What Goes Around. . .

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently stated he anticipates more bipartisan cooperation in 2018.  That's right, Mitch McConnell said that.  The same Mitch McConnell who bragged about stonewalling former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee in Obama's final year in office.  The same McConnell who was an integral part of the opposition party's obstructionist strategy.  It doesn't take an expert pundit to figure out what's going on here: McConnell knows the GOP will get crushed in next year's midterms, so he's suddenly realized the value of cooperation so he can extract some favorable legislation before his political capital expires.  So now he wants to play nice - how convenient.  There are probably countless members of the Democratic Party, both voters and elected officials, who don't feel McConnell and the GOP deserve any quarter whatsoever, and who have no intention of cutting them even a millimeter of slack; and given Republicans' conduct during the last eight years, who could blame them?

Here's the thing, though: as gratifying as telling the GOP to get stuffed sounds, it's a bad idea - for a combination of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.  (Quick note: I'm referring almost entirely to the obscure Congressional rules in this post, not any policy positions; as far as I'm concerned, the GOP is on the wrong side of history on many contemporary social issues - civil rights, environmental protections, education, the church/state separation, among others - and they don't deserve any consideration on these points.  History and sociological research have already rendered verdicts, and it's time for the GOP's policy stances to be thrown onto the pile of failed ideas.  Okay - tangent over.) For one thing, neither party manages to hold a majority forever, so any procedural changes a party makes to the will eventually get passed along to the other party; and when that happens, you're giving the opposition better tools to push its agenda and undo your accomplishments.  It's foolishly shortsighted to behave as if you'll be the party in power for more than a few years, and that the changes you make won't come back to haunt you.  For another, some politicians have long memories and vindictive attitudes; so any Democratic politicians' pettiness or slights will get filed away in the "what goes around, comes around" cabinet.

Something needs to be done, though, because the GOP went beyond an opposition party to sabotaging the government with their obstructionist tactics.  Here's a baseball analogy: have you ever watched a game where the batter steps out of the box over and over, to frustrate the pitcher and get him to do something dumb? It's technically within the rules, but it's an unsportsmanlike exploitation of a loophole.  That's exactly what the GOP did with Merrick Garland: the Constitution says the Senate gives "advice and consent" over SCOTUS nominees, so the Senate had no obligation to give Garland a nomination hearing.

Someone might ask why Congress doesn't just rewrite the rules so there aren't loopholes for any party to exploit.  It's a pretty obvious solution, after all; but saying it would be difficult is like saying the sun is kind of warm.  Let's take a look at the possible ways of going about it, and all the obstacles in the way.

• The White House/Supreme Court intervenes.  Nope, awful idea.  Congress is, in many ways, a self-policing organization, and that's by design according to the principles of separation of powers and checks & balances.  Letting it write its own procedural rules leads to some disastrous results, as anyone who pays attention to government knows; but designating the Executive or Judicial Branch to manage it means Congress ceases to exist as a coequal branch of government.  Additionally, reforming Congress is outside the scope of either of the other two governmental branches.  This might solve the problem of Congressional mismanagement, but creates a far bigger one.
• Congress reforms itself.  Good luck making this happen.  Neither of the two parties truly wants to close any of those procedural loopholes.  As I already explained, the majority party likes having those little "cheat codes" while they're in power, and the minority party knows it will have its own turn sooner or later.  (For example, the Garland nomination fiasco: Mitch McConnell rightly accused the Democratic Party of hypocrisy, noting that it had done nearly the same thing during the Bush II Administration.) Those little political machinations also provide good material for reelection ads: "The other party did X, Y, and Z. Send me back to Washington and I'll clean up its mess." Which they might, but not in a way that solves the underlying issue or that can't be reversed within a few election cycles.  Senators and Representatives like those procedural tricks, and the only way to put a stop to it would be to "reboot" Congress: send every single member packing (What, you think they all came in knowing how to manipulate the processes? Someone more experienced taught them.), and strip away all those arcane rules that accumulated over the decades.
• An outside oversight agency.  There are risks involved, such as the agency being co-opted or supplanted by political insiders, and its mission distorted and turned into a partisan weapon.  Case in point: between 1976 and 1988, the League of Women Voters organized and hosted presidential debates; unfortunately, the League relinquished the task to the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization established by the two major parties that has drawn criticism for allegedly working to exclude 3rd-party candidates.  Even if the agency was not co-opted, it would still add another layer of bureaucracy to the federal government.  
• Grassroots efforts (ballot initiatives, etc.).  It has potential, especially as people have gotten more politically active during Trump's administration; but there's no guarantee that the momentum will sustain itself.  Some Americans also possess more zeal than knowledge, and that's a moderate problem with this approach.

