Editors’ Blog
In December 2019, the British Labour Party suffered its worst defeat since 1935. Last Thursday, with a spate of local races and a parliamentary bye-election as the result of a resignation, Labour under its new leader Keir Starmer had a chance to redeem itself. But Labour lost the bye-election in Hartlepool decisively and seems to have been drubbed in local elections outside of London and university towns. These sorry results suggest that Labour may in for a long-term decline similar to that which it endured after Margaret Thatcher and the Tories’ victory in 1979.
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There’s so much crap happening with electoral shenanigans in purple states right now that it can all become a blur. But don’t miss these updates from the “audit” in Arizona. After DOJ called foul the audit leaders are going to “indefinitely defer” plans to interview voters as part of their audit. Not surprisingly this sounds like a recipe for voter intimidation. And it’s beyond shocking it was even considered.
One of the little-remarked-on dynamics of the 2020 post-election is how many Republicans, mostly at the state level, didn’t go along with The Big Lie or efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. The key in most cases was that it’s one thing to mouth off or make a protest vote. It’s another to break the law or specifically refuse a legal responsibility of office. Would Brad Raffensperger have stood his ground against overturning a free in fair election if he’d been a Republican member of Congress rather than Georgia’s top election administrator? I tend to doubt it. The same applies to Gov. Kemp, though he took much less of a clear stand.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the current intra-GOP warfare, former President Trump’s new blog, and the debate around mask-wearing as more people get vaccinated.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The Labor Department reported today that the US economy added 266,000 jobs last month. Normally that would be a healthy number. But it’s roughly three quarters of a million jobs short of what most economists were expecting. In other words, it’s a massive miss and as economist Justin Wolfers puts it, it is a “big miss that changes how we think about the recovery.”
The small club of Republicans shamelessly touting COVID-19 relief they voted against in March has grown steadily every week since.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), preemptively annoyed that this would happen since before the American Rescue Plan even passed, has been diligently blasting out press releases calling out the GOP lawmakers for their hypocrisy. She’s been kept busy.
I think TPM Reader AM somewhat clouds the issue by using the old money/new money analogy. It sounds too snooty and snobbish. But I think he’s really on to something. One of the things about Liz Cheney is that she clearly has as much or more contempt or lack of respect for Kevin McCarthy as she has for Donald Trump. She’s repeatedly and gratuitously embarrassed him in public. She likes disrespecting him publicly. As I mentioned in yesterday’s discussion with Kate in the podcast, Cheney has literally been around the highest echelons of the GOP since early childhood in the 1970s. Through her parents and her own life and political experience, she sees herself as part of the older, grown-up GOP.
I take her core conviction here – Trump’s danger, the danger of The Big Lie and the insurrection – as very genuine. But her refusal to ‘look forward, not back’ is, I think, both characterological and rooted in her deep-seated belief that guys like Kevin McCarthy and especially Donald Trump are just beneath her.
Here’s TPM Reader AM …
From TPM Reader DT …
I am a research active scientist and have been doing my best to “follow the science” with how I behave during the pandemic. It is another story entirely about how that has been hard, even with a very rigorous scientific training at the best institutions in my field.
What shouldn’t be forgotten here is the history of the current moment. During the first 10 months of the pandemic, we were essentially left out in the cold. With the notable exception of Dr. Fauci (who very understandably flubbed the mask question at first), where could you go to figure out what to do? It was nothing but quackery and disinterest from the White House, a weak, compromised, subservient CDC director, a scarf-wearing clown show of a coronavirus task force, and on and on and on. All the state and lower levels of government had to define and address the problem in their own ways, with many falling victim to politicization that came straight from the top. News journalism was largely on point from the good typical outfits, but there were many messaging issues in headlines and some stories that made many scientists roll their eyes, not to mention the misinformation peddled by the bad typical outfits.
From TPM Reader RE …
My wife and I are both fully vaccinated. She is having a hard time adopting new behaviors, and still seems truly frightened at the possibility of mutant strains taking over. Even though there is no evidence of this currently happening, it shows the lasting trauma people are feeling. But I don’t understand how Nate Silver’s tweet could get someone like JG so wound up. And I don’t understand why people get vaccinated if it doesn’t help ease their felt trauma. To start healing the wound will require behavioral adjustments. This is understandably uncomfortable for some people, but it’s necessary.
Kevin McCarthy has plenty of motives to cater to Trump and keep the congressional party united behind the Big Lie. But this report focuses on one of the most fascinating ones. McCarthy is apparently highly worried about being compelled to testify before any possible Jan 6th Commission. He should be, for two key reasons.
