Josh Marshall
Never say never and all that. But it looks like Benjamin Netanyahu’s dozen years as PM may be on the verge of ending. He was on the same precipice two weeks ago when his erstwhile ally and protege Naftali Bennett was negotiating to form a government with opposition leader Yair Lapid. Then the outbreak of inter-communal violence within Israel and another shooting war with Gaza led Bennett to foreswear that option and go back to negotiating with Netanyahu. Now Bennett is back to apparently finalizing that deal with Lapid.
Takeaways from the Jan 6 Filibuster
Senate Republicans using the filibuster to block the creation of a Jan 6th Commission is both despicable and entirely unsurprising. But the vote itself – which was 54 Yeas and 35 neas – compels us to note and consider a few points.
Yep, I’m Starting to Worry
As far as I can tell, no one thinks HR1/S1 is going to be passed in this Congress. Negotiations over a ‘hard’ infrastructure bill currently have a White House proposal of $1.7 trillion and a GOP proposal which, once you wipe away the whip cream and sprinkles, is about $200 billion. And yet negotiations are continuing.
In recent days I see lots of complaints that ‘the Democrats’ are about to blow it on electoral reform, infrastructure and much else. This is wrong. The issue isn’t ‘the Democrats’. It’s a handful of centrist Senate Democrats who simply refuse to use the power at their disposal to pass these laws with 50 votes. In fact, it’s really just Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and probably at the end of the day just Manchin. The distinction is important because it’s easy to demoralize yourself. It’s easy for a political party to demoralize itself. It’s easy for people who have their own agendas to demoralize people because they think it serves their factional political interests. If you lived through the Obama years and think, ‘wow, did we really not learn this lesson?’ ‘what’s wrong with you people?’ well, that’s going to cause a lot of frustration and make you wonder just who’s calling the shots and what they’re thinking.
Mitch Has a Big Interest in Saying the DOJ has Jan 6 Covered
Over many years and in many contexts I have argued that in cases of great public corruption and wrongdoing we place far too much emphasis and priority on criminal investigations and too little on public investigations and accountings. Both kinds of inquiry have their place. Generally both can ride in their own lane and not interfere with each other. But to the extent they bump up against each other we should prioritize the public investigations.
Take the Mueller probe. Our public interest in this or that person serving a few months or years in prison is far less than our public interest in finding out what happened and who is responsible for it. Criminal investigations are, rightly, highly secretive. Their mandate is rightly limited. That leaves the public interest too often out in the cold.
As I said, this is a longstanding belief of one and one that applies in numerous cases. But it has a particular relevance to the controversy over a Jan 6th Insurrection. Republicans are using every argument they know to deny, diminish and ‘move on’ from what happened on January 6th. Because they did it. Opposing a commission is just one part of that.
But there’s more to it than that.
Is Evangelical Support for Israel a Brittle Branch?
One of the complexities and anguishes that many American Jews feel about Israel today is not only that there is a growing cleavage between how American Jews and Israelis see the occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is also the increasing tendency, especially on the Israeli right, to say ‘who cares about American Jews?’, who make up only a tiny sliver of the US population, and focus rather on white evangelicals who make up a big chunk of the US population and have, albeit for very different reasons, a deep devotion to Israel. This fact came to the fore earlier this month, during the inter-communal violence in Israel and the fighting in Gaza, when Ron Dermer, former Ambassador to the US, said Israel should prioritize evangelicals over American Jews as the anchor of its relationship to the US. American Jews, Dermer reasoned, were in any case “disproportionately among our critics.”
A Proud Boy Takeover in Vegas
Here’s yet another chapter in the unfolding story of extremist groups and threats of violence seeping into political life in communities across the U.S. in the aftermath of Trump and January 6th. In this case it’s an attempted Proud Boy takeover of the county Republican party in Clark County, Nevada, which is basically the Greater Las Vegas metropolitan area. (About three-quarters of the state’s population lives in Clark County.) As in the other cases we’ve discussed in recent days, the situation includes a confluence or amalgam of ordinary, if contentious, factional political battles with organized threats of violence and efforts to use force to take control of party committees.
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The Militia-fication of Public Life in America
As you can see we have a new installment in what amounts to an expanding vein of coverage of what we might call mini-insurrections across the United States in the aftermath the Trump presidency and the January 6th insurrection. Here Matt Shuham goes deeper on what is on the surface a recall effort in Shasta County, California. But it’s one that is moving in tandem with violent threats from the local “militia”. It’s really a must read piece.
Another one of those sign of the times story. A bar owner in Troy, New York, Matt Baumgartner, reopens with a rule that patrons must show they’re vaccinated before entering the bar. He’s then inundated by calls, something threatening violence in response to his decision. “They’re all saying the same thing: that I’m a Nazi, that I’m anti-American.” Most of the calls seemed to be coming from Florida.