Those are some pretty big challenges to overcome, so the likelihood of forging a cooperative set of rules is very slim.  Not impossible, but very unlikely.  There's one other thing to consider: the risk of going too far.  I've already given my take, which is that the GOP is going beyond acting like a minority party; but many of those "cheat codes" serve an important purpose in a democracy.  A minority party needs some protections, to keep the majority from imposing its will at every turn.  This creates a lot of watered-down and unpopular compromises, but hey, that's democracy.  The GOP's obstructionism could provoke a predictable overreaction that sweeps away many important safeguards against the tyranny of the majority.  That cure would be worse than the disease.

Bottom line: I think we're stuck with what we have now.  The likely outcome is that nothing changes, and the best case scenario is a very modest improvement.  That's not very rose-colored, but it is what it is.

The Political Fallout from the GOP Tax Bill

So, Congressional Republicans went ahead and passed their controversial tax bill.  The bill economists overwhelmingly described as a bad idea.  The one that doesn't really do what it claims.  The one that's a massive financial giveaway to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of millions of middle- and lower-class workers.  They even passed it a few days before Christmas, possibly as an added "F.U." to all the people this bill hurts. So why did they do it? Why did they pass such a disastrous, harmful bill? The possibilities are: they don't know how unpopular it is, they think it actually helps, or they don't think there will be political consequences.

I don't think the GOP was blind to the bill's unpopularity, because it was honestly pretty hard to miss.  When was the last time a tax cut was unpopular? People lose their shit over tax hikes, but cuts are generally pretty popular.  Yet this tax bill polled at a 25% popularity rating.  That should tell you something right there.  Now, public opinion isn't a reliable basis for making political decisions, by which I mean a piece of legislation's popularity doesn't tell you a lot about its contents. How much do those poll participants know about the intricacies of tax policy? (Side note: an uninformed and easily swayed electorate was one reason Aristotle opposed basic democracy - which I mentioned before.) Those people probably could not articulate the consequences of this tax bill the way a tax lawyer or an economist could, which is why this bill's popularity rating is somewhat irrelevant.  This doesn't mean the bill's unpopularity should be discounted, because the GOP is pitching a story we've seen before.  We saw it in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan's "Trickle Down" Economics, and we saw it again a few years ago in Kansas.  It ended badly both times, and despite Americans' short memories, we still remember how things turned out.  The GOP is promising things will be different this time, but people aren't buying their bullshit.

So average Americans kinda knew that this bill would be bad for them, although in an imprecise way, which explains its unpopularity.  Maybe they didn't convey those sentiments to their elected officials? It's possible.  Several GOP Senators and Representatives have bailed on townhall meetings with their constituents in recent months, so the chance of having in-person meetings has gone down.  That still leaves phone calls, emails, and social media posts, but I don't know how many Americans reached out to their representatives.  In the past, Congressional offices were flooded with phone calls when the GOP attempted to repeal the ACA.  I don't know if it was the same this time.  I called my representative in the House this morning, and was able to get through easily; my experience is anecdotal, but I think it could've been a sign that not many people were calling.  I honestly would not be surprised: people have had to push back against the GOP's harmful policies a couple times already since January, and fatigue might be setting in.  It's exhausting watching the news like a hawk, waiting for the next shoe to drop, and having to contact your reps to ask them to not strip away programs that Americans depend on for basic needs again and again and again.  It wears you down over time.  That's just a possible explanation, but I don't think the GOP was unaware of their bill's unpopularity.

