Where's Mitch?

U.S. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not been seen in public since June, and Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, who must call a special election before tomorrow is over, cannot do so without McConnell resigning.  Ir McConnell were to resign on Tuesday, August 4, Governor Beshear wouldn't even be able to appoint an interim senator to serve out the remainder of his term.  A 2024 law passed by Kentucky's Republican state legislature prohibiting Beshear from doing so remains on the books (and will likely be repealed after November 2027 if Kentuckians elect a  Republican governor to succeed Beshear then).

Beshear has taken flak for not doing enough to discern McConnell's fitness to remain in office for the remainder of his term, which expires in January 2027, after which McConnell will retire, but it seems that McConnell has already retired - permanently.  Rumors of his death may be greatly exaggerated, but Beshear can do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation until and unless McConnell resigns or is proven to have already died.  Both of those things are beyond his control, yet progressives in the Democratic Party are using this as a cudgel to swat down his possible presidential ambitions.  They don't want a white guy from Kentucky to be the Democratic presidential nominee - why don't they come out and say it?  (Left-leaning Democrats seem to in for white male politicians from the old border region of the antebellum period.  Look at the lack of respect they gave to Martin O'Malley and Joe Biden.)  Do they expect Beshear to storm into the hospital to demand to see Senator McConnell or else?  That's not how it works.

What happens next in Kentucky is unknown, but if Beshear can't call a special election or appoint an interim senator once tomorrow passes, assuming Mitch McConnell already has passed, Kentucky will be short one senator and the GOP will be short one member in its narrow Senate majority.  That might not be a bad thing.

Quality Matters

It looks like Mitch McConnell has been having heartburn.

You'd have heartburn too, if you saw the latest news and poll numbers involving Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterms, who McConnell has to count on to win back a Republican majority.

In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is ahead of noted New Jersey resident Dr. Mehmet Oz by ten to fifteen points, and Oz undistinguished himself by complaining about the rising prices of exotic vegetables in a supermarket whose name he couldn't get right.  Mandela Barnes - whose biggest asset is that he is not Russ Feingold - is ahead of incumbent Republican Senator and crackpot conspiracy theorist Ron Johnson in Wisconsin by eight points, while incumbent Democratic senator Mark Kelly holds a similar lead over Republican challenger and 2020 election denier Blake Masters in Arizona.  In Georgia, incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock is ahead by four points over Republican challenger Herschel Walker, the noted spousal abuser and climate-change non-expert who says China can get rid of its bad air by letting the winds blow our good air over the ocean to them.  Uh, you think someone should tell him that the jet stream flows from west to east and not the other way around? 

McConnell has conceded that the GOP's lack of "quality candidates" is helping Democrats in the polls, and many of them are likely headed to defeat.  But the Republicans could make up for losses in Pennsylvania or Georgia elsewhere.  In Washington State, Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley is giving incumbent Democratic senator Patty Murray - first elected to the Senate when the biggest threat from China was Olympic diver Fu Mingxia - a run for her money, and incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennet is facing a tough challenge from Republican challenger Joe O'Dea, who actually says that Trump lost the 2020 election.  A Republican that faces reality head-on - wow, what a concept!

I don't even want to consider the J.D. Vance - Tim Ryan Senate race in Ohio.

And remember, the weaker candidates currently behind - even Herschel Walker - could pull out a victory in November.  If that sounds unthinkable, remember that the insufferable Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst won re-election to the Senate over a Democratic opponent who knew corn and soybean prices better than she did. Remember also that many a Republican wave has swept some serious chuckleheads into the Senate - remember Dan Quayle? Right now, the Democrats may be gaining some momentum thanks to having passed popular legislation in the past few weeks, but with inflation and public health issues still a problem, the Democrats could end up answering an old riddle on Election Day . . . the riddle of what happens when a force in motion meets an immovable object.  

But quality still matters.

Hitting The Ceiling

Well, the debt ceiling has been temporarily raised through early December, so a crisis has been avoided . . . for now. And the anger Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer showed toward Senate Republicans for delaying it for as long as they did was all too obvious.

After Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell allowed the vote on the debt ceiling to go through, Schumer excoriated the GOP for letting the crisis go so far.  It was the right speech at the wrong time.  It was too sensitive a moment for such a speech.  All he did was anger McConnell and made him much less likely to step in when the debt ceiling needs to be raised again.  Jesus didn't weep.  But Joe Manchin did.

"Poisoning the well" is too mild a metaphor for what just went down this past week.

The Democrats will likely have to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which will mean that they will have to set a specific number that the Republicans will force them to defend in a midterm election campaign that will focus on too much government spending.  This may be a neutral issue if the Democrats can pass President Biden's "Build Back Better" program - but that's a big "if" . . . and time is running out.

