Josh Marshall
So what’s Joe Manchin up to? I don’t know exactly. It certainly sounds like he is threatening to upend the Democrats entire legislative agenda and probably doom Biden’s presidency in a bid to dramatically scale back the budget reconciliation bill. How much lower than $3.5 trillion that means I have no idea. But it sounds like he means by a lot? Down to $2 trillion, $1.5 trillion? This is a positioning statement, like basically everything Manchin does, and subject to haggling and negotiation, like every position he stakes out. But certainly progressives will refuse to vote for his prized bipartisan mini-bill if this is what he plans to do. And they’ll be right to do so. There was a cross party deal: both factions support both bills. So no reconciliation bill, no bipartisan mini-bill. No nuthin.
SCOTUS Delenda Est
There’s nothing I can add to the overnight news out of the Supreme Court and Texas that we haven’t discussed previously: the Supreme Court is both corrupted and corrupt. One of the court’s nine members sits illegitimately. At least five of the current conservative majority have opted for a parodic version of what the judicial right once denounced as “judicial activism.” The conservative majority’s jurisprudence is a results-oriented approach abandoning both precedent and the more basic interpretive traditions to arrive at the preferred outcomes of either the Republican party or conservative ideology generally. A 6 to 3 Court doesn’t require extraordinary measures to overrule Roe. It seems prepped to do so next year in a case from Mississippi. The overnight decision – which rather overstates what the Court did – is another example of the injudicious exuberance to use the Court to remake the nation’s laws in ways that mere democracy will not allow.
The Court’s corrupt. The solution is to expand the number of justices on the high court to at least thirteen in order to break its power. I don’t know when this will be possible. We don’t know the future. But it is important to know what the correct and proper solution is.
For the immediate issue of reproductive rights the logical decision is to take the standing precedent of Roe and Casey and enact it into law right now. Given the aforementioned corruption I think it is quite likely the Court will strike such a law down, in whole or in part. If it does the Court will simply indict itself and I believe hasten the political will to break its power.
Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021
With the American war in Afghanistan and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan now definitively over, I’ve been trying to put the entirety of the last four weeks into some perspective. As you can see I’ve been fairly dug in on the proposition that the great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection. Pulling the plug on a failed or misconceived mission isn’t pretty. But it is inevitable. The ugliness is built into the failure rather than a consequence of recognizing it. Most of what we’ve seen is an attempt to deny the failure (mostly hawks) or imagine that withdrawing would be orderly and free of consequences. But with all this reasoning, what parts were handled poorly? What could have been better organized or cleaner?
Perhaps this is only a matter of stepping back and with the benefit of clear eyes and more perspective and, well … agreeing with myself. But honestly, I think I really agree with myself. The airlift evacuation appears to have transported well over 110,000 people out of the country, an astonishing feat under any circumstances and probably unprecedented for a civilian airlift in a kinetic military context and in the context of state collapse.
All Political Power is Unitary
All political power is unitary. In the rare instances when I’ve given advice to people who have political power or money to support people who do, this is the central point I’ve emphasized. All political power is unitary. You can’t be gaining it in foreign policy and losing it on the domestic front. It’s all one thing. And this is particularly important right now for Democrats looking at what the President can accomplish during these critical two years in which Democrats hold both the White House and the Congress by the thinnest of margins. In fact, in political terms it is the most important thing happening right now.
Yesterday Axios ‘Sneak Peak’ blared this: “1 big thing: Biden faces Dem defections”. The story is about Democratic representatives and Senators in marginal seats trying to distance themselves from the situation in Afghanistan and President Biden. “Many moderate Democrats and their aides are huddling with campaign consultants over how to handle the setback in Afghanistan,” as they put it.
This is a cliche Axios storyline, entirely in line with the elite DC political reaction to recent events we’ve been discussing. But if it is an Axios comfort-zone storyline it’s one they know really well. Wobbly, Sunday show going Democratic moderates is their métier. And in this case it’s real.
Force, Future and Thinking Seriously About How Governments Fall
This morning The Washington Post published an illuminating new look at the fall of Kabul. What is most telling, however, is the commentary about the facts revealed in the article. First let’s look at the new details.
The flight of former President Ghani, which triggered the final collapse of the Afghan government, was driven at least in part by apparently false reports that Taliban fighters were in the palace searching for him. The more resonant claim is about the mechanics of the turnover of control in Kabul.
Remembering the Origins of the United States’ 20 Year War in Afghanistan
I wanted to flag to your attention this opinion piece for Robert Kagan in The Washington Post. It is an overarching look at the US mission in Afghanistan. Fundamentally it is an apologia, a defense. But Kagan is significantly more sophisticated and thoughtful than most of the more editorially kinetic defenders of the mission. So even while I think he’s mostly wrong and often disingenuous about recounting these events in which he played an important role you can nonetheless learn a lot about the last twenty years from reading his account. Be cautious, though, because the real essence is the many things left out.
One thing that Kagan is right about is this: Many retrospectives say the US went into Afghanistan with hubris and optimism and a mission to build a Western style democracy in Afghanistan. That’s not true. The US invaded Afghanistan because we were scared and angry. Kagan focuses on the “scared.” “Angry” was just as much it. But it was in the nature of that moment that the two were so fused that it was difficult to distinguish them.
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I’ve been working on a piece about critiques of the American people’s lack of “strategic patience” as evidenced by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then I got this note from TPM Reader PT and thought, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.
I suspect that you, like me, have seen at least some commentators who argue that the Taliban “won” in Afghanistan by simply waiting us out, or that this demonstrates to other nations that consider an adversarial stance towards the US that we’re a paper tiger now that they know that even if we do take military action against them, all they have to do is wait for us to withdraw, which we inevitably will. I have a different perspective that I’d like to offer, starting with an analogy:
The Number Of Afghans We’re Supposed to Evacuate Keeps Spiraling Upward
I want to discuss an issue I’ve been watching unfold through the process of the evacuation from Kabul which has now been on-going for some ten days. As we’ve discussed, the fate of American allies in the country has become both a humanitarian mission as well as a cudgel used to attack the US withdrawal – both by those who wanted the US to stay in Afghanistan permanently and those who’ve wanted to use the inevitable messiness and chaos of the US withdrawal as a way to cleanse their own dirty hands and complicity in the misbegotten mission. But a key part of both dimensions of this question is that the number in need of evacuation is a moving target.
A week and a half ago reports had numbers in the range of 70,000 to 80,000 Afghan nationals needing to be evacuated – mostly so-called SIVs and their families. A greater number of people have now been flown out of the country, though a small percentage of those are US citizens and some large percentage is third country nationals. Today however The New York Times reports new numbers based on analyses of Pentagon records by an advocacy group called the Association of Wartime Allies. They find that as many as one million Afghan could be eligible for expedited immigration status and that a minimum of 250,000 are yet to be evacuated.
We’ve noted a number of times that we are in a period of great uncertainty about the outlines of the COVID Pandemic. How vaccines are holding up over time and how well they protect against the Delta variant are both uncertain, with limited and contradictory data. Yesterday I noted new data out of Israel which appears to show a dramatic improvement in protection with a third shot. But that scale of improvement rests on other data out of Israel suggesting that effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine had dropped significantly since early this year, especially against infection.
Yesterday the CDC published a new report that is at least directionally in line with Israeli data on vaccine effectiveness against infection, albeit showing a less pronounced drop.