Author: hamilton1788

A massive flash flood in Texas Hill Country, undoubtedly exacerbated by climate change, killed over 30 people yesterday. The photos of the destruction were heartbreaking. On the same day, President Trump was taking a victory lap over the approval of the BBB, which, among many other things, dismantled Biden’s program of investment in green technology to the maximum extent feasible. Is there a connection between these two events?

Of course there is, but no one on the left is making it. The victims of the flood should be treated as martyrs to shortsighted environmental policy. Instead, the implicit narrative of the right–that deaths and destruction from supersized storms are acceptable collateral damage in light of the overriding need to maximize the use of fossil fuels–is winning the day.

CDs: Ripping up the safety net for the benefit of wealthy business owners is a terrible idea. We dissent.

CLs: An unprecedented opportunity to reduce the debt and dismantle the welfare state has gone begging. Now our last hope is that Trump and Vought will use impoundment to do the dirty work.

PBPs: There is plenty to be concerned about in this bill. In particular, we hate the idea of ripping up contracts with clean energy providers. The preservation of the 2017 tax cuts was an overriding priority, however. On balance, we support the bill.

Reactionaries: We have reservations about the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, at least as they apply to white Christian families. We love the clean energy cuts, however, and we’re happy with the tax relief. We approve.

What does this tell us? That the Reactionaries and the PBPs control the party, of course. But you already knew that.

At his victory celebration yesterday, Trump couldn’t help boasting about the size of the cuts to the safety net; after all, everything he does is by definition the biggest and greatest in history. Having suddenly realized that the cuts will have a huge impact on millions of his voters, he then insisted that nobody would feel them. Does that make sense?

Obviously not, unless you assume that the federal government just burns hundreds of billions of Medicaid and SNAP dollars in huge bonfires every year. Even if you believe that the cuts are only intended to address waste and fraud, they’re going to hurt the wastrels and the fraudsters.

H: Hey, Tom! Why are you looking so glum? It’s your day!

J: It’s a mixed bag.

H: Why? It’s the day that made you famous. I always thought the Declaration should have put more emphasis on American nationality and less on universal equality, but what do I know? You’re in the history books forever for it.

J: American nationality was implicit in my argument about equality. Anyway, things didn’t exactly turn out the way I had planned.

H: How so?

J: At first, things were going smoothly. New states full of yeoman farmers were being created. It was just the kind of republic I had planned–one run by independent, virtuous small farmers.

H: It’s true. It looked like the end of my vision for America, and it killed my party.

J: But then the railroads and steamboats and the telegraph came into being. I welcomed them as improvements, but the result was large interstate corporations and a national market. I didn’t foresee that.

H: I did, in my way.

J: America became an industrial nation full of immigrants, rather than one run by my kind of people. And the corporations got out of control. All of a sudden, rich industrialists were running the country. That meant government had to grow dramatically to protect average people. It was my worst nightmare, next to the Civil War.

H: We both knew the war was coming. It was a horrible tragedy, but it was necessary. There was no other way.

J: It was a disaster, particularly for the South. Then America became an aggressive and imperialist nation with a large military. I didn’t want that, either.

H: A great nation needs a great military. I knew that even when we didn’t have one.

J: Today, we have a huge welfare state, a nation full of immigrants, and a crazy demagogue for a president who thinks he has the right to run my university. It’s America as you saw it. It’s not my America.

H: I don’t approve of the size of the welfare state, and I share your feelings about the president. The rest of it is true. And yes, in the long run, America is much closer to my dream than yours. It’s not as if your vision is completely dead, however. You still have Sarah Palin and “real Americans.”

J: That’s certainly some consolation. I guess we just have to live with the country as it is. Enjoy your holiday.

First we had TACO–Trump always chickens out–on the tariff front. Now we have FCAF–Freedom Caucus always folds–in the legislative arena.

What do they get for their acquiescence? A round of golf with the great man? Promises to impound expenditures that they are voting to approve? A commitment not to support primary challengers? An autographed T-shirt?

We’ll probably never know.

As I write this, Hakeem Jeffries is in his sixth hour of speaking against the BBB. He knows he isn’t going to persuade anyone in the room. In addition, the TV networks will, at best, run a tiny fraction of his speech on the news tonight, so he isn’t reaching the American people. What, then, is the point, and who is the audience?

As with Cory Booker’s marathon speech, I think this is an effort to prove to the blue team base that the leadership is really fighting hard on their behalf. Actually accomplishing anything in the process doesn’t seem to figure in the equation.

John Bolton predictably thinks Trump didn’t go far enough. As he sees it, the Iranian nuclear problem will never go away without regime change, which is unlikely without outside intervention due to the strength of the instruments of repression and divisions within the opposition. His solution, of course, is more war.

Bolton insists that regime change can be accomplished without boots on the ground; this wouldn’t have to be another Iraq, although he continues to argue that Iraq wasn’t so bad. My question is, how? How could you be certain that the nuclear program was gone, and that the government was completely decapitated, with just a single intense precision bombing campaign? Isn’t it virtually certain that enough of the security apparatus would survive Bolton’s bombs to keep the population under control and the nuclear threat alive? Isn’t it likely that the Iranian public would rally behind the regime, rather than overthrow it, in the face of American and Israeli aggression?

It won’t work. If you want to make the nuclear problem go away for the foreseeable future, you have three potentially viable choices: an agreement with plenty of carrots as well as sticks; a perpetual air war; or an Iraq-style invasion and occupation. That’s it. Without admitting it, Bolton is voting for #3. Trump won’t go for that, but he is now clearly willing to be Bibi’s yard guy, which is #2.

