Month: July 2017

Trump fires Mini-Me. How is that possible and what do you imagine the implications will be?

It seems to be all the rage among Republicans these days–starting in the White House.  

I was fixing to write a post wondering how Scaramucci & Kelly were going to get along. Moot!

Reading that Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has penned a reprise, of sorts, of his predecessor Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative got me thinking about a variety of things and sent me off on a little Googling adventure. One place I landed was on an old essay on Goldwater written by Louis Menand for the New Yorker in 2001. There are several elements in this essay that have extra saliency in light of the election results of November 2016.

Technically, this article is a book review of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, but it doesn’t in any way restrict itself to a treatment of Perlstein’s work.

This first excerpt is interesting because it shows the similarities and crucial differences between Goldwater and Trump, while also reminding us that the Washington establishment changes very little over time.

Goldwater was an enemy of the establishment. That term was coined by another eminent British journalist who covered American politics, Henry Fairlie. Fairlie first used it to refer to the network of power brokers in English life, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the editor of the T.LS. In America, it came to refer to the suits—the Washington lawyers, the New York bankers, and the university presidents, along with their academic and journalistic epigones—upon whose wisdom elected officials were accustomed to rely, and without whose approbation no public policy could be expected to succeed. The great virtue of this group from the late nineteen-forties through the early nineteen-sixties was also its prime vulnerability: it believed itself to be above partisanship and self-interest. Its watchword was “consensus,” and its instrument was the federal bureaucracy, whose vast resources it undertook to direct in a pragmatic manner conducive to the welfare of all. The establishment was liberal in the sense that it believed in the power of government to solve social problems and improve the quality of life. But it was deeply vested in the status quo as well. Its members had no inclination to question the assumptions of a social and economic dispensation of which they were the most privileged products.

Goldwater’s hatred of the establishment and its workings was, at its deepest level, not very different from the New Left’s and the counterculture’s: he believed that top-down managerial liberalism was a threat to individual autonomy, and he despised the notion that ideology didn’t matter. He would not have put it quite this way, but he was haunted by the same spectre that has haunted many other critics of the liberal welfare state: the spectre of soul death. Like Holden Caulfield, Mario Savio, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem, Malcolm X, Randle McMurphy, Captain America and Billy—like almost any iconic figure of the era you can name—Goldwater just didn’t like being told what to do.

It’s one of the reasons he was such a terrible candidate. The more he alienated his audiences, the more certain he became that he was on the right track. He had no great personal ambition to be President; he saw himself as the spokesman for a set of principles, and he had little interest in bending them to suit the wishes of even his admirers.

It’s an important insight that Goldwater became associated with a kind of desperate reactionary effort to preserve the status quo (a reputation earned by his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his subsequent victories in the Deep South), but was also in fact pursuing another angle on a more general anti-establishment revolt. In some sense, Goldwater pursued a Honey Badger strategy of saying whatever he wanted with little regard for the politics. It’s this habit that reminds us of Donald Trump, along with the establishment targets of his ire. The difference is that Goldwater had a deep set of principles, while President Trump does not.

And the next excerpt might help explain why Trump won and Goldwater was crushed:

Still, the tragedy of Barry Goldwater is also, in a sense, the tragedy of American conservatism, even in its moments of triumph. Goldwater’s mistake was to believe that he could run for President on a program of political abstractions. People don’t vote for abstractions. They vote their hopes and their fears, and they tend to see those in concrete terms. Twentieth-century American conservatism of the kind that Goldwater represented is the view that individuals, businesses, and local communities should have more control over their own destinies, and should not be subject to the bureaucratic dictates of a central government. As a proposition in political philosophy, there is no doubt much to be said for this view. Its appeal as a piece of campaign rhetoric obviously has everything to do with which bureaucratic dictates voters think you are talking about. What Goldwater discovered was that, in 1964, the philosophical language of conservatism was read by many voters as code for resistance to forced integration, and in the end he could not disentangle himself from an alliance that he had not desired. Many conservatives have found themselves in the same box. A political philosophy is not going to get very far without voters. As Goldwater observed, in politics you have to hunt where the ducks are. Most ducks are not interested in philosophy.