And a continuing resolution has to be passed to fund the government at the same time the debt ceiling has to be raised again.

I'm not optimistic.

Through the Roof

The United States is on the verge of defaulting on its debt, and only a fool would be nonchalant about remaining unworried of the debt ceiling blowing up.

The Republicans aren't worried.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has insisted that the Democrats raise the debt ceiling but themselves but won't let them move ahead with a procedural vote to do it on their own.  He wants the Democrats to do it without any form of Republican participation, which is to say, he wants them to use a budget reconciliation.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer can't do that.  It'll take a long time - far longer, most likely, then the expected default date of October 18.

I have cautious optimism and confidence that Schumer can get this job done.  He's vowed to get the debt ceiling raised by having Senate Democrats stay over the weekend if he can't get it done by Friday.  He won't get it done today; the procedural vote he's set up for today to raise the debt ceiling will inevitably fail, thanks to the GOP filibuster.  If the debt ceiling isn't raised, the American economy and possibly the global economy will fail.  The GOP is banking on Democrats to get the blame for letting the country default simply because they control the Presidency and Congress.  If that sounds ridiculous, because everyone can see what McConnell is doing, consider that the Republicans have always pulled this trick and have always dodged the blame and deflected it to the Democrats.  They stonewalled much of Bill Clintons agenda in 1993 and 1994 and did the same to to all of Barack Obama's agenda (except for health care reform) in 2009 and 2010.  Result?  They won the House in the subsequent midterms. 

What really frustrates me - and Democrats as well, I'm sure - is that Democrats tried to work with Republicans in good faith on the Clinton and Obama agendas with much larger congressional majorities when they should have gone it alone.  This time the Democrats have learned their lesson and have been trying to get things done on their own.  But with the narrow majorities they have right now, it's too late.

Meanwhile, the Republican objective to take back power in 2022 and 2024 and turn America into a fascist dictatorship continues full steam ahead.

I only hope we don't end up selling apples on the street two weeks from now. 

Throw Out the Vote

You knew it was going to happen. Senate Democrats brought up the sweeping election reform bill passed by the House, and Senate Republicans blocked the upper house from even debating it, never mind voting on it.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell charged that it would federalize elections and take power away from the states to run elections.  He's right.  And that's exactly why you should support voting reform.  Because, with fourteen states having passed severe voting restrictions, particularly in Republican states where Republicans almost lost key Senate and presidential-elector elections, to make damn sure that never happens again, the states (at least Republican states) can't be trusted to run elections. And Congress is clearly within its bounds constitutionally to set guidelines for how states run elections.

To be fair, the "For the People" Act, as written, was probably too sweeping and too constitutionally dubious to pass muster with the courts.  But the GOP won't even consider West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's compromise proposal , which would allow for voter ID and require no more than a utility bill but also allow fifteen days of early voting and eliminate partisan gerrymandering.  But then, Stacy Abrams, quickly replacing Nancy Pelosi as the national bogeywoman, said something that convinced Republicans to be against it.  She said she was for it.

There might be a way to convince Manchin to weaken the filibuster enough to allow an exception for voter laws, just as there might be a way to convince Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) to endorse climate-change legislation.  Manchin was actually for filibuster reform when he first joined the Senate back in 2011, but he's long since changed his mind about that.  Six years in the minority will do that to you.  For now, therefore, voter reform legislation is on the back burner, but Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer has made it clear that it's not off the stove.

"Make no mistake about it, it will not be the last time voting rights comes up for a debate in the Senate," Schumer, above, said.  "We have several serious options for how to reconsider this issue and advance legislation to combat voter suppression. We are going to explore every last one of our options."  

They'd better.  And it's worth noting that will the bill up for no debate ensures the casting of a ballot, it said little if anything about making sure that ballots are counted.  Some states are already setting things up so that legally cast votes can be thrown out by partisan poll oversight boards based on the mere suspicion of fraud however unfounded.  This could allow the Republicans to steal enough seats to win both houses of Congress in 2022 and overturn popular majorities for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024.  And if that happens . . . well, it's one giant leap to authoritarianism.

*

P.S.  It has since been reported that Donald Trump wanted to send Americans living or traveling abroad infected by COVID to Guantanamo Bay to keep the case numbers down early in the pandemic.  The next Republican President - who could be named Donald Trump, and not necessarily the one who just left the White House - could, once installed in the White House in a fraudulent election, use an emergency similar to COVID to have a law expanding his powers passed and use it to shut down opposition parties and CNN.

