Month: June 2017

Shining, just like gold.

What’s in your queue?

I don’t know how Sean Spicer lives with himself. I don’t know how he gets out of bed in the morning and gets dressed for work. I mean, how would you feel reading stuff like this about you in the national press?

With Trump feeling as though he’s under siege from all sides, even the people he perceives to be fucking things up are earning points for fucking them up in an attempt to help him. “He looks at Spicer and he sees, like, the coroner from the Wizard of Oz. Remember when the fucking witch got hit in the head with the house?” the senior administration official said. “So, he feels bad for the guy and he knows the guy’s trying really hard. He has a soft spot for the guy. His friends call him up and tell him he’s a loser, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I feel bad for the guy.’”

In the abstract, working in the White House for the president sounds great. But he’s destroyed his reputation and his credibility and they only thing he’s clinging to is that his boss feels too bad for him to hold him accountable for being bad at his job.

His coworkers compare him to the Wicked Witch of the East and call him a loser.

Even the press feels bad for him:

The least likely people you’d expect to feel bad for embattled White House press secretary Sean Spicer are those who are most often subject to his temper.

So it came as a surprise to some on Wednesday when Spicer received an outpouring of sympathy from the press. The reason: As President Trump met with Pope Francis at the Vatican, the Catholic Spicer was noticeably absent from the entourage.

This seems like the kind of situation he should get himself out of as soon as possible. He’s already lost his job briefing the press and the briefings aren’t reliably televised anymore, anyway. There’s no prospect that things are going to improve for Spicer and based on his previous life I have to think that he knows better than to serve the man in the Oval Office.

It would be a mercy if Trump fired him, but apparently Trump only likes to fire people in fake versions of reality.

I don’t know how Sean Spicer lives with himself. I don’t know how he gets out of bed in the morning and gets dressed for work. I mean, how would you feel reading stuff like this about you in the national press?

With Trump feeling as though he’s under siege from all sides, even the people he perceives to be fucking things up are earning points for fucking them up in an attempt to help him. “He looks at Spicer and he sees, like, the coroner from the Wizard of Oz. Remember when the fucking witch got hit in the head with the house?” the senior administration official said. “So, he feels bad for the guy and he knows the guy’s trying really hard. He has a soft spot for the guy. His friends call him up and tell him he’s a loser, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I feel bad for the guy.’”

In the abstract, working in the White House for the president sounds great. But he’s destroyed his reputation and his credibility and they only thing he’s clinging to is that his boss feels too bad for him to hold him accountable for being bad at his job.

His coworkers compare him to the Wicked Witch of the West and call him a loser.

Even the press feels bad for him:

The least likely people you’d expect to feel bad for embattled White House press secretary Sean Spicer are those who are most often subject to his temper.

So it came as a surprise to some on Wednesday when Spicer received an outpouring of sympathy from the press. The reason: As President Trump met with Pope Francis at the Vatican, the Catholic Spicer was noticeably absent from the entourage.

This seems like the kind of situation he should get himself out of as soon as possible. He’s already lost his job briefing the press and the briefings aren’t reliably televised anymore, anyway. There’s no prospect that things are going to improve for Spicer and based on his previous life I have to think that he knows better than to serve the man in the Oval Office.

It would be a mercy if Trump fired him, but apparently Trump only likes to fire people in fake versions of reality.

Marcy Wheeler says succinctly one of the things I’ve been yammering about since last November but apparently not connecting either with Democrats or the Democratic establishment:

That’s all the more true given the investment Democrats have made in the Russian narrative. If Russia tampering with our vote is so important, then why is Republicans doing the same, much more aggressively and effectively, not worth the same effort?

Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel: Democrats need a plan for voter protection

It is the fact that so many people are so complacent about Republicans stealing votes and so worked up about whatever it is the Russians actually did do, if our benighted intelligence agencies ever deign to tell us peons, that is the important reality of 2016.  That it is getting worse even as Chuck Schumer drones on and Nancy Pelosi plans for 2018 is beyond worrying.

