Good morning!
With the impeachment trial ready to wind up this coming Wedensday with a vote to “acquit” The Damn Fool, debates and punditry on the political ramifications of the post-impeachment landscape are plentiful.
The Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States
Jamil Smith of Rolling Stone simply states that Trump’s acquittal is more broadly a demonstration of the Republican Party’s desperation to hold onto to power and the extremes that they are willing to go to achieve and maintain that power.
This is about Republicans maintaining the ability to manipulate elections here at home. Trump, so desperate to win his election the first time, welcomed foreign interference along with the traditional domestic voter suppression his party offered. Pandora’s Box has been opened more widely than the president and the Republicans probably ever anticipated, and now they are willing to argue that Trump has the powers of an autocrat all so that they can maintain this ability to reach out to whomever they need to in order to win elections.
This is how reckless Republicans are with America, willing to give untold amounts of power to a man whom they still don’t fully understand in a frantic attempt to maintain their own grip on advantage in a country that has already elected a black president once and whose demographics are quickly turning against them.
The irony of it all is that Republicans, who have never made a real policy argument for black and Hispanic votes (and instead stigmatized and hindered them), are now stuck offering ridiculous reasoning to keep their charlatan, criminal president in office. It pays to have a case to make, but when the agenda is furthering white patriarchy and oligarchy at the expense of our natural resources, voter suppression becomes a useful tool.
Paul Kane of the Washington Post reiterates what has been a leitmotif of his writing about Congress for months now: The United States Senate is broken.
...when the final verdict is rendered with a public roll call Wednesday, the trial will serve as a three-week microcosm of the modern Senate. It has become a completely top-down institution in which the rank-and-file senators feel marginalized, if not completely ignored, and the days of ad hoc bipartisan groups helping cool political passions have vanished.
If the Senate itself were on trial, “guilty” would win the vote in a landslide.
Part of the problem is the senators themselves and their unwillingness to actually do anything about their anger.
Murkowski issued a statement Friday morning, before the vote on having more witnesses, declaring “Congress has failed.” She said the Senate was incapable of holding a “fair trial” but did not spell out the causes, other than taking a thinly veiled shot at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for her question Thursday about the “legitimacy” of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. overseeing a trial with no witnesses.
Nancy LeTourneau of Washington Monthly is as tired of Democrats being blamed for Republican intransigence as I am.
That theory was embraced by both Obama’s critics on the left and most of the mainstream media. For the latter, it became the basis of their obsession with bothsiderism. Any failures of Obama to successfully negotiate with Republicans were explained by a lack of compromise on both sides.
None of that took into consideration the fact that, on the day of Obama’s inauguration, Republicans settled on a policy of total obstruction. Their position was that, no matter the issue or the proposed solution, they would vote as a block against it.
We are now witnessing how far Republicans are willing to go with that level of intransigence in their refusal to hold Donald Trump accountable. Senate Republicans will not only refuse to hear from witnesses, they will vote to exonerate the most corrupt president in this country’s history.
While the Green Lantern theory was initially tied to the presidency, we’re already watching it be applied to congressional Democrats...
Reverend William Barber, writing for The Guardian, reminds us that the idea that democracy is quite fragile is well-known and a given among civil rights activists.
We who are heirs of America’s civil rights struggle know how fragile and hard-won our multi-ethnic democracy is. For generations after the end of Reconstruction, anyone who dared to believe that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments guaranteed them the rights of full citizenship were subject to terrorism by local law enforcement. If a crime was committed to rig the next election, it was covered up. This was the everyday practice of southern justice under Jim Crow.
People like John Lewis, who voted as a member of the House to impeach Donald Trump for seeking foreign help to rig the 2020 election, went to jail and faced beatings in the 1960s to ensure free and fair elections. Half a century later, we have fewer voting rights protections in America than we did in 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. As the majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell covered up the voter suppression efforts that guaranteed him a Senate majority long before he was called upon to cover up Donald Trump’s efforts to rig the next election.
Americans remember from the Nixon impeachment that the cover-up is evidence of the crime. But it is more than that. Time and again, the civil rights movement has learned that the cost of the cover-up is democracy itself. When the people who have power can abuse that power to influence elections and suppress the electoral power of those who would challenge them, we do not have a representative democracy. We have southern justice covering for minority rule.
2020 Iowa Caucuses
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones goes through the experience of watching political ads in Iowa as caucus date nears
The ads are a lot, but they do synthesize the basic arguments of the primary pretty simply. Maybe the biggest takeaway is this: With one exception, which I’ll get to, they’re all at least nominally positive. Although the campaign has featured sharp policy differences—boiling over in fights over Medicare for All, student debt, immigration policy, and, most recently, Social Security—these haven’t really made their way onto the airwaves. (Campaigns have been quicker to throw punches online and, at times, on the stump.) That’s a much different story from 2004 and 2008, the last two caucuses to feature large Democratic fields. To the extent that candidates are jockeying for position, they’re doing so in a way that’s more passive-aggressive than straight-up aggressive. Think of it as the subtweet primary.
