We keep hearing about doing “quality control” that is causing the delay in caucus reporting tonight. There are scattered reports of Iowa Democratic party officials talking about widespread technical difficulties with the app that was supposed to handle reporting. It seems like something went wrong with the reporting and party officials are either trying to reconstruct the results or perhaps re-canvass the results without the app. That part is speculation. What is not speculation is that something clearly went wrong. The only good I can see coming from this is perhaps this will be the last caucus in the American political system. It’s a terrible system when it works right. Make it more complicated, multilayered and totally different from how we run real elections and perhaps you get this.
Before we get started and start seeing results let’s remember that the “modern” caucus system is absurd, anti-democratic and shouldn’t exist. It’s basically voter suppression for well-meaning Democrats. There have been some reforms this cycle, in response to the primary controversies of 2016. But it’s still just retooling a system basically designed to exclude people.
Don’t miss Rick Hasen on how President Trump’s epic effort to propagandize the right-wing voter fraud myth went up in flames.
As I’ve noted before I seldom read books about contemporary politics or current affairs. When I open a virtual or physical book it’s almost always history and generally in the distant past. But I’ve been devoting a lot of time recently to reading a number of recent books for a project I’m planning. One of those I just finished is Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.
I wanted to recommend it to you because I found it exceptionally good.
Adam Schiff, in closing arguments: “You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change. And you know it.”
For years I’ve been talking about the phrase, the title of an article by Slate’s Will Saletan: The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord. Like a good poem I’ve come back to it again and again and found new levels to its meaning. The key point Will was getting at was that the fractures in the GOP, its ungovernability, institutional breakdown and extremism had made it possible for an outsider to wrest control of the whole thing by ruling only a chunk of it.
This dynamic was presaged in the Republican House from 2011 where the Republican caucus was dominated by three or four dozen hard-right lawmakers who eventually lead Speaker John Boehner to resign in despair and relief. Paul Ryan succeeded Boehner because this ‘Freedom Caucus’-plus faction lacked anything near the numbers to win a House leadership race. But they didn’t have to and perhaps didn’t even want to. They could run the party from outside the leadership. Trump’s innovation was to ape this faction and take over the party from the populist right. He was characterologically in tune and quickly made himself ideologically in tune. There was some hard going at first and breakage underneath the tires. But everyone else eventually fell in line for the same reason the party’s far-right wing got its way in the House.
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Much has been written about Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Michael Bennet’s (D-CO) dueling responsibilities in Iowa and Washington, D.C. as the four juggle campaigning while they’re muzzled for hours and hours listening to the Senate’s impeachment trial. But on the evening that’ll produce the first referendum on 2020 Democratic candidates, their shackling in the Senate feels increasingly futile. Especially after what happened last week.
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Our latest Inside briefing — a conversation with voting expert Rick Hasen — is available to watch. Josh and Rick had a wide-ranging conversation on the various threats to voting in the U.S., including “dirty tricks” by bad actors to skew elections and efforts to suppress the vote by the Trump administration and its allies. Is it fair to say that voter suppression efforts have results in Republicans “stealing elections”? The two discuss.
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We’ve known all along that it wasn’t Trump who is on trial in this Senate exercise but the Senate itself and particularly its Republican members. The last few hours have witnessed their convicting themselves more clearly than I could have anticipated. A short time ago news broke that Sen. Murkowski was a vote for no witnesses.
This matched with a flurry of new statements from Republican Senators explaining or justifying their votes. Last night, retiring Sen. Alexander said that all the charges against the President had been proven. But they were only “inappropriate” not wrong or impeachable. Sen. Sasse told reporters that Alexander spoke for him and other Senators. Then a few moments ago, Sen. Rubio seemed to concede that the charges were not only proven but that they were in fact impeachable but that it was still best not to convict. “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”