Kris Kobach seeks to have state secretaries of state and boards of elections provide him with a database of personal information on every registered voter in the US, including the last four digits of their Social Security number.  Welcome to Stasiland.  I’m surprised he didn’t ask that state vital records cross-link to each voter’s mother’s maiden name.

Now I’m going to pull an Arthur Gilroy on ya: Wake the fuck up!!!

So far, I’ve been focused on the successful hacking that the Russians did during the presidential campaign and haven’t focused much on the request Donald Trump made on July 27th, 2016 that Russia find the 33,000 emails that Hillary Clinton allegedly deleted because they were, she says, unrelated to official business and personal in nature. But I guess we need to revisit that request now in light of new reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

Let me just refresh your memory on this a little bit.

By late July, the intelligence community was reporting with confidence that Russian state-sponsored hackers were responsible for breaking and entering into DNC headquarters and leaking emails on the eve of the Democratic National Convention that led to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman of the party. The Obama administration was not yet publicly accusing the Russians of responsibility but they were privately developing options for retaliation. This was all known to the press and served as the context in which Trump made his now infamous comments:

Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, and encouraged them to publish whatever they may have stolen, essentially urging a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference here in an apparent reference to Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Mr. Trump’s call was another bizarre moment in the mystery of whether Vladimir V. Putin’s government has been seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.

At some point after that press conference, our intelligence community intercepted communications from “Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. [Michael] Flynn via an intermediary.”

Apparently, they did not identify the intermediary at that time. Yet, there is now strong evidence to suggest that the intermediary was Peter W. Smith, a recently deceased long-time adversary of the Clintons who helped finance the Arkansas Project back in the 1990s. The Arkansas Project hired David Brock and pursued the Clintons relentlessly on a variety of fronts from Whitewater to rumors that Bill Clinton had fathered a black child to what became known as Troopergate to the suicide of White House aide Vince Foster. Their efforts eventually resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton for matters that linked back indirectly to Paula Jones.

The evidence that Peter W. Smith colluded with the Russians to obtain stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s server is incontrovertible because Smith admitted to it in May shortly before he died at age 81. But the really concerning part of this is that Smith was promoting his effort as something that was approved and coordinated by Michael Flynn and his son. He did, in fact, receive emails that were purported to be the Holy Grail of deleted emails Donald Trump had requested, but he couldn’t verify their authenticity and didn’t want to take responsibility for publishing them. He asked the hackers to send them to WikiLeaks.

Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.

In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.

“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.

Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.

Here’s the really alarming part:

Mr. Smith and one of his associates said they had a line of communication with Mr. Flynn and his consulting company.

In one Smith email reviewed by the Journal, intended to entice outside experts to join his work, he offered to make introductions to Mr. Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked as chief of staff in his father’s company. Mr. Smith’s email mentioned the son among a small number of other people he said were helping.

Michael G. Flynn didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In another recruiting email seen by the Journal, Jonathan Safron, a law student Mr. Smith described as a close colleague, included links to the websites and LinkedIn profiles of people purportedly working with the Smith team. At the top of the list was the name and website of Flynn Intel, which Mr. Flynn set up after his 2014 firing as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Safron declined to comment on his email or Mr. Smith’s project.

I suppose there are a variety of defenses available here. Michael Flynn and his son can say that they never authorized Mr. Smith to use their names or their company in this manner. The Trump administration has already said that Mr. Smith had no role in their campaign and was acting as a free agent. At the time, even the Flynns were more informal advisers and supporters than salaried members of Trump’s campaign team. And, of course, Mr. Smith is now dead and unavailable to testify in court or provide further information to the Special Counsel.

But the alleged involvement of the Flynns in this activity is close to a smoking gun when you consider what subsequently transpired. I won’t detail all of that here, except to remind you that Trump ignored all advice and warnings and made the elder Flynn his national security adviser, refused to fire him even when told he was likely compromised by the Russians, and fired James Comey after the FBI Director refused to follow his request to drop his investigation of Flynn.

If nothing else, the case that Trump was attempting to conceal something and obstruct justice when he asked that Flynn’s connections to the Russians be dropped just got closer to a slam-dunk.

