Month: February 2024

There was no good reason for the Supreme Court to hear Trump’s immunity issue. The legal principle is clear; the D.C. Circuit’s opinion is well-written; all four judges who considered the case reached the same conclusion; and the public interest is best served by a speedy decision on the merits of the case. And yet, the Court decided to take jurisdiction. Why?

By cooperating with Trump’s stall ball tactics, the Court is effectively supporting his campaign. I wish I could say otherwise, but I can’t. There is no other good explanation for this transparently bad decision.

The charges are legally frivolous. The GOP leaders in both the House and the Senate have to know that. And yet, they are going forward. What’s the point?

Several reasons. First of all, the MAGA cohort within the House has always been more interested in posturing for Fox News and the base back home than in getting actual results. Second, that same cohort wants to establish that it controls the Republican Party; moderate members in swing districts are obligated to follow their will. Third, the PBPs who voted for impeachment while presumably knowing the absurdity of the allegations fear upsetting the base and facing a primary more than losing a general election.

It’s yet another embarrassment for the GOP. While some of the Republican senators will use the opportunity to posture about border control, most of them will be happy to see the charges disappear as quickly as possible.

Nikki Haley says Trump is an agent of chaos. She thinks he’s good at breaking things, but not at building anything new. She makes him sound more like Mao than Burke. Is she right?

Of course she is! Trump is the very opposite of a conservative; he’s a punk rocker in politics. That’s why genuine conservatives will be looking for a different candidate in November. Their votes may very well be decisive in the election.

Paul Krugman used to say that Democrats were ambivalent about immigration, while the GOP was schizophrenic. What he meant by that was that virtually all Democrats were torn between showing compassion for unauthorized immigrants and maintaining political and financial support for the welfare state, while Republicans were split between businessmen, who strongly supported high levels of immigration, and reactionaries, who thought unauthorized immigrants were the source of most of America’s evils. Is this still true?

No– thanks largely to Trump and Abbott, the situation has flip-flopped. On the GOP side, the reactionaries are now firmly in charge, and business interests have been told to shut up; whatever influence they have is currently exercised behind closed doors. The Democrats are now split between passionate advocates of open borders for humanitarian reasons and centrists who worry about the costs–both financial and political–of accommodating huge numbers of immigrants in blue states. They are now the schizophrenic side.

It is a change that bodes ill for the blue team.

On the matter of Joe’s advanced age.

The topic just fills me with rage.

Sure, he’s frail and he’s slow

But he’s sane, as you know,

While Trump’s ego’s at terminal stage.

Catholic reactionaries believe that a fertilized egg is a human being, so they oppose IVF. Protestant reactionaries, on the other hand, are less dogmatic on the issue, and they smell political trouble. As a result, Trump, and even GOP members of the Alabama Legislature, want to change the law to protect IVF.

This is a perfect example of a point I made years ago; Protestant and Catholic reactionaries are not natural allies. They are united in their opposition to the mostly secular status quo, but they don’t really agree on how it should be replaced. Creating a theocracy in America would be harder than they think.

Tim Wu makes the argument in today’s NYT that leaving content moderation in semi-public spaces such as Facebook and X to billionaires who answer to hardly anyone presents a danger to the public. He’s right; the situation is clearly suboptimal. But the alternative–letting Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis control content on the internet–is far worse. The right has guns and an intense desire to stifle opposing viewpoints; the billionaires don’t.

In a better world (it wouldn’t even have to be ideal), there would be something like a consensus on what speech is totally unacceptable and what isn’t, so it would be safe to let the government set the rules. We don’t have that in America today, so leaving content moderation to Musk and Zuckerberg is the best we can do.

David French correctly notes that American Christians are under no obligation whatsoever to check their beliefs at the door when it comes to politics. He draws a distinction, however, between Christians and Christian nationalists, who, according to him, seek primacy in all elements of American society. Is he right, and is there more to the story?

Yes on both counts. Christian nationalism is based on the belief that America was settled, and made great, by white European Christians in accordance with God’s plan. The Founding Fathers, in this story, were devout Christians, not deists. Both scripture and the successes of the past thus give Christians an entitlement to rule America regardless of the transient will of the majority of the voters. Christian nationalists, unlike normal Christians, think they have the right to ignore the rules of liberal democracy, and to seize power by any means necessary if their position is threatened.

Two observations are pertinent here. First, “Christian nationalism” is frequently, and correctly, called “white Christian nationalism” because the tie to the European colonization of America inevitably makes the group racist. Second, the belief that a particular group of people is entitled to rule, regardless of whether it represents a majority or not, is common to both Christian nationalists and the Communist Party. In the latter case, the belief is based on the CP’s supposedly superior understanding of the laws of history (i.e., dialectical materialism); in the former, it is based on scripture and a view of American history which disregards the role of non-Christians (including, in reality, most of the FFs) in making the country what it is today.