Could the GOP think it helps? I don't see it.  I've seen GOP figures make statements like these:

• "A married couple earning $100,000 per year ($60,000 from wages, $25,000 from their non-corporate business, and $15,000 in business income) will receive a tax cut of $2,603.50, a reduction of nearly 24 percent." - Texas Senator John Cornyn
• "The typical family of four making the typical family income of $73,000 will get a tax cut of $2,059." - Speaker of the House Paul Ryan 

Cornyn's statements show he has no idea what the average American's financial situation is, so no wonder he thinks this tax cut is helpful.  At least Paul Ryan had a reasonably close idea of what the average American's household income is, he was still a bit off: according to the US Census Bureau via USA Today, the average household income was $74,000.  To break that figure down a bit further, a household filing jointly earns $118,000; and a household filing separately earns $65,000.  Still, he's overestimating the tax bill's benefit by using some clever math.  Specifically, emphasizing the average tax benefit.  Why does "average" matter? Well, did you know that between me and Tom Brady, we've won an average of 2.5 Super Bowls? So, yeah, "average" isn't the best way to determine the tax bill's benefit.  Here's a better one.

 

(Graphic courtesy of NPR and the Tax Policy Center)

Here's a link to the full report, if you want it.  It's pretty easy to see how tilted this tax bill is toward high earners, and it gets even more unequal when you look at how much the bill saves lower income brackets.  If you're in the $40K - $50K range, your annual benefit is a whopping $570.  Divide that by twelve, and the monthly benefit is $47.50.  How far does $48 go? Two tanks of gas? One month's phone bill? That's insulting no matter what your status is. But no, the GOP couldn't stop there.  Did I mention that some of the tax cuts expire in a few years, while the corporate ones are permanent? Yeah, nice.  Maybe they do think it actually helps - see Cornyn's and Ryan's statements earlier - but I think it's more likely they're engaging in some high-level bullshitting.

That leaves another possibility, that the GOP doesn't think there will be political consequences.  They could be banking on Americans forgetting about this tax bill by the 2018 elections, which is a possibility given Americans' short memories.  They could also be underestimating the Democrats, which could be a possibility - the Democrats are still plagued by infighting and aimlessness a year after the Presidential election.  However, the recent Alabama Senate race and the earlier elections in Virginia and other places show that the Democrats have something working, even if they don't know what it is.  The point is, the momentum is in the Democrats' favor, and despite them not capitalizing on the GOP's and Trump's ineptness and unpopularity, they appear likely to win big in 2018.  If that happens, the Democrats will almost certainly repeal the GOP tax bill.

So why would the GOP pass a hugely unpopular bill, that doesn't help most Americans at all, and will probably be repealed in just a few years? There's another possibility, and it kind of ties into the GOP believing there won't be any political consequences.  That is that the GOP expects to lose, and they'll come out relatively unscathed on the other side of the elections.  They'll have cushy jobs or fat retirement accounts waiting for them, and that's a pretty sweet deal for them.  They'll be reviled by many Americans for at least a while, but our opinions don't matter because they don't give a rat's ass about us "commoners".  They probably have their own upscale gated community picked out already, so they won't have to mingle with us. 

Honestly, I'd be okay with that.  It's galling to think they'll get by without facing any serious consequences for treating the people they were supposed to represent with disdain that borders on cruelty, but when you look at it, it's a win all around.  They go away and stay out of our lives, and their obnoxious bill gets repealed in a year or so (as long as the Democrats don't find a way to bungle what should be a legislative rout). 

So, buckle up, I guess.  It's gonna be a bumpy ride for the next year or so, but it should get a bit smoother after that.

PS: Don't screw this up, Democrats. 

