Month: December 2022

Here they are. Don’t take them to Vegas:

1. DEBT CEILING CRISIS: After about a month of excruciating twists and turns, a revolt of the handful of moderates in the House results in a deal with only symbolic gains for Republicans just before the deadline.
2. IMPERIAL SUPREME COURT: The counterrevolution lives! The Court eliminates affirmative action in school admissions (with language likely applying its reasons to other forms of affirmative action), gives federal courts effective jurisdiction over only those election issues that favor Republicans, destroys Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, and permits the litigation on Title 42 to continue. There is plenty of grumbling about the Court’s legitimacy, and judicial reform emerges as a key issue in the 2024 election.
3. INFLATION/INTEREST RATES: Inflation eases. The Fed continues to talk ferociously, but decides not to cause a deep recession in order to bring the rate down from about four to two percent.
4. BIDEN RUNS: While DeSantis has emerged as the clear GOP favorite, Biden ignores my advice and runs without meaningful opposition from the left.
5. DESANTIS RULES: A large and motley crew of Republicans runs for president, most of them figures from the Trump days. They are still standing at the end of 2023, but it is clear from all of the polls that the race boils down to Trump and DeSantis. Their relationship has gone from strained to poisonous, to the benefit of everyone whose brain operates in the 21st century.

At all points during my lifetime–probably, at all points since the end of the Thirty Years War–the pope of the day has faced a choice: do I embrace modernity, emphasize the softer parts of Christ’s message, and reach out to my ideological opponents; or build walls, enforce discipline, and hang on desperately to what I’ve got? This division corresponds nicely to the red-blue split in American politics.

Francis is a blue pope. Benedict was the quintessential red one. In what he would have considered a better time, he would have burned heretics with gusto. Like Trump, but with less justification, he always sounded fake when he talked about love and compassion. He wanted to kick your ass if you didn’t fall into line. In the end, the world kicked his.

The New Right will be devastated; leaving aside his age and infirmities, Benedict would have been the perfect head of state for the theocracy they want to build in America. Me, not so much. I will miss Benedict about as much as I miss Scalia, with whom he had much in common.

I made six predictions for this year on New Year’s Day, all of which addressed major themes for the year. I was clearly right about three items: the virus gradually became endemic; the Democrats were not wiped out; and a smaller version of the BBB did pass. I was clearly wrong about Trump waiting until 2023 to announce his candidacy. I was debatably right about the state of the economy, although interest rates have gone higher than I anticipated, and will go higher still. I was mostly wrong about foreign policy; there was no war with Iran, but Russia did, in fact, invade Ukraine.

So I’m good, but hardly perfect. That’s not exactly a surprise. Keep that in mind when I post my predictions for 2023 over the next few days.

Consider just the ripple effects of the Ukraine war. Food and gas prices soar all over the world. Inflation results in higher interest rates and imperils governments. Germany and Japan agree to massive defense spending increases. Finland and Sweden apply to join NATO. All meaningful political opposition is crushed in Russia. Extreme American right-wingers support Putin against NATO, partly because the brutal Russian military isn’t “woke.” It’s an impressive list.

And those are just the secondary effects of the war. The main event is the attempt by a small, flawed democracy to retain its independence from Putin’s fascist, imperialist state. A lot of people have expended a lot of energy to analyze the war in different terms, but it really is that simple. This is a battle of good against evil, and evil has to be resisted, or it will continue to push the envelope.

Time Magazine got it right. Zelensky is the Man of the Year for 2022. It was a no-brainer.

It’s January, and the new House of Representatives has been seated, but the GOP can’t find a majority for the new Speaker. Countless votes are taken, but the extreme right-wing dissidents are dug in, so nothing changes. Finally, McCarthy reaches out to a handful of moderate Democrats, who agree to support him on one extremely important condition: he has to promise a vote on a clean bill lifting the debt ceiling even though the majority of his caucus won’t go along. McCarthy agrees, wins the election, and keeps his promise. A handful of GOP moderates votes to lift the debt ceiling, and a crisis is averted.

Do I really expect this to happen? Of course not, but hope springs eternal, particularly in a new year.

