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Republicans Are Outraged About the Deficit They Caused |
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Wednesday, 17 October 2018 08:24 |
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Cheadle writes: "The hypocrisy here would be astounding if anyone had the capacity to be astounded anymore."
Mitch McConnell. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Republicans Are Outraged About the Deficit They Caused
By Harry Cheadle, Vice
17 October 18
To pay for their tax breaks for the rich, they want to take healthcare from the poor.
 he Republican war on government is no secret. For decades, the GOP has worked in concert with a coterie of right-wing institutions to cripple core functions of the state ranging from tax collection to public schools to healthcare. The party and its leaders are sometimes honest about their aims, like when Ted Cruz talks about abolishing the IRS, or when Newt Gingrich said they hoped Medicare would "wither on the vine" in the 90s. But they go about them in a piecemeal way, like a man trying to burn down his house by setting individual items of furniture on fire. Donald Trump's latest budget proposal outlined a host of harsh cuts that targeted mainly the poor, his EPA has worked to abdicate its responsibility to ensure the nation has clean air and water, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being dismantled from the inside, and Trump's congressional allies want to make it harder for poor people—especially children and the elderly—to eat.
But the hairpin-turn logic Republicans employ to erode the government usually isn't so obvious as it was Tuesday, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the old GOP bugbear of government spending.
The hypocrisy here would be astounding if anyone had the capacity to be astounded anymore. After spending the Obama era frowning and sighing about how the national deficit (the gap between annual government spending and revenues) was troublingly high, Republicans decided last year to explode that same figure with a tax cut package massively tilted toward the rich and corporations. When warned by various experts that cutting taxes would mean lower revenues and therefore higher deficits, Republicans attacked those analyses as biased and claimed the deficit wouldn't go up all that much. Predictably, the experts were right and the deficit did increase because of the tax cut—despite the persistence of magical supply-side economic thinking. But after Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill that jacked up military spending among other priorities, McConnell is apparently back to caring about the deficit.
His solution doesn't involve cutting the defense budget or raising taxes. In remarks to Bloomberg, he made it clear that "we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid." Here's Republicans' excuse to go after the things they always wanted to destroy.
In fairness, these priorities do make up the majority of the federal budget—spending money to provide health insurance and other forms of security to the poor, the sick, and the old is expensive. But Medicare and Social Security are enormously popular, which is why Trump himself claimed that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were trying to wipe out Medicare in a falsehood-laden USA Today column last week. McConnell's comments make it clear just how big a lie that claim was. And it's not like the Senate leader is alone—his view is apparently shared by White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who said last month that "we have to be tougher on spending." (House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is leaving Congress, was another proponent of what's euphemistically called "entitlement reform," though he wasn't able to accomplish anything on that front.)
So, to recap: Republicans, who claim to care about how much money the government is spending, effectively spent a bunch of money by giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Now they're demanding that to solve the problem partly created by that giveaway, the government should cut benefit programs aimed at alleviating suffering among the most vulnerable people in society. The GOP economic policy can be properly summed up by a bastardized Game of Thrones quote: The rich get to eat, and everyone else takes the shit.
This is obviously politically toxic, since most Americans actually seem to want Medicare expanded. It's also nonsensical from a common-sense policy perspective. Even if you don't buy the lefty idea that deficits don't matter, if you were really concerned about the federal balance sheet, why would you reject the idea of ever raising taxes? Why is the revenue side of the ledger completely off the table whenever a conservative talks about fiscal responsibility?
The answer, of course, is that the rich want lower taxes and the Republican Party is the party of the rich. Even if the combination of tax cuts and slashed benefits is both unpopular and a bad idea on the merits, Republicans will still support it just as rats instinctively chew through wires even if it kills them and starts fires. And just as negotiating with those rats is pointless, debating Republicans on economic policy seems like a lost cause—the GOP only cares about deficits when it's politically convenient, and it won't be honest about its policy goals.
Even when McConnell admitted that the Republicans were going to go after Social Security and Medicare, it was clear that he was also doing a bit of political positioning. "Entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government," he told Bloomberg. In other words, if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterms, expect them to start hollering at the Democrats about making vicious benefit cuts in the name of responsibility and thrift—cuts too unpopular even for the current crop of GOP politicians dominating DC to openly advocate for.
If Democrats learned anything from the past two years, they won't be listening.
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RSN | On the Frontline: Real News Battles Fake Power |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 16 October 2018 12:36 |
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Rosenblum writes: "An email from Florida landed in this noble Normandy town with less impact than a Nazi shell, yet it was an eerie reminder of how hubris and folly filled so many graves on the beaches nearby. The menace today is America über alles."
Palestinian Saber al-Ashkar (29) hurls rocks during clashes with Israeli forces, May 11th, 2018. (photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP)
On the Frontline: Real News Battles Fake Power
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
16 October 18
 AYEUX, France – An email from Florida landed in this noble Normandy town with less impact than a Nazi shell, yet it was an eerie reminder of how hubris and folly filled so many graves on the beaches nearby. The menace today is America über alles.
Last week, I assembled hard data for a Mort Report Extra on the dangers posed by Donald Trump and his enablers. One response, dismissing fact as “liberal-leftist rant,” made plain what the world is up against — and why Bayeux is again on the frontline.
“We can agree to disagree,” the email said, “and you can live in whatever fantasy world you think is best. IF YOU don’t like it here, then move to Finland, or the socialist utopia of your dreams.” Sure. We’ll leave America to greedheads, useful idiots and flat-out morons like him.
I’d have junked that note, like so many similar ones we all see, but for the reason I’m here. As every year for the past 25, journalists from around the world gathered at the weekend for the Bayeux-Calvados War Correspondents Awards. We honored our own, mourned our fallen, and during long, lubricated, music-blasting nights we avoided shop talk about workaday mayhem.
Some of the gang are fresh out of the box, with new skills and high energy. Others have been at it for half a century. Patrick Chauvel, son of a grand French photographer, just covered his 44th war alongside his 18-year-old son, Antoine, in Iraq.
They are a disparate bunch, but one hard fact defines them. Men and women who wade into risk, spending miserable months staying close to their story, do not lie about what they see.
Bayeux is the perfect venue. The last big battle around here was clear-cut. Allies and French resisters stopped Germany just in time to spare this small jewel of a city, with a magnificent cathedral that houses the world’s first newsreel, a millennium-old tapestry reporting the Norman conquest of England.
Today’s wars are insidious and elusive. World War II pales in comparison, considering the potential domination of authoritarians who not only stamp out human rights and let desperate refugees die in droves but also speed up ecological collapse of the only planet we’ve got.
Few of these looming threats lend themselves to headlines. When a torrent of words and images numbs us all, con men prevail over statesmen. Here in Bayeux, it is easy to spot the devils in the details. The more people learn, the more they care. Townsfolk, schoolkids and visitors jam every exhibit.
One night, 12,000 adults and children in a city of 14,000 filled the big tent for three hours of graphic accounts of how Saudi Arabia, with U.S. support, has been bombing blockaded Yemen for three years. Twenty million people are at risk, with raging cholera and soaring infant deaths. For many back home in America, Yemen is just another of those puzzling foreign names.
In the winning photo spread by Mahmud Hams of Agence France-Presse, a Palestinian in a wheelchair aims his slingshot at the heavily armed Gaza border with Israel. Partisans on either side of that enduring conflict can see it is not easy to decide who is David and who is Goliath.
All week long, images and words brought grim reality from Venezuela, Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Ukraine, among others. At the end, an international jury picked dispatches, photos, and TV reports that exemplify the best work of real-news practitioners.
The solemn Bayeux moment is on the first afternoon when we gather among long rows of white steles bearing more than 2,000 names of journalists killed since World War II, in conflict or by people with something to hide. Each year, the list of new names is distressingly long.
Christiane Amanpour headed the jury this year, reuniting with pals who worked with her in Bosnia and on stories going back to the first Gulf War. In those earlier days, we sought old-style balance. In a Trumpian world of evolving disorder, her new mantra is a guideline: truthful, but not neutral.
Truth in its actual up-close context is getting damned hard to find. At lunch one day, I sat next to a photographer I should have recognized. He had spent 11 months in an Islamic State prison, at times watching others beheaded in front of him. He made a chess set out of scraps to keep himself together until the French government worked out his release.
“I took a little time to get myself straight,” he said, smiling as he made a small circle with his finger around his ear to mock transitory mental problems, “and then went right back to work. I don’t talk about it, don’t want to be known as an ex-hostage. It’s the life I’ve chosen, and I’m going to continue at it.”
Committed journalists look beyond bang-bang, strife, and piteous human tides to new trends that distort reality. The most troubling is in Donald Trump’s America, a blatant reversal of fundamental tenets. Beyond the obvious, vignettes show an insidious underside few people notice. Take the case of Lucas Menget, a widely respected French reporter.
Lucas still has his grandfather’s Stanford University thesis on Thomas Paine. As a kid, he lived in Boston; his father was a Harvard professor and his mother taught American literature at Tufts. Every year, for decades, he has flown back to visit friends in a country he loves. Now he can visit North Korea but not the United States.
When he took his kids for a holiday recently, a Customs and Border Protection agent noted his many visits to Iraq and denied him entry. Without explanation or recourse, he is on an indefinite shitlist. Diplomat friends at the U.S. Embassy in Paris told him things would get worse if they intervened, because the CBP, under Homeland Security, distrusts the State Department.
Reporters can usually find a way into the strictest of countries. But, Lucas said, the embassy warned him not to try. “I don’t want to risk being handcuffed in front of my children and be locked up for days before getting expelled and banned for life.”
Such cases are unusual, but they are hardly rare. Attempts to investigate them seldom get anywhere. That is not what America is supposed to be.
This year, a U.S.-dated story was chosen as a finalist for judging. It was from Charlottesville, describing deadly violence by neo-Nazis at that rally, for which Trump said there was “blame on both sides.” Jurors agreed that division in America didn’t qualify as war. At least not yet.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Who Can Stop the Supreme Court? |
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Tuesday, 16 October 2018 10:45 |
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Thomson-DeVeaux writes: "History has shown that there are practical reasons for the court to avoid bucking mainstream sentiment."
Activists in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. (photo: Getty Images)
Who Can Stop the Supreme Court?
By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, FiveThirtyEight
16 October 18
Congress and the president have historically reined in the justices when they’ve gone against public opinion.
 ow that he’s officially taken his seat on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh has no obvious reason to care what you think. Neither does Sonia Sotomayor, or Samuel Alito, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They and their colleagues are justices for life, which should in theory give them the freedom to write unpopular opinions.
But Supreme Court history shows that’s not always how it works. In the past, the justices have appeared to bend to popular opinion, in addition to being reined in by other branches of government when they deviate dramatically from the mainstream. That history has a lot to tell us about how much leeway the court’s new majority has when deciding future cases on issues where a conservative ruling might spark a backlash, like abortion. These justices may have an unprecedented opportunity to shift an already conservative court even further to the right, but they’ll likely have to navigate more than just jurisprudence if they want their rulings to last.
The relationship between the court and the rest of us is well-studied by historians and political scientists. And several studies do suggest that the justices respond to public opinion. For example, Peter Enns, a political science professor at Cornell University, found that the court’s ideological tilt tracks with public opinion over time. “We can’t get inside their minds and understand how they’re weighing the potential public reaction,” he said. “But when the public’s perspective is more liberal, we consistently see more liberal Supreme Court decisions, and the reverse is true when the public mood is more conservative. It’s hard to believe that’s just a coincidence.”
It’s possible, of course, that the justices’ individual worldviews are simply influenced by the same forces that shape broader public opinion. But history has shown that there are practical reasons for the court to avoid bucking mainstream sentiment. In the past, Congress, the president and state governments have openly defied controversial Supreme Court rulings. Congress can also regulate the types of cases the court is allowed to hear or dilute a recalcitrant majority by “packing” the court with ideologically sympathetic justices. Proposals that take advantage of that power have been considered seriously only a handful of times, according to Tom Clark, who is a political scientist at Emory University and studies the limits of judicial independence. But when they have, the court avoided formal retaliation — like being remade into a 15-member chamber — because the justices ultimately backed down.