And after that, the only question about the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers will be which group will be nationalized into our new secret police. 😠

Senate Setup

Here's an update on that Senate standoff.  Early last week, Mitch McConnell backed off from his stand against the filibuster and let a power-sharing arrangement go through when he concluded that the Democrats wouldn't be able to get rid of the filibuster thanks to opposition from two Senate Democrats in particular: Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Both Sinema and Manchin are moderates who have a problem with progressives not unlike the problems Republicans have with progressives. But they're more likely to side with Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer on numerous economic issues, so that should help Schumer get President Biden's COVID relief bill passed.

President Biden wants to go big on this bill, and most congressional Democrats don't want to cave to Republican demands to spend less, knowing that the last time they did that, in 2009, they lost the House and also their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate - which allowed the Tea Party to come in and ruin President Obama's agenda.  If the Democrats can pull America out of the COVID crisis, the 2022 midterm elections could be a repeat of the 1934 midterms, when Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal helped the Democrats gain seats in Congress despite being the party holding the executive branch.  (The party that holds the White House often loses congressional seats in midterm elections.)   

Senate Standoff

Although the Democrats control the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote as the Senate's presiding officer (and we might as well call her the 101st senator, since she's likely to cast tie-breaking vote on measures that go along party lines with numbing regularity), the 50-50 split means that Republicans control the levers of power per the rules of the Senate in the previous Congress because Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and because Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (below) have yet to agree on a power-sharing deal - a deal made necessary by the even split - for the new 117th Congress.

The main sticking point is the filibuster.  McConnell wants it so Republicans can block any legislation they do not like. Schumer, knowing that ending a filibuster by a three-fifths majority would be impossible, wants to get rid of it.  No deal is imminent.  Eve if the Democrats had a clear majority, it would be difficult to end the filibuster, as some moderate Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), want to keep it.  

But if the Democrats had managed to win just one more seat in the Senate - one more seat, that's all - they could have at least organized the committees, fast-tracked President Biden's legislative agenda, and put President Biden's Cabinet nominees on a faster track as well (although Lloyd Austin was confirmed as Secretary of Defense).  That what continues to flabbergast me.  The Democrats couldn't win Senate elections in any of the numerous states where the vote could have gone either way.  Maybe it was because of progressives' calls to defund the police after George Floyd's death.  Maybe it was because the pandemic made it more difficult for Senate Democratic candidates to campaign. Maybe it was the fact that almost all of the tossup Senate elections were in states where the voters stuck with the GOP and voted for Trump - except Maine, which Biden carried the state but where Senator Susan Collins managed to win a fifth term. At any rate, I curse all of the Democratic Senate candidates who had a chance to win but let the elections slip through their fingers.  And for sexter Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, that goes double. 

Power Plays and Loose Ends

The past week showed how the great civilizations of Europe have long since gotten their acts together after three thousand years of history and how America is neither great nor civilized.  While Great Britain and the European Union have successfully finalized their separation, the United States Congress has torn itself asunder for no good reason other than for political power plays.  Trump was  pushing for more COVID stimulus money, something Democrats want (for which I give him credit) and he also pushed for a repeal of the regulation that protects Internet platforms - platforms like Twitter - from lawsuits against what their users - uses like Trump - post, along with a call for a voter-fraud investigation, neither of which Democrats want (which instantly cancels out that credit).  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (below) proceeded to put all of that into one bill, knowing that the Democrats wouldn't vote for it (and thus the stimulus money wouldn't pass, McConnell's preferred outcome) and knowing also that Democrats would go on record as having opposed more money for Americans in desperate need.  Democrats immediately called this out, letting McConnell and their constituents know that they would not be played, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders demanded (forcefully, but unsuccessfully) that the extra COVID stimulus money be voted on separately.  And after all that, the old Congress expired, as did the COVID extra-stimulus legislation. 

And meanwhile, the COVID vaccinations are going so slowly in the U.S. that we may be dealing with the bug for the rest of the decade - and it's only 2021.

McConnell also did this to allow Georgia's two Republican senators, David Perdue (currently in quarantine after being exposed to someone with COVID) and Kelly Loeffler, to vote for the extra money and thus improve their standing with voters in the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff elections being held tomorrow, but their respective Democratic opponents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have been vehement in calling out their duplicity, and they've been persistent in pushing the issue of fairness and decency at a time when Republican power plays are anything but that.  Heck, they might just pull it off and win tomorrow, giving the Democrats the Senate! 

It'll take awhile to count the votes in Georgia, though, and even if Ossoff and Warnock win, we can expect policies in 2021 to be a messy affair in which loose ends are left untied or tied very sloppily in the 117th Congress.