Internet Professionalism

One of my aspirations when I started this blog was that it would someday gain a decent-sized following, which I could exchange into a successful and profitable on-the-side project (like Jim Wright aka Stonekettle) and maybe a podcast (like Dan Carlin) eventually.  Reaching either of those goals involved a lot of processes, but two in particular: I had to deliver quality content on a consistent basis, and I had to maintain a certain level of professionalism and cordiality when interacting with my readers.

I didn't do a very good job of the latter on Tuesday, while discussing my Alabama Senate race post with a reader on Twitter.  I did a poor job of articulating my position, and reacted badly to what I perceived to be either intellectual dishonesty or trolling on the reader's part.  Truthfully, I've never been the most patient person when dealing with different points of view; and my supply of patience gets significantly smaller when that different point of view comes from a source I consider a troll or a fool.  My temper was also frayed from some work-related stresses, too, which put me in a somewhat foul mood.

None of that excuses my behavior, though.  Despite a few verbal cheap shots, that reader came looking for rational debate; however, I felt like I was under attack and reacted by lashing out.  In doing so, I undermined my position as well as my credibility.  I made myself look close-minded and thin-skinned, and incapable of taking criticism.  I may not always succeed, but in the future I will make more of an effort to exercise patience.

How America Got Its Mind Back

So, Roy Moore lost the special Alabama Senate race.  A creepy old man whose public image flaunts so many of the characteristics a lot of Alabamans love (a love of guns, racism and bigotry, pseudo-Christianity, ignorance as a virtue) was decisively beaten by Democrat Doug Jones.  That's a pretty big deal, since Alabama is part of the deep red South, a state where "Democrat" is a 4-letter word in many rural and smaller urban areas.  It's a big deal since Alabama is casually open when it comes to implementing voter suppression measures specifically targeting POC, and those POC still turned out in droves to cast ballots for Doug Jones.  That's what democracy looks like.  Also, huge "thank you" to all those POC for pulling this off - the Jones victory wouldn't have been possible without them.

Add tonight's election outcome to the results of the November 7 elections, and it's clear there's a trend emerging.  There were several elections that day, so here are a few of the important ones.  Ralph Northam defeated Ed Gillespie in the Virginia gubernatorial race.  Also in Virginia, Danica Roem became the first transgender candidate to serve in the VA legislature.  Maine residents passed a Medicaid expansion initiative.  St. Paul, MN, elected its first black mayor (Melvin Carter) and Seattle elected its first lesbian mayor (Jenny Durkan).  In many ways, the November 7 elections were a repudiation of Trump's first year in office.

A lot seems to have changed in a year.  In November of 2016, American citizens let their guards down, got complacent, bored, and disinterested, and let a raving racist moron sneak into the White House.  That was our dead serious, "Oh shit, we need to reexamine our lives" moment, and we've had a lot of time to clean up and ditch the destructive behaviors in the year and change since.  The results of November's and tonight's elections tells me that America might have learned a thing or two.

There's still a lot of work to be done, though. First, not electing a racist and accused pedophile isn't a high bar to clear for democracy - there shouldn't have ever been any doubt that a candidate with that baggage would lose.   So, we all need to keep taking that hard look in the mirror.  Second, the institutional corruption still runs deep throughout our government, at all levels.  Trump just brought it to our attention because he was so brazen and clumsy about it - like when a nagging ache becomes so excruciating that you can't put off seeing a doctor any longer.  Let's not pretend that replacing Republicans with Democrats solves some of the most pressing problems, like military interventionism or unsustainable spending; but putting the Democrats back in power is a repudiation of what Trump and the modern GOP stand for - which are some of the worst parts of human nature: intolerance, greed, cruelty and selfishness.

America's realized it has a problem, and has taken the first baby steps to correct it.

Frogs and Boiling Water: Trump's Incremental Swing toward Authoritarianism

Feel great yet, America?

We've all heard that folksy wisdom about the frog and the boiling water, or about glaciers moving slowly.  Each piece of wisdom has essentially the same take-away: that we can overlook incremental shifts if they occur slowly, until enough increments have accumulated, and we're in an entirely different situation.