Perhaps the most famous example of a Supreme Court brought to task by the other branches of government was in the 1930s, which also happened to be the last time the court was controlled by a strong conservative majority. The country was in the depths of the Great Depression, and the Supreme Court was aggressively striking down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive economic legislation, which was widely popular at the time. Finally, Roosevelt announced a plan to increase the size of the court by as many as six justices. The scheme ultimately collapsed in Congress — and may have done some damage to Roosevelt’s popularity in the process — but not before one of the right-leaning justices suddenly began voting to uphold New Deal laws that were identical to ones he had voted to gut only a year earlier.
Barry Friedman, who is a professor at New York University Law School and studies legal history, said there’s a clear lesson from the 1937 court-packing episode. “The court can’t get too far out of step with public opinion before something happens to rein them in,” he said.
And it wasn’t the first time Congress or the president had intervened when the court appeared to block a popular policy agenda. During Republican-led Reconstruction, when three constitutional amendments were passed to end slavery, give legal equality to former slaves and prohibit racial discrimination at the polls, the GOP swept the 1866 congressional elections. That gave them a veto-proof majority against President Abraham Lincoln’s Democratic successor, who wanted to allow Southern states to re-enter the union more easily than many Republicans were willing to countenance. When the Supreme Court seemed likely to halt Reconstruction’s progress, Congress repeatedly changed the size of the court for political ends and revoked the court’s ability to review a case that could have threatened military rule in the South — a decision the court itself upheld.
Even in moments when the court has taken steps to shore up a controversial decision, a backlash has first delayed the enforcement of the ruling and eventually set the stage for the court to back down. The landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which said that school segregation laws were unconstitutional, was decided unanimously with the explicit goal of lending additional legitimacy to the decision. But it was still met by outrage and defiance from Southern state governors and a lukewarm response from President Dwight Eisenhower, who thought the court should pursue integration by subtler means. And after years of striking down attempts to thwart desegregation — and amid a fierce national debate about the use of school busing to integrate schools — the court finally capitulated to the status quo when it ruled in 1974 that the Detroit public schools could remain functionally segregated. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that the majority’s ruling was “more a reflection of a perceived public mood” that desegregation had gone far enough than “the product of neutral principle of law.”
These historical showdowns are uncommon, but Clark said that’s precisely because the Supreme Court justices are concerned about their own institutional legitimacy and aware of limitations on their power. For a book published in 2010, Clark reviewed all of the bills introduced in Congress to curb the court starting in 1877 and found that the court seemed to respond through its opinions. When Congress introduced more bills that would limit the court’s power, the court struck down fewer laws. Clark sees the court-curbing bills — which almost never became law — as a way of sending a signal to the court. “These reactions allow the justices to learn if they’ve gone too far out of line,” he said.
Whether the current Supreme Court justices have internalized this view is another question. Some research has concluded that the court’s historical “swing” justices are more likely to respond to strategic concerns like public opinion when casting pivotal votes. If true, the addition of Kavanaugh could put even more pressure on the new median justice, Chief Justice John Roberts, who is already known for his concern about the court’s reputation, to moderate the court’s right wing. He might even join the liberals in key cases, as retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s previous median justice, sometimes did.
Who controls Congress could have an impact on the conservative majority’s willingness to make a sharp right turn, too. If Republicans retain control after this year’s midterm elections, the court would be largely safe from reprisal (although its institutional legitimacy could be even further damaged on the left). But the stakes would change considerably if the Democrats take one or both houses of Congress in November.
Part of the problem is that no one — including the justices — knows exactly what “too conservative” means. Over the past decade, the Roberts court has already issued a slew of right-leaning rulings without triggering widespread public outrage. And even when a decision is unpopular, it can be difficult to predict what will spur Congress and the president to action and what won’t. The 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed unlimited corporate spending on direct advocacy for and against political candidates, was broadly disliked when it came down, but the Democrats — who were in control of both Congress and the White House at the time — didn’t retaliate against the court.