Aaron Blake of the Post dug up these statements from Elise Stefanik, the representative from New York State who is likely to replace Liz Cheney once she’s ejected from the House GOP leadership. Stefanik was a garden variety Upstate New York Republican before she hitched her wagon to Trump around 2018 and went all in with the Trump personality cult.
In the lead-up to the January 6th insurrection most congressional Republicans were careful to avoid repeating Trump’s most outrageous lies about a stolen election. They focused on the purported unconstitutionality of pandemic-related changes to election regulations. In other words, they weren’t directly claiming a stolen election in the sense of stuffed ballot boxes or dead voters or other similar stuff. They were arguing that states had exceeded their constitutional authority in doing things that making voting by mail easier. So those votes were illegitimate though not ‘fraudulent’ in the way most of us understand the term. This allowed them to back Trump’s claims of an illegitimate election by hanging their hat on a very weak constitutional argument rather than racist lies about ‘inner city’ vote fraud and other conspiracy theories.
But Stefanik wasn’t so careful.
From TPM Reader JS …
Strongly disagree. Science is science. You can’t wrap yourself in it to justify the shutdowns and then appeal to “trauma” to be for them.
And from TPM Reader MH …
Thank you, Josh, for your humane defense of people feeling cautious and traumatized, and for pointing out that most of the country is still not vaccinated.
The case numbers didn’t start dropping in New York until the first week of April. I didn’t get my “fully vaccinated” card until a month ago, and the data on variants and vaccine escape was also slow to arrive. We didn’t know *what* was keeping the cases up, but if you listened to the epidemiologists, they said “variants” a lot.
I’m not sure what the analogy is. But a new Post OpEd from Liz Cheney makes crystal clear that she is making her political fate – certainly her role in the Republican House leadership, which seems doomed – a test case for the future of the Republican party. Here’s the piece.
As I said in the podcast today, it would be simple enough for Cheney to ‘look forward and not back’ as they say. Not change her position on the disgraceful legacy of last winter but point to where she and her conference agree on opposing the Biden agenda. Rather she has deepened and sharpened her critique.
Some of Trump’s closest “Big Lie” allies along with one of his former lawyers are launching a new advocacy group to try to further cement former President Trump’s false claims about a stolen election into reality.
I publish many great TPM Reader emails here. They’re one of the best things we offer as a site. But it’s seldom that I publish one that captures so palpably something I’m feeling or states more resonantly what I had, less coherently, had in my mind. As TPM Reader JG notes here I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that The Atlantic seems to have cornered the market on these tut-tutting articles about liberals or blue staters who apparently aren’t letting down their COVID guards quick enough.
From TPM Reader JG …
I saw your tweets re: the Emma Green article in The Atlantic earlier and wanted to contribute some brief thoughts as a long-time resident of Somerville, Massachusetts. Specifically, I wanted to push back on the idea that it’s progressive politics and not the experience in the region that is the main reason for the attitudes of many COVID behavior.
From TPM Reader MW …
I appreciated your think-piece on the pandemic as a catalyst for progressive reform. I absolutely agree with you that political reform can happen very rapidly—far more swiftly than people expect—and I share your optimism that we may be nearing such a period. As you note, America’s welfare state and civil rights advances were developed in relatively short sprints, emerging suddenly from periods of political stasis.
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.
Just in case the House minority leader’s sleeping arrangements were keeping you up at night — he told “Fox and Friends” this morning that he will soon be back to sleeping on the couch in his office on the Hill where he, apparently, belongs.
Nature is healing, etc.
But why are Kevin McCarthy’s sleeping arrangements a topic of discussion? Read More
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.
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.
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.
In the waning days of his presidency, former President Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, ending a years-long, messy legal battle in which Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI only to reverse course, hire Sidney Powell as his lawyer, and seek to reverse his plea.
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.
A new bonus episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! Today, Josh and Kate discuss the FBI raids on Rudy Giuliani’s properties and recap the events that brought us to this stunning development.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode: talk@talkingpointsmemo.com:
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
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.
The former Veep is speaking at a carefully chosen podium this evening.
He’s giving his first speech post-Trump administration tonight, in a less-than-coincidental state (South Carolina) to a less-than-coincidental audience (the conservative Christian Palmetto Family Council).
This week, Josh and Kate discuss a week of actual fake news rocketing around the rightwing media ecosystem leading up to President Biden’s first big speech.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode: talk@talkingpointsmemo.com:
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.