Hawley New Year

It didn't take long for events to dictate that 2021 is going to be another bad year.  As if the slowdown in distributing COVID vaccines (which wipes out the optimism their arrival heralded) and the prospect of war with Iran weren't enough, we now have to deal with something most of us - including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell - had hoped to avoid.

U.S. Senator Joshua Hawley (R-MO), who celebrated his forty-first birthday on New Year's Eve, has announced that, on Wednesday, January 6,  when a U.S. Representative objects to a state's electoral college results favoring President-elect Joe Biden when the votes are counted before a joint session of Congress, he, Hawley, will support the objection - which will force a two-hour debate on whether or not to accept the results from said state before the vote count can continue.  Hawley has said that, so far, he plans to challenge Pennsylvania's results, but he's left open the possibility of endorsing as many as six challenges to a given state's Electoral College results, which would likely force Congress going into the wee small hours of Thursday, January 7.  Eleven more Senate Republicans plan to join him.

Hawley says he's doing this to call to attention the widespread concerns of voter fraud and of the failure of states to follow their own election laws, but no one is buying it.  The only widespread concerns of election integrity only exist in the minds of Donald Trump and all those, including Hawley, who curry favor with him. Hawley is either thinking of his re-election chances in 2024 or a possible presidential bid that year.  He wants Trump to have his back.  And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who didn't want his caucus to endorse a challenge to Biden's win, has lost control of that caucus so much that he caved and told Republican senators to vote their own conscience. 

This stunt will yet further undermine faith in electoral democracy among Americans and set a precedent for future attempts by the Republican Party to overturn the will of the voters.  As for the chances of overturning the election to put Trump back in office . . .  well, in the incoming 117th Congress, and each chamber has to decide individually the validity of a state's electoral vote result one way of the other.  Both chambers have to agree to toss out challenged electoral ballots.  With a Democratic majority  in the House and 48 Democratic senators plus a few Republicans in both chambers who won't go along with Trump's or Hawley's charade, the Biden electoral votes should be accepted and that will be the end of it.  But with so many Republicans forced to go on record as supporting or opposing Trump, it is possible, however unlikely, that every House and Senate Republican will vote to support Trump out of fear of being primaried in a future election by Trump supporters and fear of the power Trump may have within the GOP after he "retires" to Mar-a-Lago.

We can probably count on Mitch McConnell and less extreme GOP senators like Ben Sasse and Susan Collins to support the Biden electoral slates.  After all, they just got re-elected, they won't be up again until 2026, and McConnell, who's beginning his seventh term in the Senate today, probably doesn't care about what happens to him anymore, just like he stopped caring about the country long ago.  Add Mitt Romney to that corner, too.  In the House, you can add Illinois' Republican House member Adam Kinzinger.  But given all of the chaos and disorder Wednesday's electoral vote count in Congress is expected to generate (did I happen to mention the planned Trump rally for January 6 outside the Capitol?), it's likely that many members of Congress will be wearing masks not out of COVID concerns but because they're ashamed to show their faces in public.

As for me, I'll probably just sleep through it. 

Well, maybe, but one thing could keep me up at night in the days leading up to Wednesday.  The same people who assure us that Trump can't overturn the 2020 election are the same people who said that he couldn't win the 2016 election.

Trump Bump

Trump finally signed the COVID relief bill after threatening to veto it because it did not offer payments of $2,200 to Americans rather than the payments of $600 that his own administration agreed to in a compromise.  Apart from a break in unemployment benefits caused by his tardiness, though, everything should go smoothly after that, especially now the the government will be fund for nine months, by which time the pandemic might be over and President Biden may have secured further funding for COVID relief.  Biden has called this bill a down payment.

Trump apparently agreed to sign the bill only after getting assurances from Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that the Senate would vote to increase payments to Americans to $2,200, as the House is already planning to vote on that as well.  But I have a terrifying suspicion that Trump made McConnell promise something else.  I think he made McConnell promise not to stand in the way of any U.S. Senator who approves of a challenge to the electoral vote count in Congress a week from this Wednesday by Republican House members.

The electoral vote count in Congress may be scheduled for January 6, but don't expect House Republicans to suddenly realize that Joe Biden is President-elect through . . . an epiphany.  

Traps For Biden

Okay, Mitch McConnell actually congratulated Joe Biden for winning the Presidency once the Electoral College certified the President-elect's win, after having said that he would recognize a winner once the electors actually voted.  But I'm not going to give McConnell brownie points for being consistent.  Mitch Mac is acknowledging Biden's win because he wants to give Georgia Republicans an incentive to vote in the U.S. Senate double runoff election on January 5.  If they think Donald Trump still has a chance of being declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election as a result of voter fraud, they have no reason to vote in the runoffs or expect them to be fair and secure, which helps the Democrats and makes it more likely that they can win both seats and, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris's vote, control the Senate.

