Month: September 2017

“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” won half of the eight Primetime Emmy Awards for which it was nominated, including repeating all three categories it won last year, Outstanding Talk Variety Series, Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, and Outstanding Picture Editing for a Variety Series.  It also won Outstanding Interactive Program, unseating “The Late Late Show with James Corden” and holding off SNL in the face of a near sweep.

The episode after his four wins, Oliver and his crew kept up the outstanding work with Corporate Consolidation, in which he actually tries to tank the merger between HBO’s parent company Time Warner and AT&T.

Big businesses are getting even bigger thanks to a rise in corporate mergers. John Oliver explains why that could make you want to physically destroy your cable box.

The ubiquitous tribute to small business reminds me of this exchange between Greer the Archdruid and me in Donald Trump and the Politics of Resentment.

“Even the once-mighty profit class, the people who get their income from the profit they make on their own business activities, is small enough these days that it lacks a significant collective presence.”

The odd thing is that the small business owner still plays an important political and cultural role, even if they don’t actually have much political clout.  Lots of politicians craft the appeals for their policies as promoting “small business,” even if they don’t really do anything of the sort.  There’s also the repeated fantasy of running a business, such as a restaurant or store, as a way of achieving independence.  The reality is that it’s usually the interests of the investment class that get promoted when politicians talk about policies that are “good for business,” not the profit class.  Also, running a small business is much more work than people realize.  In the current system, it’s a lot more remunerative for less work to be a member of the salary class.

Thanks to John Oliver and his writers, researchers, and editors for pointing out how true my observation still is.

In addition to blowing up a cable box to point out the problems with monopolies, Oliver also took aim at the airlines.  Here is his most savage dig, which might earn yet another nomination for Picture Editing.

Mean, but true and funny.  Just for that, congratulations, John Oliver and the crew of “Last Week Tonight.”  Keep up the good work of being the most entertaining informational program on television.

A longer version was posted at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the El Morro National Monument painting.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have decided to handle this painting from the top down.  As such, I’ve concentrated on the sky and butte.  The sky has been largely completed.  Note the fluffy clouds to the far right.  I may make minor revisions as things progress.  As to the butte, I’ve divided it in shadowed and lit sections.  The details will be seen in next week’s cycle.  There is much left to do but it’s a good start.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Did President Trump add $33 million to Puerto Rico’s debt by bankrupting a golf course there? No? Not really? Not if we’re being fair?

Okay, maybe we shouldn’t say that then. Right?

Maybe we can have the Russians say if for us on Facebook instead, and we can help them target it to the most persuadable registered voters we need to win in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Or maybe we can just make shit up and say that Trump has HIV and paid for thirty abortions. Maybe some foreign country will spread those rumors around for us. Maybe we can tell anyone who asks about the rumors that we don’t know if they’re true or not.

Maybe Trump’s mother was a prostitute and he was born in an outhouse. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether someone fact-checks this.

Maybe we play by one set of rules and the other side thinks that rules are for suckers.

No, Trump isn’t responsible for adding to Puerto Rico’s debt. On the other hand, who can say?

As the Catalonia referendum crisis reaches it’s apotheosis the Irish Government has proposed to hold no fewer than seven referendums in the next couple of years which has even friendly commentators questioning their necessity. More hostile commentators regard the plan as nothing more than a stunt pulled by a weak minority Government trying to prove it has vision and durability.

But some of the proposed referenda are very important and likely to prove extremely controversial and difficult to pass. The proposal to remove or amend the Eight Amendment to the Constitution which prohibits abortion in almost all circumstances is one such issue. There is a broad consensus that access to abortion in Ireland needs to be liberalised, but little consensus on precisely to what degree.

The Eight Amendment was originally passed in 1983 (with a 54% turnout) at the height of the Catholic Church’s powers and guaranteed “the equal right to life of the mother and the unborn child”. It has proved controversial then and ever since, but conservative forces will not give up without a fight.
Two further proposed referenda propose to reword the arcane constitutional provisions about a woman’s place in the home and to abolish the crime of blasphemy. No one has ever been successfully prosecuted for blasphemy and the language about a women’s place being in the home has had no practical effect in recent years.  That doesn’t mean that those provisions don’t need to be removed, however, especially as many Islamic countries have cited our blasphemy laws as evidence to support their own implementation of similar laws which often include a penalty of death.

Three further proposed amendments would give votes to recent emigrants while abroad in Presidential elections, reduce the waiting period for divorce from four years to two, and reduce the voting age from 18 to 16 years of age. Some people will feel strongly about some or all of these issues, but the greatest danger is that, if held individually, some will attract a very low turnout and thus a potentially very unrepresentative result.

Hence my letter to the Editor of the Irish Times published today:

Sir, – Stephen Collins writes that the plan to hold at least seven referendums over the next couple of years is a needless distraction from the pressing issue of Brexit and worse, could even undermine our system of representative democracy at a time when populism is doing great damage in the US and UK (“Do we really want seven referendums?”, Opinion & Analysis, September 28th).

Some of the proposed referendums deal with pressing issues for many of our people and others are of more marginal concern. On their own, many may not command a high turnout, and there is nothing more damaging to the legitimacy of our democratic system than constitutional changes approved by only a small section of our population.

However, there is no reason why these referendums can’t be held simultaneously, or even in conjunction with the next presidential, European, local or general election. The idea that our citizenry can only be trusted to think about one issue at a time is insulting. Holding the referendums simultaneously will save on the cost, on our citizens’ time, and, most importantly, promote the legitimacy of our political system by helping to ensure a high turnout. – Yours, etc,

FRANK SCHNITTGER,

Conservatives have generally tried to entrench Roman Catholic dogma into the Constitution to prevent more liberal governments from legislating to liberalise them. They are aided in this effort by the generally more highly motivated conservative vote, and by higher turnout amongst older voters. Combining a number of different issues, important to different demographics but not necessarily to all will help to counter their disproportionate influence.

Referenda in Ireland typically attract turnouts in the range of 30-60% and so the level of voter mobilisation on an issue is important in determining the outcome. 27 amendments have been passed since 1972 but 11 proposed amendments have been defeated against the advice of the Government of the day – so there is no guarantee of a successful outcome. Proposals to liberalise abortion and divorce laws (and further EU integration) have often succeeded only at a second attempt when a higher turnout poll was achieved.

Catalonia may be fighting for the right to hold a referendum on independence, but in Ireland that right is too often taken for granted, or abused by entrenched minorities determined to impose their will on less motivated majorities. We take our freedoms for granted at our peril.

Without getting bogged down in the full spectrum of insanity that surrounds the Republican Party’s behavior and policy toward Planned Parenthood, I am willing to acknowledge that opponents of abortion have an understandable desire to not see federal funding go (however indirectly) to an organization that provides abortions. I may wish that they understood that the organization prevents many, many more abortions than it performs, but I still understand the basic logic that’s driving them. And I can see why they’re frustrated that a Republican Congress and a Republican president can’t find a way to stop “funding” Planned Parenthood.

But I’m at my wit’s end with people, on both poles of the political spectrum, who don’t understand the limitations of what our politicians can do. Ed Kilgore explains today that the anti-choice movement is freaking out because their highest priority legislative ask this year has died along with the plan to repeal Obamacare:

But there’s one important GOP faction that isn’t bowing down before the golden calf of tax cuts: the right-to-life movement, which has seen its major legislative goals thwarted by the health-care fiasco. Every one of the House and Senate Republican health-care bills included language “defunding” Planned Parenthood for a year and prohibiting use of Obamacare tax credits to buy insurance policies covering abortion. So the anti-abortion lobby is viewing the failure to pass any of this legislation as a broken promise to them. They want it redeemed right away, in the budget resolution Republicans are battling to reserve for tax cuts…

And there’s a quote from Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins who says “If this was a priority for leadership, they would have found a way to get this done. This is something we’ve been talking about for many years.”

There’s just one wee little problem. Back in July, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that legislative language in the health care legislation that was moving through the budget resolution/reconciliation process violated the Byrd Rule:

The Senate Republican health care bill has run into another major problem, as key anti-abortion provisions — a major selling point to conservatives — have been ruled to run afoul of Senate rules, endangering them altogether.

The Senate Parliamentarian provided guidance, released Friday by Senate Democrats, that provisions to effectively defund Planned Parenthood for a year and prevent tax credits from being used to buy insurance plans that cover abortion violate Senate budget reconciliation rules, meaning each would require 60 votes to be maintained on the Senate floor.

I have to get wonky here just for a moment. The Byrd Rule would allow for something that impacts spending or revenues, but not if the measure is purely incidental to the underlying legislation.

The rules of reconciliation dictate that provisions within the health care overhaul can’t have just an “incidental” budgetary effect. There was running skepticism that the Planned Parenthood provision would comply with that rule.

The parliamentarian ruled that whatever money Planned Parenthood would be denied didn’t qualify as germane to the object of the health care bill and the goals of budget reconciliation. And that’s why it didn’t matter whether or not the repeal bills passed or not if all you cared about was Planned Parenthood.

I don’t like to defend the Republican leadership, but what are they supposed to do? They can include the provision, but it will be stripped out. They can include the provision again for the new budget, but it will get stripped out again.

For anti-choice lobbyists, demanding that McConnell and Ryan attach this to tax reform is an example of simply not understanding the thing they’re paid to understand.

As Ed points out, they have a fallback plan even if they clearly don’t understand why it will be necessary:

What the RTLers could do, though, is threaten that if their cause isn’t included in the new budget resolution, they’ll think long and hard about taking hostage one of the two big “must-pass” bills coming up in December, the next debt-limit increase and an omnibus appropriations bill. It is unclear whether they might be willing to insist that their congressional allies actually risk a debt default or a government shutdown. But the possibility might strike GOP congressional leaders as more dangerous as just giving the anti-abortion lobby its pound of flesh by incongruously adding its agenda to a tax bill.

Whether it’s dumb or not, if their immediate demand is not met, the anti-choicers could try to take the December calendar hostage. I don’t see why the budget resolution is part of this conversation at this point, but they could conceivably get their way if they’re willing and able to force a government shutdown or credit default over this issue. I mean, it is at least possible in the sense that there’s no rule against it.

Believe me, I sympathize with the average voter who believes a candidate when they promise to do something even though what they’re promising isn’t realistic or likely. But the people who get paid to work in politics or to write about politics really need to do a better job of knowing what they hell they’re talking about.

Here’s is something worth pondering for a few minutes:

On Tuesday, [Freedom] caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said he would not vote for a final tax bill if the corporate rate rises above 20 percent. That is the rate proposed in the [Republican tax] framework.

Unlike, say, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Freedom Caucus doesn’t have an official roster, and it doesn’t have a mission statement. It’s hard to define exactly what it is even though Rep. Meadows is consistently labeled as their chairman. Yet, we all talk about it and seem to know what we mean most of the time. Wikipedia says “the caucus is sympathetic to the Tea Party movement” and “is considered the farthest-right grouping within the House Republican Conference,” which appears accurate to me. You’ll see them variously described as “populist” or “antiestablishmentarian.”  At least in theory, they’re a contrast to the classic Connecticut Yankee country club Republican typified by the Bush family before they started making accommodations to the Reagan wing of the party.  The Freedom Caucus shouldn’t be carrying water for Wall Street. If this were The Grapes of Wrath, they’d be looking to string up the bankers who’ve come from New York to repossess the tractors and farms.

Yet, the chairman’s bottom line position on tax reform pertains to corporate rate of taxation. He wants it lower.

Now back in July, the Freedom Caucus refused to support the House Budget Committee’s plan because they wanted to see the tax reform plan first. The Budget Committee chairwoman, Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee, argued that she needed the budget to unlock the special reconciliation rules that allow the Senate to avoid a Democratic filibuster, and only after she had an approved budget in hand would they be able to really get down to work on the details of their tax plan. That created a chicken and egg problem that has so far remained unresolved.

There has been progress, however, and earlier this week the Freedom Caucus announced that they would go along with the tax framework (as limited as it is) that the leadership unveiled. This presumably means that they’ll vote for the budget despite all their previous concerns and demands on deficit reduction and entitlement reforms which have otherwise gone unmet.

Likewise, the Senate Budget Committee sounds like they’re ready to move their budget, although you should be astounded to see how their confidence contrasts with their uncertainty. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania is quoted, saying “I think within probably the following week we’ll be on the Senate floor with a budget.” But then there is this:

One major question is whether Republicans will insist on including plans for major reforms to entitlement programs and other deficit-reduction measures in the budget document. An alternative would be to pass a “shell” budget that steered clear of politically difficult questions about major reforms, and just unlocked the reconciliation procedure.

Toomey said that he wasn’t sure which direction the panel would take.

Another way of putting this is that the Republicans still don’t know if they can pass a budget. If they can’t, they’re prepared to pass a “shell” of a budget that doesn’t actually contain a budget at all. It would be nothing but budget reconciliation instructions that are piggy-backed on an otherwise empty and hijacked budget bill. It’s a way of abiding by and taking advantage of the Byrd Rule while violating everything that the Byrd Rule was designed to do.

This is precisely what the Republican leadership did back in January to fast-track their effort to repeal Obamacare. They took the bill that was supposed to be last year’s budget and hollowed it out. What they put in wasn’t a budget at all, but simply instructions for the committees with jurisdiction on health care. This allowed them to do precisely what the late Sen. Robert Byrd sought to avoid, which is to use the budget process to enact legislation that could not ordinarily pass under regular order.

At the time, the Freedom Caucus was extremely unhappy with the tactic because they always want to use the budget process to drive cuts in government spending. In fact, at first the Freedom Caucus members were confused by the procedural gambit they were being asked to support and had to be reassured that “it wasn’t a real budget.” They were won over with the promise that they could wage their budget battle over the summer as this year’s “real” budget was negotiated.

And the Freedom Caucus did attempt to extract concessions during the budget negotiations, which led ultimately to a stalemate and explains why the full House still hasn’t produced one. As I began pointing out repeatedly in August, the Republicans were not going to be able to do tax reform if they remained deadlocked on a budget, and that meant that the Freedom Caucus would have to back down.

It appears that we’ve finally gotten to the point where the Freedom Caucus understands that they can’t get the tax cuts they want if they don’t vote for a new budget, and if that budget has to be an empty shell (again), then they are perhaps prepared to admit they were taken for a ride back in January. That’s really what Sen. Pat Toomey is saying when he explains that he’s not sure which direction his party will take.

Procedurally, both the House and Senate need to pass a budget. Those budgets will need reconciliation instructions for tax reform (and possibly for Obamacare repeal, too). The two bills will then have to be melded into one bill, probably in a Conference Committee.  And then each chamber will have to pass the melded bill with no amendments.  If they can accomplish that, their job is done. Budget resolutions do not become laws and don’t go to the White House for the president’s signature.

Now, some Republicans (including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina) say they won’t vote for a budget resolution that doesn’t include instructions for eliminating the Affordable Care Act. The Freedom Caucus has spent all year promising that they won’y vote for a budget resolution that doesn’t include large, specified cuts to entitlements.

But then we see Freedom Caucus saying that they’re on board with tax reform, and we see Lindsey Graham saying that enacting tax reform is “the difference between succeeding as a party and failing. It’s the difference between having a majority in 2018 or losing it. It’s the difference between one term and two.”

What it looks like is that a whole lot of this year’s effort and rhetoric and ambitions are going to be set aside and wasted in order simply to get a chance to pass tax cuts at the fifty-vote threshold in the Senate. And, for the Freedom Caucus, despite their populist reputation, the only thing they really care about is that the corporate rate of taxation not exceed twenty percent.

To me, this is a completely fraudulent kind of economic populism.

I also wonder about their judgment. I definitely do understand the sentiment that the Republican Party desperately needs to accomplish something major legislatively, but what they’re seeking to do here won’t actually be popular except among their donor class. The donors are obviously important, but they just helped Mitch McConnell outspend Roy Moore more than five to one in the Alabama special election and it didn’t prevent Luther Strange from losing his Senate seat. Donors only get one vote each, and doing their bidding at your base’s expense isn’t obviously a way to improve your popularity.

So, in conclusion, we first want to see if the House and Senate can each pass a real budget. If they can, we’ll see if they can meld them together into one bill and pass it. If they can’t do these things, they’ll try to pass another empty shell of a budget.

Only when they’re done with that process will they get to the really hard stuff, which includes trying to devise changes in the tax code that don’t hurt the parochial interests of more than two Republican senators to the point that they won’t vote for them.

And this is going to be attempted despite the fact that back in July, White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin made it known that they didn’t think the tax reform effort could succeed this way and asked that the whole plan be scrapped in favor of a bipartisan process.

We can taste their desperation which will help them move the process forward. But there are so many pitfalls on this path that it’s very hard to predict they’ll ultimately have success.

Josh Marshall admits that he isn’t really writing anything new or original. It’s more of a recap of previous pieces that covered well-trodden ground. It’s worth reading though because Josh does a very nice job with it.

What I want to do here is mainly to open the floor to debate. Josh makes two good points that seem unassailable on their own but are in conflict when taken together. Here’s the first point (the emphasis is mine):

Last spring I said the Trump phenomenon was a product of what I termed ‘nonsense debt‘. Republicans had spent years pumping their voters up on increasingly extreme and nonsensical claims and promises. This worked very well for winning elections. But it had also built up a debt that eventually had to be repaid. Concretely, they were making claims and promises that were either factually ridiculous, politically unviable or unacceptable to a broad swath of the voting public. Eventually, you get elected and need to produce. By definition that’s never really possible: both because the claims and promises are nonsensical and unviable but also because a politics based on reclamation, revenge, and impulse is almost impossible to satisfy through normal legislative politics.

A lot of what Trump in 2016 did was hijack an opening created by this build up of nonsense debt.

Here’s his second point:

A mix of partisan polarization, the built-in electoral advantages enjoyed by rural America, hyper-efficient gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in urban enclaves all give Republicans and the Trump base power significantly greater than its numbers. In the House and the Senate, Democrats can easily get more votes and remain in the minority. A GOP nominee can lose the popular vote and become President. It’s happened twice in the last five elections. So while I expect 2018 and 2020 will go quite badly for Trump and the Republicans, it is not at all impossible that they will get a minority of votes and retain all power.

That is disastrous for Democrats and the country. But it doesn’t change the essential dynamic of early 21st century conservatism, an infinite loop of inflammatory and engaging promises, claims and demands which are mostly entirely unrealizable, creating a permanent cycle of establishmentism and grassroots’ betrayal which continues spinning forward even as the players in each category change.

Maybe this is a problem of mixed metaphors, but we can’t have both an infinite loop and a build up to some culmination where the debt needs to be repaid. We’re either getting somewhere or we’re not. We could be getting somewhere worse, of course, but all of these things can’t be simultaneously true.

Are we in a fairly closed system where structural advantages keep us locked in a state in which the Republicans can defy every normal law of political accountability, or are we watching an actual come-to-Jesus reckoning on all the past excesses and sins of the conservative movement?

How you answer that question may tell us more about your general disposition towards life (e.g., optimistic vs. fatalistic) than do anything to establish the truth of the matter, but you should at least try to figure out how you feel, and why.

The president may be simmering that Steve Bannon got the better of him in the Alabama special election, but let’s not forget that not too long ago Bannon was in a much more powerful position at the president’s right hand, and that he had big dreams.

Moreover, some close Trump advisers see infrastructure as a way to pull Democratic voters, including some minorities, into a new political coalition that will remake the Republican Party and keep it in power for decades. “With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything,” Trump campaign CEO and now chief White House strategist Steve Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter soon after the elections. “Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

But those grandiose plans haven’t yet come to fruition, and after Bannon was shown the door in August, he said that his dreams were as dead as his brief White House career:

Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon is declaring the impact of the Trump presidency “over.”

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” he told the Weekly Standard on Friday. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.”

It was never quite clear how well Bannon’s vision of a massive 1930’s-style infrastructure mobilization jibed with the plan the Trump team floated in December during the transition. The money was right. Trump was talking about a trillion dollar bill, which won instant praise from Chuck Schumer. It was a lot more money than Trump had promised in September on the campaign trail, and nearly four times as large as Hillary Clinton’s $275 billion proposal. On the other hand, Paul Ryan had laughed the much smaller September number straight out of town.

House Speaker Paul Ryan burst into laughter and repeatedly tapped the arm of his chair when asked in September if he would help a President Trump pass an infrastructure plan costing $550 billion or more.

“That’s not in the ‘Better Way’ agenda,” the Wisconsin Republican said, referring to his conservative agenda for the House.

The early signs were that the Trump administration would be looking for a lot of Democratic votes:

Trump’s influential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told business leaders at a breakfast last week in Manhattan that Trump is closer to Schumer than to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) when it comes to infrastructure spending.

McConnell told reporters at a news conference earlier [in December] that “it will be interesting to see how” Trump’s infrastructure plan is put together.

“I hope we avoid a trillion-dollar stimulus,” he said.

Yet, the Democrats were highly critical of the basic concept of the infrastructure proposals. In The Nation, Michelle Chen called Trump’s plan “a full-on privatization assault.”

Trump wants private investors to basically direct $1 trillion in infrastructure projects nationwide through a “revenue neutral” financing plan, which banks on financing from private investors, allegedly to control deficit spending (which the GOP generally deems wasteful, while promoting tax breaks as a wiser redistribution of public funds into corporate coffers). To draw some $167 billion to jumpstart the $1 trillion, 10-year infrastructure plan, Washington would grant a giant tax break “equal to 82 percent of the equity amount.” The goal isn’t fixing bridges so much as fixing the corporate tax codes to promote privatization and unregulated construction with virtually no public input.

The basic concept of the plan was spelled out in a paper authored by Wilbur Ross (now the Secretary of Commerce) and UC-Irvine Professor Peter Navarro (now Director of the White House National Trade Council), which was released on October 27th. The facts and figures in that paper were used by Chen in her critique. They also informed a critique we published by Christopher B. Leinberger in our March/April/May 2017 issue called The Thinking Person’s Guide to Infrastructure. By the time that article went to press, more details had come out both in the December announcement and in a speech Trump delivered in February.

In the feature piece, Leinberger noted that Trump would need Democratic help and made the case against gargantuan and indiscriminate building projects based on huge tax incentives to private developers.

Trump will almost certainly need large numbers of Democratic votes to pass any substantive infrastructure bill. That means Democrats will likely have significant leverage in determining the shape of such a bill.

What should Democrats demand in return for their support? For one thing, that Trump drop the idea his advisers floated in December for $85 billion in new tax credits for infrastructure investors. The private sector must be involved in America’s infrastructure build-out, but tax credits are a very expensive way of making that happen. Tax credits attract private investors and corporations needing high rates of return to offset their tax liabilities—returns in the range of 18 to 35 percent annually. But infrastructure investments don’t typically produce those kinds of high returns unless the risks are somehow shifted onto others, typically taxpayers. With interest rates at 3 percent, it’s much cheaper and less risky to the public for the federal government to simply borrow the money and have it paid back by local sources, both public and private.

The Trump administration has taken no procedural steps on infrastructure to get around a Democratic filibuster, so they know with certainty that they’ll need eight Democratic senators, at least, to pass a bill. And that’s probably why Trump unexpectedly trashed his original plan this week:

President Trump told lawmakers this week that he was abandoning a key element of his planned $1 trillion infrastructure package, complaining that certain partnerships between the private sector and federal government simply don’t work…

…The president acknowledged the new approach during a Tuesday meeting with Democrats from the House Ways and Means Committee, who came to the White House to discuss the administration’s tax code rewrite set to be unveiled Wednesday,

During the meeting, Trump “emphatically rejected what everybody assumed was his position relative to financing infrastructure,” said Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), who attended and asked Trump about the proposal. “He dismissed it categorically and said it doesn’t work.”

If the administration is scrapping the Heritage Foundation‘s neoliberal wet dream for infrastructure in an effort to win Democratic votes, it’s probably a good time to go back and read Leinberger’s piece because he has a lot more to say than just what the Democrats should reject. And he might not disagree with the White House’s new view that “wants to force states and localities to foot most of the bill.” That all depends on the details.

Leinberger doesn’t think we should repeat the stimulus pattern of 2009 by opening “the federal funding spigot and spraying infrastructure dollars haphazardly.” Instead, we should focus on meeting the growing demand for more walkable communities. We can do that partly by changing the current system under which suburban sprawl-friendly highway projects get much larger matching federal funds. We can also take a lot of the decision-making power out of where it is now, in Washington and the states’ capitals, and give it to “municipal governments, metropolitan-wide entities, and local governance organizations.” In return, “Washington should insist that localities have skin in the infrastructure game—that is, that they find local sources for the funds needed to maintain the infrastructure and service the debt that federal grants and loans make possible.” Leinberger argues that federal loan repayment could come in the form of “pledged sales or property tax increases, or as a percentage of the increased value of adjacent real estate, paid for by private-sector developers.”

The last idea is nearly the opposite of the original Trump plan. Instead of giving developers a giant tax cut to incentivize them to build, we should ask them to give us a cut of the increased property value they get when, say, a brand new rail station is built near their holdings.

It’s an innovative idea that falls between the privatization of public infrastructure plan originally floated by the Ross and Navarro, and the kind of demands the Democrats are making to “pay for infrastructure upgrades through direct federal spending — either by paying for projects with new tax revenue or by taking on debt.”

Remember, the Trump administration may need Democratic votes, but they need Republican votes, too. And they’re not going to get a lot of Republican votes for classic firehose stimulus spending on shovel-ready projects. Even this tradeoff may not be good enough. For example, the Republicans may like the sound of local control, but it doesn’t seem as good when that local control moves from the state capitol to the big city or inner suburb. Still, the idea offers a potential way out of an impasse. Trump wants a win on infrastructure and agrees more with the Democrats about the scope and size. The Republicans want to find a way to say ‘yes’ to the president, but they need talking points to buttress their move away from conservative orthodoxy. And this could be a way to hold down the overall cost and risk without it becoming a massive privatization scheme.

I don’t know if this Republican Congress can ever get to ‘yes,’ on anything, but the Democrats, at least, should be willing to propose something along these lines.

To get a fuller picture, take some time and read The Thinking Person’s Guide to Infrastructure.

Here’s a funny thing. Every day since Donald Trump won the presidency, I have gone to bed embarrassed and pissed.

Returning from a high-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan on Tuesday evening, an infuriated President Donald Trump watched aboard Air Force One as Fox News called the Alabama Senate primary for Roy Moore against Trump’s favored candidate, Luther Strange.

What ensued was a barrage of angry venting at his political team and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had consolidated establishment GOP support behind Strange.

Trump, officials and informal advisers say, felt misled by McConnell and his political team, who encouraged him to endorse and campaign for Strange…

…He went to bed “embarrassed and pissed” following the election loss, according to a person familiar with his mindset. Trump, multiple sources said, is furious with McConnell, and feels outdone by his former aide Bannon.

That’s why I don’t have any guilt about my schadenfreude in this particular case. If the president is humiliated and angry, then he’s only feeling what all decent folks have been feeling for nearly a year now. And it’s his own fault. What kind of politician needs a political team to tell them who to endorse? I thought he had the best education and the highest I.Q., so why is he so easy to mislead?

So, he’s mad that he didn’t endorse a man like Roy Moore whose understanding of the law is so flawed that he’s twice been kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court?

He should be embarrassed. And he should be pissed at himself for being such a lousy person.

Everyone is talking about the horrible day Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had yesterday. He had to announce that he was giving up on executing an Obamacare repeal through budget reconciliation; he learned that one of his allies, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, won’t be seeking reelection; and he watched the candidate he supported in the Alabama special election lose very badly. It’s all bad news for him and it’s hard to decide which piece is the most threatening to his political career.

I actually think it’s the dynamic that unfolded in the Alabama race that should worry McConnell the most. To fully understand this, it’s probably helpful to read Jordan Gehrke’s Medium article today. He works for a political consulting firm that was initially hired by Rep. Mo Brooks and subsequently by Roy Moore. What he discovered during his research for both candidates is that their most effective message was their opposition to McConnell’s leadership. Here’s just a small sample of Gehrke’s piece:

Despite what Mitch McConnell and Senate Leadership Fund will tell you, this was nothing less than a stunning loss for Mitch McConnell tonight. He and his team at Senate Leadership Fund invested millions on a deep Red seat that Republicans were never in danger of losing, simply so that Mitch McConnell would have another loyal vote in his pocket. They threatened people, they wasted money, and they misled President Trump into thinking this race was close.

Finally, more stunning than McConnell’s loss is the way that he lost. Roy Moore did not win despite McConnell’s opposition, he won because of McConnell’s opposition. Going all the way back to the Primary, both Roy Moore and Mo Brooks promised that if elected, they would not support McConnell for Leader under any circumstances. They won because of open defiance to the Majority Leader. This is simply unprecedented.

In today’s exit polling, we asked the question of Alabama voters, “Did Mitch McConnell’s support of Luther Strange make you more or less likely to support Strange?”

25% More Likely

55% Less Likely

In the end, Mitch McConnell’s support was a more than 2–1 net negative for Luther Strange.

Tonight’s victory for Roy Moore was not simply an isolated incident: the Alabama Senate race will now become a playbook for conservative outsiders across the country. They now know that if they put Mitch McConnell on the ballot, they can beat him.

Here’s what I find most interesting. I’ve been very critical of Mitch McConnell, both for how he behaved when Barack Obama was our president and for the legislative strategy he sold to President Trump. But, on both scores, McConnell should actually be popular with the hard right Republican base.

Briefly, during Obama’s presidency, McConnell adopted an unprecedented strategy of total opposition where he utilized every stalling tactic in the book and helped his caucus stay together in complete opposition to anything Obama wanted to do. His reward was to win back control of the Senate for the Republicans and to hold his advantage through two subsequent election cycles. It’s hard to see how he could have possibly have had more success or how he could have been more of a staunch obstructionist.

As for the legislative plan he adopted for the Trump presidency, it was based on the idea that he could use two budgets in one year to repeal Obamacare and get giant tax cuts without having to ask for a single Democratic vote. Had he refused to attempt something so partisan and with such long odds of success, he would have had to settle at the outset for a repair of the Affordable Care Act rather than an attempt to repeal. And he would have had to give the Democrats in the Senate co-authorship of any tax reform, with all the concessions that implies.

From the hard right conservative point of view, that would have been a surrender before the fight even began. McConnell didn’t shy away from the fight. He adopted a highly innovative and unprecedented strategy designed to make the fight possible.

The reason I’ve criticized him so heavily for it is because it never really had much hope of success. He didn’t level with Trump and tell him that the odds of his plan working out were extremely low. And by suggesting that he could accomplish these things in a strictly partisan way, he didn’t make clear to Trump that legislative successes would require that he significantly tone down his campaign rhetoric and spend substantial time mending fences with the Democrats. He needed to tell Trump that most of his campaign promises would not be achievable, and the best strategy was to find ways to take partial credit for advancing his goals.

If McConnell and Ryan had done these things at the outset, the right would really hate them. Obviously, the effort to repeal Obamacare with fifty votes collapsed almost immediately. The next six months were dedicated to showing they were still fighting rather than making any serious effort to succeed. This is basically a demonstration of how easy it is for the right to manipulate and control the congressional leadership, but also a demonstration of how easily they can be manipulated in return.

So, now, McConnell is loathed by the base for his failure even though he led a charge up the hill against entrenched machine guns. It’d be one thing if the base said, “I like soldiers who don’t get shot to pieces,” but they actually think he’s a coward who didn’t fight at all.

What the base should be mad about is that Republicans made a lot of promises that they never were going to be able to keep. No one was more guilty of this than Trump who suggested virtually everything could be done easily and in record time.

There are solid reasons not to like McConnell for both progressives and conservatives, but it’s crazy that he’s seen by the Republican base as too soft and too little committed to the cause.