I was writing something else when the verdict came. It’s a huge relief. Never was there such a slam-dunk case, but it only takes one moron to hang a jury.

It’s too soon, I suppose, to declare that some kind of corner has been turned. Still, we can hope that this trial and conviction — on national television — will be a watershed moment, like the Army-McCarthy hearings, that impacts everything to come. Let us hope the very righteous conviction of Derek Chauvin is not an aberration.

It is alleged there are ten “moderate” (a relative term) Republican senators who call themselves the “G-10” (nobody will say what the G stands for) and who feel very put out that they can’t get President Biden to negotiate with them. He didn’t negotiate on the covid bill, they say, and he isn’t negotiating on the infrastructure package.

It’s not clear to me which ten are THE ten. The ten who met with President Biden on the covid bill were Bill Cassidy, Louisiana;  Susan Collins, Maine; Shelley More-Capito, West Virginia; Jerry Moran, Kansas; Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Rob Portman, Ohio; Mitt Romney, Utah; Mike Rounds, South Dakota; Thom Tillis, North Carolina; and Todd Young, Indiana. But some new reports make Roy Blunt, Missouri, one of the “moderate” Republican senators put out because the administration didn’t negotiate with him. That would make eleven.

The truth is that this crew are terrible negotiators. Matt Bai writes at WaPo:

Even then, they couldn’t guarantee the vote of every Republican in the room for their smaller package, much less anyone else in the caucus.

And yet these senators were apparently shocked when Biden refused to stop Democratic leaders from advancing his bill along party lines. I guess he was supposed to bargain against himself instead.

Of course, in the past the Democratics did bargain against themselves, so being unreasonable has worked for Republicans. Oh, and Bai thinks the “G” stands for “grumpy” or “geriatric.”

All this might have made sense if it were really just the kind of strategic feint Republican leaders used during the Obama years: Offer something obviously untenable and then gleefully blame the president for refusing to compromise. But this group actually seemed to think they were going to drive away in the car.

They seem to have forgotten that when a president wins an election by almost five percentage points, gets control of both chambers of Congress and proposes legislation that clear majorities of the country support, he really doesn’t need to meet you halfway.

Exactly.

Even when Donald Trump sought to overturn an election and dismantle the democracy, the self-aggrandizing G-10 did nothing but issue a few disparate statements.

But when Biden passes an economic bill by reconciliation, and then threatens to drive through an infrastructure bill rather than meet Republican demands to cut it by more than half, these same moderates suddenly care deeply about fiscal sanity and fair process.

GOPers gonna GOP.

Last week Paul Levitz at New York Magazine wrote a piece called Moderate Republicans Accuse Biden of Trying to Pass His Agenda. It begins:

Moderate Republicans are accusing Joe Biden of secretly plotting to enact the policies he campaigned on.

In interviews with Politico Wednesday, staffers for the “G-10” — a group of ten Senate Republicans with an ostensible appetite for compromise — claimed that the president’s avowed interest in bipartisanship is insincere. In their account, Biden’s negotiations with the G-10 over infrastructure are a mere formality; his true intention is to make Republicans an offer they can’t accept, then use their refusal as a pretense for passing his $2.25 trillion plan through budget reconciliation.

Levitz writes that the “moderate” Republicans seem to not realize how weak their position is. And it’s weak for several reasons. First, the infrastructure bill is polling very well.

It’s hard to make voters afraid of better-paved highways, new manufacturing jobs, at-home care for the elderly, or any of the American Jobs Plan’s other components. Recent polls from Morning Consult and YouGov suggest that virtually every item in Biden’s proposal commands supermajority support, while 65 percent of voters endorse paying for the measures through a corporate tax hike.

Second, Democrats just learned they can pass a big bill on a party-line vote and not suffer a backlash. Hmm. It’s also the case that a “majority of Republican House members voted to nullify the 2020 election because Democrats won it,” which kind of makes their declarations of love for bipartisanship ring a tad hollow.

Also last week, Paul Waldman wrote a column called Do Republican moderates even know what they want?

He notes that Republicans engaged in talks with the White House are feeling used. “But what is it that these Republicans actually want?” He asks. After they had made a stupidly low offer on the covid bill, the Administration actually gave them something — “making the bill’s stimulus payments phase out more quickly for those with higher incomes, an issue they raised specifically.” But of course they all voted against the bill anyway.

So they’re scared that this bill will turn out the same way the American Rescue Plan did: The moderate Republicans have some meetings with Biden; he listens to their ideas and perhaps adopts a bit of what they want; in the end they say, “Not good enough,” and all vote against the bill; the bill passes through reconciliation with only Democratic votes; it gives the public a bunch of things they like; and Biden gets all the credit.

Yes. And why would the Democrats not do that? This is what the allegedly “moderate” Republicans can’t seem to grasp.

Waldman makes a bold proposal: These ten (or eleven) Republicans could easily put themselves back in the game by really negotiating and pledging to vote as a block for the bill if they get certain changes, and then make a reasonable offer. As Matt Bai wrote, you don’t offer $3,000 on a $10,000 car. Maybe if they’d offer $8,000 they’d get the car. And then they’d have their names on a popular bill, and ten Republican votes means the filibuster isn’t an issue.

That’s the only thing they have to offer. The onus is on them to convince Biden and Democrats that if the right deal can be worked out, all of them, without exception, will defy Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and vote with Democrats on an infrastructure bill — even knowing Biden will get most of the credit for the results of the bill and for being bipartisan, too.

Yes, that’s the only thing they have to offer. A pledge of ten Republican votes would be valuable to the Democrats. And it probably won’t happen.