What’s odd about this is that it pertains entirely to events and actions that took place after the DNC hacks and after the initial release of emails. This seems to have been an effort to prove that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked, which at the time was something that James Comey said was possible but unproven. It looks like it was based on the conspiracy theory that Clinton was lying when she said the deleted emails were personal in nature.

While this story shows collusion, it doesn’t link Flynn and Trump back to the Guccifer 2.0 hacks that were the previous focus of interest. Yet, it also shows an amazing recklessness that these folks would aggressively seek to collude with Russian hackers at the exact same time that the intelligence community and the Obama administration was trying to figure out a way to punish the Russians for what they had already done.

If either Flynn left electronic records of communications with Mr. Smith, the Special Counsel will have arrived right at Trump’s door. And, of course, the elder Flynn is facing enough charges to add up to significant jail time. He may decide that testifying to Trump’s knowledge of his activities is the only way to remain a free man.

Recurgitated old news (seabe) from April 19 of this year. Just search the news item on the Internet.

“The mission was unable to visit the site itself due to security concerns and will
not attempt to get there, the head of the OPCW was said to have decided.”

From the official OPCW (The Hague) website no new press releases!

[Update-1] I repeat …

• Yesterday there was NO official press release from the OPCW
• Today’s OPCW twitter message was time stamped 4 hours ago!
• Yr link yesterday was to a Reuters news release which was regurgitated content from April of this year
• Stop the accusations and bullshitting!
• Yes, the OPCW has found evidence of CW used by rebels in Syria
• Yes, Turkish MIT was caught delivering sarin precursors into rebel held territory some years ago.

 « click for more info »

Why now does this old piece of news recirculate? Because of Macron in France and his strong statement about Syria, red line and promise France, if need be, will act  alone to retaliate? Later the same echoed by the White House and US Amb. Halley to the UN?

President Macron has invited Donald Trump to visit Paris on Bastille Day coming July 14 as commemoration of 100 years since U.S. joined the First World War against Kaiser Wilhelm’s German forces.

After a tense start of their relations, with a weird handshake, #Trump and Macron also agreed yesterday to cooperate on Syria.

Why now? Who is running the show in Washington DC … CIA at Langley, the military staff at the Pentagon or Tillerson at State – Foggy Bottom. Nest week presidents Trump and Putin are set to meet on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany. US Congress has passed fresh sanctions on Russia today.

Chemical weapons watchdogs rejects Russia’s bid for new Syria attack probe | The National – April 2017 |

But the Russian move had “attempted to undercut” the OPCW’s existing fact-finding mission (FFM), the British delegation said on Twitter.

“The OPCW executive council has overwhelmingly rejected the Russian and Iranian decision. Needless to say — #OPCW FFM investigation continues,” the tweet from the British delegation to the watchdog said.

The Belgian representative said the fact-finding team deserved the OPCW’s full confidence and there was no need “to put in place a new structure.”

The move came as OPCW head Ahmet Uzumcu said that “incontrovertible” OPCW test results had shown sarin gas or a similar substance were used in the attack.

The tests were conducted on samples from three people killed in the attack and seven survivors and analysed at four OPCW-designated laboratories.

I was admittedly stunned when Donald Trump won the presidency on Election Day, but by November 17th I had recovered enough to begin making an effort to see into the future. I began by looking at how the House Freedom Caucus would behave and what kind of choices they would face.

Trump wants to immediately do away with the Defense sequester, which the American Enterprise Institute estimates will allow him to spend about $300 billion extra over the next four years. The Wall Street Journal thinks that Trump’s proposed tax cuts will result in “$6 trillion in lost revenue over the next decade.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget looked at Trump’s proposals in the Spring and came up with this handy chart:

Now, you might wonder how you can increase the debt by 12 trillion in ten years without raising the borrowing limit of the U.S. government. Sure, you can sprinkle some magic fairy dust around that will assume economic growth will exceed 10% annually, but that seems rather extreme even for committed supply-siders. Will the Freedom Caucus laugh in Trump’s face, as Paul Ryan did in September, when asked to pass his $550 billion unpaid-for infrastructure bill?