Goldwater’s comments about hunting ducks was in reference to the then-existing habit of Republicans to court the black vote, especially in the South, since the Democratic Party there was so clearly hostile to their interests. Goldwater was saying that southern whites were naturally conservative and a richer vein to tap. It was advice that Richard Nixon intuitively understood and pursued with vigor, and the success of this strategy explains pretty much everything that came after for the conservative movement, including both its successes and its failures. Goldwater wasn’t a segregationist but he did quickly find that segregationists were drawn to elements of his philosophy like no other interest group. Nixon was eager to entangle himself in the moral quagmire. Reagan brought in the post-Roe evangelical right, consolidated the Wallace Democrats and won two landslide victories.

Looking at what Sen. Jeff Flake says went wrong with the conservative movement is instructive here.

This is a long time in coming. I got here in Washington in 2001. … And we got [President George W. Bush’s education overhaul law] No Child Left Behind, which was, I thought, big federal overreach into local education policy. And then we got the prescription drug benefit, which added about $7 trillion in unfunded liabilities. I didn’t think that was a very conservative thing to do.

When we couldn’t argue that we were the party of limited government anymore, then that forced us into issues like flag burning or trying to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, things that we wouldn’t have done otherwise if we would have been arguing about true principles of limited government or spending.

George W. Bush understood that Goldwater conservatism was too abstract and lifeless and frankly cold-hearted, which is why he and Karl Rove pitched a new “compassionate” conservatism. Part of that compassion was an actual commitment (however misguided in their implementation) to public education and a desire to make sure that seniors have access to life-saving and life-extending prescription drugs. For Sen. Flake, these were deviations from conservative principles. Once abandoned, the party was left to appeal to the religious right, jingoism, and (although unstated) white racial resentment.

But this is a bad misreading of history. These disparate elements of modern conservatism confounded Goldwater from the beginning. They were woven together by Nixon and expanded by Reagan. And even as George W. Bush abandoned some of the more libertarian elements (both domestically and in foreign affairs), he also considered his father’s electoral defeat largely in terms of his failure to sufficiently bind the racists and the religious right to his bosom. Poppy Bush had broken his “read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes, but he had also invited a Buchananite cultural values revolt. Dubya sought to head both threats off at the pass by making tax cuts his first priority and insisting that Jesus Christ was his favorite political philosopher. The Terri Schiavo case should also be considered in this context, along with his creation of an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

This wasn’t a deviation from principle on Bush’s part. It was a carefully considered exercise in coalition building. Bush didn’t actually win the election in 2000, but he came close enough. And he could not have come so close without his pandering to the religious right or his tax-cutting promises or his efforts to soften the hard edges of Gingrich’s brand of conservatism.

What Trump did differently was dial down the pretense of compassion and dial up the racial resentment and religious insecurity. It turned out that that these things could be adjusted and still even out in the end. But what really worked for Trump was his full-throated attack on the establishment. The more he insulted the Republican leaders and the media and the elite’s cultural expectations of decency, the better he performed in the primaries. And it worked just well enough in the general election to win in the areas he needed to win.

What I’d say to Sen. Flake is that it’s true that Trump is an abomination but the solution to Trump is not going to be found by tinkering with the dials so that there is less boorishness and anti-intellectualism and more attacks on the federal bureaucracy. Trump is extreme and in many ways unrepresentative of the conservatism that has come down to us from Goldwater, but the sin of modern conservatism was there from its inception. It was there with Goldwater’s biggest backer, William F. Buckley, making excuses from Jim Crow based on white supremacy in the pages of the National Review. It was there when Robert Bork and William Rehnquist convinced Goldwater that he had to oppose the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds despite his instinctual distaste for racial politics.

Sen. Flake wants to know how things got so bad for the Republican Party, but they’ve been bad. At the root of this is the problem Goldwater faced at the outset, which is that his limited government ideology had limited appeal as a bloodless political philosophy and could only gain power by being wedded to a politics of grievance and resentment.