Since all 10 of them voting for any bill that would help a Democratic president is so unlikely, and since Democrats have reconciliation as the trump card they can use if they have to, the Republicans are in an extremely weak position. That means that when it comes time to negotiate the details, they have to meet the Democrats not just halfway, but more than halfway. Maybe two-thirds of the way, or even five-sixths of the way (which would seem appropriate if they’re going to be 10 votes out of 60).

That’s the reality of negotiating from a position of weakness: You’re just not going to get everything you want. If you want to get anything at all, you’re going to have to give up a lot.

So to repeat: What exactly do these Republicans want?

But that’s the problem — all they want is to not pass most of the bill. They’re only against stuff, not so much for stuff.  It’s hard to imagine what bill they would vote for.

So now the Republican moderates are faced with two choices: They can make real substantive and political sacrifices to have a genuine role in shaping the bill, or they can just whine about not getting everything they want. I know which outcome I’d put my money on.

This afternoon President Biden met with a small “bipartisan” group of senators, some from both parties, to discuss the infrastructure package, and we’ll see if anything comes out of it. The Administration has already agreed to not raise the corporate tax rate above 25 percent, a concession to Joe Manchin. Other adjustments may have to be made to pay for the bill. A disagreement among Democrats has emerged over the SALT tax cap. SALT stands for “state and local tax” deduction on federal taxes, and some Dems in blue states like New York very much want to lift the cap that the Trump Administration put on deducting the taxes. So there’s a long way to go yet on this bill, it appears. Republicans can jump in any time they want to get real.

The “moderate” ten, possibly.

So this happened:

Hard-right House Republicans on Friday were discussing forming an America First Caucus, which one document described as championing “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and warning that mass immigration was putting the “unique identity” of the U.S. at risk.

I’m at a loss to know what “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” are, considering that the Angles and Saxons lost control of their territory in Britain a thousand years ago with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Most of the developments in British law and government that got exported here to the colonies were developed by the Normans, who came from France. This includes the Magna Carta (1215) and English Common Law, upon which early U.S. law was based. English Common Law was very much a Norman thing, according to Britannica.

Saxon Cosplayers

This got me wondering how “Anglo-Saxon” came to be a synonym for “white people,” since most white people are not Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, it’s estimated that only about a third of the DNA of modern-day English people is Anglo-Saxon.

This is a simplified map. The invadors didn’t all come from Denmark.

Greatly over-simplifying a lot of history: After the Roman occupation of Britain ended in about the year 410, German-speaking tribes crossed the channel and began taking over. The three major tribal groups were the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Everybody forgets about the Jutes, who may have been lovely people for all we know, but let’s continue. The diverse tribes spoke similar Germanic languages (the original Old English was a Germanic language), and once in Britain they appear to have forged a common cultural identity, although according to one scholar the term “Anglo-Saxon” didn’t come into widespread use until the 18th century or so. The Germans in 1st millennia Britain more often called themselves either “Angle” or “Saxon” than Anglo-Saxon.

What little we know of that period of British history shows us that the German invaders fought the indigenous Celts and eventually occupied a territory that was roughly where England, Angle-land, is now. The Celts appear to have been pushed into the “fringe” — Scotland, Wales, Cornwall — by the Germans. That’s a bit disputed, but it’s a common view. There is a popular but unproven theory that the original “King Arthur” was a Celtic chieftan who fought the Saxons. And then in the 11th century the dominance of the Germanic tribes in Britain came to an end with the Norman Conquest. In the years that followed there was resistance and rebellion, but in the end the Normans prevailed. Much of the old Angle and Saxon nobility fled their confiscated lands and headed for Celtic territory or Scandanavia.

Knowing this, how did it come to pass that “Anglo-Saxon” came to designate “white people,” at least among English speakers, and “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” or WASP, came to be shorthand for “snotty upper-class white people”?

The scholar cited above, Mary Rambaran-Olm, and some of her colleagues say the whole notion of Anglo-Saxons as the epitome of whiteness began in the late 1700s. At the time, the British were keen to justify their growing colonial empire around the globe, and a myth of the very white Anglo-Saxons as the creators of English civilization, even though they weren’t, seized the public’s imagination at the time and “informed” the English that they were a naturally superior people who were doing all these simple brown natives a favor by exploiting them. I assume the Normans, being French, just weren’t white enough to serve the same purpose.

This makes me think of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and his novel Ivanhoe. If you have read it or seen one of the film versions, you’ll remember that the title character is a fair and noble Saxon being oppressed by the sleezy Normans, and in the novel much attention is paid to the blondness of the Saxons in comparison to the darker Normans and the even darker Jewish characters, Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca, who at least were treated sympathetically. In the 1952 film version Rebecca was played by Elizabeth Taylor.

As a sidebar, do read ‘It’s all white people’: Allegations of white supremacy are tearing apart a prestigious medieval studies group about how Mary Rambaran-Olm resigned from being a vice president of the prestigious International Society of Anglo-Saxonists because, she said, the term “Anglo-Saxon” has too many racist implications and the society had refused to change its name. Another scholar who resigned, Eileen Fradenburg Joy, said,

“The entire field of medieval studies is undergoing massive upheaval because they have not dealt with long-standing issues of racism and sexism,” Joy said. “This name change controversy is sowing the fault lines that still exist between white scholars — because it’s all white people, a bunch of white people arguing over whether they’re racist.”

At Washington Monthly, Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer explain How Mistreating Nursing Home Staff Helped Spread Covid-19.