You might think that these folks will simply adjust to their new situation and go along to get along. And many of them will do just that. But they won’t be able to avoid breaking pledges or casting votes to raise the debt ceiling every five minutes.

And, that, in a sense, is having their wings clipped.

As you can see, my starting point was trying to figure out how a group of lawmakers who had become habituated to voting against raising the debt ceiling could be convinced to blow up the deficit to anything approximating the degree to which Donald Trump was proposing.

As I explored this further, the outlines of my future analysis started to emerge:

Now, when it comes time to vote on huge budget-busting bills, it may be that the Democrats will be there ready to lend a hand. But they’ll have conditions, and those conditions will grow more demanding to the exact degree that the Freedom Caucus refuses to supply the votes themselves. In other words, the more intransigent they are on blowing up the debt and deficit, the more power the Democrats get to shape legislation.

Will they learn their lesson from this?

If they do, it will be something new because they continually forced Boehner into the arms of Pelosi over the last six years until it frustrated them so badly that they essentially forced Boehner’s resignation.

It’s a no win situation for the Freedom Caucus because Trump will go around them if he needs to. But they could still cannibalize their own leadership. At least, for now, they seem content with Paul Ryan as their speaker, but there could come a day that Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon (an avowed enemy of Ryan) asks them to defenestrate him. Or they could decide to do it wholly on their own as a way to push back against the White House’s big spending and reliance on Democrats.

There isn’t really a coherent strategy for them going forward, though. They can demand a total root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare but that’s probably not going to be possible on the terms they desire. But mostly, they’ll find themselves being whipped to vote for things that aren’t even remotely paid for, which will require them to up the debt ceiling repeatedly.

And if they refuse, the Democrats can hold the administration hostage in a fair bit of turnabout.

I had not yet anticipated how Trump would proceed and was still thinking that he might truly “clip the wings” of the Freedom Caucus as Jennifer Rubin was reporting he would at the time. I did not yet know that he would sign off on a plan to use a dual budget reconciliation process to in an effort to both repeal Obamacare and enact tax reform with only fifty votes in the Senate. By pursuing a plan maximally offensive to Democrats at the outset we also inadvertently gave veto power to both the Freedom Caucus and the moderate wing of the GOP to veto anything they didn’t like. And since they can’t agree with each other, he put his entire agenda at risk. But, more than that, he pushed off dealing with some of his other budget-busting ideas, like increased defense spending and a big infrastructure bill.

So, things didn’t unfold the way I anticipated but the structural logic of the conundrum remained in place and actually came out worse for the president. Trump hasn’t even gotten around to whipping House conservatives to vote for things that aren’t even remotely paid for and yet he’s still going to have trouble getting them to raise the debt ceiling. He should have made them walk that plank after he forced them to sign off on his big spending.

More than this, though, the dual budget reconciliation plan compounded the problem where the Freedom Caucus’s refusal to sign off on Trump’s campaign promises meant that the congressional leadership would have to go in search of Democratic votes that would not be forthcoming without painful conditions.  This was both because the plan alienated the Democrats and because it gave the Trump administration the false impression that they would never need Democratic support.

I actually gave Trump too much credit back in November. I thought he’d realize that the most fruitful way forward  would be to cut the Freedom Caucus out and seek the votes he needed for things like defense spending and infrastructure from the middle.  But he let the Republicans hijack his presidency and convince him to make Obamacare repeal and huge deficit busting tax cuts his top priorities.

Maybe this was driven by the fact that his most ardent supporters came from the far right. But it missed the reality he would face as president, the fact that he didn’t run as an orthodox tea partying conservative Republican on infrastructure, health care and entitlements, and that his most crucial supporters were actually longtime Democrats in the Rust Belt who had supported Barack Obama.

His natural congressional power bloc was actually a bipartisan one that would jettison Republican orthodoxy in the interest of building lots of roads and bridges, increasing defense spending, protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, dealing with the opioid crisis, and (yes) taking a hardline on immigration.

He pushed that group aside and followed a plan laid out by McConnell and Ryan that would have been fitting for any Republican president, including Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio.  Except Jeb and Marco would have been smart enough to realize that that kind of plan would never work.