McConnell is craven and power-mad, but he's nowhere nearly as nefarious as Trump, who forced Attorney General William Barr out of his post in order to put a caretaker Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department and facilitate the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Biden's son Hunter (above) - something Barr was reluctant to do.  (Barr also wouldn't report that Hunter was being actively investigated until after the election so as not to include the vote.) Such an appointment would ensure that investigations of Hunter Biden's business dealings will dog his dad for at least a year and prevent him from getting anything done.  Biden's Attorney General would be powerless to stop such an investigation.

So what, you say?  It's the son being investigated, not the father.  Except that Hunter is accused of trading in on his dad's previous position as Vice President in his dealings, meaning that Uncle Joe would be deemed guilty by association.  Or guilty of worse.  One caveat, though - any special prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden would have to actually find something.  There's no real evidence that Hunter did anything wrong.

Give Biden credit for not being distracted by any of this.  Give him credit also for going hard after all of the Republicans who backed Trump's futile attempts to overturn the election in his speech to the nation after the Electoral College declared Biden the winner of the election.  My only concern with Biden's speech was his constant throat-clearing, which, surprisingly, did not lead Trump to start tweeting insinuations about Biden's health in the middle of a pandemic.

Biden moves on, having appointed Pete Buttigieg to get us moving again; Mayor Pete is Biden's choice for Secretary of Transportation.  (Maybe Martin O'Malley can get the ambassadorship to Ireland.)  I'll have more on Mayor Pete later.     

COVID Vaccine? PAH!

Just a few days after Britain, then Canada,  approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for use for their citizens - or subjects, since both Brits and Canadians bow to the Queen of England - the United States recommended it for approval for its citizens, half of whom bow to Donald Trump.  The Food and Drug Administration gave American doctors and clinics emergency authorization to se the vaccine.

The beginning of the end of the pandemic?  Curb your enthusiasm, Sparky.   The number of vaccines we're getting is far to small to make a dent in the COVID outbreaks we're currently experiencing in this country, and it will take several months for everyone to get vaccinated.  That is, assuming everyone will get vaccinated; a large minority, say 40 to 45 percent, of Americans don't trust COVID vaccines.  Which works out fine, since not too many of them will be available anyway.  Some epidemiologists expect that the vaccine won't let us get back to normal until the middle of summer at best, but others are warning us that we'll have to keep staying six feet apart and go into banks looking like we're about to rob them until next December.

And 2022 may not be all that promising, either.

Meanwhile, Congress can't pass a COVID relief bill, which would help millions of people in the verge of being kicked out onto the street, because Senate Majority Leader A. Mitchell McConnell won't let anything pass unless he gets protection against COVID lawsuits for major corporations.  Given the closeness in the polls in the U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, I doubt that the Democrats will take over the Senate and get anything done.  Bottom line: Just because we're heading into a new year doesn't mean we have to deal with the same old crap.    

On the other hand, the Supreme Court rejected that lawsuit from Texas demanding that the ballots of voters in four swing states that went for Biden be invalidated.  That should be good news.  But Trump and his minions keep fighting the result of the election. 

Ruthless

I'm not going to comment on the life and legacy of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday, as many legal scholars, feminists, and feminist legal scholars are more qualified than I am who can do that.

I'm going to comment on how how this may completely f**k up the presidential election.

Ginsburg's death gives Trump the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court seat and cement a lasting conservative majority, one that could last until long after I'm dead.  And I'm almost 55.  And you know full well that Trump will try to fill it (in fact, he's already announced that he wants to appoint a woman, and soon) because Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has said that the conditions that led him to block President Obama's attempt to nominate a justice to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016 - a President of one party and a Senate controlled by the other -  so close to the elections don't exist now, with the White House and the Senate both under Republican control . . . though we're even closer to the elections.  Besides, Trump wants to fill the seat quickly because he wants to fire up his base to come out and overwhelm Joe Biden.

Of course, this could have the unintended consequence of firing up Biden's base, a base fearful of Trump getting another four years and possibly replacing Stephen Breyer, who's no spring chicken himself, or Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes.   Which means that for once, the Democratic base will actually keep the judiciary in mind for a change when they go to the polls.  But even if Biden wins, a new justice will likely be confirmed by the lame-duck Republican Senate before January.  And for all we know, there may be no vacancies during a Biden administration. 