By the end of May 2020, half of all cases among the elderly were brought in by “direct care workers,” such as nurses, nursing assistants, physical therapists, maintenance and kitchen staff. These people are among the most essential workers—and some of the worst paid. In 2019, their median hourly wage was just $12.80. Nearly half live in low-income households. More than half receive public assistance. The vast majority are women and three in five are people of color.

Add poor pay to no sick leave or health insurance, and many direct care workers can’t afford to stay home when they are sick. Jen Hurst is a critical care speech pathologist in Kansas City, Missouri. For 15 years, she’s worked for the same long-term care company, which has never given her a full-time job or benefits. She can’t afford to take time off when she’s sick. When she developed symptoms that seemed like Covid-19, she briefly thought about going into work before deciding to stay home—and that required tapping her family’s modest savings.

Note that there are a wide variety of nurses. A registered nurses has had anywhere from two or three years of classroom study in medical science to a Ph.D. in nursing. LPNs, licensed practical nurses, generally have a year or so of classrom study and clinical experience before getting licensed. But a “nurse” might also be a CNA, a certified nursing assistant, who has a high school diploma and four to twelve weeks of training, mostly to do things like giving baths and helping patients transfer from a bed to a wheelchair. I suspect these are the nurses the article is talking about.

Nursing home staff qualify as “health care workers” but are often on the periphery of medicine. They are not paid well, and some employers limit their hours in order to limit their benefits. The article explains that a lot of infections happened because people work for multiple facilities in order to make a living. One study showed that roughly half of all covid deaths in nursing homes could be traced to staff moving between facilities.

There is a direct link between low pay and benefits for nusing home staff and high rates of covid infection and death. Unsurprisingly, the for-profit nursing homes had higher rates of death than those run by nonprofit organizations. A google search brought up all kinds of articles and studies (example) saying that for-profit nursing homes tend to have lower quality of care, lower staff-to-patient ratios, are more likely to overbill Medicare, etc.

It’s also the case that there are much lower vaccination rates among nursing home staff than hospital staff. Harvard Medical School reported in February that a high percentage of nursing home staff had no plans to get a vaccine, even though their employers offered it to them. Remember, many of these workers have little to no classroom instruction in science, in spite of being classified as “health care workers,” and many don’t trust their employers.

But the bottom line here is that there is a direct link between the way nursing home staff are considered nothing but cost who must be denied sick days and a living wage for the sake of profits, and a whole lot of death. And this ought to tell us that you can’t protect a population during a pandemic if you’re not protecting all of the population during a pandemic. That includes low-wage workers stocking shelves or cleaning bedpans; this includes undocumented immigrants who may have no access to vaccines. The virus doesn’t care what documents you have or how much money you make.

This is just one way our stubborn insistence on for-profit health care got in the way of the pandemic response. See Elizabeth Rosenthal at the New York Times, We Knew the Coronavirus Was Coming, Yet We Failed, May 6, 2020.

… our system failed in its response. Heroic health care providers were left to jury-rig last-minute solutions to ensure that the toll wasn’t even worse.

But the saddest part is that most of the failings and vulnerabilities that the pandemic has revealed were predictable — a direct outgrowth of the kind of market-based system that Americans generally rely on for health care.

Our system requires every player — from insurers to hospitals to the pharmaceutical industry to doctors — be financially self-sustaining, to have a profitable business model. As such it excels at expensive specialty care. But there’s no return on investment in being primed and positioned for the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

Combine that with an administration unwilling to intervene to force businesses to act en masse to resolve a public health crisis like this, and you get what we got: a messy, uncoordinated under-response, defined by shortages and finger-pointing.

The prevailing faith in the Free Market to provide for all left us vulnerable. Free markets don’t fix infrastructure (see: Texas). Free markets go where the profit is, but not everything people really need can be made profitable.

Democrats in Congress plan to introduce a bill to expand the SCOTUS from nine to thirteen justices. At the moment this bill has very little chance of going anywhere, but that may not be the point. The Dems may just be attempting to signal the Supremes to watch themselves. (Naturally Nancy Pelosi is being a poopyhead and saying she won’t bring a bill to expand the Court to the House floor.)

At TPM, Kate Riga writes that the Court has been sitting on some abortion cases for a remarkably long time. When Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed last year anti-reproductive rights advocates were certain Roe v. Wade was toast. And, of course, now that I’m blogging about a delay they’ll probably issue some draconian decision tomorrow.

But assuming they don’t, it does begin to look as if something is going on behind closed doors to inject some moderation into them. And I’m betting that something may be all the talk of expanding the Court. Chief Justice John Roberts may not be want to be the Chief Justice who precided over a Court that was so radical it had to be watered down.

Last week President Biden announced he was forming a commission to study Supreme Court reform. “The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices,” the announcement said. There is no deadline given for the commission’s recommendations. Still, it gives the justices something to think about.

At the moment a bill to expand the Court is unlikely to get around the 60-vote cloture threshold in the Senate. But Paul Waldman writes that maybe the appointment process could be reformed. One suggestion: Give every new POTUS two Supreme Court picks, and let the size of the Court fluctuate, he says.  If a justice dies or retires, the POTUS doesn’t get to make another appointment; he or she just gets two. That would eliminate a lot of the game-playing and drama around Supreme Court picks.

That wouldn’t, however, save us from the current Court’s majority of hyper-conservative religious extremists. See The Supreme Court Is Making New Law in the Shadows in the New York Times.

Videos of the police encounters with Lt. Caron Nazario in Virginia and Daunte Wright in Minnesota have been viral for the past several hours. After watching these, I’d like to suggest that we fire every cop in America and start over.

