Category: Uncategorized

Putin may be all-powerful in the political sphere in Russia, but even he can’t control the sun and the wind. Neither can MBS. As a result, there is no necessary conflict between American efforts to fight climate change and reach energy independence.

The Ukraine war has given this old issue new urgency. While the private sector has made progress on its own, it could use some help in funding innovation and the infrastructure for electric cars. Unfortunately, due to the GOP and its cult of self-reliance, none is likely to be coming at the federal level.

California can’t do anything about the use of fossil fuels in power plants in Texas, but it has a large say in the kind of cars we buy and drive. If the state uses its regulatory power to push the car companies to move faster, and some of its budgetary surplus to fund a system of charging stations, that will serve as a powerful example to the rest of the country, and will change the economics of electric car ownership. Let’s hope they do it.

Happy Independence Day!

When you compare the first 18 months of Biden’s administration to the last years of the Trump regime, you are struck more by the amount of continuity than by the differences. The tone is completely changed, of course. But the following items were not, due to a lack of votes in Congress and a high level of concern about political blowback:

1. Biden complied with Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal agreement;
2. The Trump tax cuts have not been repealed;
3. Trump supported the 2021 stimulus;
4. The Trump tariffs on China are still in effect; and
5. Biden has not entered into a new agreement with Iran.

Where would we be today if Trump had actually remained in office? Inflation and unemployment would be at about the same levels, and our position in the Middle East would be roughly the same. The big difference, of course, is our willingness and ability to work with our partners in both Europe and Asia to contain China and Russia. Trump would have done his best to help Putin in Ukraine, and would have tried to take on the Chinese on his own.

Since Biden does not present an easy target for Trump’s identity politics gambit, and the man on golf cart has little interest in policy, his campaign is bound to be primarily about the “corrupt” establishment and the “rigged” 2020 election. He will grumble about inflation and falling markets, but say little about what he would do to improve matters. In short, it will be a campaign heavy on personality and owning the libs, and extremely light on any vision except of the man with the orange face in the mirror. Just like 2020.

I had always assumed that Trump would wait as long as possible before making an announcement about his candidacy. That way, he could get more people to kiss his ring, and keep his options open. The NYT, however, has reported that an announcement could be imminent, which surprises me.

Maybe it shouldn’t. Announcing early has some clear advantages for Trump. It makes it easier for him to argue that any potential prosecutions are politically motivated. It gives him a larger megaphone with which to shape public impressions of the work of the January 6 committee. Anything that attracts attention is always welcome, of course, and he absolutely loves running for president (being president, not quite so much). Finally, and most importantly, it would mean that DeSantis could not blunder into running against him. Trump will be the presumptive nominee the minute he announces, and anyone who dares to take him on will be fully aware of the consequences.

For the GOP, an early announcement prior to the midterms would be a disaster. It would put Trump and January 6 in the foreground of the campaign, which is the last thing McConnell and McCarthy want. It will increase turnout among otherwise disaffected Democratic voters. It will also attract attention to Trump’s idiosyncratic views about Russia and Ukraine at the least appropriate time. For Trump, however, concerns about the welfare of the party will always take second place to the interests of the man in the mirror.

So what would Trump actually say on the stump? Even more importantly, how would he govern, if he wins? I will be addressing the likely events of a second Trump term throughout the week.

Question presented: Can a state government completely ban the sale of AR-15s to private citizens?

For the would-be sellers and owners: Hey, everyone owns an AR-15! They’re as common as Japanese cars! That makes them analogous to 18th century muskets. They can’t be prohibited.

For the state: Are you high? The AR-15, in addition to having no legitimate public purpose when owned by a private citizen, has destructive power far greater than a hunting rifle, which is the appropriate analogy for a musket. It’s destructive power that controls here, not the number in circulation. The state can ban AR-15s.

How do you suppose Justice Thomas disposes of this one?

If Trump does, in fact, have to run against DeSantis, he is bound to lose at least some of the primaries. As in 2020, would he attribute his defeats to “rigged” elections, even if they are run by Republicans exclusively for Republicans?

Of course he would! He did it when he lost to Cruz in 2016. And the gap between him and the remaining respectable members of his party would widen even further.

At a summit also attended by leaders from Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, NATO revised its mission statement to discuss the “challenge” presented by China. The document is also harshly critical of Chinese behavior in a variety of ways. The Chinese responded, as usual, by suggesting that the US is leading the rest of the developed world by the nose and threatening consequences for Europe, a key trade partner.