Justice Ginsburg was hoping that Trump wouldn't get a chance to chose her replacement, but there is something resembling a bright side regarding the two men Trump has appointed to the Court.  Both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have ruled against Trump's repeated efforts to prevent his tax retunes from being released, letting Trump know that they're not his bitches.  And Justice Gorsuch also wrote a thoughtful opinion regarding the sovereign rights of Native Americans to prosecute justice on their lands in Oklahoma.  And because the Democrats in the Senate have some leverage, a Trump appointment is not a foregone conclusion.  Also, Trump is no lawyer.  On the down side - Mitch McConnell is.

Time to think about adding six more justices.  I think Franklin Roosevelt was on to something.

I hope Trump at least makes an effort to promote diversity with his next Supreme Court nominee by nominating a justice from an unrepresented group.

I hope he nominates a Protestant.

Black humor there . . .

The Impeachment Trial: More Meh

Now that Her Holy Modal Majesty, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is releasing the articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate, people are praising her deft move to get pressure on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to have fair trial, with key Republican senators demanding a fair process in which to call witnesses and with new information about the Ukraine scandal - including former White House national security adviser John Bolton's willingness to testify on the matter - during the Speaker's imposed interregnum.   

Don't you believe it.  It's more daft than deft.

Pelosi (above) never had any leverage in holding back the articles if impeachment.  McConnell never wanted to receive them anyway, and he has no interest in holding a trial that would, if not remove Trump from the White House, still make him look bad.  There are four to six Republican senators who could join the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus in allowing witnesses to be called who could easily stick with McConnell when it comes to actually calling the witnesses during the trial.  (Except maybe Mitt Romney, who has said he'd like to hear what Bolton has to say.)  If there is a trial; McConnell is seriously considering a dismissal of the trial so he can get back to packing the courts with right-wing judges that will dominate the federal judiciary at least until my generation dies off.  In short, Pelosi's intransigence changed nothing, and it helped not a single Democrat.

Except maybe Joe Biden.  With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the presidential polls in New Hampshire and in both February caucus states (Iowa and Nevada), House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has opined that Pelosi delayed the submission of the articles of impeachment to ensure that Sanders is stuck in Washington as a juror in the impeachment trial to get him off the campaign trail in the crucial final weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire.  I don't agree entirely with McCarthy's assessment.  I think she did it to get Senator Elizabeth Warren off the presidential campaign trail as well.  Speaker Pelosi is officially neutral in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination process, but she's already made clear her disdain for Grandpa Bernie's and Aunt Liz's policy positions, such as their support for Medicare for all and the Green New Deal (which went down like an old brown shoe).  The last thing she wants is to have either one of them as the Democratic presidential nominee, and their absence from the campaign trail wild help Biden gain traction in the state primaries and caucuses preceding Super Tuesday and possibly prevent the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign from going all the way to New Jersey in June.

But Pelosi's gambit is not going to have a detrimental effect on Trump's standing or slow down or retard McConnell's progress in fighting progress.  It would only make sense that her moves are designed to affect the presidential trail more than the presidential trial.

Trail, trial . . . love those anagrams. ;-)           

Impeachment

Get it?

Now that Trump has been impeached, the Democrats have won the battle but have not yet won the war.  The might find the end of this war to be like Waterloo, and not from Wellington's perspective.  They have history and duty on their side, with House leaders Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler convinced they have Trump dead to rights, but the Senate's Republican majority is already trying to figure out how to concoct a show trial that will allow Trump to be acquitted while Trump and his minions on his campaign and at the Republican National Committee figure out how to destroy the Democratic Party once and for all in 2020 and consign it Whig-like extinction.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is already anticipating that, and she's reportedly holding back on referring the indictment to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell is already planning to strike the final blow against the Democratic opposition.  Mitch is already planning how to decimate Amy McGrath, his likely Democratic opponent in Kentucky's Senate election next year, and he must relish the idea of doing the same to Pelosi simultaneously.  The Speaker has been known to outwit many an opponent, but McConnell is not an opponent.  He's a mortal enemy, and in him she may yet meet her match.        

Meanwhile, the Republicans are sure to raise money over the impeachment vote, giving them more  dough than they need.  Democrats are likely to get money from their biggest supporters, which means they'll get checks in figures without a lot of zeroes at the end, thus pointing to a financial disadvantage.  Joe Biden is already campaigning against Trump as if he's already the nominee-in-waiting, not because he's convinced he's going to win the nomination but because he wants to frame the argument against Trump early, whether he's the nominee or not.  Biden is showing how dangerous to democracy and the rule of law Trump is.  That said, how many people will really care if we continue to have a booming stock market and low unemployment, even if the Dow numbers and job statistics are grossly misleading?  This, sadly, is nothing new for the majority of voters in These States, who continue to vote their pocketbooks for leaders who take their oaths on Bibles. :-(  

Kentucky Fried Senate Election

Is Amy McGrath the Kentucky Democrat who can beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky's U.S. Senate election in 2020?  Or is she a female Jack Conway?