Mississippi was about as Democratic a state as you could find when Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act. In November 1964, Mississippi gave the Republican Goldwater eighty-seven percent of their votes. That’s where the entangling began, and everything since then for the conservative movement has just been a postscript.

It’s true, as Louis Menand wrote in 2001, that the idea that “local communities should have more control over their own destinies” has a lot of merit. What it doesn’t have and has never had is enough intrinsic appeal to overcome politically the people’s desire for a robust federal government without making common cause with racists and religious fundamentalists.

Flake is right to bemoan this situation but incorrect to think that Trump represents a true break or that the elements that make up the conservative coalition can ever prevail without each other. What Trump does signal, though, is that as the Republicans continue to lose greater and greater percentages of the non-white vote, the only solution for them is to gain more of the white vote. And Trump showed how to accomplish this, to his everlasting shame.

No, the GOP isn’t giving up:

The Cassidy-Graham proposal hasn’t been scored by the Congressional Budget Office, which would be required if it were to receive a vote under the fast-track budget “reconciliation” procedure. There is also no bill text publicly available. The plan would keep intact most of Obamacare’s taxes except the medical device tax, send federal health care funds to the states in block grants, kill Obamacare’s individual mandate and maintain protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Trump pressured aides over the weekend to show progress, and the Graham-Cassidy proposal is seen as one possible way forward. Administration officials have sought to bring together Graham and Cassidy, along with conservative Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows of North Carolina, to agree on a proposal. For now, the effort is mostly supported by mostly rank-and-file GOP lawmakers.

Basically, if they can find a bill that will appease McCain, they will have a bill that can pass.

It is true they did not pass the Skinny Repeal.

It is also true they were one vote short.  Can they find a way to get McCain to vote for something?  My guess is yes.

Can they do that and get the same bill past the House?
I have no idea.

And neither does anyone else.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/31/obamacare-repeal-white-house-effort-241168

There are two very significant things you can observe when reading this Washington Post piece by Sari Horwitz and Robert Costa on the broken relationship between the president and his attorney general. The first is that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is willing to be obsequious in an effort to keep his dream job, but only up to a point. When it comes to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, he’s not willing to concede much to Donald Trump. Sure, he can understand why the president finds his decision frustrating, but…

“I’m confident I made the right decision, a decision that’s consistent for the rule of law,” Sessions said. “An attorney general who doesn’t follow the law is not very effective in leading the Department of Justice.”

…the president is angry with him for following the law. One day after the Post revealed that Sessions had met in his Senate office with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and failed to disclose it during his confirmation hearing, and a mere three weeks after he was sworn in as attorney general, Sessions held a press conference at the Department of Justice and announced that “I have recused myself from matters that deal with the Trump campaign.” He explained that he was following the advice of Justice Department lawyers. Trump is fuming mad that Sessions followed the legal advice of Justice Department lawyers. But imagine what it would have looked like if Sessions had ignored that advice. He would have invited a revolt by not only Congress, but also by the majority of people serving in the department he has just begun to lead. In particular, the FBI would have gone ape. It’s not unlikely that there would have mass resignations, and anyone trying to argue that Sessions wasn’t leading a cover-up of Trump’s actions and his own actions would have been left with no compelling rebuttal points.

Sessions admits as much. He’s saying that the president asked him to break the law and he’s sorry if his refusal to do so makes Trump angry but that’s just the way it had to be: “I serve at the pleasure of the president. If he wants to make a change, he can certainly do so, and I would be glad to yield in that circumstance, no doubt about it.”

The second significant thing you can observe in the piece is that Trump is now suffering from an age-old managerial problem. Those in positions of responsibility frequently find that their staff, for a variety of reasons, will seal them off from bad news down below or from hearing alternative points of view that are helpful in formulating policy. In this case, Jeff Sessions has some strong allies in the West Wing, including especially senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn (who was until recently a Senate aide to Sessions). But neither of them are willing to risk the Trump’s displeasure by advocating for Sessions directly to the president. Thus, the job of warning Trump off his plans to replace Sessions as attorney general has fallen to chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House counsel Donald F. McGahn. Since they aren’t personally close to Sessions, their advice can be seen as more neutral and more clearly as intended to be in the best interests of the president. Yet, even here, Priebus was constrained by worries about his own job security, and he was indeed fired late last week after the health care effort collapsed.