Jenna Johnson at the Washington Post reports that Latino voters could be an underrated and significant force at Monday’s Iowa Caucuses...and Bernie Sanders stands to gain from that understanding.
Although Latinos make up just 6 percent of Iowa’s population — the vast majority of the state’s residents are white — they have more than doubled in number over the past two decades. There are more than 50,000 registered Latino voters in the state, plus thousands more who are eligible, making them a potential force in caucuses that campaigns expect to draw up to 240,000 voters.
Sanders’s operation has done far more than his competitors in seeking the support of those voters, having belatedly realized in his 2016 campaign the growing heft of Iowa’s Latino voters — and their attraction to him.
It estimates that fewer than 3,000 Latinos participated in the 2016 caucuses overall, and hopes to dramatically increase that number this year. The campaign says it is in regular communication with tens of thousands of Iowa Latinos, and the League of United Latin American Citizens in Iowa — whose leaders are excited by the heavy investment Sanders is making in the sort of organizing they have done for more than a decade — has separately set a goal of getting 20,000 Latinos to the caucuses.
I warned a few people about the influence of the POC vote in Iowa in 2016. In 2008, Barack Obama won 72% of the black vote in Iowa with high black turnout relative to the size of their population in the state; in other words, Iowa’s black vote was predictive of Obama’s performance nationwide. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s razor-thin victory margin in the Iowa could very well have been due to black turnout. Bernie’s campaign (assuming Johnson’s report is accurate) seems to have learned that lesson. And you know what: Y’all know how I feel about Sanders; that hasn’t changed but...good on Bernie.
Moving right along...
When I do my Tuesday Overnight News Digest’s, I like to occasionally feature articles from college/university student newspapers so when I noticed that Julia Shanahan, Politics Editor for The Daily Iowan (The University of Iowa), had interviewed Vice President Joe Biden, I had to get that in here, somehow.
Biden emphasized in the interview that his two major priorities as president will be to stop violence against women and to cure cancer. In 2015, Biden’s son died of brain cancer at 46 years old...(snip)
...Biden defended his record of advocating for women, pointing to the Violence Against Women Act he proposed in 1990. In 2014, Biden created a White House task force as vice president under Barack Obama to help prevent sexual assault on college campuses, and denied Title IX funds to universities who were not enforcing sexual assault rules and regulations.
For young women who are considering supporting Biden on caucus night, he said he wants them to know that he’s going to continue fighting for gender equality, and that he’s proud the #MeToo movement has allowed women to come forward and draw boundaries.
“I think Anita Hill deserves significant credit … and she did not get a fair shake in the process,” Biden said. “I told her that, she knows that, and it’s not a question of apologizing, it’s a question of how do we change the rules to be able to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
Biden called Hill to apologize in April 2019, but Hill said at the UI that “the statute of limitations was up” on his apology.
As a gay man myself, I feel obligated to share Frank Bruni’s assessment of Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy specifically in the context of Buttigieg being the first openly gay man to make a serious bid for the presidency.
He has grappled, on the national political stage, with questions that all L.G.B.T.Q. people ask, so that his candidacy is a metaphor for our lives: To what extent am I defined by my sexual orientation or gender identity? What does and doesn’t it tell you about me?
Buttigieg’s answers have disappointed some L.G.B.T.Q. people — and were bound to, given the expectations placed on any politician who is blessed and cursed to become a symbol. Female candidates have had experiences similar to his; candidates of color, too. These pioneers are exhorted to open doors closed to the groups they represent but to represent those groups first and foremost, and that’s tough. Check with Obama. Or Hillary Clinton.
Or, now, Buttigieg. He has weathered complaints, even derision, from L.G.B.T.Q. progressives, many of whom say he’s not gay enough, his manner and mannerisms too strait-laced, his policy preoccupations too moderate, his success infuriatingly reflective of how readily and well he assimilates into heterosexual America. “Gays Seem to Be Mayor Pete’s Worst Critics” was the headline of a column in The Washington Blade, an L.G.B.T.Q. publication.
I agree with portions of Bruni’s oped here and disagree with other parts but I can say that discussions about Buttigieg’s have been ongoing within the the LGBTQ community modeled along the lines that Bruni mentions. And I will also say, according to the tiny amount of polling that I’ve seen that has captured LGBTQ-exclusive views on the 2020 race, Buttigieg has not led in any those polls (Joe Biden led the field among LGBTQ voters in an early poll I’d read and Elizabeth Warren led in the latest poll that I have seen.)