It’s beyond obvious that what went wrong in these encounters — as well as with George Floyd in Michigan, Maurice Gordon in New Jersey, Sandra Bland in Texas, Elijah McClain in Colorado, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Philando Castile in Minnesota (again), and so many others — is that police officers unnecessarily took what should have been routine, low-tension situations and escalated them into life-and-death struggles.

Of those mentioned above, only Lt. Nazario survived. This is because he was admirably disciplined and kept his head, but it should be police who are disciplined and keep their heads. Instead, in videos more often than not you see shouting and screaming and foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria on the part of the cops. Are they not trained to de-escalate tension rather than ramp it up? Apparently not.

The officer who killed Daunte Wright was screaming “taser! taser! taser!” just before she shot him with a gun. It’s obvious she was not thinking straight. And she was a 26-year veteran, news stories say, not a rookie.  Somethng is seriously wrong here.

And no, I’ve never been a police officer. I am sure they face many challenging and dangerous situations. But you’d think they’d be better trained to be controlled and disciplined, not volatile and erratic.

In my life I’ve been stopped for traffic violations a couple of times (although it’s been years). In my experience as a middle-aged white lady the cop comes to the window and says, Lady, you were speeding, here’s your ticket. Bye. Nobody screamed at me, made me get out of the car, tried to put me in handcuffs. If the cops had come at me the way they came at Lt. Nazario or Duante Wright I’m not sure how I would have reacted, but I don’t think anyone should be faulted for having a meltdown or trying to get away. That must be a terrifying experience, and it shouldn’t be the responsibility of a person stopped by police to keep the cops calmed down.

In the case of Lt. Nazario, the cops should have just told him “We stopped you because you don’t have a license plate.” And then the Lieutenant would have pointed to the dealer temporary license plate, which may have been hard to see because of the tinted windows. And then the cops could say, “Oh, okay. Never mind. Have a nice day.” End of encounter. Why is that so hard?

In Georgia, an intoxicated Rayshard Brooks fell asleep in his car in a Wendy’s drive-through line. When cops arrived to deal with him, by all accounts he was genial and cooperative, but still very drunk. He wanted to lock up his car and walk to his sister’s house nearby, and maybe they should have just taken his car keys and let him go. Indeed, they could have driven him to his sister’s to sleep it off.  They had his name and license plate number; somebody could have followed up and taken him to court in a few hours when he was sober. But Brooks became agitated and tried to get away, and he was shot and killed.

The excuse one hears is that if people being arrested would just comply with police, these unfortunate outcomes wouldn’t happen. Explain to me what undercover St. Louis detective Luther Hall could possibly have been doing that justified his brother officers beating him to a pulp?

In the case of George Floyd, it’s unclear that anyone ever explained to him why he was being arrested. He was obviously terrified. Derick Chauvin, the cop who killed him, is an even worse example of malpractice than the over-excited officer who mixed up her gun for a taser. If you saw the highlights of the prosecution’s case at Chauvin’s trial, you know that happened to Floyd was just stone-cold murder. For once, even Chauvin’s superior officers clearly said Chauvin was in the wrong. For once, maybe this time there will be a conviction. But as Eugene Robinson wrote today, one fears Chauvin will get off, because that’s what always happens.

Still from bodycam video of Daunte Wright’s death.

Ronald Reagan died in 2004, of course, but it struck me that he’s even deader now than he was then. Today he’s not just physically dead; he’s also dead as a revered and worshiped figure of the American Right.

Reagan used to be adored by the GOP. Of course, Republicans never did admit to themselves that the Reagan they revered, the Reagan of their imaginations, differed considerably from the once corporeal person. Ronald Reagan was a hero in movies, not in real life. His celebrated “sunny optimism” was a thin veneer of affability over a whole lot of bigotry against nonwhites and gays. His popular economic ideas, enshrined in history as “Reaganomics,” contributed mightily to economic inequality, the shrinking of the middle class, and an eroding standard of living among working people. Yes, GOP insiders no doubt considered those features, not bugs.

Most of all, he taught ordinary Americans that it was wrong to look to their government for help. Government, Reagan told them, was wasteful and incompetent, and expecting it to benefit ordinary citizens led to moral decay and, eventually, commujnism. One might have stopped to reflect on what the bleep a government is supposed to be for, but St. Ronald of Blessed Memory was a man of action, not a thinker. Thinking is for Democrats and Europeans. Real Americans put on their shoes (made in China) every morning and march out to do productive things on behalf of Capitalism (blessed be It) without thinking real hard about it.  Look to Capitalism and God — in that order — to provide, not government.

The real legacy of Reagan was less American Greatness and more of a big mess. See, for example, Reagan’s Real Legacy by Peter Dreier and How Reaganomics, deregulation and bailouts led to the rise of Trump by John Komlos. Yet there was something about Reagan that resonated deeply in the mystic chords of memory of U.S. conservatives. and they practically worshipped the man. Or, their idea of the man. And in many ways after Reagan left office in 1989 the GOP remained, in its shrunken little heart, the Party of Reagan for about the next twenty-five years. This was so even though Reagan himself seemed to drop out of sight once he was out of office, no doubt because of the Alzheimer’s that was finally disclosed in 1994.

But now the worship of Reagan that sustained the Republican Party through the 1990s and 2000s is really, truly, utterly dead. I’m not sure precisely when it died, but it’s dead now. It must have died before the 2020 Republican National Convention; see No Bushes, Reagans, Cheneys or McCains: Who Is Missing at Trump’s R.N.C. by Adam Nagourney, Aug. 27, 2020.

Today I read about a recent Republican National Committee shindig held for deep pocket donors at — where else? — Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. And it struck me as I read that Reagan is dead.

Former president Donald Trump called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a “dumb son of a bitch” as he used a Saturday night speech to Republicans to blame him for not helping overturn the 2020 election and reiterated false assertions that he won the November contest.

“If that were Schumer instead of this dumb son of a bitch Mitch McConnell they would never allow it to happen. They would have fought it,” he said of election certifying on Jan. 6, the day his supporters led an insurrection on the Capitol to block Joe Biden’s formal victory.

Trump spent much of the speech, with many senators in the room, lashing into his former ally in personal terms, often to cheers from the party’s top donors.

In his off-the-cuff remarks Trump also badmouthed Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and his own former vice president, Mike Pence.

You might remember that Reagan’s 11th Commandment was “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Movement conservatism took off in the late 1970s and kept flying through the 1980, 1990s, and 2000s largely because the many interest groups that signed on to Republicanism, from the Christian activists to the anti-tax zealots to the neoconservative hawks, stuck to that commandment and maintained a uniform front. Meanwhile the Democrats, headline writers assured us, were perpetually in disarray. But now that command is revoked, and the new kids in the party who align with Trump are not at all shy about trashing other Republicans.

Other accounts of Trump’s recent RNC speech say the cheering was more subdued.

“It was horrible, it was long and negative,” one attendee with a donor in the room tells Playbook. “It was dour. He didn’t talk about the positive things that his administration has done.”

Instead, Trump used the final night of the retreat to talk about himself, his grievances and how he plans to enact retribution against those who voted to impeach him — which runs counter to the donors’ main objective of making sure their dollars go toward winning overall.

Yet there they were, at Mar-a-Lago. This past January I predicted that once Trump was out of Washington the old GOP establishment would reassert itself and take the party back from Trump, but that hasn’t happened. The party seems determined to stick with Trump at least through the midterms. (See Republicans at a Crossroads.) The young pups in the party who don’t remember Ronald Reagan — not to mention the old dogs like Lindsey Graham who seem to have just plain surrendered — are determined to follow Trump off a cliff. The donors may not like it, but at the moment they haven’t jumped ship.

Seriously, Josh Hawley was born in 1979. That means he was still in diapers when Reagan was first elected president.  Matt Gaetz is even younger. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a bit older; she was in high school when Reagan left office in 1989. Ted Cruz was an undergraduate at Princeton then. The point is that the Reagan Mystique seems to be dying off, literally, with the older members of the party. There’s not much left of Reagan but the obsession with cutting top tax rates, and even that really pre-dates Reagan. Calvin Coolidge pushed multiple tax cuts to help business growth, too. The basic theory behind “trickle down” economics goes back to William McKinley, if not earlier.

Anyway, while Reagan was bad enough, now we’ve devolved to …

As much as I despise Ronnie, he would never have kissed Vladimir Putin’s and Kim Jong Un’s asses. And it says a lot about how much Reagan is dead that Trump did that, multiple times, and his supporters didn’t care. Whatever Republicans believed Reagan stood for is no longer marketable.

Last summer in Portland, by several accounts, a self-identified antifa activist named Michael Forest Reinoehl shot and killed Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of a far-right group called Patriot Prayer. After the shooting Reinoehl made a video in which he claimed he acted in self-defense. Videos of the incident don’t clearly show what happened, only that Reinoehl walked away and Danielson didn’t.

In any event, Reinoehl was never tried because he was killed by a task force made up mostly of local law enforcement officers and assembled by the U.S. Marshalls. This crew appears to have decided it was too much trouble to bring Reinoehl in. I wrote at the time,

We’ve learned a bit more about last week’s shooting in Portland, although probably we’ll never know exactly what happened since the suspect was killed in a “hail of gunfire” by police. Convenient, that. Court documents say that both the victim, Aaron “Jay” Danielson, and the alleged and now dead perpetrator, Michael Forest Reinoehl, were armed with handguns. Before he was killed, Reinoehl made a video claiming he shot Danielson in self-defense.  Unfortunately no video has come to light of the actual shooting, just the immediate aftermath, so there is no way to know if Reinoehl was telling the truth about being in danger.

The manner of Reinoehl’s execution by the task force is a matter of, shall we say, confusion. No two news stories of the event tell exactly the same story. Some accounts say Reinhold fired at the marshalls before they opened fire on him; some say he didn’t. But here is one of the accounts from the New York Times —

On Sept. 3, about 120 miles north of Portland, Mr. Reinoehl was getting into his Volkswagen station wagon when a pair of unmarked sport utility vehicles roared through the quiet streets, screeching to a halt just in front of his bumper. Members of a U.S. Marshals task force jumped out and unleashed a hail of bullets that shattered windows, whizzed past bystanders and left Mr. Reinoehl dead in the street. …

… But a reconstruction of what happened that night, based on the accounts of people who witnessed the confrontation and the preliminary findings of investigators, produces a much different picture — one that raises questions about whether law enforcement officers made any serious attempt to arrest Mr. Reinoehl before killing him.

In interviews with 22 people who were near the scene, all but one said they did not hear officers identify themselves or give any commands before opening fire. In their official statements, not yet made public, the officers offered differing accounts of whether they saw Mr. Reinoehl with a weapon. One told investigators he thought he saw Mr. Reinoehl raise a gun inside the vehicle before the firing began, but two others said they did not.

Mr. Reinoehl did have a .380-caliber handgun on him when he was killed, according to the county sheriff’s team that is running a criminal homicide investigation into Mr. Reinoehl’s death. But the weapon was found in his pocket.

An AR-style rifle was found apparently untouched in a bag in his car.

Five eyewitnesses said in interviews that the gunfire began the instant the vehicles arrived. None of them saw Mr. Reinoehl holding a weapon. A single shell casing of the same caliber as the handgun he was carrying was found inside his car.

Garrett Louis, who watched the shooting begin while trying to get his 8-year-old son out of the line of fire, said the officers arrived with such speed and violence that he initially assumed they were drug dealers gunning down a foe — until he saw their law enforcement vests.

“I respect cops to the utmost, but things were definitely in no way, shape or form done properly,” Mr. Louis said.

Tim Elfrink wrote in the Washington Post,

As I said, you can find other reports, including some other stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, that say Reinoehl opened fire on the marshalls first, and the marshalls returned fire. No videos of this have turned up, I don’t think. The task force members did not wear body cams, nor were there cameras on their vehicles.

But now the New York Times has published an update:

Last week, local investigators concluded a monthslong homicide inquiry with the announcement that the activist, Michael Reinoehl, had most likely fired at authorities first, effectively justifying the shooting.

But a review of investigation documents obtained by The New York Times suggests that investigators for the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office discounted key pieces of contradicting evidence that indicate Mr. Reinoehl may never have fired or pointed a gun.

While investigators found a spent bullet casing in the back seat of Mr. Reinoehl’s car, and pointed to that as evidence he probably fired his weapon, the handgun they recovered from Mr. Reinoehl had a full magazine, according to multiple photos compiled by Thurston County authorities showing Mr. Reinoehl’s handgun. The gun was found in his pocket. …

In announcing its conclusions, the sheriff’s office wrote that “witness statements indicate there was an exchange of gunfire, which was initiated by Reinoehl from inside his vehicle.” A spokesman, Lt. Cameron Simper, said that while investigators could not conclude for certain that Mr. Reinoehl had fired his weapon, he said it was “highly likely.”

But one of the witnesses that Thurston County investigators relied on to reach their conclusion that Mr. Reinoehl had fired his gun was an 8-year-old boy. His father, Garrett Louis, who had rushed to his son’s side at the time of the shooting, has consistently said he believed that officers opened fire first without shouting any warnings.

Of the two other witnesses who investigators cited to support the conclusion that Mr. Reinoehl fired his gun, one did not see it happen and the other was not sure.

Do read the whole article. The cops are covering their butts.

Also keep in mind that after Danielson was killed, Donald Trump and much of rightie media seized on the incident as evidence that antifa is a violent and lawless “organization.” It may have been important to a lot of important people that Reinoehl not be given a chance to defend himself.

Attorney General William P. Barr trumpeted the operation as a “significant accomplishment” that removed a “violent agitator.” The officers had opened fire, he said, when Mr. Reinoehl “attempted to escape arrest” and “produced a firearm” during the encounter.

If he’d been tried, Reinoehl might have been found guilty of Danielson’s murder, and maybe he was guilty. But his death looks like a political execution to me.

In other law enforcement news — Do read about Lt. Caron Nazario, U.S. Army Medical Corps, and his encounter with police. Lt. Nazario, dressed in uniform, was driving through Windsor, Virginia, in a newly purchased Chevrolet Tahoe when police lights started flashing behind him. It was night, and the lieutenant is black. Rather than stop on a dark road he flipped on his turn signal and drove slowly to a gas station about a mile away before he stopped. He placed his cell phone on the dash and put his empty hands out of the window.

The cops got out of their car, drew their guns on Lt. Nazario, shouted threats at him, and then doused him with pepper spray.

Medics had to be called to attend to Lt. Nazario’s injuries. The cops also refused to explain to him why he’d been pulled over. The police report said it because his car lacked a permanent plate, but body cam videos show the dealer’s temporary plate properly displayed in the rear window.

Lt. Nazario has filed filed a lawsuit in federal court that accuses the officers of illegally searching his car, using excessive force and violating his rights under the First Amendment. The lawsuit seeks $1 million in compensatory damages.

Michael Forest Reinoehl

As explained by a fellow named David Roth:

One of the defining aspects of the highly caffeinated conservative cable news sludge that Trump still chugs thirstily from morning until night is that it is hard to understand. It is intended to induce a state of heated clammy umbrage in the slack and softening minds of its consumers, and reliably does that, but it does this more through tone and frequency than by means of information. The point is to keep everyone watching both very upset and kind of curious about what exactly they’re upset about. …

… the idea is to repeat things enough that even passive viewers will be able to pick up the broad strokes, learn the heroes and villains and outrages and memes, get upset when they’re supposed to get upset and keep watching through the commercial breaks. Someone who watches enough hours of this will become not just familiar with but wholly conversant in all the salty phonemes that make up its language, but never quite know what the fuck they’re talking about.

Do read the whole thing; it’s a hoot. It’s also true. I’m sure we’ve all caught enough of right-wing media to know how true this is.

This is the Right’s superpower. Their followers believe what right-wing media and politicians say even though they don’t understand it, even though it makes no sense. And of course they don’t have to have facts to support their allegations. They can just make up whatever shit they want to make up, and it is believed. It is believed so strongly that you can show a true believer irrefutable evidence that what they believe isn’t true, and they won’t budge.

Last year righties were certain the coronavirus was a hoax; that entire U.S. cities were being burned to the ground by BLM and antifa, and that somehow massive voter fraud took the election from Donald Trump. Oh, and those thugs who attacked the Capitol Building? They were all freedom-loving patriots who were waved into the building by supportive police, and at the same time they were all antifa thugs just pretending to be Trump supporters to make Trump look bad.