As a result, Trump isn’t getting as much internal pushback as he should on the political and legal perils of firing Jeff Sessions or moving him to another position in the cabinet. He may not realize just how seriously the Senate Republicans would take such an action, and he may not understand how it could help build a case for impeachment against him.

Let’s be frank. The president simply doesn’t have a normal human grasp of the concept of obstruction of justice nor of the principle of avoiding a conflict of interest. If he did, he wouldn’t be blasting Sessions for following the ethical and legal advice of Justice Department lawyers. He certainly wouldn’t be publicly admitting that he expected Sessions to obstruct justice and is furious that he did not. So, if anyone needs to be told hard truths from his staff, it’s Donald Trump.

Yet, his staff is afraid to explain these things or to explain them with enough force and repetition to be convincing.

Will new chief of staff John Kelly have more success? Does Kelly understand these things and their perils, and is he willing to start off his new relationship with the president by taking him on on this issue?

I guess we will find out, but so far it looks like Trump is hellbent on doing Robert Mueller’s job for him and making a rock solid case for his own removal from office. He does not have any respect for the law and he wants everyone to know this in the most irrefutable way possible.

As anti-Russia hysteria reaches a boil in Washington DC …

Russia to expel hundreds of US diplomats | DW |

President Putin warned Sunday that bilateral relations with Washington appeared to be headed for a prolonged period of gridlock, while confirming the exact number of US diplomats who must leave Russia under measures undertaken in retaliation for new sanctions passed by the US Congress.

“More than a thousand people were working and are still working” at the US embassy and consulates, Putin said in an interview with Rossiya-24 television.

“Seven hundred and fifty-five people must stop their activities in Russia.”

Earlier, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had demanded that the US slash its diplomatic presence in Russia to 455 by September – the same number of diplomats that Moscow has in Washington.

The Kremlin chief added that an improvement in Russia’s relations with the US could not be expected “any time soon.” Indeed, he warned that Russia reserved the right to impose additional sanctions in the future.

“We have waited long enough, hoping that the situation would perhaps change for the better,” he said. “But it seems that even if the situation is changing, it’s not for any time soon.”

President Trump stripped of authority on Russia sanctions

From my comment last Wednesday …

EU Set to Impose Countermeasures

French diplomacy: United States – Adoption of sanctions (26 July 2017)

The U.S. Congress adopted a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. If this bill is passed, it will make it possible to impose measures against European natural or legal persons due to situations that have no connection with the United States.

Consequently, the extraterritorial scope of this text appears to be unlawful under international law. We have challenged similar texts that may have been adopted in the past.

In order to protect ourselves from the extraterritorial effects of U.S. legislation (and other legislation), we need to adapt our national mechanisms and update European mechanisms. During the previous legislature period, the National Assembly accomplished valuable work in that respect.

In any event, this issue should be discussed with the institutions [such as the G7], especially the European Commission, and our EU partners.

○ Good Grief! Iran Sanctions and the Expansion of American Corporate Liability for Non-U.S. Subsidiary Violations Under the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012

The New Deterrent? International sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis | Clingendael – The Hague |

Sanctions in place against Russia, imposed in light of its 2014 annexation of Crimea and involvement in the conflict in south-east Ukraine, present a monumental challenge to policy-makers. Never before has such a powerful and strategically-important target been sanctioned to this degree. Its high level of integration in the global economy facilitates sanctions circumvention, while heightening political stakes. Russia’s retaliatory counter-sanctions have proven divisive in Europe and led to calls by some member states and business lobbies for their lifting, irrespective of a political settlement.

In emphasising that sanctions never operate in isolation and must always be considered alongside other policy instruments, our report brings to the fore the following findings …

Possible countermeasures by the EC needs unanimity of all nations to go into effect immediately.  Nest step would be to lodge a complaint with the WTO but that proces will take years. Most likely the US will be hit by a most similar countermeasure which will sour relations anyway. The isolation of the US and the UK after Brexit is already upon the rest of the world.