The country’s deep ideological divisions may also help insulate the court, said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. “We’re so divided — it’s hard to think of many issues that an outright majority would get really angry about,” he said. Overturning Roe v. Wade is one clear example of a ruling that could spark a legitimacy crisis, since polls have consistently found that a solid majority of Americans oppose such a move. But it’s possible to significantly undermine abortion rights without overruling Roe explicitly, using what some legal experts have called the “death by a thousand cuts” approach.
These questions won’t be answered overnight. So far, the Supreme Court’s term looks relatively sleepy, and it will take time for the engines of the conservative legal movement, now emboldened by Kavanaugh’s confirmation, to bring new, sweeping challenges to the court. But the figure to watch for clues isn’t Kavanaugh — it’s Roberts, who will need to start figuring out what kind of conservative court he wants to lead.
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I'm Not Sure We're Ready for the Chaos That Will Follow the Midterms |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Tuesday, 16 October 2018 08:30 |
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Pierce writes: "Over the weekend, there were a couple of ominous, if overlooked, statements from Republican officials touching on the upcoming midterm elections."
U.S. Capitol police give protesters a warning to move away from the front of the Capitol or get arrested. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
I'm Not Sure We're Ready for the Chaos That Will Follow the Midterms
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
16 October 18
Prepare for recount hell and the delegitimizing of the Blue Wave.
 ver the weekend, there were a couple of ominous, if overlooked, statements from Republican officials touching on the upcoming midterm elections. In a radio interview, National Security Adviser John Bolton sang the new administration* tune of how what we really should be watching as regards outside interference in our elections is what China is doing. From the Washington Free Beacon:
On Chinese election meddling, Bolton said the problem is serious. "We are very worried about the question of Chinese interference not just in individual elections, but more broadly trying to influence the American political discussion with an influence campaign that I think could well be unprecedented," he said.
Echoing declassified intelligence made public during a speech by Pence, Bolton said the Beijing influence operations must be stopped. "I think the United States needs to stand up, frankly, to any foreign government that thinks it's going to interfere in our politics," he said. "We are a self-governing people. We will govern ourselves. We don't need international institutions to tell us how to do it. And we particularly don't need foreigners trying to exert undue influence over us."
And then, down in Georgia, Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State and current GOP candidate for governor, has been spreading the word that Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent, has been arranging for undocumented immigrants to vote in November. He has been sending out mailers to that effect. From Mother Jones:
The back side of the mailer features an image of Abrams and says she’s “too extreme for Georgia.” His proof: Kemp says Abrams intends to turn Georgia into a “sanctuary state” and would “allow illegal immigrants to vote.” It’s a sly political maneuver on Kemp’s part, but it’s also false. The claim apparently dates back to Abrams’ time as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, when she voted against a law that would have required potential voters to provide proof of citizenship while registering to vote. Georgia passed its law in 2009, followed by Alabama in 2011 and Kansas in 2013, as my colleague Ari Berman has reported. But in 2016, a federal appeals court blocked all three states from implementing proof of citizenship laws for people who use the federal voter registration form, because under the National Voter Registration Act, it would be unfair to require proof of citizenship for some registrants and not others.
These two statements are not merely crude electioneering. They are part of a national mechanism that is being created to delegitimize a Democratic sweep should it happen next month. It will be Chinese meddling, or sneaky "Illegals." And they will sell it hard to those people most likely to believe it. And the country likely will catch on fire.
In addition, as close as some of these races appear to be, we likely are heading into a couple of months of recount hell. If 2000 was any indication, there could be 10 or 20 Brooks Brothers riots in our future. All democratic norms are down. It's a free-for-all.
I'm not sure if the Democratic Party is ready for what could be coming, and I'm very sure neither the elite political press nor the country is ready for it. I'd like to believe everything is going to be most chill at the polling places, but I'm not betting on that either way. I'd like to believe that the results, whatever they are, at least will be treated as legitimate decisions made by a democratic polity. But you'd have to be crazy to bet on that.
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limate change is a hoax.
