Back on July 28th I wrote about Eliot Cohen’s piece in The Atlantic arguing Biden should step aside and let another Democrat be the nominee for 2024. That Cohen piece seems to have become almost a genre in itself, a set piece even down to the same outline making the same point. David Ignatius wrote almost the identical piece last night in the Post.
It’s become a latter-day wise man formula: Biden has done a great job. He had a historic achievement in stopping Trump in 2020. But now because he’s so old he could squander that achievement by losing to Trump. So he should bow out and let someone else run.
Since it’s basically the identical piece, albeit brisker and to the point, you can see my take from July. But I wanted to note one addition Ignatius makes to the argument. While first suggesting the absurd idea that Biden should soft-heave-ho Kamala Harris and “encourage a more open vice-presidential selection process” he has a realization: “breaking up the ticket would be a free-for-all that could alienate Black women, a key constituency. Biden might end up more vulnerable.”
I have been so pleased by the way TPM Readers have allowed me to expand on the complexities of the Musk/Ukraine/Starlink question. As TPM Reader JS explains, it’s actually not true that the US military doesn’t need Starlink or isn’t using it. It’s true that the US military has a whole system of secure satellite communications. The US wouldn’t have found itself in the situation the Ukrainian military did when Musk blocked the use of his satellites over the Crimean coastline. But that’s not the whole story.
A special edition of TPM’s Morning Memo, where I test your willingness to put up with me writing about the glittering world of property insurance – but it’s really about climate change, if that helps. Sign up for the email version.
It’s not surprising that the initial pinch of climate change for property owners as a group would come not in the real estate market but in the property insurance market. It’s just surprising that it’s taken this long to begin to show up … except has it really?
When I bought my first house back in 1996 in Louisiana, memories of Hurricane Andrew were still fresh, and major insurers had started to pull back from underwriting, as I recall it, south of I-10, which is where I was. It put me in a real bind at the time. While the bigs were recalibrating and limiting their coastal exposure, other insurers were willing to issue policies, but if memory serves they were crappy and expensive.
As it turned out, even the big insurers apparently had some discretion. I was 26 and had no idea what I was doing. So my first editor and first publisher went to bat for me with the State Farm agent they used and after a brief but nerve-wracking scramble that threatened to hold up the closing, I obtained a proper policy at a suitable rate and completed the home purchase.
I don’t have a great sense of how the ebb and flow of underwriting along the immediate coast has gone in the 27 years since then, but there are signs we’ve turned a corner. I suspect your initial reaction is: “Wow, this is bad!” But pricing in climate change impacts is actually an important step towards confronting the current reality, so there’s a way in which this is really a good thing.
We have a property value bubble right now, especially along the coasts, and insurers tightening up will be the kind of thing that takes the air out the bubble. That will be a painful readjustment financially for millions of Americans, especially if the collapse comes all at once, but that’s not the fault of whatever or whoever comes along and pops the bubble. It reminds me of the movie version of The Big Short, when mortgage default rates had gone through the roof but the pricing on even the crappiest mortgage bonds was impervious to the erosion – at least initially. The main characters were pulling their hair out at the incongruity (and fraud) of it all. Bubbles can be stubborn and persistent things, until suddenly they’re not.
But is this really a good thing? Maybe focusing not on current property owners but prospective ones will help make it clearer. We’ve all marveled at the unceasing pace of coastal development over the last 10-20 years despite the obvious and ever-plainer risks. Even in the immediate aftermath of devastating hurricanes, out come the hammers, plywood decking, and 2 x 4s. We do it all over again. But as this particular story shows, if developers can’t get insurance on their investments, they don’t build, at least not there.
I was warily looking at coastal property last year in a particularly vulnerable part of the country. Clearly, climate risk wasn’t being priced in yet. I asked one real estate agent how he talked to clients about the climate change risk. “Well, it depends on your time horizon. Is this your forever home?” I was not reassured.
Part of what got us into the climate change mess (at least in the 40 some odd years since the public became generally aware of the inexorable physics of global warming) has been externalizing the costs of carbon emissions. Until we begin to capture those costs, the incentives for decarbonizing won’t be lined up. This is a painful but important step in that direction, but it will need to be managed, regulated, and tackled as a public policy matter, not just a market correction. Not much good news to report on that front, I’m afraid.
McCarthy Catches His Impeachment White Whale
The eventual impeachment of Joe Biden was assured before he took the oath of office, so long as Republicans could recapture the House. There’s no one motivation behind this power play, but revenge for Donald Trump’s two impeachments is a major driving force.
It is of course laughable and a disgraceful abuse of power while also being potentially effective, so long as the D.C. press corps lives up to GOP’s quite-low expectations. So far so good on that front. Political journalism still isn’t up to this task. More on that in the coming days at Morning Memo.
In the meantime, not everyone in the press corps is a gullible dope:
“If you had evidence that Joe Biden was linked to Hunter Biden's business deals in a way that is illegal, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You would probably have the votes for an impeachment inquiry, but you don't” pic.twitter.com/85K2O9L1d5
"If you can't see that! If you are that blind!" — Rep. Scott Perry gets very mad at a reporter who asks him what actual evidence Republicans have against Biden (he never cites evidence!) pic.twitter.com/pqlI7PXcgR
Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers shot down as ‘bogus’ a surprise plan Republicans floated Tuesday that would have the Legislature approve new maps drawn by nonpartisan staff, preempting the state Supreme Court from tossing the current GOP-drawn boundaries.
Faced with what looks like a near certainty that a newly liberal-controlled state Supreme Court will toss out their notorious 2011 gerrymander, Wisconsin Republicans have threatened to impeach and remove newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she even rules on her first case. But today Republican leaders in the state House and Senate came forward with a new plan to workaround the lawsuits and controversies over the 2011 gerrymander and adopt new maps created by at least nominally nonpartisan staff.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who’d have to sign the new bill, quickly shot down the whole idea. “Republicans are making a last-ditch effort to retain legislative control by having someone Legislature-picked and Legislature-approved draw Wisconsin’s maps,” said Evers. “That is bogus.”
Despite what the Freedom Caucus claimed in its press conference this afternoon, there are a variety of factors behind House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) announcement today that he would direct House committees to open a bogus impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus repeatedly pressed during a Tuesday press conference that an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has nothing to do with their ongoing efforts to drive the government into a shutdown unless a list of their demands are met.
Predictably, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), trying to avoid a shutdown and hold on to his gavel, has now endorsed an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. But I wanted to flag how the inside D.C. sheets manage to carry water for House Republicans even when they are notionally highlighting the oddity of a full blown impeachment inquiry based on literally nothing.
I want to return to the topic Nicole LaFond wrote about in yesterday’s column. Senate Republicans spent the day last week getting a detailed polling brief explaining (and searching for a solution to) how it is the public got the idea that “pro-life” politicians want to ban abortion. Who is responsible for this terrible misunderstanding?
I hesitate to use the term “gaslighting” because it’s become so ubiquitous and overused in our culture. Even that phrase doesn’t quite capture it, a shift that is somehow both instant and glacial — a kind of policy moonwalk in which the evacuees are so stunned and disoriented it’s not always clear whether they’re fooling their marks or themselves. It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — under pressure from the far-right — officially announced on Tuesday he is “directing” House committees to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over unclear and bogus accusations manufactured by Donald Trump defenders in his caucus.
Groups pushing to disqualify Donald Trump from 2024 ballots struck again Tuesday, filing a lawsuit in Minnesota Supreme Court to bar him from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
