politicized,” Lagodinsky said. “We thought about these young people as people who only stare at their screens. But they can walk the streets. And that has an impact on their parents and grandparents.”
NY Times:
Nigel Farage’s Populist Brexit Party Wins Big in European Parliament Elections
Britain’s new populist Brexit Party was on course to win the country’s European Parliament elections, according to early results released on Sunday, further roiling the already turbulent politics of a country polarized over its failed effort to leave the European Union.
Led by Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party’s strong performance humiliated the governing Conservatives, whose leader, Prime Minister Theresa May, on Friday announced her resignation after almost three troubled years in power.
The 28 member countries of the European Union voted from Thursday to Sunday for the European Parliament, the bloc’s only directly elected institution, which has extensive powers over legislation. The individual country votes often serve as a gauge on important domestic issues.
NY Times:
Marginal success for populist candidates.
The election was seen by some as a gauge on the rising influence of populism in Europe, which has made marks in national elections from Italy and France to Hungary and Poland in recent years.
Populist parties made a notable impact, clinching about 25 percent of Parliament seats, compared to the roughly 20 percent they secured in the last election. But it was hardly the populist wave that candidates like Matteo Salvini of Italy and Marine Le Pen of France had hoped for after their attempts to present a united front before the vote.
“The so-called populist wave, I think it was contained,” Mr. Selmayr said, adding: “All the democratic pro-European forces will need to work together.’’
College libraries have issues:
Dan Cohen/Atlantic:
The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.
Maybe students aren’t checking the books out but are still consulting them regularly within the library? This also does not appear to be true. Many libraries also track such in-house uses, by tallying the books that need to be reshelved, and the trends are the same. At my library at Northeastern University, undergraduate circulations declined 50 percent from 2013 to 2017—before we decided to do our own book relocation—and our logged number of books removed from shelves but not checked out also dropped by half.
These stark statistics present a conundrum for those who care about libraries and books. At the same time that books increasingly lie dormant, library spaces themselves remain vibrant—Snell Library at Northeastern now receives well over 2 million visits a year—as retreats for focused study and dynamic collaboration, and as sites of an ever wider array of activities and forms of knowledge creation and expression, including, but also well beyond, the printed word. It should come as no surprise that library leadership, in moments of dispassionate assessment often augmented by hearing from students who have trouble finding seats during busy periods, would seek to rezone areas occupied by stacks for more individual and group work. Yet it often does come as an unwelcome surprise to many, especially those with a powerful emotional attachment to what libraries should look like and be.
An issue we have been following is the corrupt bailouts going to meatpacking giants instead of farmers. NY Daily News:
Brazilian-owned meatpacker at center of Trump bailout scandal has been written up for numerous violations in recent years
Yet, despite running afoul of federal regulators numerous times, the Agriculture Department has since January awarded JBS at least four taxpayer-funded bailout contracts for pork worth more than $64 million, as first reported by The News earlier this month.
JBS, meanwhile, is under investigation by the Justice Department for possible violations of U.S. corruption statutes and remains under the control of Joesley and Wesley Batista — a pair of crooked Brazilian brothers who have confessed to bribing more than 1,800 government officials in their home country.
And finally, today’s polling summary:
