Month: May 2023

Something new for you all this time: DOMi and JD Beck. They’re a jazz duo.

Enjoy!

Cheers!

The last time I really bothered to write about Kevin McCarthy and the debt ceiling was on January 2, 2023 in a post titled Kevin McCarthy Has Already Lost. It was on the eve of the California lawmaker’s bid to win the Speakership, which he would only secure on January 7th after four days and 15 roll call votes. It was already evident on the 2nd that McCarthy had acceded to a rules package allowing a mere five members of the House to force a vote on ousting the speaker. As it turned out, that wasn’t good enough. In order to secure the votes he needed on the 7th, he granted a rule allowing a single member to force such a vote.

One of the key concessions made by Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy in his bid to be House speaker was to restore the ability of a single member to call for a no-confidence vote in the speaker, a provision he opposed early this week, but one he agreed to on Wednesday to win over the most conservative members of the GOP conference.

The demand by the Republican holdouts would restore the House rule on vacating the chair to what it was before Rep. Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker in 2019. Under Pelosi, a motion to vacate could be offered on the House floor only if a majority of either party agreed to it.

But even at the five member threshold, I knew McCarthy had a major problem that would likely doom him.

In one sense, McCarthy has already lost because making it so easy to oust the Speaker makes it impossible for him to do his job. Even if he somehow secures the gavel on Tuesday, he won’t be able to keep it. He’ll either get bounced by right-wing radicals for paying America’s debts and funding its agencies or he’ll get bounced by the vast majority of the House for refusing to do those things and causing a global depression.

At the time, I was arguing rather strenuously that the true majority in the House wasn’t Republican but rather a bipartisan coalition of members who would be willing to pay the government’s debts on time and avoid intractable budget impasses that lead to government shutdowns. I suggested repeatedly that we skip to the chase, and rather than go through all the drama we’re seeing play out now, this true majority should come together and elect a suitable Speaker who would and could represent their interests. I said it was likely that this majority would eventually exert itself, but perhaps not before a catastrophic debt default.

The same problem will face any other Republican Speaker who relies on support from the far right for their majority. This is why we may actually see a bipartisan majority caucus emerge in the House. It could happen preemptively, to avoid obvious looming catastrophes, but it will more likely come down the line in response to catastrophe. There is a ton on the line, and it will be quite the show.

As I saw it, I had laid everything out in this January piece and other ones preceding it in December, and I didn’t have anything more worth saying about the debt ceiling. Would McCarthy eventually strike a deal with the Biden administration to avoid default? Should the administration make concessions? What would be a good deal or a bad deal? None of that interested me, because I knew that the basic facts remained the same. McCarthy could not agree to any deal that would be acceptable to the administration without triggering a motion to vacate the chair. The drama would then come in two steps.

1. What decision would McCarthy make? Would he risk his Speakership to do the responsible thing, and knowing he’d need Democratic votes, would he do it in time to prevent a disaster for the country’s credit rating?
2. Would he accept Democratic support to keep his Speakership, and what conditions would the Democrats require in return?

It appears we have the answer to question number one. Speaker McCarthy will risk his gavel to pay our debts on time, with a vote now scheduled for Wednesday. That means we will soon begin talking about question two. CNN is reporting on-air that Rep. Chip Roy of Texas will make a motion to vacate the chair. If Rep. Roy follows through on that threat, McCarthy will almost certainly not retain his Speakership without the help of at least a handful of Democratic members. There are currently 222 Republican members of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives, meaning that a Speaker needs 217 votes to prevail on a challenge to their leadership.

Back in January, I wondered why McCarthy was fighting so hard to win a position he probably couldn’t keep. I suspect we’re about to get back to approximately the same situation McCarthy faced then. He was unable to secure the majority he needed until he made untenable (and sometimes secret) promises to Rep. Roy and other members of the Freedom Caucus. He’s in the process of breaking some of those promises now, which was inevitable if he intended to be even minimally competent and responsible.

On a motion to vacate the chair, the Democrats are likely to vote in favor. Once the Speakership is vacant, the Democrats will vote for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York. If McCarthy wants to keep the gavel, he will need to offer the Democrats something very valuable, including at a minimum a reshuffling of committee assignments and chairmanships that gives the Democrats more power.

In September 2015, when then-Speaker John Boehner faced a similar challenge, he quit.

Today, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced to House Republicans that he is retiring from Congress at the end of October.  Boehner, now in his fifth year as Speaker of the House, faced a challenge no other House Speaker had faced in over a century: A Motion to Vacate the Chair spearheaded by a small, conservative group inside his own Republican Causes and led by Congressman Mark Meadows, a second-term Member from North Carolina.

In Boehner’s case, the triggering event was a demand by the Freedom Caucus that he force a government shutdown if Planned Parenthood wasn’t completely defunded, which has just another in a long serious of demands that he wage battles it was impossible to win. He could have gone to the Democrats to win some support on the motion to vacate, but he wasn’t willing to make the necessary concessions and put up with the resulting vitriol from his own party and its supporters.

Maybe McCarthy’s desire to keep the gavel will lead him to a different calculation. Maybe he can head off the motion somehow before it is made, although I don’t know if having broken his previous promises to the Freedom Caucus, there’s anything he can do to forestall their challenge now.

Before we get to all this, though, we first have to see if McCarthy can actually get the deal passed in the first place. That’s not a certainty given his record of flailing and failure.

The progressives in Minnesota are ecstatic. For the first time in a decade, the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party has control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature, and it did not disappoint.

DFL lawmakers before final votes were cast celebrated that they had checked off everything on their wish list.

Among the bills on that initial agenda: codifying abortion rights; setting a new carbon-free electricity benchmark; free breakfast and lunch for all children in school; a state-run paid family and medical leave program; gun regulations; expanding voter access to the polls and much more.

Democrats also said OK to legalizing recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older.

…Lawmakers worked through the weekend to wrap up the remaining pieces of the next two-year budget, which is a 38% increase in state spending over the current biennium. Part of that includes a tax bill with $3.3 billion in cuts targeted at low- and middle-income Minnesotans, including one-time rebate checks for an estimated 2.5 million households.

Nearly all of the $17.5 billion budget surplus that lined the state’s bank account at the beginning of session is accounted for.

Colorado progressives, on the other hand are weeping bitterly. Of course, everything started well.

Defying expectations of a red wave, voters in November instead strengthened Democrats’ control of Colorado’s state government, re-electing Governor Jared Polis in a blowout, expanding his party’s margins in both houses of the legislature, and further undercutting a diminished GOP’s ability to block progressive change.

So, what went wrong?

The record of the 2023 legislative session in Colorado, which ended May 8, has led to profound frustration—boiling into public view—from more progressive-leaning lawmakers and state advocates who regret missed opportunities to pass headlining liberal policies.

Democratic legislation to allow cities to establish safe drug-use sites or rent control programs failed, as did proposals to ban assault weapons and install new protections for gig economy workers. Earlier this month, in the session’s final days, a pro-tenant bill meant to thwart evictions in which landlords haven’t proved cause to evict withered alongside a bill to study the idea of moving Colorado to single-payer health care system.

One factor is that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is more of a cheerleader for progressive legislation than Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. It’s also worth noting that Minnesota is catching up to Colorado when it comes to liberalizing cannabis policy. On the whole, though, Minnesota’s agenda just looks more popular. Low and middle-income families get a tax cut, free food for their children at school and a new state-run family leave program. That certainly trumps legislation making it harder to evict people who don’t pay their rent and creating places for opioid users to safely shoot up.

It remains to be seen which state will create a bigger political backlash, but my money’s on Colorado because they largely failed to deliver on their agenda which was far more popular among progressive activists than among the electorate as a whole. That leaves the Colorado Democratic Party losing coming and going, while Mineesota’s DFL seems to have passed their dream list of legislation, most of which is broadly popular even among their natural opponents.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Sedona, Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

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

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

There are many changes for this week. The buttes have been revised and highlights have been added. Below, all the various green areas have all been repainted.

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.

Maybe you’ve read of the exploits of Pyrrhus of Epirus, a Greek general who fought the Romans in the 3rd-Century B.C.E. He’s known best today for the term “Pyrrhic victory,” which describes a battle in which the victors suffer such high casualties that it really amounts to defeat. Today, it could well describe the Battle of Bahkhut in Ukraine, which was just “won” by Russian oligarch Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s mercenary Wagner Group.

The analogy isn’t perfect. In Pyrrhus’s case, his Roman opponents had more reinforcements and that meant they could more readily recover from their losses. The situation is reversed in Ukraine, where the defenders are outnumbered. But the Russians are also stretched very thin, suffer low morale, and are operating far from home. Moreover, the regular Russians troops are inferior to the Wagner Group mercenaries and have a habit of running away when attacked.

That’s a problem because now that the city of Bahkmut is under firm Russian control, Prigozhin is pulling his troops out for rest and refitting, and they must be replaced with Russian army soldiers.

The prime example of a Pyrrhic victory is the Battle of Asculum which occurred in southeast Italy in 279 B.C.E. Here it is described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as retold by Plutarch is his famous Parallel Lives.

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one other such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.

Realizing that he could not defeat the Romans, Pyrrhus took his troops to Sicily to wage war there. There have been reports, which Prigozhin has denied, that he will take his Wagner force to Africa where he has been operating in Libya, Sudan, Mali and the Central African Republic. Regardless, his troops are leaving Bahkmut for the foreseeable future.

What he’s leaving behind is a destroyed and uninhabitable city which is already facing the threat of encirclement from angry and resolute Ukrainian forces who are “not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained” as they advance on the flanks.

Meanwhile, Prigozhin is warning that Russia has failed in all its objectives, especially their effort to disarm Ukraine.

In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, also asserted that the war has backfired spectacularly by failing to “demilitarize” Ukraine, one of President Vladimir Putin’s stated aims of the invasion…

…Instead of demilitarization, he said, the invasion turned “Ukraine’s army into one of the most powerful in the world” and Ukrainians into “a nation known to the entire world.”

“If they, figuratively speaking, had 500 tanks at the beginning of the special operation, now they have 5,000,” he said. “If they had 20,000 fighters who knew how to fight, now they have 400,000. How did we ‘demilitarize’ it? Now it turns out that we militarized it — hell knows how.”

And he predicts that Putin’s regime may fall if the war continues on its current trajectory.

“The children of the elite smear themselves with creams and show off on the internet, while ordinary people’s children come home in zinc [coffins], torn to pieces,” he said, according to The Times. “I recommend that the elite of the Russian Federation gathers up, bitch, its youth and send them to war.”

Prigozhin said their “fat, carefree” lives could spark outrage and a “revolution,” leading working-class citizens to storm the elite’s “villas” with “pitchforks.”

That revolution, he concluded, “might end as in 1917,” referencing the Russian Revolution of 1917, when citizens overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

There is a lot of speculation about what kind of dangerous game Prigozhin thinks he’s playing with his scathing criticism of the Kremlin leadership and military brass, but what’s clear is that these are not the words we would expect from a victorious general. They are the words of Pyrrhus who said after the Battle of Asculum, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

I think you know an environmental ruling by the Supreme Court is bad news when Brett Kavanaugh writes the following in dissent:

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote separately to object to the majority’s reading of the law. He wrote that the majority’s new test “departs from the statutory text, from 45 years of consistent agency practice, and from this Court’s precedents” and will have “significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.” Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson joined Kavanaugh.

Here’s an example of where Chief Justice John Roberts shows his traditional conservative colors, although the actual majority opinion was penned by the always loathsome Samuel Alito.

The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police water pollution, ruling that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into some wetlands near bodies of water.

The court held that law covers only wetlands “with a continuous surface connection” to those waters, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for five justices.

That might sound innocuous, but it’s not. In truth, the main issue at hand was decided unanimously. An Idaho family had been told by the EPA they could not build on a property they bought near a lake. All the Justices agreed that the regulation should not have applied to them, but their reasoning differed. Alito’s interpretation of the rules broadly weakens the EPA’s ability to protect wetlands nationwide. Here’s the problem:

In a unanimous ruling in which the justices were divided on their reasoning, the court found that EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers wrongfully claimed oversight of the wetland on the Sacketts’ property — located about 300 feet from Idaho’s Priest Lake — and that federal courts had erred in affirming the agencies’ jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA is a huge victory for housing developers, farmers and the energy industry. The ruling could complicate the Biden administration’s legal defense of its new definition of which wetlands and streams qualify as “waters of the U.S.,” or WOTUS, subject to Clean Water Act permitting. The WOTUS rule is now on hold in more than half of the country.

The Idaho property owners could have received some relief without upending longstanding rules that protect wetlands.

Reacting to the decision, Manish Bapna, the chief executive of the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, called on Congress to amend the Clean Water Act to restore wetlands protections and on states to strengthen their own laws.

“The Supreme Court ripped the heart out of the law we depend on to protect American waters and wetlands. The majority chose to protect polluters at the expense of healthy wetlands and waterways. This decision will cause incalculable harm. Communities across the country will pay the price,” Bapna said in a statement.

As I said at the top, all you need to know is that this ruling appalled Brett Freakin’ Kavanaugh. We will never stop being punished for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to retire.

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The stunning number of Catholic priests who have sexually abused children in Illinois can almost make you numb. An investigation by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul produced a 696-page report revealing the “names and detailed information of 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers who abused at least 1,997 children across all of the dioceses in Illinois.” For context, the investigation was launched in response to revelations from a grand jury investigation in Pennsylvania which found in 2018 that “300 Catholic clerics had abused more than 1,000 children in the Commonwealth over the prior 70 years.” Because these investigations span decades and victims are understandably reluctant to speak up or may have difficulty providing credible evidence, the official numbers are probably a small fraction of the troubling reality.

I’m not Catholic and I’m not saying that the Catholic Church has a monopoly on pedophilia because America’s largest Protestant denomination has its own shocking history of child sexual abuse. But you’d think revelations, like those found in Pennsylvania and Illinois, would lead Catholic parents to run screaming from the pews. If a summer camp had a record like this, it would go out of business. If Little League had a record like this, baseball would go extinct. In 2020, the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy because of the legal costs and plunging membership resulting from its pedophilia problem.

If you believe religious observance is generally a positive thing, you should be grateful that Catholics in America haven’t responded to the pedophilia problem in the same way as in Ireland, where “Weekly Mass attendance which stood at 91% in 1975 was down to 36% in 2016 according to figures from the last Irish census.” The Church there is thought to be in “terminal decline.” The average age of an Irish priest is 70.

Religion is more resilient in America because of the separation of Church and State. The pedophilia scandal in Ireland hit much harder because it was difficult to discern where the church began and that government ended. Much of the worst abuse occurred in the church-run state schools and childcare system. So, as the scandal unfolded, it implicated the whole of Irish leadership, not just the supposedly celibate priests, bishops and cardinals. The government then became as interested in a coverup as the church, and the people decided the whole edifice was rotten.

Europe’s long history of official state religions helps explain why church attendance plummeted there relative to the United States during the 20th Century. Keeping the politics out of worship is what prevents religious scandals from undermining faith in government, and governmental scandals from undermining religious observance.

This is precisely what the American Christian Nationalists don’t seem to understand. They believe all manner of social evils result from people not getting their butts into the pews, but their solutions would almost assuredly hurt attendance.

A push to inject religion into public schools across Texas faltered on Tuesday after the State House failed to pass a contentious bill that would have required the Ten Commandments to be displayed prominently in every classroom.

The measure was part of an effort by conservative Republicans in the Legislature to expand the reach of religion into the daily life of public schools…

…In recent months, religious groups in several states have appeared interested in seeing how far states might now go in directly supporting religious expression in public schools. This month, the South Carolina legislature introduced its own bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. In Oklahoma, the state education board was asked earlier this year to approve the creation of an explicitly religious charter school; the board ultimately rejected the application.

“Forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments is part of the Christian Nationalist crusade to compel all of us to live by their beliefs,” said Rachel Laser, the president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit advocacy group. She pointed to new laws in Idaho and Kentucky permitting public school employees to pray in front of students, and a bill in Missouri allowing elective classes on the Bible. “It’s not just in Texas,” she said.

This is not really a bipartisan effort. I think it can be fairly described as a project of the Republican Party, even if a few Democrats are willing to go along here and there. So, problem number one is that you’re alienating half the country politically on a matter of religion. You’re bound to convince some people that attending your church, or any church at all, is in some way lending support to political causes they oppose.

But problem two comes when you actually have some success in eroding the distinction between church and state. That’s when a scandal at a public school, for example, impacts not just the school but your political party and your denomination. That’s when your own church members begin to believe that nothing will change until everyone who holds any power is drummed out of office and made impotent under the law. That’s when they stop overlooking your shortcomings and turn to secularism.

Ironically, the best way to preserve the vibrancy of American religious life is to make sure the 10 Commandments are not displayed in public schools. I have only anecdotal evidence to go by, but in my personal life I’ve noticed that the Republican Party’s embrace of aggressively religious rhetoric has already led many middle of the road people against both the GOP and Christianity. It seems to work passably well as a strategy for winning a decent percentage of elections, but it doesn’t lead to a more Christian, more observant nation.

The pious will put up with shocking misdeeds from their religious leaders but not their politicians. And when they can’t tell the difference between the two, that’s when the faithful are shaken.

After a brief hiatus, I am back. The next few weeks may be a bit more hit or miss, depending on some my circumstances. In the meantime, I’ll take a break from Miles Davis and move on to some other music from my excessively eclectic archives.

I was one of those rare teens and young adults back in the late 1970s and into the 1980s who really enjoyed punk and its many offshoots but also openly acknowledged a deep love and respect for progressive rock. That led to its share of heated arguments. So it goes. This piece was written by Steve Howe, who was in Yes at the time. As far as I know, Howe didn’t have much in the way of formal musical training, but he’d clearly listened to quite a bit of Spanish and Classical guitar pieces, and he crafted a piece that connects every time I hear it.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of some of the music my dad would put on the record player after it was time for me to go to bed. Certainly a number of my earliest memories include hearing the sound of a solo acoustic guitar gently filtering its way through the walls of each room of the house as I was getting ready to drift off into slumber.

Enjoy. I’ll check in periodically to see who stops by. Cheers.

There are two basic takes at this very early point in the 2024 presidential cycle, but only one of them seems to inform the analytical pieces I see. Everyone seems to be operating on the assumption that Donald Trump is simply unbeatable in the primaries. A good example comes from Charlie Sykes, who has produced the following categories for Trump’s competitors.

• Real, even if delusional: Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Glenn Youngkin
• Running for vice president: Tim Scott, Francis Suarez
• Better speaking fees: Nikki Haley
• Random grift: Vivek Ramaswamy
• Knights Errant: Asa Hutchinson, Liz Cheney
• Suicide bombers: Chris Christie

I don’t really know why Miami, Florida mayor Francis Suarez is on this list. I think North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is more likely to actually launch a campaign. The most notable thing about Sykes’ thinking here is that he doesn’t give any of these candidates any chance whatsoever of becoming the nominee, let alone the president. The most serious contenders are still considered “delusional.”

But what if Trump simply isn’t viable? What if he’s in prison? What if his cumulative legal problems have the effect of convincing Republican voters that he isn’t an option?

If you allow for this possibility, then the list above almost certainly includes the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential candidate. Once we start thinking along these lines, it seems the most delusional are clearly Mike Pence and Liz Cheney who are simply toxic with Republican voters. Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are too anti-Trump to have any hope of winning over any meaningful percentage of his voters.

On paper, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin have the best arguments, since they both performed very well in their election cycles, they both have executive experience and then can realistically hope to raise gobs of money. Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, both of South Carolina, have decent resumes, but must overcome being ethnic and/or religious minorities in a party dominated by White Christian nationalists. Much the same can be said of venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy. I wouldn’t count them out for that reason alone, however, because Republicans like to believe they can neuter the racism charge by supporting minority candidates who assure them they’re not racist. With three candidates to choose from, though, it seems like this opportunity will be pretty watered down.

Talking about the difficulties with the sun for left fielders playing day games in Yankee Stadium, Yogi Berra said “it gets late early out there,” and time is running out for new candidates to get into the race. Maybe Burgum will become a serious player, but I don’t see other alternatives on the horizon. All I know is that the Republican voters inexplicably want Trump, and if he isn’t on the menu or doesn’t seem realistic, then they’re not going to be enthusiastic about these options. But they will still have to choose.

They didn’t have much enthusiasm for Bob Dole, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and we saw how that worked out. This will be a different kind of cycle, however. Even if Trump isn’t seen as a viable contender, the other candidates’ attitudes towards Trump, his presidency and his legal woes will all inform how the primaries shake out, and there will be a rich debate on those issues thanks to presence of multiple anti-Trump candidates on any debate stage.

I definitely agree with a lot of analysts who doubt DeSantis has the personal touch to be a strong candidate, but I don’t really see anyone other than perhaps Youngkin who could knock him off his perch as the top alternative to Trump. But it’s really early and the world and economy are in a volatile state. Someone with a compelling case to make that they have foreign policy experience, like Nikki Haley, or economic expertise, like Ramaswamy, could emerge if their skills seem most needed in the moment.

The last possibility is the most frightening for the Republican Party, and that is that Trump is dead in the water and perhaps even sitting in a prison cell, and yet he still wins because there are too many candidates splitting too much of the vote.

I think the best analysis right now is almost to offer no analysis at all. In Magic 8-Ball terms, I’d go with either “Reply hazy, try again,” “Ask again later” or “Cannot predict now.”

On Friday, on the first day of its conference in Hiroshima, Japan, the Group of Seven (G7) countries announced new, intensified sanctions on Russia.

A statement issued by G7 leaders said restrictions would cover exports of industrial machinery, tools and technology useful to Russia’s war effort, while efforts would be pursued to limit Russian revenues from trade in metals and diamonds…

…The actions targeted Russia’s sanctions evasion, future energy revenues and military-industrial supply chains, with sanctions imposed on more than 300 targets on Friday.

The Treasury said it imposed sanctions on 22 people and 104 entities with touchpoints in more than 20 countries in jurisdictions, while the Department of State targeted almost 200 people, entities, vessels and aircraft.

US sanctions authorities were also expanded to more sectors of the Russian economy, including architecture, manufacturing and construction, the Treasury said, allowing any person or entity operating in those sectors to be hit with sanctions.

Russia was ready with a response.

Among the 500 people singled out for travel and financial restrictions on Friday were Americans seen as adversaries by Mr. Trump, including Letitia James, the state attorney general of New York who has sued him for alleged fraud, and Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel investigating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after leaving office.

Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who rebuffed Mr. Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome of the election, also made the list. So did Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot the pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021.

None of them has anything to do with Russia policy, and the only evident reason they would have come to Moscow’s attention is because Mr. Trump has publicly assailed them. The Russian Foreign Ministry offered no specific explanation for why they would be included on the list but did say that among its targets were “those in government and law enforcement agencies who are directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of the so-called storming of the Capitol.”

It’s easy to see what the G7 is trying to do. They’re trying to win a war by weakening Russia’s economy and military preparedness, while also making sure to create some significant discomfort for Russian elites who might be swayed to organize against the current leadership in the Kremlin.

It’s a bit harder to surmise what Russia is aiming for with their sanctions. Putting travel and financial restrictions on a Capitol police officer isn’t going to do anything to help them keep their hold on seized Ukrainian territory. Doing the same to New York’s attorney general will not disrupt America’s ability to supply weapons and logistical support to Ukraine. By a simple process of elimination it’s clear that the strategy is to help Donald Trump win the presidency, which they expect would disrupt America’s ability to support Ukraine. Short of that, they are signaling their support for the MAGA movement and their election denialism–the idea being to maintain and strengthen a faction of the American public that is more aligned with the Kremlin’s priorities than the priorities of the government in Washington, DC.

Once again, Trump and his strong supporters are being used as tools of Russian policy.

This is a pretty desperate ploy by Vladimir Putin. Even if elected, Trump will not take office until late-January 2025. That’s a long time to wait for relief from the Western buildup of military capacity in Ukraine. They can get more immediate relief if MAGA-aligned members of Congress succeed in cutting off military appropriations for Ukraine. And, of course, if the USA defaults on its debt, which Trump is clearly urging, that would be a giant victory for Russia, greater than anything they could ever hope to impose on a battlefield.