Jack Conway, of course, was the Democrats' great big hope to win a U.S. Senate seat in 2010, although he lost to Rand Paul and, after losing the 2015 gubernatorial race there, retired from politics never to make a comeback - after Chris Matthews declared that Conway had a brilliant future.  Amy McGrath is a former Marine pilot who ran for the House in 2018, just like former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill - but, unlike Sherrill, lost her bid to become a congresswoman.  And now she thinks she can defeat Mitch McConnell?

For all of Jack Conway's misfortunes, he was lucky never to have challenged McConnell in an election, because had he done so, his political career would have been buried twelve feet under instead of merely six feet under.  McConnell is like a masterful conductor, going after his Democratic opponents with a fully symphonic attack that ensures that the last thing they hear on Election Eve is their own political death song.  After he lost two statewide elections, Conway's political career was toast.  McConnell's Democratic opponents are left with political careers that are the equivalent of a turkey that's been deep-fried too long. 

Add to McGrath's uphill battle a statewide electorate that Trump carried in 2016 by thirty points, a Kentucky congressional delegation with only one Democrat, and a tendency for "cultural" issues to come up just in time for elections in the Bluegrass State to animate the reactionary Republican base, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.

Sorry, but this is an easy call - Amy McGrath will be no more successful against McConnell than she was against Andy Barr in her House race. She'll be less successful, in fact - she only lost the House race in 2018 by three points.  But then, stranger things have happened.  No one thought McConnell had a chance against incumbent Democratic Senator Walter Huddleston back in 1984.  And Huddleston, as a Democrat, was many people's favorite Republican (sort of like Joe Lieberman).

Anyone Can Be a Senator

But not everyone can be President.

The Democrats have fewer U.S. Senate seats to defend in 2020 than Republicans - 12 versus 22 - and the only need four seats to win back control of the chamber, but as TV producer and political activist Brian Taylor Cohen recently pointed out, the most attractive Democratic prospects for the Senate are all running for President.  Most of them have no chance of winning the White House but are so fixated on Trump that they all think that they can take out Trump in a mano-a-mano match-up.  Ironically, the reason there are more then twenty Democratic presidential candidates in the first place is because they all saw Trump get elected and decided that, well, if a politically inexperienced businessman can get elected to the highest office in the land, any one of them certainly can.

No, they can't.  And right now, there's a bunch of Democratic presidential candidates who are better suited to win a Senate seat in 2020 . . . and they're all polling in the low single digits in their presidential campaigns.  As Taylor Cohen tweeted, you have Beto O'Rourke of Texas only getting two percent in the polls, John Hickenlooper of Colorado getting one percent in the polls, Steve Bullock of Montana not getting anything in the polls and having officially declared for the Presidency just yesterday, and Stacey Abrams of Georgia not even running for President yet and already having ruled out a Senate run.  All of them, Taylor Cohen noted, could defeat the Republican incumbent senators up for re-election in 2020 - John Cornyn of Texas, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Steve Daines of Montana, and David Perdue of Georgia.  And I would add that Cory Booker of New Jersey, who's already a Democrat in the Senate and is up for re-election in 2020, is concentrating on a presidential run. 

With the possible - possible - exception of O'Rourke, these candidates are unlikely to get out of the single digits in the polls.  Defeating Trump is only part of the challenge; the Democrats also have to hold the House, but it's especially important that they take back the Senate.  Because even a post-Trump Republican Party, with a Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell, will be as obstructionist and as illiberal as the Trump-era Republican Party has been and as the pre-Trump Republican Party was.  A Republican Senate under a Democratic President will only block judicial appointments, delay Cabinet confirmations, and stymie international treaties that the rest of the world realizes are common-sense approaches to solving global problems but American industry hates because they're bad for business.  People like Bullock, Hickenlooper, and others are so focused on the big picture of the fight against Trump that they've lost the sight of the more local political competitions necessary for the Democrats to control Washington in order to govern.  It's not that they can't see the forest for the trees; they can't see the trees for the forest.

Focusing more on the Presidency than on state and local races is the reasons Democrats declined and fell from their lofty perch in 2009 when they controlled everything, and this mass rush to run for the White House is just another example of that.  The silver lining is that there's still time for these no-shot long shots to abandon their presidential ambitions when they see that they can't win - most likely you too, Beto! - and switch to a Senate run instead.  At least Cory Booker, who, to the best of my knowledge, is the only incumbent senator up for re-election in 2020 who's also running for President, is able to hedge his bets on his own political future.  The New Jersey state legislature passed - and Governor Phil Murphy signed - a law allowing Booker to run for both offices at once.

