[Meteor Blades is on vacation]
Anne Applebaum/WaPo:
21 British Conservatives put country over party. Why can’t 21 Republicans do the same?
Thirdly, they did it because they know — everybody knows — that members of the current Tory leadership have chosen this destructive path not for the sake of the country, not for the well-being of the British, not for the future of their children, but because they are afraid that, having promised Brexit and failed to deliver, they will lose the next election. They are putting party over country. By contrast, the 21 Tory rebels have decided to put country over party, indeed country over career, in defiance of their leaders.
Here is the more of the UK fix for the Anglophile junkies amongst us:
Politico:
UK MPs back bill to block no-deal Brexit
U.K. MPs backed a bill to block a no-deal Brexit Wednesday and prepared to vote on whether to call a general election.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the House of Commons had “scuppered” his negotiations with the EU and it should be up to the country to decide “whether that is right.”
But opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, alongside other opposition leaders, refused to back an election until the Brexit delay officially becomes law. Under U.K. law, two-thirds of MPs would need to back a snap election for one to take place.
Ian Dunt with nice write-up about what comes next with snap election:
Checkmate: Labour rejects Johnson's election gambit
"The offer an election today is like the offer of an apple to Snow White from the wicked queen," Corbyn concluded. "What he is offering is not an apple, or even an election, but the poison of no-deal. Let this bill pass and gain Royal Assent, then we will back an election."
On the face of it, this seemed ruinous. The bill will probably get Royal Assent in the next few days. If Corbyn then immediately accepted one of Johnson's requests for an election, it would take place before late October. A Johnson majority, if he got one, could then be used to repeal the rebel legislation and secure no-deal.
But there was a little more wriggle room in there than that. Saying he would "back" an election is not the same as saying he would activate it. Could he block an election during the tiny gap between Royal Assent and prorogation starting? He'd then be clear for the next five weeks, with Johnson's own plan to silence parliament now working against him.
Or perhaps a no-confidence vote could be used. This would start a 14-day period in which to try and form a government, either through himself as prime minister or someone like Harriet Harman. They could then extend Article 50 and then hold an election. And importantly the process would kill more time.
There is space to work with in Corbyn's statement. It's still not clear which way he'll go. And there's a sustained effort from within the Labour party to stop him falling into Johnson's trap.
John Bercow, Speaker, teaching and practicing process. It’s like watching Barney Frank with a Brit accent:
And now back to American politics. Order. ORDER!! Learn your place, which is in your seat (watch the Bercow video).
Include Kroeger’s and (previously) Dick’s Sporting Goods in doing the right thing.
Jonathan Weiler/IndyWeek:
In 2009, Conservatives Shouted Down Efforts to Confront Right-Wing Threats. We’re Still Dealing With the Consequences.
It’s not that greater investment in rooting out violent domestic extremism would stop every attack. But law enforcement has thwarted some potentially deadly threats in recent years, suggesting that greater attention to the seriousness of the problem would lessen their frequency.
Neither John Boehner nor Mike Pompeo were trying to encourage or defend right-wing extremism. And no doubt they were as horrified as anyone by the sickening events in El Paso.
Political parties, of course, always try to play the media environment to their advantage. As the old saying goes, politics ain’t bean bag.
But the right’s ability to shout down efforts to confront profoundly serious threats to our country’s well-being have had grave consequences.
In this case, working the refs wasn’t just a game. [Darryl] Johnson’s 2009 [DHS] report was not in any serious sense a partisan gambit. The frenzied effort to quash it was.
We’re still dealing with the aftermath.
Max Boot/WaPo:
On gun violence, Republicans are a profile in cowardice
Louis Klarevas, a researcher at Columbia University, found that during the 10 years when the assault weapon ban was in effect, “the number of gun massacres … fell by 37 percent, and the number of people dying from mass shootings fell by 43 percent.” The effect would have been even greater if the 1994 law had fewer loopholes and if it had banned the possession, not merely the sale, of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. That’s essentially what Australia did in 1996 after a gunman slaughtered 35 people. Australia has had only one shooting since then that killed more than four people — and that was the slaughter of a single family carried out by a relative.
New Zealand and Australia have had a sensible response to mass shootings. Our non-response is suicidal — and it’s due entirely to Republican lawmakers and a Republican president putting loyalty to the NRA above their loyalty to the American people. Republicans claim to be tough on defense, but when it comes to what is, along with global warming, arguably our top national security threat (more Americans have died from gun violence in the past 50 years than in all of our wars combined), they are a profile in cowardice. In their dealings with the gun lobby, Republicans are Neville Chamberlain, not Winston Churchill.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
In Trump country (Wisconsin), trade and immigration are getting more popular
On immigration, the poll finds that 65 percent of Wisconsin voters think “having an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities in the United States makes this country a better place to live.” By contrast, only 27 percent say those things make no difference (and only 4 percent say they make the U.S. worse)
Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette poll, told me that this represents an increase of 12 points compared to 2016, when only 53 percent of Wisconsin voters said those things made the U.S. a better place.
“You‘ll find a lot of evidence that the society has become more positive to immigrants and minorities in the last three years, not less positive,” Franklin told me.
In Wisconsin, Franklin said, there’s been a shift, in which Republicans haven’t moved much, but “Democrats and some independents have moved away from the president and to a more pro-immigration and pro-minority position.
It’s early!!! vol. XXIII:
John F Harris/Politico:
What We Know About the Democratic Primary
Iowa is just months away. It’s time to take stock of what we’ve learned about the campaign so far.
If the standard is what do we absolutely, super-duper know for sure then the honest answer is: not much. The Democratic race features a front-runner, Joe Biden, whose support looks impressively durable in one light (in a succession of polls) and acutely vulnerable in another (in a series of mildly clumsy performances, offering himself as a vessel for the restoration of pre-Trump political norms at a time when significant numbers of Democrats on the left and even center are hungering for something more disruptive than that).
But we knew all that before the summer debates, before the Iowa State Fair, before we learned that the next president won’t be John Hickenlooper or Kirsten Gillibrand.
So that answer won’t cut it. Political journalists are paid (modestly) to squint through the haze, looking for patterns and trends early in formation. In the closing days of summer, a group of POLITICO reporters—Natasha Korecki, Holly Otterbein, and David Siders—joined me for some squinting.
Turns out there are some things we think we learned over the summer—and some critical questions that will be answered imminently this fall. A transcript of the conversation follows, and you can listen to it in a Labor Day bonus edition of POLITICO’s “Nerdcast.”
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Trump’s war on reality enters bizarre new terrain
Specifically: A not-exactly-hurricane-ravaged Alabama.
Happily for Florida — though not the Bahamas — the storm’s track shifted, with more recent projections showing that it was expected to brush against the coast and then follow it past North Carolina. Still a risk to the southeastern United States but not as much to Florida itself.
That’s not what was happening at 2 p.m. Wednesday. Instead, social media at that time was roiling over an apparent alteration to a NOAA hurricane map shared by Trump during a briefing in the Oval Office. That map was a version of the first map shown in this article but with an addition: a weird little drawn-in spur covering parts of Alabama.
Why? The answer is probably a simple one: Someone was trying to preserve Trump’s pride.
You see, on Sunday morning Trump had tweeted a warning to Alabamians that the hurricane was threatening their state.
Thomas Edsall/NY Times:
The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else
Political nihilism is one of the president’s strongest weapons.
A political leader who thrives on chaos, relishes disorder and governs on the principle of narcissistic self-interest is virtually certain to find defeat intolerable. If voters deny Trump a second term, how many of his most ardent supporters, especially those with a “need for chaos,” will find defeat unbearable?