Cromwell

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.

Now we know why he had the courage to vote against the BBB yesterday. Is there any chance we can recruit Mark Robinson to run for his Senate seat?

If the Iranian regime gave any sort of a crap about the material well-being of its subjects, it would give up its nukes and sign a big, beautiful deal with Trump for sanctions relief. It doesn’t, and it won’t. Why?

Because the ayatollahs at the top of the food chain think their system is ordained by God; it is his will, not the material desires of the people, that must prevail, even in the face of calamity. And because the more prosaic interests of the instruments of repression–most notably, the Revolutionary Guards–are completely entwined with the current system; the Guards would be risking their power and privileges if they supported regime change.

As long as these two groups of people are united in their desire to maintain the status quo, there is no realistic hope of reform in Iran. If the regime splits, however, it is doomed, because it doesn’t have any public support. That probably won’t happen until Khamenei dies, which can’t happen soon enough.

My guess is that the Roberts Court will go down in history as the worst since the 1850s. From the creation of important new legal standards untethered to any provisions in the Constitution (“major questions”) to deliberate misstatements about the record (free exercise cases) to grubby political compromises (Obamacare) to the unscrupulous cherry-picking of history (gun cases; abortion) to an opinion based on hypothetical future facts that bear no resemblance to the actual record (presidential immunity) to rulings favoring parties who clearly lacked standing (most notably, student debt relief), this Court has done it all.

But which decisions were the worst? Here are my choices:

1. THE PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY CASE: The Court ignores the actual facts of the case, the text of the Constitution, and the legislative history–that is, everything that would normally drive a decision–and crafts dangerous new standards to protect Donald Trump based completely on its own views of what the Constitution should say.
2. THE NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS CASE: The evil twin of #1. The Court makes a sweeping new rule that will result in grave injustice and administrative chaos based solely on its distorted views of equity and history.
3. THE GUN CASES: No reputable historian with whom I am familiar believes the Court accurately interpreted the historical record. Now we are left with a line of reasoning that requires judges to determine whether AR-15s are the modern equivalent of muskets.

Roger Taney would be proud.

The voters responded to Trump’s recession and foreign policy failures by giving the Democrats a mandate for fundamental change in 2028. AOC took power in January 2029 and promised to make America fair and prosperous again. Citing “emergencies” involving poverty, environmental decline, inequality, immigration, and gun violence, she immediately enacted a blizzard of new rules that were applauded by the left.

The right predictably used the judicial system to fight back. It won a string of victories in the Supreme Court. But AOC threw Justice Barrett’s words back at the Court. The correct response to executive overreach was not judicial overreach, according to the new president, and the Court’s jurisdiction was limited to the parties in front of it; the government would no longer treat its decisions as the equivalent of forbidden nationwide injunctions.

The McConnell Project was truly dead. The red team and the reactionaries on the Court were outraged. But what could they do? The template had already been established during the Trump years. They were reaping what they had sowed.

I was hoping that I would feel better about the nationwide injunction decision when I woke up this morning. I don’t. If anything, I am even more alarmed than before.

The Supreme Court is sending a message to the country–we are not the resistance. We will establish new precedents to limit our powers to deal with executive overreach. We will continue to assume that the federal government is operating in good faith even when all of the evidence tells us otherwise. We will do the absolute minimum to keep Trump from trampling on the rights of vulnerable Americans. If that means chaos and massive injustice, that’s your problem, mon; you will have to find another way to solve it.

Trump is largely expanding his powers under the guise of bogus “emergencies.” This case tells us that the Court is going to acquiesce to whatever the government calls an “emergency.” Then what?

Regardless of what happens thereafter, count on Justice Barrett to wash her hands of it.