I was admittedly stunned when Donald Trump won the presidency on Election Day, but by November 17th I had recovered enough to begin making an effort to see into the future. I began by looking at how the House Freedom Caucus would behave and what kind of choices they would face.

Trump wants to immediately do away with the Defense sequester, which the American Enterprise Institute estimates will allow him to spend about $300 billion extra over the next four years. The Wall Street Journal thinks that Trump’s proposed tax cuts will result in “$6 trillion in lost revenue over the next decade.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget looked at Trump’s proposals in the Spring and came up with this handy chart:

Now, you might wonder how you can increase the debt by 12 trillion in ten years without raising the borrowing limit of the U.S. government. Sure, you can sprinkle some magic fairy dust around that will assume economic growth will exceed 10% annually, but that seems rather extreme even for committed supply-siders. Will the Freedom Caucus laugh in Trump’s face, as Paul Ryan did in September, when asked to pass his $550 billion unpaid-for infrastructure bill?

You might think that these folks will simply adjust to their new situation and go along to get along. And many of them will do just that. But they won’t be able to avoid breaking pledges or casting votes to raise the debt ceiling every five minutes.

And, that, in a sense, is having their wings clipped.

As you can see, my starting point was trying to figure out how a group of lawmakers who had become habituated to voting against raising the debt ceiling could be convinced to blow up the deficit to anything approximating the degree to which Donald Trump was proposing.

As I explored this further, the outlines of my future analysis started to emerge:

Now, when it comes time to vote on huge budget-busting bills, it may be that the Democrats will be there ready to lend a hand. But they’ll have conditions, and those conditions will grow more demanding to the exact degree that the Freedom Caucus refuses to supply the votes themselves. In other words, the more intransigent they are on blowing up the debt and deficit, the more power the Democrats get to shape legislation.

Will they learn their lesson from this?

If they do, it will be something new because they continually forced Boehner into the arms of Pelosi over the last six years until it frustrated them so badly that they essentially forced Boehner’s resignation.

It’s a no win situation for the Freedom Caucus because Trump will go around them if he needs to. But they could still cannibalize their own leadership. At least, for now, they seem content with Paul Ryan as their speaker, but there could come a day that Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon (an avowed enemy of Ryan) asks them to defenestrate him. Or they could decide to do it wholly on their own as a way to push back against the White House’s big spending and reliance on Democrats.

There isn’t really a coherent strategy for them going forward, though. They can demand a total root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare but that’s probably not going to be possible on the terms they desire. But mostly, they’ll find themselves being whipped to vote for things that aren’t even remotely paid for, which will require them to up the debt ceiling repeatedly.

And if they refuse, the Democrats can hold the administration hostage in a fair bit of turnabout.

I had not yet anticipated how Trump would proceed and was still thinking that he might truly “clip the wings” of the Freedom Caucus as Jennifer Rubin was reporting he would at the time. I did not yet know that he would sign off on a plan to use a dual budget reconciliation process to in an effort to both repeal Obamacare and enact tax reform with only fifty votes in the Senate. By pursuing a plan maximally offensive to Democrats at the outset we also inadvertently gave veto power to both the Freedom Caucus and the moderate wing of the GOP to veto anything they didn’t like. And since they can’t agree with each other, he put his entire agenda at risk. But, more than that, he pushed off dealing with some of his other budget-busting ideas, like increased defense spending and a big infrastructure bill.

So, things didn’t unfold the way I anticipated but the structural logic of the conundrum remained in place and actually came out worse for the president. Trump hasn’t even gotten around to whipping House conservatives to vote for things that aren’t even remotely paid for and yet he’s still going to have trouble getting them to raise the debt ceiling. He should have made them walk that plank after he forced them to sign off on his big spending.

More than this, though, the dual budget reconciliation plan compounded the problem where the Freedom Caucus’s refusal to sign off on Trump’s campaign promises meant that the congressional leadership would have to go in search of Democratic votes that would not be forthcoming without painful conditions.  This was both because the plan alienated the Democrats and because it gave the Trump administration the false impression that they would never need Democratic support.