While we’re waiting around for the House to act on the BBB, Trump announced that he had a trade deal with Vietnam. The deal consists of a 20 percent tariff on Vietnamese goods, increasing to 40 percent for pass-through goods, and no tariffs on American goods. What should we make of this?

I think you can assume this will be the template for agreements with less developed areas in Africa and Asia. The objectives clearly are to maintain incentives for friendshoring relative to China and to encourage domestic production relative to the rest of the world; the ultimate hope is that the tariff wall will create a domestic manufacturing boom which will reduce imports and cause our bilateral trade deficits to disappear.

American consumers will pay for this deal in the form of higher prices. The real question is whether these tariffs are sufficient to create competing domestic manufacturing businesses. I’m pretty sure the answer is no, even in the long run, but I guess we’re going to find out.

Back in the day, when the GOP was a club run by and for business interests, the leadership could attack the safety net without much concern for the voters. Today, the party’s support comes primarily from working people, so the leadership has to at least pretend to care about their welfare. The benefits of the BBB, however, will flow primarily to capitalists. How will the party explain this to the base?

The first gambit, of course, is to argue that deserving people will still have health insurance; the cuts to Medicaid and food aid only eliminate waste and fraud. That won’t go very far, however, because the victims of the cuts are unlikely to view themselves as waste and fraud. Then what?

There are two pages in the playbook. They are as follows:

1. OK, you lost your health insurance. But look at all you’ve gained! Illegal immigrants are no longer coming for your job and driving up the cost of housing! Your daughter won’t be raped in the bathroom by a trans person! Your tax dollars won’t support lazy black people anymore! The government won’t shut down your church! The benefits of Republican rule far exceed the costs.
2. You don’t really want a handout. What you want is your old job back–the one that was stolen from you by global elites and Democrat overregulation. We’re working on bring that job back. Just be patient, and things will be much better! You’ll have real health insurance again, not a government handout! Trust us!

In other words, culture wars and nostalgia. They worked before; why not now?

The BBB just passed the Senate by the smallest of possible margins. Collins voted against it; Murkowski reluctantly voted for it. While I won’t speculate as to their actual motives, from a political perspective, those votes make sense; Murkowski is vulnerable to an attack from the right, while the danger to Collins comes from the left. Collins can now disclaim any responsibility for what happens to the economy in the next few years, which will help her in the next general election.

Will the Senate bill pass the House? The House SALT warriors appear to be satisfied with the Senate’s compromise, which leaves Medicaid spending and the deficit as the remaining sticking points. The few remaining CDs won’t like the additional Medicaid cuts, but they had already embraced the concept of massive reductions by voting for the House bill, so the difference there is only one of degree. As to the CLs, they will be very disappointed in the final product, which they will view as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity gone begging, but their initial tough talk is usually followed by acquiesce to Trump and the leadership. Don’t expect this episode to be any different.

Trump’s favorite way of keeping GOP legislators in line is a threat of a primary. But Murkowski has already beaten a Trump-backed opponent, Tillis is not running for re-election, and Susan Collins is probably the only Republican who can win a Senate seat in Maine. She is effectively the Joe Manchin of her state. Defeating her in a primary would mean losing the seat to a Democrat, as both Collins and Trump well know.

And so, the answer to the question is yes. Does she have the will and the nerve to play them? TBD.

You motivate wealthy people to work even harder and invest more by giving them money, but you motivate poor people, whose only goal is to lounge in the hammock of dependency, by eliminating their benefits.

The GOP has changed quite a lot since the Reagan era, but that belief remains the same, as evidenced by the BBB.

The majority opinion in the nationwide injunction case is based on a finding that there was no such thing as a nationwide injunction in 1789. Was that the proper way to analyze the history of equity courts?

No. The whole point of equity courts, as they evolved in England throughout the centuries, was to provide enough flexibility to do justice when the common law courts could not do so. Different times and circumstances–including a successful rebellion against the existing system and the creation of a written constitution, which did not exist in Britain–call for different remedies. Freezing the remedies available to the judiciary at the standard set in 1789 consequently makes no sense whatsoever, particularly in a case in which fundamental rights were at stake, more than one court had ruled for the petitioners, and administrative chaos is likely to result.

The recent anti-Trump demonstrations were styled “No Kings,” which apparently offended the president, even though he has publicly identified himself as a king on multiple occasions. Some commentators, on the other hand, have described his rule as a kind of dictatorship. What is the difference, and who is right?

A dictator, in the Roman Republic, was an eminent man who was given extraordinary powers for a very limited period of time in order to deal with an emergency. While modern dictators have tended to retain their powers for a much longer period, something of the original meaning still remains. That is why Marx described the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a short transitional period to pure communism.

A king, on the other hand, is a permanent thing. He rules in ordinary as well as extraordinary times. He transfers his power to his son upon his death. He is expected to protect the traditional laws and customs of his realm, not to change them. Since he was the ultimate source of all land ownership in the Middle Ages, the distinction between the public and the private realm was fuzzy, to say the least.

So which does Trump resemble more? His reliance on emergency powers and his desire to make swift, dramatic changes to his country smacks of a dictatorship. It is also unlikely that he plans to pass on the presidency to his eldest son. On the other hand, Trump’s willingness to profit from his position doesn’t sound like something an upright Roman leader would do. As a result, you can make an argument either way.

Thom Tillis isn’t about to turn into a Democrat, but his decision not to run frees him to slide further into Collins/Murkowski territory. That means Trump doesn’t really have a Senate working majority for his more outrageous initiatives. Could that be a problem for the next 18 months? Yes, it could.