○ This Is How Trade Wars Start – EU Threatens To Retaliate Against US Sanctions On Russia | Forbes – 5 hrs ago |

I’m not positing a conspiracy theory that the vote that happened last November was hacked. Smarter people than me with better access to information have looked at this question and haven’t found evidence of it. But I do think that the people who have the capability to change election results are the people who knew before the rest of us how vulnerable our systems are to outside interference.

Hackers at at a competition in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America’s election infrastructure.

Tech minds at the annual DEF CON in Las Vegas were given physical voting machines and remote access, with the instructions of gaining access to the software.

According to a Register report, within minutes, hackers exposed glaring physical and software vulnerabilities across multiple U.S. voting machine companies’ products.

Some devices were found to have physical ports that could be used to attach devices containing malicious software. Others had insecure Wi-Fi connections, or were running outdated software with security vulnerabilities like Windows XP.

The Register reported that the challenge was designed by Jake Braun, the Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Global Advisors and Managing Director of Cambridge Global Capital.

“Without question, our voting systems are weak and susceptible. Thanks to the contributions of the hacker community today, we’ve uncovered even more about exactly how,” Braun said.

“The scary thing is we also know that our foreign adversaries — including Russia, North Korea, Iran — possess the capabilities to hack them too, in the process undermining principles of democracy and threatening our national security.”

I think we need to accomplish two things here. The first is that we need to make our voting systems secure. And the second is that we need to convince our people that our voting systems are secure. It’s very easy to see how someone could jump to the conclusion that it just isn’t possible for the polls to be off by so much and that the best evidence of tampering is the unexpected results. And maybe we need to get away from the presumption that the initial election results are correct and adopt the habit of having some kind of comprehensive sampling audit of the machines before we expect the “loser” to call and concede.

The purpose of this would be to satisfy that second requirement above that the people have confidence in the results. Of course, to accomplish this step, we simply can’t have machines that don’t provide any paper trail or way to test their ability to accurately tally the vote.

As things stand now, the only defenses against hackers are the deterrence provided by the fear of getting caught and the lack of centralized elections (especially on the statewide and presidential level) that make it hard to change the results without really widespread hacking efforts.

Yet, the decentralization defense can be exaggerated. A hack of the last presidential election would have needed to change the votes in only three states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) to be successful in changing the result, and the absolute numbers in each of those states were small enough that it could have been accomplished in each without access to all the polling places.

Again, I’m not saying that this happened, but it’s also hard to rule it out. And that’s probably the problem we can’t wish away. We have the election, the initial uncertified numbers come in, and before we know it someone has conceded while they’re still counting votes. It’s very hard to unring the bell of a concession, as Al Gore discovered to his lasting regret. Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin grew for about a month after the election as more and more votes were counted, and there were some limited recounts in several states that resulted in modified numbers.

Since we’ve built in a long delay between election day and inauguration day, we should take advantage of it by building an audit of the election into the schedule. States that can’t certify their results up to a reasonable federal standard shouldn’t be allowed to cast votes in the Electoral College, which would pressure the states to put in better protections against hacking. Of course, the federal government should pay for any needed upgrades.

The way things stand, I can’t blame people for lacking confidence in the integrity of the result. In general, if a system is vulnerable to hacking, it will be hacked. The protections we have in place are clearly insufficient to give the people confidence, and that’s a dangerous situation for a system that relies on the consent of the governed.

Here is an interesting (and long) read from Vanity Fair

Booman had a list of reasons to impeach Trump. Read that article and try not to be frightened. Obama chose professional and competent people to do the important government work, Trump picked his sons brother in law.

Trump needs to go. Something very bad is inevitable if he stays.

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If I see one more nice thing written or said about John F. Kelly, I am going to puke. He just agreed to work as Donald Trump’s chief of staff. That tells you all you’ll ever need to know about his character. Let’s stop pretending anything is okay or will be okay. It’s not and it won’t be.