The Title 42 and student debt cases have a lot in common. Both involve unusual exercises of executive power based on the pandemic; in both cases, red states have challenged the use of that power; and in both cases, standing is going to be a major issue. There are significant differences, however. In the Title 42 case, the states are objecting, not to the use of pandemic powers, but to Biden’s decision to stop using those powers; the standing question in the Title 42 case relates more to the timing of the state objections than to the nature and degree of the injury; the states have a much better argument on the merits of the student debt case; and the Supreme Court is processing the cases differently. The student debt case will be decided in its entirety in short order; the Title 42 case has been broken up and will be slow rolled.

How will these cases be resolved? The Court should find against the states on the standing issue in the student debt case, but it won’t; Biden and the students will lose on both the process and the merits. On the Title 42 case, I can’t believe that even this Supreme Court will find that Biden has some sort of legal obligation to continue to use extraordinary pandemic powers under the changed circumstances, so I expect the government to “win” the case in the end. The Court, however, is clearly determined to put off that decision to the last possible moment in order to avoid inconveniencing the red states. Biden’s “win” will, in reality, be a loss for the asylum seekers, fair play, and the rule of law.

The red states involved in the Title 42 litigation weren’t parties to the original proceedings. Worse, and even more importantly, they transparently have no case on the merits. Given their indifference to fighting the pandemic at home, they cannot plausibly argue that the CDC acted capriciously by determining that Title 42 is no longer defensible as a public health measure. A “normal” Supreme Court would not, therefore, have involved itself in this litigation.

The current Supreme Court, however, is anything but “normal.” It extended the stay, pending a final decision on the red states’ right to intervene in June. It did not agree to hear the case on the merits at that time; if the Court finds that the red states had standing, the merits will be considered by the Court of Appeals on a slower track. As a result, the final decision on the case may be over a year away.

In other words, five justices have decided to slow roll this case in order to keep the stay in place as long as possible even though they have to know that the asylum seekers will ultimately win on the merits. The Court is trampling on the rights of litigants purely for purposes of political expediency; even Biden, whose lawyers said all the right things in public, is probably quietly relieved.

Sounds like Korematsu for the 21st century, doesn’t it? If push comes to shove and your rights are at stake, you can’t rely on this Court to defend them if it is politically inconvenient.

Kevin McCarthy begged GOP senators to vote against the omnibus bill in the hope of pushing it into the laps of the new GOP House. It didn’t work; the bill passed the Senate with plenty of GOP support. In fact, the vote wasn’t even close. What do we learn from that?

Two things. First, that an impending blizzard just before Christmas is a wonderful tool to get politicians to concentrate. Second, that GOP senators have very little confidence that the new GOP House will behave reasonably and responsibly. They are, of course, correct about that.

Assume, for purposes of argument, that the American economy has adjusted to the impacts of the war and the pandemic. Supply chain issues are a thing of the past. Gas and food prices are no longer soaring. The traditional balance between spending on goods and services has been restored. As a result, inflation has declined to about 3 or 4 percent.

But that number is still uncomfortably high by the standards of the last 30 years. It is being driven by two phenomena. First, wage increases are still outpacing productivity gains as a result of labor shortages. Second, many companies have discovered that Americans will pay more for their products than they previously suspected. Profits are consequently increasing, the stock market is doing well, and consumer demand remains at a relatively high level.

What can be done to resolve these issues? The obvious response to labor shortages is to liberalize our immigration quotas. That, of course, is a political non-starter. American consumers can start refusing to tolerate unwarranted price increases as their pandemic savings dwindle. Finally, the Fed can try to destroy consumer confidence by raising rates to the point that stock, bond, and real estate prices are crushed. That’s the real danger in 2023.

The record of the 117th Congress was marked by two conspicuous failures. First, in an understandable effort to avoid the mistakes of 2009, it spent too much money on the pandemic relief bill, which somewhat exacerbated (but did not create) our inflation problems. Second, it did not transform the dollar store economy by dramatically expanding the welfare state. As a result, Biden’s aspirations to become FDR for the 21st century were unrealized.