As Caitlyn Jenner once said of athletes back when her sex was still male and his forename was still Bruce, they're all good but only one can be the best. Likewise, the twenty-odd Democratic presidential candidates may all be good, but only one of them can be the presidential nominee . . . but that hasn't stopped long shots who have a better chance at running for something else from trying to win the Presidency.  It reminds me of what H.L. Mencken said to a friend of his while at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, looking at all of the politicians in attendance . . . "Every one of them thinks that he can be President of the United States."

There Goes Your Nineteenth Nervous Shutdown

The shutdown is over, and Congress managed to come up with a deal over the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) issue without involving Donald Trump, who had no idea what he wanted to do about it.  The government will be funded for three weeks - three whole weeks! - after Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York got Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to agree to discuss it . . . later.  While Trump chief of staff John Kelly and Trump adviser Stephen Miller retard and block any real progress on immigration reform. 

And Schumer trusts McConnell (below) to keep his promise?

That's like trusting a lioness to babysit a pair of lambs.

Schumer was supposed to get a deal on replacing DACA with real legislation once and for all, and instead he gets nothing!  He loses! And so do the Democrats, who, by the way, had public support for DACA but not at the expense of letting the government shut down. Which would have been suvivable if they hadn't caved.  

Ask McConnell for a promise?  Schumer might as well asked him for a pie crust.

You know, you silly Democrats, you could have avoided this mess.  You could have chosen as your 2016 presidential nominee the most liberal 2016 presidential candidate on immigration, one Martin Joseph O'Malley.  You had in O'Malley a potential President who was passionate on the immigration issue, who eagerly supported helping and getting legal status for DACA subjects, and who was ready and willing to get immigration reform done come hell or high water.

But instead of getting behind O'Malley (below), you laughed him out of the race, let your national committee anoint Hillary Clinton as your presidential nominee, and got a President who wants to avoid dealing with DACA and wants to stop immigration, come hell or high wall.  And you're still laughing at O'Malley?

You Democrats aren't very smart, are you?

I think I'm going to have a Pop-Tart now . . ..

The Parties Are Over

Donald Trump gave the Democrats what they wanted?  Yes.  And the Republicans are really upset.

Trump agreed with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer to extend the debt ceiling by three months and to pass a stopgap spending bill to fund the government, which made the heads of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell explode.  Ryan, McConnell, and other Republicans wanted an eighteen-month extension of the debt ceiling, hence it would have pushed a decision on the issue to March 2019 - after the 2018 midterms.  This deal between the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership ensures that the GOP will have to answer for its ineffectiveness in this Congress, and it allows Trump and the Democrats to govern in a bipartisan fashion.

But to what end?  It's no secret that Trump wanted the debt ceiling issue pushed back - and hurricane relief settled - to promote his tax plan, which would benefit the wealthiest Americans.  Also, even if his base doesn't necessarily vote for Republicans in the midterms, he's made himself look reasonable and eager to "get things done" - and keep his base in his corner for his re-election bid in 2020.  Thus, he could get re-elected.   And Pelosi and Schumer - both of whom have served in Washington since Ronald Reagan was President and are old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was an actor - have just fallen into Trump's trap.  They are such clueless insiders that they demonstrate why seniority is just another variation of senility.  The Democrats need new, bold leaders who can stand up to Donald J. Trump, not a couple of old pros who are seasoned enough to screw up everything by dealing with him.  

As Martin O'Malley said, now we fight.  As Pelosi and Schumer say, "Who is Martin O'Malley?" 

The congressional Democratic leadership is not doing anyone any favors by working with Trump.  You don't lie down with dogs . . . lest you wind up with fleas. :-p       

However, with the Republican Party having been burned by their own President and with the Democratic Party about to be burned as well, the resulting collapse of the current two-party system can only be a good thing.  Note to progressives: Call a convention and form a new party now.    

Night of the Living Dead Health Care Bill

The Senate Republican leadership pulled the plug on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, as too many members of the GOP's Senate caucus have refused to back the Senate bill in any way, shape or form.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer has offered to work with the Republicans to fix the law, but Mitch McConnell, Schumer's Republican counterpart, has decided to schedule a vote to repeal it without replacing it.

Too bad for him that he doesn't have the votes for even that.

Attempts to "reform" health care will go on, but in broad daylight, with hearings, markups, and all those other old-fashioned things that Congress used to be good at.  And the House repeal-and-replace bill is still floating out there.   It looks like the Republicans will have to actually work with the Democrats in - HORRORS! - a bipartisan fashion.

The GOP isn't done decimating the middle class, though.  Wait until the Republican House releases its budget.  It will have more in common with Trump's budget than you think.