Xi has to be alarmed; encirclement is becoming more of a reality every day. But what did he expect? Did he think that China could engage in belligerent “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, throttle the rights of people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, continually threaten Taiwan, and openly support Russian aggression without provoking a response from the liberal democratic world? Did he believe that China has so much money, it can buy off even countries with far larger per capita GDPs?

We used to be told that China was sensitive to the analogy putting it in the position of the German Empire prior to World War I. Xi seems to have forgotten that lesson. Having effectively given Putin a blank check in Ukraine, he increasingly resembles the blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914.

The first phase of the Ukraine war–the blitzkrieg that wasn’t–was a disastrous failure for the Russians. The second phase–terror, slow and indiscriminate destruction, and strangulation–is coming to an end, and will almost certainly end inconclusively. What happens in the third phase?

It will focus on the international and political elements of the war. Putin will be hoping that the increased cost of gas and food will dampen the enthusiasm for the war among NATO members, and that he will have support from starving Third World countries. Biden’s job will be to prevent that. So far, he has done well.

Trump held off making his announcement as long as possible, because it was his way of attracting attention and exerting authority over the other candidates. Finally, DeSantis had had enough. He announced his candidacy in the summer of 2023, explaining that he assumed that Trump had decided not to run, and sounding as deferential as possible to the man on golf cart.

Trump was outraged, as anyone would have predicted. He announced that he would take on the ungrateful “Ron the RINO” within days. He attacked DeSantis, amusingly enough, for being irresponsible on the “Trump vaccine.” He claimed DeSantis was a closet environmentalist who was soft on fossil fuels. He said DeSantis didn’t really care about illegal immigration and had presided over an increase in violent crime. But mostly, he went on and on about how DeSantis had failed to support him adequately on January 6. DeSantis was not a true counterrevolutionary, he fumed. He had to go, along with all of the rest of the corrupt establishment.

DeSantis, for his part, was much more moderate in tone, but as the campaign got uglier, he took stronger stands on Trump’s failures in office and on his irresponsibility on January 6. Tucker Carlson was appalled; to him, this was the right-wing equivalent of Sanders fighting with Warren. Couldn’t they just work together and get along? The answer was no; there was too much at stake.

In the end, the GOP voters split pretty evenly over the January 6 issue. Biden waited in the wings to take on a badly divided party.

Ron DeSantis has governed Florida as a reactionary ideologue, not as a racist or a sexist. Unlike Trump, he isn’t an identity politics one-trick pony. So if he is the GOP nominee, who can beat him?

The Democrats would need someone who has plenty of energy and passion, a clear focus on stopping Orbanization, and strong debating chops. Having a nominee who can’t be blamed for any shortcomings of the Biden administration would also be helpful.

While Harris, if given a chance, might fit the bill, the first name that comes to my mind is Elizabeth Warren. While she was about the worst possible choice to challenge Trump, and she would have to refocus her campaign on democracy issues instead of inequality, she might well be a good option to take on DeSantis.

Because the Supreme Court doesn’t permit cameras. Today’s decision on the EPA and the Clean Air Act, based on a poorly defined, judge-made legal concept (the “major questions doctrine”) with no textual support in the Constitution, probably means the end of any effective attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions at the federal level, barring some sort of dramatic change in our political and legal systems.

The Court is determined to destroy the “administrative state” in the name of pop democracy. The result of this decision should consequently be the end of the filibuster. If Congress is going to be required by the judiciary to legislate with specificity and agility every time a problem arises, it needs the ability to legislate, period. That ability simply doesn’t exist as long as the filibuster is in place.

We’re seeing a lot of agitation from the left as to whether Biden should run for re-election. While most of the complaints about his administration are misguided, as I’ve noted in previous posts, his age and inability to sell the Democratic product to the public make the question a fair one.

Here is my analysis of the situation:

1. If Trump runs and is the nominee, Biden definitely should run, because he is the perfect Trump foil; Trump can’t play his favorite card, identity politics, against him. His age is not much of an issue, he is willing to let Trump take center stage and destroy himself, and his candidacy makes January 6 the principal issue in the campaign, which works to the Democrats’ advantage.
2. If someone else (presumably DeSantis) is the GOP nominee, he should not run, because the contrast with a much younger candidate who is not tainted by January 6 would not work to his advantage. A race between Biden and DeSantis would revolve around energy, competence, and ideology, not the dangers posed by a counterrevolutionary GOP with a narcissistic, autocratic leader.

In 1857, the solution du jour to the slavery problem in the territories was “popular sovereignty.” It wasn’t working very well, as the residents of Kansas could have told you. The Supreme Court decided to put an end to the issue by openly siding with the pro-slavery side regardless of public sentiment. As we know, that didn’t turn out too well.