We learned last week that Trump can scam the true believers out of their last dollars, and they’ll still support him. (For the latest on right-wing donation scamming, do see Tim Miller at The Bulwark.)

I still run into people who think we should be trying to engage in dialogue with the Right. Maybe once in a great while you might bump into an individual who is reachable. On the whole, though, when dealing with the true believers there’s no point. It would be less frustrating to try to explain algebra to a squirrel.

So now the Republican Party is engaged in a vast revision of election law so that they can suppress the votes of those who oppose them, because they realize that’s the only way they can win elections.

Stepping in to provide a philosophical argument for why suppressing votes is good — Kevin D. Williamson, a charmer who was once fired from The Atlantic for proposing that women who obtain abortions should be hanged. We don’t need more voters, he says, we need fewer but better voters. Note that he never clearly defines “better.”

Here’s a sample argument:

There would be more voters if we made it easier to vote, and there would be more doctors if we didn’t require a license to practice medicine. The fact that we believe unqualified doctors to be a public menace but act as though unqualified voters were just stars in the splendid constellation of democracy indicates how little real esteem we actually have for the vote, in spite of our public pieties.

The 14th and 19th amendments make voting a right of all adult citizens, and the 26th Amendment set the minimum voting age at 18. Therefore, being 18 years old and a citizen are the only necessary qualifications . There is no constitutional right to a medical license.

And if we genuinely believe that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed, we can’t very well argue that only a select group of “qualified” voters — “qualification” in this case being a vague and undefined thing unconnected to citizenship — should be permitted to give their consent. Narrowing the franchise is a clear path to oligarchy.

But of course Williamson doesn’t agree with the Declaration of Independence on this point. While he lacks the moral courage to come out and say so, one clearly infers that a “qualified” voter is one who thinks like Williamson and is presumed to possess mostly European DNA.

Williamson continues,

The real case — generally unstated — for encouraging more people to vote is a metaphysical one: that wider turnout in elections makes the government somehow more legitimate in a vague moral sense. But legitimacy is not popularity and popularity is not consent. The entire notion of representative government assumes that the actual business of governing requires fewer decision-makers rather than more.

The entire notion of representative government is that the people through elections choose who will represent them. And then the representatives make decisions about laws and policies on behalf of their constituents. It is presumed that in making laws and policies the representatives do what they think is right and do not need to canvass their constituents before every vote.

Williamson almost says this later in the essay —

Representatives are people who act in other people’s interests, which is distinct from carrying out a group’s stated demands as certified by majority vote.

Yes, but it’s the majority vote that gives representatives the legitimate authority to act in their constituents’ interests. Duh.

Voters — individually and in majorities — are as apt to be wrong about things as right about them, often vote from low motives such as bigotry and spite, and very often are contentedly ignorant. That is one of the reasons why the original constitutional architecture of this country gave voters a narrowly limited say in most things and took some things — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. — off the voters’ table entirely.

Yes, voters can be wrong; we see that in every election when some of the same corrupt old windbags get reelected. But other than the prohibitions on the federal government written into the Bill of Rights, I can’t think of any way that the “original constitutional architecture” limited the federal government from responding to the will of the voters in any matter. It’s true that over the years ideas about the proper role of the federal government in many matters has changed, but that doesn’t have anything to do with “constitutional architecture” that I can see.

It is easy to think of critical moments in American history when giving the majority its way would have produced horrifying results. If we’d had a fair and open national plebiscite about slavery on December 6, 1865, slavery would have won in a landslide.

[History lecture begins] No, slavery would not have won in a landslide in 1865.

There actually was something close to a national “fair and open plebiscite about slavery” held on November 6, 1860. This was the presidential election. The most prominent plank in Abraham Lincoln’s platform was a promise to keep slavery from spreading out of the slave states and into the western territories. Lincoln won easily against three other candidates.

The Democratic party split in half over slavery and nominated two candidates. The unabashedly pro-slavery-in-the-territories Democratic candidate was John Breckinridge, who won most of the slave states. He came in third in the popular vote although second in the electoral college. Stephen Douglas, who called for new states to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery, was the other Democratic candidate, and he was second in the popular vote and third in the EC.

The fourth candidate, John Bell, was anti-secession but did not take a postion on slavery. Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia.

Note that at the time no candidate, not even Lincoln, called for abolishing slavery in the existing slave states. Lincoln may have wished to do so, but he believed such a thing required a constitutional amendment that was not bloody likely to happen at the time.  Voters in “free soil” states were mostly ambivalent about slavery down South but believed passionately that it should be confined to the South and not allowed to spread. They were also concerned that the Dred Scott decision opened the door to allowing slave owners to move into “free soil” states and keep their “property” enslaved. Basically, we’re looking at NIMBY — a majority of voters in non-slave states were willing to tolerate slavery in the slave states, but they didn’t want it in their back yards. Or the territories.

But if voters were ambivalent about slavery in 1860, by 1865 a considerable majority hated the slave-owning Southern plantation class with with a white-hot passion, and there is no way a majority would have voted to let them waltz back to their plantations to keep people enslaved as if nothing had happened. So the 13th Amdnement abolishing slavery was ratified on December 6, 1865, and I’ve seen nothing to suggest a majority of voters opposed this. [History lecture ends.]

Back to Williamson:

Representatives are people who act in other people’s interests, which is distinct from carrying out a group’s stated demands as certified by majority vote. Legitimacy involves, among other interests, the government’s responsibility to people who are not voters, such as children, mentally incapacitated people, incarcerated felons, and non-citizen permanent residents. Their interests matter, too, but we do not extend the vote to them. So we require a more sophisticated conception of legitimacy than one-man, one-vote, majority rule. To vote is only to register one’s individual, personal preference, but democratic citizenship imposes broader duties and obligations. When we fail to meet that broader responsibility, the result is dysfunction: It is no accident that we are heaping debt upon our children, who cannot vote, in order to pay for benefits dear to the most active and reliable voters. That’s what you get from having lots of voting but relatively little responsible citizenship.

It’s kind of rich that a conservative would express such tender concerns for the welfare of children, incarcerated people, and non-citizen permanent residents. However, one assumes that most adult voters care about children and have opinions about policies that affect them. (Note that we also have a large faction of voters who are more concerned about fetuses than children, and vote accordingly, often at the expense of their own economic well-being.) What Williamson portrays as a disregard for children is really a disagreement about what policies are better for the nation, including the children. It may be that fewer of us think about the special concerns of the incarcerated and resident foreign nationals, unless those concerns are called to our attention, but it simply isn’t true that most voters are unconcerned about the well being of others. We are not a nation of sociopaths, I don’t think.

As far as mental disabilities are concerned, it’s not clear that such people are legally and constitutionally blocked from voting. I looked it up. A few states still enforce old laws on the books that take the franchise away from people declared “mentally incompetent,” but in most of the U.S. if you are functional enough to register to vote and can show up at the correct polling place on election day and use a voting machine, you can vote. If you are too demented to do those things, then you won’t be voting, will you?

I skipped over much of the first half of the essay, where Williamson wallows in the straw-man argument that Democrats oppose Republican demands for more stringent ID requirements for voting because they are unconcerned about voter fraud.

No, dear Mr. Moron Williamson, that is not the case. If there were evidence that in-person voter fraud happened at a high enough rate to change election results we would certainly want to address it. But there isn’t. Study after study has found that incidents of people using a false identity to vote are extremely rare.  Obvously, the safeguards already in place to discourage in-person voter fraud are working just fine. Placing ever more burdensome requirements on people before they can vote is a solution without a problem. It’s also a handy voter suppression tool, especially against voters with less time and fewer resources to go chasing down this or that particular document.

And so on. The whole essay is one howler after another. But, you know, if you’re a rightie you don’t have to make sense. Any assemblage of words, no matter how inaccurate or illogical, will do for an argument.

One might sorrow over the sorry state of today’s American conservative (and National Review essayist), once represented by brainy elites like William Buckley and now by barely cognitive bigots like Kevin Williamson. But at WaPo, Philip Bump — who also takes issue with Williamson’s essay — reminds us that maybe things haven’t changed that much. He quotes Buckley from 1957 —

“It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct.”

So perhaps thngs haven’t changed that much. The only difference is that Williamson uses fewer semicolons and is more constrained than Buckley was from just coming out and saying what he means by “better.”

William F. Buckley

Yesterday St. Louis voters elected City Treasurer Tishaura Jones, a progressive black woman, to be their next mayor. And enough seats flipped on the Board of Aldermen — the city’s legislative body — to give progressives a small majority. (Congratulations to Flip the Board.) Maybe now they’ll change the name of the Board of Aldermen to City Council.

The new city government is about to receive a $517 million windfall from the newly passed American Rescue Plan. Also thanks to the Biden Administration, St. Louis’s sluggish vaccination rate is finally picking up. Vaccine efforts run by the state had blatantly favored rural areas over St. Louis.

So St. Louis may be poised for something of a Renaisance. It’s a city that for sure has seen better days, but it has a lot of potential.

I assume police reform is going to be on the agenda. A week ago I wrote about the failure of a jury to convict some St. Louis cops for beating a black St. Louis detective, Luther Hall, while he was working undercover. (Three officers were acquitted on most charges. Jurors could not agree on two charges, but I undersand the defendants will be re-tried.)

St. Louis also is plagued by a high rate of gun violence, in large part because of the state’s “carry whatever you want” gun laws.

Meanwhile, the Republican state government of Missouri continues to be criminally bad at governing. You might remember that last year the state’s voter passed a resolution calling for Medicaid to be expanded under the Affordable Care Act. As I wrote at the time, “This [expansion] was proposed as a constitutional amendment so that the looney tune wingnut legislature couldn’t block it with legislation.”

But, by golly, they’re blocking it anyway by refusing to fund it.

From directing $18 million to school transportation costs to sending an additional $88 million to nursing homes, the House Budget Committee reviewed how it will spend the $1 billion that Republican Gov. Mike Parson had earmarked for the expansion of the health insurance program for the poor.

The panel’s review came after last week’s decision to not fund the expanded Medicaid program that voters approved last August by a 53-47 margin, saying even with federal sweeteners, the addition of 275,000 Missourians was not sustainable over time.

That last part is total bullshit, of course. The federal government currently is picking up 90 percent of the cost of expansion. And state tax revenues are picking up nicely at the moment from last year’s slump.

In addition to the state’s tax collections, Missouri has received billions of dollars in federal aid over the past year, giving Parson’s administration a robust cushion heading into the next fiscal year.

But no money to expand Medicaid, no no no.

At the time this was going on, the state’s positivity rate was close to 20 percent. But somehow all these Republicans couldn’t think of anything that might be done with the Covid relief money. For all we know Gov. Parsons was using piles of cash as doorstops in the governor’s mansion. See also What Will State GOP Officials Do to Waste the Covid Relief Money?