Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
The GOP Foreign Policy Resistance Against Trump
Rank-and-file Republicans have been loyal to the president’s agenda. But on foreign policy, party leaders are working to undermine the commander-in-chief’s isolationist tendencies.
But Trump is facing an unyielding Republican resistance, working to check his agenda when it runs against long-standing principles. It’s a very rare phenomenon to see such independence in today’s tribal Washington. It’s a reminder that Republicans aren’t all marching in lockstep to the beat of Trump’s drum. And it’s a sign that Trump’s foreign policy views have a lot in common with Democratic dogma—as much as they’d loathe to admit it.
Nice thread here by Matt Glassman:
Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
Trump Lost the Shutdown, But At Least God Made Him President, and He’s Building That Wall
Trump suffered the worst defeat of his Presidency when, after single-handedly shutting down a large part of the federal government for more than a month in order to demand billions of dollars in funding for his border wall, he was forced to end the shutdown without getting a single dollar. (This has been misportrayed in some accounts as a “deal” with congressional Democrats; it was not a deal—Trump, losing support from Republicans to keep the government shut down, simply caved.) The same day, the F.B.I. arrested Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest political associates and the first person who believed Trump could, and would, become President someday. Stone now faces up to forty-five years in prison, on charges that he secretly coördinated with WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign on the release of Russian-hacked Democratic e-mails from the 2016 Presidential campaign and then lied to Congress about it.
It’s hardly surprising that, in the days since his shutdown humiliation, Trump has retreated into the virtual seclusion of Twitter, holed up watching cable news and tweeting his alternative reality as America struggles with an actual deep freeze. For Trump, the fake world is much better than the real one. There is no extreme weather in his White House; in fact, climate change does not exist inside its walls. Trump’s policy has decreed it. He’s avoiding more than just the frigid air outside; in the cocoon of the Oval Office, there are only invited guests and staff who, while they may be secretly leaking unflattering accounts, at least have the good sense to be nice to Trump’s face.
Tom Nichols, ex-Republican/WaPo:
Sorry, Republicans. You can’t call out Northam for racism and give Trump a pass
How Northam got all the way to the Virginia statehouse without the yearbook photo being discovered will wind up as a case study in future training for political opposition researchers and for reporters. Regardless of how it happened, it’s fair to view his inconsistent statements and conclude that he never thought he would have to explain any of this until after it became public. That disingenuousness is damning in itself, and if the voters and elected leaders of Virginia decide that this episode disqualifies him from serving honorably in office — it appears they do — that’s their choice. (I happen to agree with them.)
Democrats don’t have completely clean hands on race issues; if nothing else, the Northam episode illustrates that. But when commentators such as David Limbaugh ask if Trump supporters must “forfeit the right to pass any moral judgments” because of their continual excuse-making for him, the only reply is: yes. Criticizing Northam for “past racist behavior” and his present equivocation after more than two years of overlooking an astonishing record of divisiveness reflects little more than a self-serving, morally repellent double standard. There are plenty of good arguments for kicking Northam out of his job. The newfound racial piety of a party that sold its soul to Trump isn’t one of them.
Brent Staples/NY Times:
When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy
African-American women were written out of the history of the woman suffrage movement. As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, it’s time for a new look at the past.
Americans are being forced to choose between a cherished lie and a disconcerting truth as they prepare to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020. The lie holds that the amendment ended a century-long struggle by guaranteeing women the right to vote. The truth is that it barred states from denying voting rights based on gender but “guaranteed” nothing. More than a dozen states had already granted millions of women voting rights before ratification, and millions of other women — particularly African-Americans in the Jim Crow South — remained shut out of the polls for decades afterward.
While middle-class white women celebrated with ticker tape parades, black women in the former Confederacy were being defrauded by voting registrars or were driven away from registration offices under threat of violence. When the black suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell petitioned her white sisters for help, they responded that the disenfranchisement of black women was a race problem — not a gender problem — and beyond the movement’s writ.
NY Times:
Northam Clings to Office in Virginia, Risking Democrats’ Ambitions
“I tell the truth. I’m telling the truth today,” Mr. Northam said on Saturday at the Executive Mansion in Richmond, where he denied a role in the yearbook photograph but acknowledged that he had darkened his face with shoe polish for a Michael Jackson costume at a dance contest in 1984.
But elected officials and strategists in both parties said they believed Mr. Northam was too far compromised to remain in office, his authority and power undercut gravely by his whiplash-inducing efforts to contain the fallout from the picture, which appeared on his page in the 1984 yearbook at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Really, just about all Democrats have called for him to resign. “Risking Democrats’ Ambitions” is a bit of fanfic.
Harris has had a successful rollout, Gillibrand and Booker not so much. But they are all top tier. We will see if Biden, Bernie or Beto run (also top tier).
Bradley Blakeman/The Hill:
Gov. Northam is done, by his own deeds and words
Gov. Northam is incapable of being believed. He is resting his case on the fact that the man in blackface in the yearbook photo cannot be identified and that the face of the person in the KKK outfit is, obviously, hidden by the hood. The main reason the Klan dressed in hoods, of course, was to hide their identities while they practiced their racism. Given the governor’s changing stories, one might wonder if he hopes to benefit similarly, his identity protected from being affirmatively disclosed.
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
The coming war over robots replacing your job is going to make you forget Trump
That said, and maybe it’s just my fertile imagination, but I believe the winds began to shift a little the moment that Trump’s hoped-for one term entered its second half on January 20. The shutdown fiasco — which made Trump look like a weakling, not a dictator-in-waiting — and the rapid flooding of the zone by 2020 Democratic hopefuls is starting to shift the focus to America after Trump. And the war over robots — and the wealth they create — may soon dwarf the Trumpian conflicts we are experiencing today.
Think again about why our cuddly thinking about robots in the years after World War II was so far off. It was a different time. Post-war modern appliances — vacuum cleaners, dishwashers and what not — was making life easier and giving everyday people more leisure time, so it was natural to think robots would be a positive extension of that, Politically, the New Deal welfare state was strong and (largely thanks to unions) the gap between rich and poor was shrinking. But by 1980 everything started to flip. Economic elites have gained steadily at the expense of the working class.