It's been almost a full year into the Trump presidency, and if you look at the long-term view, there's been a noticeable shift toward authoritarianism.  It's not a major shift, but it is a noteworthy one, because any movement toward authoritarianism is noteworthy.  So what has this administration done so far that has nudged us toward authoritarianism? Here's a list of the most significant things it's done:

• Floating the idea of privatizing intelligence collection
• Publicly disparaging the judicial system, the FBI, and the media - all key democratic institutions, in their own way
• Moving to centralize decision-making among his inner circle (AKA family members)
• Establishing an commission to investigate the overhyped voter fraud problem, likely intended to disenfranchise millions of voters
• Expressing admiration for brutal despots and heavy-handed law enforcement officers and harsh tactics
• Hinting that thousands of Americans are under surveillance (while his administration's lawyers have argued they can continue a controversial surveillance program even if Congressional authorization expires)

Feel great yet, America?

There are two ways to look at this.  On one hand, a lot of this is just posturing - a mix of blustery rants, fueled by Trump's anger and frustration in reaction to policy defeats, and him being a masterful showman and playing to the crowd.  Trump hasn't taken many concrete actions to translate his words into policies.  On the other hand, it's probably not a coincidence that authoritarianism is a recurring theme in Trump's words and opinions.  Any tendency that surfaces so many times is a sign of a belief a person holds.  When Trump remarked that he'd only acknowledge the election results if he won, maybe he was joking - but there was a grain of honesty in it.  On some level, Trump was giving us a glimpse behind the curtain. 

There are also many parallels between Trump's words (and deeds) and things both past and present authoritarian regimes have done.  Sarah Kendzior (among other journalists) has made a career researching authoritarian regimes, and she has been sounding the alarm about the Trump administration for months.  She has written some truly amazing articles.  When I first discovered her writing, I thought she was being too alarmist; but she has been well ahead of the curve in predicting Trump's next moves. And even if it's just talk, the president's words send a message of what's acceptable to all the subordinate Executive Branch agencies.  It's not a coincidence that ICE methods have gotten harsher since Trump took office.  Things like these are more like small steps than giant leap, but even small steps deserve pushback.

In my lifetime, I've never doubted that a president would step down once his term was over - until now.  This is why Trump's statements can't be written off as harmless jokes.  When he made the remark about honoring the election results, it was like saying "bomb" in an airport.  It may be said in jest, but it's not something to joke about.  And Trump has said a lot of things that could be interpreted as signs he might not step down.  Additionally, Trump enjoys a lot of legal advantages and protections he didn't get as a private citizen - which will become more important to him and his inner circle as the Mueller investigation closes in.

And even if Trump does leave voluntarily, what about where we are as a country?

Because the truth is, Trump's campaign rhetoric had a grain of truth to it: DC is a swamp that needs draining.  The politicians and wealthy donors take care of each other, while they put on a show of holding those who step out of line accountable.  Remember General Petraeus? He would be in jail for the rest of his life if he'd been a junior enlisted without the right political connections.  How about GWB and the Iraq War architects? That got swept under the rug, and nobody was held accountable.  Same thing with the Wall Street banking CEOs who crashed the economy in 2008 - nobody went to jail for that.  People see all of that, and it feeds a narrative that the government is neglecting average Joes and Janes - and perception creates reality.  Right now, that perception/reality is feeding a lot of frustration with the status quo.

Feel great yet, America? You should; because as bad as things have gotten, there's a glimmer of hope on the horizon.  People are getting more politically active.  A record number of women have filed to run for office, Paul Ryan is facing a credible challenger to his House seat, the Virginia election was a kind-of referendum on Trump's performance, and the Women's March drew one of the biggest crowds in US history.  For the most part, our institutions are holding, too.  Trump is stocking federal judge positions with ideologically similar candidates, and that goes in the "loss" column; but the victories outweigh that. 

The battle to undo Trump's damage and set things right will not be easy, but the end result will be worth it. 

Feel great, America.