Given the tiny Democratic majorities in both houses, however, those dreams were completely unrealistic. With that in mind, the accomplishments of the last Congress were quite impressive. While the pandemic bill might have been a bit over the top, it did succeed in pushing down unemployment faster than most people have expected. The infrastructure bill was a bipartisan success. Some of the worst fears about the hijacking of presidential elections were addressed in last week’s massive spending bill. The IRA was a substantial step forward in the battle against climate change. And so on.

What you will notice here is that the GOP members in the Senate were actually fairly reasonable, which provides some justification for Biden’s positions on the filibuster and bipartisan government. The House, of course, is a different story, and will only get worse next year.

What can we expect from the 118th Congress? Chaos and vandalism, of course. The last two years are going to look like Brigadoon in a few months.

Phase 1 was the lightning assault on Kyiv, which, of course, turned into a complete debacle. Phase 2 was rolling thunder in the Donbas area, which started promisingly, but was partly reversed by superior Ukrainian tactics and new NATO weapons. Phase 3 is the use of diplomacy and the withholding of gas supplies during the winter to break NATO’s resistance. Every indication suggests that approach will fail, too. What will Putin try in Phase 4?

I don’t think he has any new ideas, so he will repackage old ones. My guess is that he will try to update his battlefield tactics and spread the Ukrainians out by threatening to open several new fronts. The decisive battle, if there is one, will probably take place in the Donbas, because that is where Putin has had the most success.

Will it work? We’ll see. The bottom line is that the Russians have a long history of fighting ineptly at first but learning from their mistakes. This is no time for complacency.

We’re approaching the end of the year.

What comes next, I would say, isn’t clear.

The pandemic is gone

But the war soldiers on

And a debt crisis beckons, I fear.

Ross Douthat predicts there will never be a reckoning for either Trump or his enablers. The former will just fade away, and the latter will fall into line behind DeSantis or some other nominee. Is he right?

As with most things, it depends–in this case, on Trump and his followers. If Trump benefits from a large field and wins the nomination, all bets are off. If he loses the primaries but claims that the establishment rigged the process against him, his most fanatical supporters are likely to follow him out of the GOP, with disastrous results in the general election. Electoral defeat as a result of the actions of the “burn it down” crowd would represent a reckoning of a different sort.

As I’ve noted before, Rich Lowry is the quintessential anti-anti-Trumper (AAT). He was as aware of Trump’s innumerable personality flaws as anyone, which admittedly doesn’t say much about his judgment, but he trained his fire exclusively on the left as long as the man on golf cart was in office. Whether this was out of a desperate desire to keep the right united against the left or a simple craven wish to remain on good terms with the mainstream of the GOP, I don’t know. What I do know is that Lowry and his like were Trump enablers. History will show that they could have tried to keep the ship of state on track, and they didn’t. They watched a disaster unfold and just let it happen for purely self-interested reasons.

Today, of course, Lowry has a plausible right-wing alternative, so he’s attacking Trump with as much fervor as I do. In the immortal words of Shania Twain, that don’t impress me much.

Ross Douthat examines the data and concludes that Americans aren’t really any less “religious;” they just aren’t willing to submit to the discipline of traditional mainstream churches. In his eyes, that makes us “heretics.” Is he right?

I have two observations about that. First of all, “heresy” is part of the American DNA. Some of our ancestors came here to worship outside of the control of state churches; others started completely new forms of Christianity, of whom the Mormons are the most prominent. America was, and is, a kind of spiritual tabular rasa. It’s a place to break from the chains of the past and make your own shining city on the hill.

Second, as a nation of free individuals and constant change, we don’t accept traditional European forms of discipline. We make our decisions about ethics and metaphysics based on logic and our own experience, not the opinions of emperors and church fathers. In the end, St. Augustine didn’t have any more idea of what happens to us after death than you and I do. He just thought he was required to rely on the authority of Christian scripture for all of the answers. Most of us don’t agree.

As far as I’m concerned, this is cause for celebration, not doom and gloom. If that makes me a “heretic,” so be it. Merry Christmas!