Anti-abortion activists like to analogize abortion to slavery. For reasons I described years ago, that analogy really doesn’t work, but let’s go with it. Alito probably thinks Dobbs is the opposite of Dred Scott, because he has taken an issue that was mostly relegated to the courts and returned it to the political sphere: i.e., we’re back to “popular sovereignty.” In reality, however, Dobbs resembles Dred Scott in that the class of individuals in question was deprived of important pre-existing rights by an activist judiciary. Alito is more the new Taney than the anti-Taney.

The American people clearly long for the economy of 2019. Who can blame them? Unemployment was low, and real wages were rising, even for unskilled workers. Notwithstanding historically low interest rates and enormous deficits, inflation was completely under control. It was still the dollar store economy, to be sure, but life was pretty good.

Today, the underlying policy background is essentially the same as it was in 2019. The Trump tax cuts were not repealed, and the additional welfare state spending in the last pandemic relief bill has been wound up. The deficit is falling fast. Unemployment is at about the same level as it was in 2019. Unlike 2019, however, we are plagued by inflation, interest rates are rising, and a recession could loom. What does this mean, in policy terms?

That we would be in the same position today if Trump had been elected in 2020, and that the GOP is not entitled to any presumption that it knows how to deal with inflation. In fact, the GOP’s usual elixirs–tax cuts–would actually make things worse by fueling additional demand. If you want to make cutting inflation an overriding priority, you would do it by ditching tariffs, raising taxes, and requiring state and local governments to put their federal overpayments into rainy day funds, not tax cuts. All of these ideas would be violently opposed by Trump and his GOP buddies, and they will not happen, so all we can do in the real world is try to deal with the supply side problems and be patient.

Roe is dead. Gas prices are too high. The airlines keep cancelling flights. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic. There isn’t enough baby formula. Interest rates are rising. The BBB didn’t pass. Why? It’s Biden’s fault, of course!

Or so the left would have you believe. In reality, Biden was elected to operate within the constraints of liberal democratic government, and unlike Trump, he is doing so. Given that he doesn’t really have a majority in the Senate, he has accomplished about as much as anyone could. And he has done it without constantly “fighting.”

To put it another way, imagine Warren or Sanders had been president. Would Roe still be in place? Would gas prices be lower? Would the airlines be running smoothly? Would we have stayed in Afghanistan? Would we have more baby formula? Would interest rates have remained microscopic? Would Manchin and Sinema have changed positions on the BBB? The obvious answer to all of those questions is no.

I think it is accurate to blame Biden for being a bad salesperson for his administration, but some of that is a deliberate attempt to return American government to some semblance of normality after Trump sucked all of the oxygen out of the air for the four previous years. You can also “blame” him for, thus far, failing to wipe out student debt, which is something Warren and Sanders would have done by now, but in my opinion, his measured approach is the correct one. The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan may not have been the best choice, but it was fully supported by the left. Everything else he has done, or not done, has either been completely within the mainstream of the Democratic Party, or has been the result of constitutional constraints. If the left wants to accomplish its agenda, it needs to persuade the electorate to vote in more progressives.

During the 2020 primaries, the Democratic candidates were occasionally asked how they were going to accomplish their ambitious objectives, in light of the makeup of the Senate, the filibuster, and the hostility of the counterrevolutionary Supreme Court. Biden said he would do it by working with reasonable Republicans. He was accused of being naive and stuck in the past when he said it, but his real, unspoken message was that we needed to lower our expectations. Warren, on the other hand, always responded by saying she would “fight” tirelessly. By that, she presumably meant she would run around the country and make lots of fiery speeches supporting her agenda.

The events of the last year have shown that Biden was right. The voters didn’t elect enough Democrats to get much done; “fighting” with Manchin and Sinema has accomplished nothing; and the most important pieces of legislation coming out of Congress, the initial pandemic relief bill excepted, have been bipartisan.

So what can progressives do, given that the deck is stacked against them in both the legal and the political system? They have two choices. First, they can lower their expectations, focus their energy on working with moderates in both parties to save liberal democracy from the Orbanizers, and wait for the angry old reactionaries to pass from the scene. Second, they can try to organize a movement to make fundamental changes to the political system and the judiciary. That will take vast amounts of energy, a lot of focus, plenty of patience, and, in all likelihood, a young, charismatic leader with the ability to fuse both identity- and class-based arguments into a single, persuasive whole.

Right now, the essential ingredients for Option 2 do not exist. That leaves us with Option 1.