I actually gave Trump too much credit back in November. I thought he’d realize that the most fruitful way forward  would be to cut the Freedom Caucus out and seek the votes he needed for things like defense spending and infrastructure from the middle.  But he let the Republicans hijack his presidency and convince him to make Obamacare repeal and huge deficit busting tax cuts his top priorities.

Maybe this was driven by the fact that his most ardent supporters came from the far right. But it missed the reality he would face as president, the fact that he didn’t run as an orthodox tea partying conservative Republican on infrastructure, health care and entitlements, and that his most crucial supporters were actually longtime Democrats in the Rust Belt who had supported Barack Obama.

His natural congressional power bloc was actually a bipartisan one that would jettison Republican orthodoxy in the interest of building lots of roads and bridges, increasing defense spending, protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, dealing with the opioid crisis, and (yes) taking a hardline on immigration.

He pushed that group aside and followed a plan laid out by McConnell and Ryan that would have been fitting for any Republican president, including Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio.  Except Jeb and Marco would have been smart enough to realize that that kind of plan would never work.

Reading the New York Times last night and this morning, I felt like I had been plagiarized. It seems that what was once a lonely voice is rapidly becoming common wisdom. It’s been a recurring theme of my analysis for months that the Trump administration had blundered badly by marrying his unorthodox and in many cases heretical campaign for the Republican nomination and presidency with a strategy that is wholly reliant on conventional conservative Republicans for implementation and passage.

In particular, the decision to sign off on the never-before-attempted plan to pass two budget reconciliation bills in a single fiscal year is beginning to look like a narrow-alley dead end in a very bad neighborhood. The idea was that the Republicans could take advantage of the fact that since they never did their budget work last year they still had the opportunity to finish that up with a health care bill that only requires fifty votes to pass (with the vice-president breaking any tie). They could then use the same legislative trick to pass tax reform in this year’s budget plan at a fifty vote threshold. Without getting into all the parliamentary rigamarole that’s involved, the most significant consequence of adopting this plan was that the administration believed and acted as if they would never need a single Democratic vote for anything, ever.

The first problem with the plan was two-fold. First, by relying only on Republican votes in the Senate, they assured that they would get only Republican votes in the House, too. In itself, that wouldn’t be a problem except that it gave House Republicans permission to pass the most right-wing health care bill their moderates could stomach. That bill had no relationship to the promises Trump made on the campaign trail where he said he would protect Medicaid and not leave people dying in the street.

The plan relied on Republican unity. With only 52 votes in the Senate, any health care bill would have to win the support for virtually all of their members. But many of their members represent states that expanded Medicaid. If Trump had learned nothing else about Congress during the Obama years, he should have known that they have factions and are hard to lead. Did he not notice that Speaker of the House John Boehner lost his job because his own members refused to follow his leadership and rebelled when he had to go to the Democrats repeatedly to pay our bills on time and keep the doors to the government from being shuttered?

Trump put his health care agenda in the hands of conservative Republicans and then relied on a disunited party to act with complete discipline. This was a recipe for a bill that polls about as well as a case of genital warts and that cannot win passage because it is so heartless.

The second problem is more general. By acting as if the Democrats don’t matter and have nothing to contribute, the Republicans (both in the congressional leadership and in the White House) badly alienated a group of senators who might have been willing to lend Trump a hand on at least some of his agenda. And he has an agenda besides Obamacare repeal and tax reform that will need to get sixty votes in the Senate. In other words, he needs eight Democratic senators to sign off on anything he wants to do that isn’t contained in one of his two budget reconciliation bills. This was never going to be easy, which is kind of the point. To succeed, Trump couldn’t adopt a hard right agenda or think he could rely on that large of a rump of Democrats to back him in fulfilling the GOP’s longstanding wish list.

Now that McConnell has failed (at least, for now) to implement the dual budget reconciliation bill plan, he’s confessing that he’ll need Democrats to help him fix the damage his party and his strategy have done to the health care exchanges of the Affordable Care Act. Of course, that’s going to come at a price.