LGBTQ voters, like black voters, tend to favor experienced and seasoned politicians.
Patrick Condon of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune gives us a meaty and broad overview of the presidential campaign of Minnesota’s very own, Amy Klobuchar.
Coming into this final weekend, Klobuchar's campaign reported over 120 paid staff in Iowa working out of 19 offices across the state. She nabbed endorsements from 18 state legislators, though her moderate rivals landed bigger names: Biden has backing from Iowa's two most recent Democratic governors and two of its sitting House members, while Buttigieg landed the state's other Democratic U.S. House member.
But in a symbolic victory for Klobuchar, Kelly Shaw, the Republican Mayor of Indianola, announced Friday that he will switch parties and caucus for Klobuchar.
A Klobuchar adviser said that caucus night organizing has focused in part on rural areas and Iowa's northern swath, along the Minnesota border. The campaign also sees fertile ground in more blue-collar, older cities like Waterloo and Davenport, as well as suburban areas around Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
It's a sound but potentially risky strategy, said Christopher Larimer, a political-science professor at the University of Northern Iowa.
"It would have to a be a pretty good sweep" of rural areas, plus "finishing first or second in most of northern Iowa," Larimer said.
The headline of the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells profile on Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders speaks for itself: Bernie Sanders, The Democratic Front-Runner.
We are a long way from the start of this primary campaign, when a half-dozen candidates met with Obama, and went out to try to build a gentler bridge between the political needs of the present day—as the Party sees them—and the coalition of the future. The majority of those candidates—Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Beto O’Rourke, and Kamala Harris—are now out of the race, and two others, Pete Buttigieg and Warren, have seen their prospects weaken. In just a few weeks, Democrats may be left with a simple and stark choice between Biden and Sanders. In Iowa last week, the most powerful forces in the Democratic primary did not seem to be those massing behind Mike Bloomberg and Biden, but those affiliated with the Sanders bus speeding west across Iowa—the ninety-six million dollars and the multiracial coalition of the young behind it, who seemed to want what he was offering, and not, as he might have said, fifty cents on the dollar.
An interesting fact check by the Associated Press on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that, as President, she can reduce drug pricing without Congressional authority: She is correct.
We asked the Warren campaign for the basis of her claim and they directed us to her “Medicare for All” transition plan. It identifies two legal mechanisms — “compulsory licensing” as outlined in 28 U.S. Code Section 1498 and the so-called march-in rights provision of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act.
We spoke to legal and pharmaceutical policy experts about whether those mechanisms could be used to bring down drug prices, as Warren described. The answer? Yes. But it’s complicated and controversial.
THE LEGAL MECHANISMS
Of the two legal levers, Section 1498 is perhaps more straightforward.
The law says the government can intervene to take over patents without a company’s permission if the price is too high. The government can then create competition to bring down prices by importing those products from abroad or manufacturing them. The original manufacturer can sue for damages but cannot stop Washington from breaking the patent.
Norbert Mappes-Niediek, a journalist specializing in southeastern Europe, writes for Deutsche Welle that the Trump Administration is spreading their diplomatic poison acumen into the Balkans...and, specifically, Kosovo.
In recent months, Washington has appointed two special envoys to the region, one in which it had not been interested for a long time. The troubled Balkans has now become a practice ground for Trump's foreign policy. The US president wants to make "deals” all over the world according to his doctrine: In every international conflict, the parties to the quarrel — usually "strong men” in his own image — should agree on so-called solutions. In doing so, they are not required to take international rules or agreements, international law, or the interests of third parties into account. So far, this strategy has not been successful for Trump anywhere in the world. The White House sees the Balkans as a welcome practice ground. Here, the players are weak, and they have enormous respect for America.
No sooner had he been appointed than Trump's special envoy, the Berlin ambassador Richard Grenell, deployed bullish diplomacy, declaring that a "strongman” in the Trump mold, President Hashim Thaci, should take control again in Kosovo. The fact that voters punished Thaci's party last October's election and that Thaci himself is hated by large parts of the population has not diminished the White House's support.
Whether or not the US has succeeded in asserting itself across the board in Kosovo will be established on Monday, when the winner of the October election, left-wing populist Albin Kurti, must face parliament. The Americans don't want him. Instead, they're trying to cobble together a motley, shaky governing coalition that would give Thaci an easy ride. Kosovars are already used to foreign ambassadors deciding who gets to be in their government and who doesn't. Of the 45 percent of the electorate who still bother to vote, a third only do so to secure their own jobs. If the party to which you owe your position loses, your job is gone.
Everyone have a good morning!