Josh Marshall
From TPM Reader AT …
I share Josh’s chagrin about my growing respect for Rep. Liz Cheney. Like Josh, I am repulsed by her policy positions – and, perhaps more importantly, by the values and ethics that underlies those positions.
BUT Liz Cheney provides Democrats an important and powerful contrast: Liz Cheney accepts the rule of law, does not sell conspiracy theories because they are politically convenient. Almost every other elected Republican demonstrates through their actions a fundamental opposition to democracy itself. Those same elected Republicans are eager to punish Rep. Cheney for supporting our system of government.
From TPM Reader WB …
There’s a fascinating dynamic at play in the Cheney drama. While Trump’s presence and influence have receded on the national stage, they have only grown within the Republican Party. Since he lost the election Trump has occupied very little of my headspace. I don’t know anyone who still talks about him. It’s amazing in its own right how quickly most of us have learned to ignore him. And yet at the same time fealty to Trump has become the sole organizing principle of the Republican Party. For a while it looked like apostates like Cheney might survive in the party, but now it’s clear they will not.
On the Big Lie
Kevin McCarthy signaled this morning that Liz Cheney may be on the way out as conference chair. She can’t effectively deliver the message, he says.
The truth is he’s right. And that is damning. It confirms that the GOP message is loyalty to Donald Trump, embrace of the Big Lie of a stolen election and – subsidiary to these two points – pretending the insurrection never happened.
COVID and the Roots of Reform
When I was 19 I got assigned to a work study job as a research assistant for Daniel Rodgers, a history professor who, fortuitously, turned out to be one of two or three people who taught me how to think. The research I was going to do was for a project that was eventually published a decade later as Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. The book is about the trans-Atlantic connections, borrowings, rivalries between reformers and states during the period in which virtually all North Atlantic states devised some version of what we call welfare states. There were rich well-springs of home grown reformism in the US. But looking to models in Europe was a constant focus. A recurrent theme is that the US so often seemed to be a late arriver to these reforms or resisted them because of beliefs in American exceptionalism or a more general resistance to state action.
There’s an article today in the Times which reports that we may never reach ‘herd immunity’ for COVID or at least that we may not do so for a very long time. The article strikes me as needlessly alarmist, in part because the ‘news’ being reported is as much a question of semantics or people being informed about epidemiology as it is some new negative development in the course of the pandemic. The details are probably what you would expect, a mix of vaccine hesitancy, more transmissible viral strains and viral evolution that slowly chips away at vaccine immunity all working together to put ‘herd immunity’ out of reach. But I want to zoom in on the potential role of vaccine hesitancy or politics-driven resistance to vaccines.
The Atlantic has a piece by Ron Brownstein on the 2022 election and whether or not the Democrats can avoid a “wipeout”. It is, typically for Brownstein, quite good.
My worry is not that there will be a wipeout but that Republicans may have a comparatively disappointing midterm and still take control of at least the House. The mix of redistricting, the strong pattern of mid-term losses for first term Presidents and the fact that the margin is already razor thin – these all stack the deck heavily against the Democrats. Most of the article goes over different strategies Democrats are discussing and specifically the general consensus that they are better served going big on their policy agenda than trimming their sails to avoid antagonizing swing voters or Republicans.
Let me share a couple thoughts of my own on this question.
Perhaps you read it many years ago. But if not, I wanted to flag your attention to this article Sarah Posner wrote for TPM back in 2015. Yesterday we reported that Josh Duggar, one the kids from the Duggar Family of Reality TV fame and himself a one time player in hard right evangelical politics, was arrested for possession of child pornography. This followed an earlier scandal in 2015 when it was revealed that as a teenager a decade earlier he had molested his younger sisters and one other girl of the same age.
This led to the cancellation of the family’s show 19 Kids and Counting. But what was revealed in that story was that in response to the sexual abuse the family sent Josh to be ‘mentored’ by a guy named Bill Gothard at a place he founded called the Institute for Basic Life Principles. Posner calls the IBLP “an insular and authoritarian evangelical homeschooling ministry whose charismatic founder, former followers say, sexually harassed female employees, blamed rape victims for provoking their attackers, and subjected young disciples to grueling physical labor for little or no pay.” It’s a fascinating part of the Duggar backstory. But more than that it is a fascinating look into part of the world of rightwing evangelical politics where a climate of sexual repression and adulation of charismatic leaders creates its own world of sexual abuse and predation. Here’s the piece.
The Russian Nesting Doll of Giuliani’s Corruption
I had worried that federal prosecutors might be forced to whittle the fullness of Rudy Giuliani’s criminal conduct down to a technical violation of failure to report lobbying on behalf of a foreign entity. But reports this morning suggest his legal peril may go well beyond that. Federal investigators seem to be looking at his decision to work with Russian spies to damage Joe Biden and spread disinformation about his family and seek the ouster of the US Ambassador to Ukraine as part of the extortion plot that eventually got Trump impeached.
Thank God it didn’t come to that. But if Derek Chauvin had been acquitted in Minneapolis federal officials were planning to arrest him at the court house on federal civil rights charges. The DOJ still plans to bring those charges against Chauvin and the three other officers involved in George Floyd’s arrest and death.
Tim Scott had a tough job following Biden and it showed. His speech seemed premised on Biden delivering a confrontational and aggressive speech that he didn’t give. Scott seemed to argue that Biden had brought to an end some glorious era of national unity. This is absurd. I don’t think it was effective.