“At this stage,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, “there is general agreement among Democrats that it would be premature to meet with Republicans. We have to know that this repeal bill is dead.”

In this case, Sen. Schatz is merely keeping true to Chuck Schumer’s admonition and guidance to his caucus:

Rather than taking advantage of his honeymoon phase to pick an issue on which Democrats from conservative states might be amenable — fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, cutting taxes or stiffening immigration laws — Mr. Trump raced toward the most partisan corner of the room, pushing to repeal the health care law with no input from Democrats, in a manner that has proved deeply unpopular.

Democrats, watching Republicans careen around in search of a health care solution, honored the demand of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, that they stick together in their refusal to lift a finger to help until repeal was taken off the table.

And perhaps most important, Mr. Trump has rarely bothered to ask.

If that looks familiar it’s because I’ve written essentially the same thing over and over again. It’s not just health care and tax reform that are in peril. If Trump attempts to raise the debt ceiling using nothing but Republican votes, he will fail, too. If he tries to pass appropriations bills without any Democratic support, the government will either shut down or be funded on continuing resolutions that keep Obama’s priorities in place. He will not get an infrastructure bill without significant Democratic input and support.

Not only can he not govern successfully using this strategy, he cannot govern at all. This is why I foresaw that his administration would crack up on the shoals sometime this summer, and certainly no later than September when the fiscal year ends and the debt ceiling becomes critical.

Most concerning was the prospect and likelihood that he had painted himself into a corner and would discover that he had no way of recovering from the mess he’d made. As McConnell’s plan for Obamacare repeal faltered, he began warning his caucus of exactly what I am explaining now. But it was too late and the plan was never going to work anyway. The only thing that McConnell had to use in support of a bill that the people hate was the direness of the consequences of failure. But either he doesn’t understand the severity of the problem or he was unable to communicate it effectively enough. Perhaps it’s just not salvageable on any level, since the only way to delay their fate is to pass a bill that would strip 22 million people of their access to health care.

The consequences will begin to pile up now. Trump will lash out in ever more confusing and bizarre ways. And then the indictments and plea deals will start to flow in from Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s shop. By Thanksgiving, if not before, the nation will be confronted with the urgent need to remove Trump from power and I suspect there will be more consensus about it by then than most people can imagine right now.

I was hoping someone would take a careful look at how Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s experiment in Voodoo Economics has worked out for his state, and Justin Miller at The American Prospect has granted my wish. Without getting into all the details in this piece, I want to make a more general observation. There’s a lot of value in what Brownback did to Kansas because it gives us a chance to compare what the Republicans say will happen for education, employment, economic growth, and budgeting health if they get to implement their policies and what will actually happen.

Since 2013, the national job growth rate has been 7.6 percent but it has only been 3.5 percent in Kansas. There are 34 hospitals in the state that are now at risk of going out of business. Both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have downgraded its credit rating, increasing their cost of borrowing. Public schools are so short of money that two districts were compelled to end their year early. Brownback found himself so desperate for operating capital that he looted the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System and slashed funding for the state’s transportation system.

In short, things got so bad that the Republican-dominated legislature overrode Brownback’s veto and passed a budget that, among other things, rolled back his tax cuts and provided more funding for schools.

The Democrats should not ignore these results. They should study them and they should figure out a way to highlight them relentlessly so that as many people as possible internalize the lessons. No people should have to endure what the people of Kansas have endured if it can be avoided. Republican office seekers will continue to assure us that the best way to raise revenue is to ask for less of it and that exempting businesses and limited liability corporations from taxation will lead to job growth. They’ll continue to starve education budgets with talk about providing choice, and they won’t stop attacking Medicaid even as it results in devastation for the health care system. But we can point, in all these cases, to Sam Brownback and Kansas.

We can say that we tried all that and here is how it turned out.

In the end, it was Republican lawmakers who had seen enough and voted to override their governor’s veto. But they had to learn the hard way, and Republicans from other states and in Congress show no signs that they’re going to alter their ideology as a result of seeing it fail so spectacularly when given a real chance to succeed.

Since the GOP won’t learn, it’s up to Democrats to make sure the voters learn.