Ironically, the CCP in practice bases its right to rule less on Marxism and more on the party’s success in expelling foreigners and making China great again. Xi consequently has more in common with white Christian nationalists than either side would like to admit.

The Conservatives were crushed in the 1905 election, but Arthur Balfour, their leader, still had a card to play. He could rely on the House of Lords to defeat any bill that he found completely unacceptable regardless of the state of public opinion.

In the end, the strategy didn’t work, because the Liberals turned aristocratic obstruction into a constitutional issue and ultimately emasculated the House of Lords. Substitute McConnell and the filibuster for the House of Lords and you have a lesson for the Republicans in the Senate.

At the same time that Trump is asserting that he is absolutely immune from prosecution for criminal acts while in office, he is threatening to put Joe Biden and members of his family in jail on the campaign trail. How do we reconcile these two ideas?

You could argue, of course, that absolute immunity applies to actions taken by the president while in office, but not the VP. That would suggest that the president is sovereign–an American king–while the VP is not. Since the office of VP is also referenced specifically in the Constitution, it is difficult to make a persuasive argument out of that.

If Trump is right, Biden couldn’t be prosecuted for attempting a coup if he loses the election unless he is impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. He couldn’t even be prosecuted if he orders the military to shoot . . . Donald Trump! Does Trump really mean that? Of course not!

In reality, what Trump is actually saying is that the law doesn’t apply to him. Immunity is purely personal. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US, Churchill met with President J.D. Vance to discuss grand strategy. As you would expect, Churchill wanted to make victory over the Nazis the initial objective, with the campaign against the Japanese having a lower priority. Vance, however, was having none of it.

Vance made it clear that America would be putting all of its resources into winning the Pacific war and protecting the border. America, he said, simply didn’t have the money or the manpower to fight a two-front war. Hitler was a European problem, and should be dealt with by Europeans.

When Churchill noted that Vance’s approach would lead to a Europe dominated either by Hitler or Stalin–more likely, the latter–Vance was unconcerned. He opined that Stalin wasn’t so bad. After all, he had been fighting wokeness in the USSR for decades.

Ross Douthat wants desperately for Americans to have more children. The fate of our very civilization depends on it, in his view.

But Douthat believes that a fertilized egg is a human being, so he has to agree with the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision which says exactly that. IVF clinics in Alabama are shutting down as a result. Alabama women who need medical assistance in getting pregnant will have to give up on the dream or move out of the state.

Sweet home Alabama, indeed. It’s a serious dilemma for the right, to say nothing of a political liability.

There are three distinct views of Putin within the GOP. They are as follows:

1. Putin is awesome! He’s the man! He was fighting wokeness throughout the world when it wasn’t cool! We need someone like him to take out the garbage in our country and start over again! PROPONENTS OF THIS VIEW: Trump; Carlson; Ramaswamy.
2. Putin is a thug, to be sure, but his country just isn’t that dangerous. Russia is struggling to defeat Ukraine; it would be no match for NATO. Europe should take over this problem and let America use its limited resources to deal with the real existential threats–China and the border. PROPONENTS OF THIS VIEW: J.D. Vance.
3. Letting Putin work his will in Ukraine will just encourage him to try the same thing with the Baltic states and Poland. Dictators are never satisfied. Didn’t we learn anything from Hitler? PROPONENTS OF THIS VIEW: Nikki Haley; Mitch McConnell.

My best guess is that the third group is still the largest within the GOP, but is not a majority. In any event, some prominent Republicans talk tough against Putin, but enable him in practice. Lindsey Graham, for example, sounds like a member of the third cohort, but votes with the second.

During the 1860 campaign, Donald Trump refused to say where he stood on the slavery issue. He simply insisted that he would reveal a plan that would be really great, and that everyone would love, after he was elected.

The voters took him at his word and elected him. What was his plan? Noting that one side viewed slaves as people, and the other as property, he proposed to split the difference. A slave would henceforth be treated as a person from the waist up, but an object from the waist down.

To Trump’s surprise, nobody embraced his proposal, the South seceded, and, well, you know the rest.

The FFs were not Victorians, as Maria Reynolds and Sally Hemings could have told you. Prostitution was common and was understood to be inevitable. There were lots of illegitimate children. Some women practiced rudimentary forms of birth control. It wasn’t ideal, but that was just the way it was, and few people thought it could be changed.

Based on this, you would have to think that the Founders would have been sympathetic to legislation authorizing abortion under some circumstances. But if you had asked them if the Constitution prohibited any legislative consideration of the issue, they would have snorted in derision. The Constitution was about the distribution of power, not the poisoned fruit of sin. Abortion never would have entered the minds of the FFs as they were arguing and drafting in 1787.